NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FrozenNorth" data-source="post: 7940299" data-attributes="member: 7020832">To respond to the original poster, I incorporate a character's Background (I mostly play 5e) and backstory into the game all the time.First, I incorporate it into the adventure in the manner that has already been discussed in the thread.  If a rogue character used to run with a gang led by a mysterious red-haired halfling, the halfling is going to appear in the game.  Your character is a noble?  That's going to be directly relevant, whether from family asking you to defend their interests or political intrigue.Second, background and backstory are going to come up in the game in a lot of other ways as well.  I sometimes gate checks behind backgrounds and skills.  The enemy is flying a distinctive banner?  Characters who have the Noble background or training in History can try to identify it.  If you have both you get advantage.  Sometimes it goes the other way: you don't have to roll if you have an appropriate background: You have the Sailor background?  I'm not going to make you roll to do regular work around a ship.You're a rogue from Neverwinter?  Yeah, you don't have to roll to find the black market.  You know that Dagult Neverember is in charge, and you probably have a pretty good idea of the laws as they pertain to your activities.Incorporating a character's backstory improves immersion, by giving the impression of a living world.  It also improves player engagement:  the choices players make tell you what they want to see in the campaign, and, unless it is unreasonable somehow (in which case it should be brought up with the player in advance), as a DM, you should try to accommodate what a player finds interesting.Finally, there is also the fact that on the fiction layer, a character's backstory is not independent of the world, it is part of it.  If my background is "Sole survivor of a gnoll raid", it is going to be weird, immersion breaking and implausible that there don't seem to be any gnolls don't seem to appear in the world, or in any relevant numbers near where I grew up.</blockquote>

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