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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ratskinner" data-source="post: 6088190" data-attributes="member: 6688937">That's definitely true. Although, if a group is willing to wait a while, you can start out with just about no background, and eventually your first several adventures become the backstory. FATE has an interesting piece of character gen where the players go through three phases that represent previous entanglements between the PCs. For FATE, this generates an aspect for each phase. Aspects are one of the easiest things to add to D&D.They are pretty foreign to D&D. I agree that Inspirations would be easier than Drives, although I'm not sure how much they actually would help encourage the OP's definition of "narrative" in D&D. After typing that post, its been rolling around in my head. FWIW, here's how I think I'd try using Inspirations in 4e: InspirationsPlayers get an inspiration each time their character drops in combat, or each time the party fails at a skill challenge. The initial value of that Inspiration is d4, and has a tag associated with either what happened, or what you learned from what happened. So falling against some gnolls might earn you "Keep your shield up!  d4". Failing the traditional "get the Duke to help" skill challenge might earn a "the Duke hates acrobats d4".An inspiration can be spent at any time to add its die value to any roll your character makes or to increase one of your defenses for one scene. To do so, you must describe, in character, how it is that this inspiration is helping you.Additionally, If you spend time during a scene discussing or talking about an Inspiration in character without using it, you may step up the value of its die (to a maximum d12).That's very true, but this is also why I think D&D isn't a good system for this. Its fundamental structure is all about "becoming more uber and gaining phat lewtz." Even if your campaign is striving mightily against the grave-robbing murder-hobo trope, the fact that it has to strive at all is going to give you grief. Characters with narrative traits (be they aspects or whatever) closer to the murder-hobo thing are going to find them much more useful than those without. So, to fix all that you go back under the hood to rework alignment, then Action points, then XP, maybe classes, back to alignment,...at some point, its just easier to play FATE, or MHRP, or something. D&D cannot be all things to everyone. Whether there is a smaller set of things that constitute "D&D" for its fractured audience is the big experiment of 5e.I will ponder this some more. I just wrote and deleted a long section that, in the end, I realized didn't actually respond you concern.</blockquote>

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