D&D General It's Session Zero! How Much Backstory Do You Give Your Character?
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Man in the Funny Hat
Hero
On the limited occasions when I've been asked to write a backstory it has either gone completely ignored by the DM, or it's only been used to screw my PC over in some fashion. Anything a DM has ever done with backstory I write simply disrupts whatever I had envisioned for that PC for nothing more than a session or two of free adventure fodder at the expense of MY character concepts.
Left to my own devices I most likely don't write A SINGLE WORD of backstory. Maybe I'll list a few family members and an uneventful life up to when the game begins. However, on a couple occasions I've ended up with a couple pages of something that plugs into WHATEVER setting the DM may have already cooked up, and which gives the DM no reasonable way to use it against me if they even see it. Usually it's LESS rather than more, with it mostly being none at all.
Is it uncreative if many of my PC's are orphans? No. At least it's deliberate as opposed to a DM turning my backstory friends and family into convenient bad-guy-of-the-moment victims, or into monsters not otherwise different than any of the other hundreds of monsters our PC's will kill. I'll save the DM the trouble and myself the irritation and just have my PC be yet another loner orphan. Whatever my PC achieves on their own or with the other PC's at their side - that's enough for me. Always has been. Chances are they'll be dead or the game itself will shut down LONG before my PC sees the fruition of their fondest dreams. If they simply live to reach a comfortable retirement of some kind they've most likely succeeded in achieving their dreams.
The more I write for any PC of mine as a truly involved backstory, the more it is for MY EYES ONLY. I write it because it provides ME with motivations and experiences to base my character's beliefs and attitudes on when IN ACTUAL PLAY. I'll trust the DM that they are creative enough to NOT NEED me to create past events and characters. If they've made a creative game setting then -I- don't need to invent specialized ways for my character to be linked to it. My PC is right here in the game right now. Whatever is happening in the game NOW - my PC is up to their neck in it as it is. That's why I agreed to play - so that my PC would be involved in WHATEVER the DM has happening in their game world whether it ever revolves specifically around my PC, or other PC's, or just happens apropos of nothing because our PC's are simply THERE.
Left to my own devices I most likely don't write A SINGLE WORD of backstory. Maybe I'll list a few family members and an uneventful life up to when the game begins. However, on a couple occasions I've ended up with a couple pages of something that plugs into WHATEVER setting the DM may have already cooked up, and which gives the DM no reasonable way to use it against me if they even see it. Usually it's LESS rather than more, with it mostly being none at all.
Is it uncreative if many of my PC's are orphans? No. At least it's deliberate as opposed to a DM turning my backstory friends and family into convenient bad-guy-of-the-moment victims, or into monsters not otherwise different than any of the other hundreds of monsters our PC's will kill. I'll save the DM the trouble and myself the irritation and just have my PC be yet another loner orphan. Whatever my PC achieves on their own or with the other PC's at their side - that's enough for me. Always has been. Chances are they'll be dead or the game itself will shut down LONG before my PC sees the fruition of their fondest dreams. If they simply live to reach a comfortable retirement of some kind they've most likely succeeded in achieving their dreams.
The more I write for any PC of mine as a truly involved backstory, the more it is for MY EYES ONLY. I write it because it provides ME with motivations and experiences to base my character's beliefs and attitudes on when IN ACTUAL PLAY. I'll trust the DM that they are creative enough to NOT NEED me to create past events and characters. If they've made a creative game setting then -I- don't need to invent specialized ways for my character to be linked to it. My PC is right here in the game right now. Whatever is happening in the game NOW - my PC is up to their neck in it as it is. That's why I agreed to play - so that my PC would be involved in WHATEVER the DM has happening in their game world whether it ever revolves specifically around my PC, or other PC's, or just happens apropos of nothing because our PC's are simply THERE.
payn
I don't believe in the no-win scenario
I know the type. That or completely ignore backstory so who cares?
Oofta
Legend
If people make their PCs orphans, I'm actually more likely to mess with them by revealing parent(s) or sibling(s) they thought had died.
On a more serious note, people were generally raised by someone or at the very least had friends. Unless you just dropped into the world with no memory, everyone has a history.
If doing level 1 D&D characters or the equivalent: not very much. The character is, after all, only just setting out on their journey. The equivalent of a few paragraphs maybe: where you're from, and why are you here. Though I usually don't write it as much as keep it in my head.
