First, sorry to take so long to get back to you on this. Long evening with friends.
Yeah. That aspect is basically a non-starter for me.
Yeah, it's not my thing, either. I expect and enjoy some amount of ... making the characters effective, but past a point it doesn't seem to me to have a point.
Re: pre-written stories. Yeah, that sounds like what I’ve done before. Everything is emergent rather than pre-ordained. I don’t think I could stand to run games another way.
I generally have at least some of a situation together before it hits the table, but it's not wildly uncommon for it to change after. Even if I have some idea for how a thing will go (which is usually based on how I've seen the players run their characters) I'm not committed to anything.
Re: backstories. Ugh. I’ve tried that a few times. The players either ignore the obvious backstory hook or get mad that it doesn’t play out exactly how they wanted it to. It honestly felt like I was supposed to just stay out of their way as the referee and validate the story they wrote and pretend dice rolls were involved. Any change or hint of challenge, obstacle, etc in their path was met with…less than ideal responses.
I generally start a given campaign by getting the characters in the same place at the same time and throwing [stuff] at a convenient fan. The situation evolves and expands from there, and typically I manage to thread in a thing or three from various backstories, so that when the PCs wrap up the starting situation they have multiple directions to go.
I have had PCs choose not to pursue a given thing, but I've never had them refuse to pursue all the things they've uncovered connected to their backstories. Also, all the players I've had have been clear I was looking for information about their characters' pasts, and that their futures weren't written yet, that their backstories might arise in ways they weren't expecting. This hasn't been a problem (yet).
Also re: backstories. How do you communicate…politely…to players that only a few relevant bullet points of their backstory are sufficient to play and that reading pages and pages of backstory is not what you signed up for?
In my last call for backstories, I said something to the effect that the players should keep in mind that their characters were basically at the beginnings of their stories, and their backstories should reflect that in both amount and in content. I've had players give me more than 10,000 words of backstory before, and I agree that can be a lot to sort through to find what you need as GM, but I haven't ever asked for any given length of backstory. The ones I write--which I sometimes do, as something like an exercise, tend to be somewhere in the 250-750 word range, mostly toward the shorter end of that.
In my most recent campaign, I gave the players a 5500-ish word write up of the city they were starting in, told them they were all long-time residents (no fish-out-of-water), asked them to tell me about people, places, group, and events in the city and how their characters were connected to them, and asked them to make sure that each PC specifically knew two others (though they were all nodding acquaintances). This sort of thing is, I think, also neo-trad.
