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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rel" data-source="post: 2030954" data-attributes="member: 99">One cautionary word about this:  A little goes a long way and there IS such a thing as "too much of a good thing".My gaming group are GREAT roleplayers.  So great that we had recently found that we tended to paint ourselves into a corner with character background and motivations.  At the start of every campaign we wound up all having characters with a minimum of three typed pages of background detailing where they came from and what made them tick.  That seemed great at first.But when we'd start playing it became a complete pain in the butt to try and come up with adventure ideas that would grab the whole group and hook them because they had such entrenched adgendas.  There might be an opportunity to rid some woods of Goblin bandits and one of the PC's would pipe up with, "That's all very well but my family was killed by ORCS and I've sworn that I will not rest until I've avenged them.  I really need to find some Orcs to kill."  Another would interject, "Actually I was once nearly mauled by wolves and if a Goblin Ranger had not intervened then I would have surely been killed.  So I'm going to give these Goblins the benefit of the doubt and I refuse to hunt them down."  Meanwhile somebody else would say, "But these Goblin bandits have kidnapped the Princess and I am IN LOVE with the Princess.  We MUST hunt them down and rescue her!"You get the idea.So when it came time to start a new campaign last week, I had them all make their characters in the two hours before we actually started playing.  I told them that I really wanted no more than a few sentences of background and motivations.  I jokingly quipped that, "Anybody who will write a paragraph of character background gets some bonus XP.  Anybody who writes more than half a page takes an XP penalty."And I think it has worked.  The players all seem to be looking to derive their character motivations from the story unfolding WITHIN the campaign rather than having so much written before we even start.  This has caused much less dithering about whether they all even want to participate in the adventure proposed and, though not in lockstep, they seem to be moving in more or less the same direction.  It's kind of refreshing actually.</blockquote>

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