D&D General Oh Please give me some Happy Backgrounds!!

[Hussar]

Heck, in my case, Jammy was a dickhead. Happy homelife, but, he was a rebel - drinking, getting into trouble, the whole nine yards. Not evil, but, a troublemaker. AKA being a teenager.

But, then again, you could take up adventuring to protect your happy family - my Hoard of the Dragonqueen paladin was exactly that. The dragon armies threatened his family and his home. That's why he was an adventurer.

One could easily ask why Superman adventures. Or Wonder Woman. Or Iron Man. Or Thor (although he does rather have some family drama) There are lots of adventurer inspirations that aren't Batman.

 

[TaranTheWanderer]

I like the idea of a halfling family/settlement with an inverted hobbiton attitude, where going on an adventure and bringing back these grand tales of life and death and weirdness to be recorded is a respected and celebrated accomplishment, recognised as a dangerous thing yes, but still respected and considered a praiseworthy ambition.

Isn’t that how Kender are portrayed?

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I’m sure there’s lots of happy people with families, who go to war-torn countries or poor or crime ridden places to build schools, bring medicine, work as mercenaries etc…

There’s stories of foreigners joining the Ukraine forces, there’s Doctors Without Borders, Red Cross. The list is long.

In fact, living a happy privileged life seems like exactly why a good aligned character would want to adventure: feeling like they should “do their part in the world”, looking for meaning in their life, have a cause to support or share their good fortune.

 

[TiQuinn]

Maybe characters with unhappy backgrounds come already predisposed to adventuring whereas characters with happy backgrounds have to have the adventuring thrust upon them in the present?

 

[aco175]

A lot depends on how the DM played things along the RPG developmental path. Did your wandering halflings keep having their family and village put in danger by the DM for 'plot reasons' or your wife held hostage so you are railroaded in going on this adventure? Eventually some players have all these ties killed by the local orcs on Rampage Day.

There are also players who would rather be Batman than Superman. Superman is the proverbial hammer looking for a problem since everything just bounces off him.

 

[TiQuinn]

A lot depends on how the DM played things along the RPG developmental path. Did your wandering halflings keep having their family and village put in danger by the DM for 'plot reasons' or your wife held hostage so you are railroaded in going on this adventure? Eventually some players have all these ties killed by the local orcs on Rampage Day.

Yeah, I’ve done this. Having a character with no family ties means the DM isn’t going to be trying to create tragedy via family connections; it’s not always about having an edgy background.

 

[CreamCloud0]

Isn’t that how Kender are portrayed?

i don't know anything about kender except them being an excuse to be a compulsive kleptomaniac with an inbuilt justification to bat their eyes innocently when asked to explain themselves.

I’m sure there’s lots of happy people, with families who go to war torn countries or poor or crime ridden places to build schools, bring medicine, work as mercenaries etc…

There’s stories of foreigners joining the Ukraine forces, there’s Doctors Without Borders, Red Cross. The list is long.

In fact, living a happy privileged life seems like exactly why a good aligned character would want to adventure: feeling like they should “do their part in the world”, looking for meaning in their life, have a cause to support or share their good fortune.

okay i'm sure that's great but thats not what i meant, i meant a people who value the resulting story more than the treasure aquired or any good the deeds themselves achieved, the 'adventurers' go off specifically so that when they return everyone can hang off their words with excitement and tension, like Bilbo storytelling to the kids at his birthday near the start of fellowship.

 

[Mannahnin]

I am reminded of how The Nightmares Underneath, as part of character creation, asks you to explain either A) Why the character is compelled to fight the nightmare incursions, or B) Why they are unable to hold down a normal job and are thus forced into an adventuring life.

I've noticed this trope as well, though I don't think my groups are as rife with it. I also tend to use more of "just looking for adventure/power/compelled to go out and do good" than tragic backstories.

 

[DEFCON 1]

This occurs for all kinds of reasons. First and foremost is that the "dark character" or the "Anti-Hero" often is one of the most popular characters in any group setting. Like Wolverine, Batman, Snake Eyes, Martin Riggs from Lethal Weapon, Trevor from GTA V... the ones who don't "have to play by the rules". For a lot of people... ones who in their normal everyday life do play by the rules in normal society... getting to play a character who doesn't is a change of pace. And they get to try an emulate those characters they love in media.

Secondly... as Dungeons & Dragons is very much a game about mass murder... where every session your PC straight up will kill like 1 to 50 sentient creatures for no other reason that they are a roadblock to your goals... playing a dark character makes it easier to justify it. Because if your character is a supposedly happy and "good person"... you can only go to the "I'm just killing them in self-defense because they attacked me!" well so many times before it loses all meaning. And for those players who care about that sort of narrative dissonance, they will often design PCs for whom that dissonance is reduced, if not removed. And dark characters do that.

 

[Misanthrope Prime]

As a child of divorce my ultimate fantasy is to have a stable home life, so literally when I started playing D&D as a kid one of my subversions was that every character I ever played would have living parents and a positive relationship with their family.

This kind of creates a new conundrum; I inevitably describe my character's backstories as rather idyllic, which makes the fact that the job of an "adventurer" involves a lot of killing, trauma and mercenary work so then the characters kind of come across as being inherently violent sociopaths who choose a life of death and dismemberment over a clearly better alternative working at their family's bakery or something.

 

[TiQuinn]

This occurs for all kinds of reasons. First and foremost is that the "dark character" or the "Anti-Hero" often is one of the most popular characters in any group setting. Like Wolverine, Batman, Snake Eyes, Martin Riggs from Lethal Weapon, Trevor from GTA V... the ones who don't "have to play by the rules". For a lot of people... ones who in their normal everyday life do play by the rules in normal society... getting to play a character who doesn't is a change of pace. And they get to try an emulate those characters they love in media.

Secondly... as Dungeons & Dragons is very much a game about mass murder... where every session your PC straight up will kill like 1 to 50 sentient creatures for no other reason that they are a roadblock to your goals... playing a dark character makes it easier to justify it. Because if your character is a supposedly happy and "good person"... you can only go to the "I'm just killing them in self-defense because they attacked me!" well so many times before it loses all meaning. And for those players who care about that sort of narrative dissonance, they will often design PCs for whom that dissonance is reduced, if not removed. And dark characters do that.

I think the issue with dark characters is that in other media, there’s typically only one or two actively being the dark character at any one time in that story, and other characters act as contrasts to them. Riggs is dark as a contrast to Murtagh just wanting to make it to retirement, and has a good home life that he invites Riggs into - Riggs becomes less dark as a result. Wolverine is the loner of the X-Men traditionally as a counter to the much more strait-laced Cyclops. In D&D, those contrasts tend to get lost because players tend to think only about how their characters are going to be - not how they’re going to interact with other PCs. And as a DM, if one is going to interweave parts of PC backgrounds into the story, all those brooding characters become very one note.