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

[Umbran]

Wanderlust and happiness are not mutually exclusive. You can have a happy childhood but decide to spend a year travelling Europe.

Spending a year travelling Europe... and slaying monsters and being coated with gore as you go...

I think some of the dark backgrounds come along with people trying to square being okay with the wholesale violence many games entail. "I had a happy childhood, but I'm just as happy beating your skull in with a huge hammer...," can seem a bit weird.

 

[Morrus]

Spending a year travelling Europe... and slaying monsters and being coated with gore as you go...

Well it was more you plan to spend a year travelling Europe but the monsters find you instead!

 

[Fifinjir]

If most of the monsters are non-sapient it could still work. Basically like an accidental hunting trip.

 

[KYRON45]

Not really. Bored with the conversation?

I think the value of a PCs backstory is directly proportional to where the player is in their life when they write it. Obviously this wouldn't be true of all players as nothing is ever true of all players.

The edgy teen wants to be seen as a bad arse from the first drop. They want you to ALREADY think of them as awesome so their backstory will have more adventure behind it than in front of it. Dark and mysterious usually means that they lied about their ability scores so that their super dark and awesome skills and what not make sense. You can't be a hardened criminal with an 11 strength after all. Most of all the teen player just wants to roll high numbers and set things on fire.

The "i'm an adult now" 20 something probably wants to be respected for what they have earned in those few years as a teen. People trust them with responsibilities and and don't talk to them like they are children anymore. Maybe some years doing things so that the skills they chose are starting to make more sense. They might be ready for something deeper than "you meet some strangers in a bar and 26 min later you trust all of them with your life." After all, they don't have a solid work schedule and they want this time at the table to have more meaning meaning than just wandering the countryside stabbing things.

30 somethings often want to be portrayed as the "go to" member of the group. Responsible and respected. The party member you can count on to know the rules and to remember to write down "rope" on their character sheet. So their backstory will be less dramatic and more practical. It's possible that this player wants some depth to what's going on. How do i know these people and why do i care about the same things they care about?

40 somethings have seen some things. Maybe they've done some things. Their stories are going to likely be more dramatic...lost love, life gone wrong, debt. Depth but not melo-drama. I know who I am and I want more. I want to use the skills i chose to matter so i chose meaningful ones to start with and i talked to my DM to let them know that.

50ish are content being the...."back in my day" types. They want to be able to remember their "edge lord" days as "better times". They want things to make sense and they want their skills/abilities etc. to not just be random numbers on a character sheet....a character sheet that they are most likely trying to keep clean. So they are more likely to want the whole party to have a pre-established linkage. We should all know one another, but in the limited way that we should at 1st level.

If you've made it this far I applaud you.
I doubt most of this made any sense. I was in fact bored and this woke me up a little.

Game your own game folks. Make whatever character you want; or whatever character your DM will allow and have fun doing it.

 

[Tonguez]

It’s not just about having a reason to leave home or take risks, plenty of people do that. It’s the fact that D&D adventures (remember what banner the thread is under) generally expect the PCs to jump into violence at a moments notice. People doing foreign aid or research tours tend not to do random acts of vigilantism along the way.

Soldiers at war is a better analogy, but even then I’m informed by some veterans that a large part of the training is getting your mind to be okay with pulling the trigger on the enemy soldiers. That should show that waking up and thinking “I’m going to slay a bandit chief today and present their head to the sheriff” is something that takes more than wanderlust to commit to.

I do wonder about Pilgrimages and the such and whether the pilgrims expected bandits or wild beasts to be a threat. but still travelled due to their religious fervour. IIRC Chaucers doesnt mention Highwaymen in the Canterbury tales and by that time their were no large predators left in England, but I do know that during the Hundred Years war pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela would avoid travel through France and take safer routes instead.
There is also the examples of the Grand Tour, where young nobles would make educational tours of european sites, generally done in safer times but there was always a risk of bandits.

Personally I tend to equate Adventuring Parties with the Mercenary Companies and Privateers that fought all over europe from the 13th to 18th century of which there were a whole lot - of course it was also those same mercenary-adventurers who often turned Bandit/Pirate when they were between official Jobs

 

[TiQuinn]

I think the value of a PCs backstory is directly proportional to where the player is in their life when they write it. Obviously this wouldn't be true of all players as nothing is ever true of all players.

The edgy teen wants to be seen as a bad arse from the first drop. They want you to ALREADY think of them as awesome so their backstory will have more adventure behind it than in front of it. Dark and mysterious usually means that they lied about their ability scores so that their super dark and awesome skills and what not make sense. You can't be a hardened criminal with an 11 strength after all. Most of all the teen player just wants to roll high numbers and set things on fire.

The "i'm an adult now" 20 something probably wants to be respected for what they have earned in those few years as a teen. People trust them with responsibilities and and don't talk to them like they are children anymore. Maybe some years doing things so that the skills they chose are starting to make more sense. They might be ready for something deeper than "you meet some strangers in a bar and 26 min later you trust all of them with your life." After all, they don't have a solid work schedule and they want this time at the table to have more meaning meaning than just wandering the countryside stabbing things.

