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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Helldritch" data-source="post: 8186578" data-attributes="member: 6855114">That is why I've always been cautious (if not downright hostile) against long back story for 1st level characters. Anything more than a paragraph make me raise an interogative, suspicious and cautious eyebrow.  Background should come trough playing the character, not from a story written. Most of the time, the actions and feats accomplished in these "background " stories could not have been achieved by a single level character (and sometimes, even a high level characters would have been hard pressed to do the same). With all that work, and I have seen some 4 to 5 pages long back stories... killing a character becomes a lot more troublesome than it should be. It is hard to kill a character when the player invested so much in a background story... These stories, especially extravagant ones, also break the "realism and believability " of the character.  You killed ten ogres in your backstory? Why should you die to 8 goblins... No true background should come through play and not stories made up.So again, with so much work done with background stories, it is not hard to understand that killing a character can bring a lot of cringe from the player(s). I much prefer to make it clear that character can and will die if not played cautiously. So far, never met a player that did not like my games and my DMing in that regard. The feats they do are their own. I did not fudge for them and it was not a simple story. They achieve reknown on their own merits. I believe that it is worth a million times any background story ever written as they did it.</blockquote>

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