Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="FrozenNorth" data-source="post: 7942307" data-attributes="member: 7020832">You won’t get any disagreement from me that many modern books and films lazily employ coincidence rather than good writing (though my initial example was Star Wars, so modern is relative).However, certain points remain:1) there is no reason to assume “DM uses character backstory” means “DM uses character backstory in an excessively implausible manner”.  “You run into the gnoll who killed your parents as the chief of a gnoll tribe somewhere else in the same kingdom” is different from “you are actually the son of the BBEG’s lieutenant and this was never alluded to anywhere else previously”;2) while bad writers (and bad DMs) tend to rely excessively on implausible coincidences, it is possible to use implausible coincidences to very good effect.  To put it differently, if you remove bad coincidences from the repertoire of a bad writer, what remains is still a bad writer.  Removing coincidences from the repertoire of a DM is removing a tool that can be the proper tool for the job, if used sparingly;3) to get back to a point I raised earlier, I do this for fun in my spare time, yes, I take pride in my work and try to do the best job I can, but it is a little ridiculous to compare me to a professional screenwriter;4) the DM who completely ignores your backstory is worse from both an immersion perspective and a “plausibility” perspective.  In a 4e game, I rolled up a Rogue with a Soldier background.  He was a farmboy who had been conscripted at the end of the war and trained with other locals who knew the area as a scout and a skirmisher.  I provided a short background to this effect to the DM.  The DM began the adventure with my character trying to break into an archeological dig as part of a Thieves’ guild initiation, and the climax depended on my character reading a note in thieves’ cant, despite my character neither being a thief nor literate.</blockquote>

Verification