If starting at higher levels, a bit more. But not too much detail. Look at someone like Elliot Spencer in Leverage: it's enough to know that he has a military/covert ops background and has worked as a "retreival specialist". That gives you a shape of the background, which can then be filled in as needed during play. No need for a detailed description of previous tours and missions and such, unless one of them happens to be particularly relevant (e.g. Jayne Cobb's possession of Vera).
Or, to take another example, Widow and Hawkeye in the Avengers. We know they're agents of SHIELD, we know Widow is a former Russian spy with "red in her ledger", we eventually learn that Hawkeye has a wife and kids (which is the kind of thing that should probably be established from the start), and we know that Widow and Hawkeye have been on missions together before. We don't need to know more than that before start. When one of them tells the other "Remember Budapest?", we learn that they were on a mission in Budapest, but we don't know what, and that's something they can riff off.
If starting at higher levels, a bit more. But not too much detail. Look at someone like Elliot Spencer in Leverage: it's enough to know that he has a military/covert ops background and has worked as a "retreival specialist". That gives you a shape of the background, which can then be filled in as needed during play. No need for a detailed description of previous tours and missions and such, unless one of them happens to be particularly relevant (e.g. Jayne Cobb's possession of Vera).
Or, to take another example, Widow and Hawkeye in the Avengers. We know they're agents of SHIELD, we know Widow is a former Russian spy with "red in her ledger", we eventually learn that Hawkeye has a wife and kids (which is the kind of thing that should probably be established from the start), and we know that Widow and Hawkeye have been on missions together before. We don't need to know more than that before start. When one of them tells the other "Remember Budapest?", we learn that they were on a mission in Budapest, but we don't know what, and that's something they can riff off.
Man in the Funny Hat
Hero
Yes they do. When the game starts, however, the lives of characters now revolve around a NEW circle of friends and found-family in the other PC's. If those individuals of my past were so important to my PC why aren't the other players playing those characters instead of their own? Why does my PC need to return to the family farm to visit mom and dad and uncle Flarrb in order to get other players to accept that my PC HAS a family somewhere? How important is it to write that history down for everyone else and have EVERYONE'S backstory specifically feature in the ongoing game events?If people make their PCs orphans, I'm actually more likely to mess with them by revealing parent(s) or sibling(s) they thought had died.
On a more serious note, people were generally raised by someone or at the very least had friends. Unless you just dropped into the world with no memory, everyone has a history.
I get where you're coming from, but allow me to present an alternate perspective:
You will run into bad guys in the course of the game. It's the DM's job to present you with challenges. Would you rather have those challenges tie into your backstory, thereby making them more relevant to your character, or would you prefer they come out of nowhere?
RangerWickett
Legend
It depends on the game and GM. Some GMs ask for more because they want to weave the characters' history in. Others are just doing action, and the present day is what matters.
If I were in a Game of Thrones game, lots of backstory.
If I were in a Walking Dead game, not so much.
Probably the longest I wrote was less a backstory and more a 1-page tone poem, because the GM was running Pathfinder's Strange Aeons and told us we'd wake up with amnesia. He told us we could have backstories we made ourselves that we would remember during the game, but that there would be an important gap where secret stuff would happen.
I asked if I could play a genuine amnesiac, and I'd trust him to fill in a bunch of details, but my general idea was that I was a changeling left by a hag, but with a psychic talent that linked me to the child I was replacing, and that that child was somehow a mystical, reincarnating soul with multiple iterations of herself throughout history, and I was just someone pretending to be her, like an actress reciting lines for a biographical play, taking the place of the real person.
So yeah, long backstory for an amnesiac.
If I were in a Game of Thrones game, lots of backstory.
If I were in a Walking Dead game, not so much.
Probably the longest I wrote was less a backstory and more a 1-page tone poem, because the GM was running Pathfinder's Strange Aeons and told us we'd wake up with amnesia. He told us we could have backstories we made ourselves that we would remember during the game, but that there would be an important gap where secret stuff would happen.
I asked if I could play a genuine amnesiac, and I'd trust him to fill in a bunch of details, but my general idea was that I was a changeling left by a hag, but with a psychic talent that linked me to the child I was replacing, and that that child was somehow a mystical, reincarnating soul with multiple iterations of herself throughout history, and I was just someone pretending to be her, like an actress reciting lines for a biographical play, taking the place of the real person.
So yeah, long backstory for an amnesiac.
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