30 somethings often want to be portrayed as the "go to" member of the group. Responsible and respected. The party member you can count on to know the rules and to remember to write down "rope" on their character sheet. So their backstory will be less dramatic and more practical. It's possible that this player wants some depth to what's going on. How do i know these people and why do i care about the same things they care about?

40 somethings have seen some things. Maybe they've done some things. Their stories are going to likely be more dramatic...lost love, life gone wrong, debt. Depth but not melo-drama. I know who I am and I want more. I want to use the skills i chose to matter so i chose meaningful ones to start with and i talked to my DM to let them know that.

50ish are content being the...."back in my day" types. They want to be able to remember their "edge lord" days as "better times". They want things to make sense and they want their skills/abilities etc. to not just be random numbers on a character sheet....a character sheet that they are most likely trying to keep clean. So they are more likely to want the whole party to have a pre-established linkage. We should all know one another, but in the limited way that we should at 1st level.

If you've made it this far I applaud you.
I doubt most of this made any sense. I was in fact bored and this woke me up a little.

Game your own game folks. Make whatever character you want; or whatever character your DM will allow and have fun doing it.

So you had thoughts on the subject. I’m glad. My heart is full.

 

[KYRON45]

So you had thoughts on the subject. I’m glad. My heart is full.

It’s usually giving voice to my thoughts that get me in trouble.

 

[M_Natas]

Hrm - I don't know tragic - just - give them a reason to adventure?
My very first character I ever played was a female cleric of sharess. Who was always in full plate armor, so no sexy bikini time. Why was she a priestess of Sharess? Because she was a charlatan who tried to rob the temple of sharess when they were having a "chose a new priestess ceremony" and she was picked as new priestess... and now she is supposed to.go out and make new experiences. that's like the whole background. I didn't even know the status of her parents.

My second character was a female evocation wizard who's noble family wanted her to become a fine lady of society, which she despised. She preferred to become "more like a knight who can blow things up with her mind" and left home. Like, she doesn't hate her family, its just they wanted different things.

Another was the .."Bard", who was actually secretly a celestial warlock, who fled from bard school after she made a pact, with a unicorn (who tricked her into thinking he was something cool like a demon or devil ...). Her name was Kiela Death, had the whole goth look going on and wanted to be seen as this cool punk singer and was super afraid, that anybody would find out that she has something uncool like a unicorn as her patron!

Oh, my last character was an order of scribe wizard, who was thrown out of Strixhaven, after she blew up a building with her spell experiments.
She tried to keep that a secret when she took an internship at a thieves guild (where the campaign began) because she told the thieves guild that her magic university wanted her to get some practical experience ...

In my current campaign I'm running as a DM, the PCs all woke up at the start of the campaign with amnesia in clone tanks. So far they figured out that their former selves were some kind of heroes, thieves and may have destroyed the main planet of the system some 400 years ago (spelljammer campaign). And that campaign is a blast so far.

So, you don't need to kill your parents or grew up an urchin. You just need something interesting in your backstory that gives you a reason to be put there. And if you put in something embarrassing for the character, the better. Like, when the former teacher of my wizard came and my group found out she was thrown out ... great role playing ensured.

So, have a reason to adventure, have an (embarrassing) secret, and you are good to go. That is enough to last year long campaigns.

Oh, I forgot my illusion wizard who was basically a street kid, trying to make money by giving illusion street performances while her siblings steal the money from onlookers to get enough cash to heal her sick mom ...

 

[GrimCo]

I had my share of dark, brooding edgy characters in my teens. Also, had my share of happy go lucky "i wanna be a rockstar" characters (mostly rogues and bards) who went out to get fame,fortune and all the girls. In 20ish years of playing, not once one of the DMs i played with, used background for "gotcha" impromptu adventure hook.

Most of my characters these days have pretty "normal" background. They are people with normal lives who go on to do extraordinary things with mix of wit, grit, luck and some sharp steel. Then again, our campaigns usually don't have much combat. Current one has a bit more combat, but our country is in the middle of civil war, so, yeah, pick side and try to win with as few casualties as possible is main theme right now.

 

[TiQuinn]

It’s usually giving voice to my thoughts that get me in trouble.

So I think all of that is too highly specific to obviously be accurate for everyone, but I’m sure there’s plenty of people who do follow that trajectory. Speaking for myself, my POV is creating a character that’s going to fit well with the group and support the DM’s world. If they say they want to run an old school dungeon crawl, then yeah sometimes I’ll ironically play an edgelord character or generic archetype, often because I don’t plan on that character sticking around too long anyways in that sort of game. And I agree that there’s often a stage where everyone wants to play something outside the box or with more depth to it, possibly emulating a character they’ve seen in fiction (or taking a page from a Critical Role character).

I’ve kind of gone the opposite direction. I don’t worry about backgrounds so much as I rely on a few tropes and a general idea of a backstory but I want to keep the details nebulous so that I can ask the DM when we meet an NPC who seems like someone this character may have known in the past, we could riff that in the moment rather than have it all pre-planned. I find it much easier all around for both me and the DM then trying to write up something intricate.