I cringe most of the times a guy wants to play a female. There are exceptions but most of them will have their character sleep with anyone anytime for any reason. Talking to the crew of a pirate ship and the scurvy ridden crew with 3 teeth between them that are catcalling the women (I left what was said up to their imaginations)? Looks like it's time for a gang bang. Another guy always played one of two characters, a (male) halfling orphan with no ties to anyone or a promiscuous well endowed female drow. He would repeatedly emphasize her looks ... it was just ... ugh.
D&D General Oh Please give me some Happy Backgrounds!!
- Thread starter Hussar
- Start date
I cringe most of the times a guy wants to play a female. There are exceptions but most of them will have their character sleep with anyone anytime for any reason. Talking to the crew of a pirate ship and the scurvy ridden crew with 3 teeth between them that are catcalling the women (I left what was said up to their imaginations)? Looks like it's time for a gang bang. Another guy always played one of two characters, a (male) halfling orphan with no ties to anyone or a promiscuous well endowed female drow. He would repeatedly emphasize her looks ... it was just ... ugh.
Maxperson
Morkus from Orkus
Oh, I know. Once he gets going, though, he's all in. Antagonizing the terrorists and everything. He still has that background that allows him to do that. Some college kid isn't going to switch it up and try to take them all out, because he doesn't have the background for it.McClane goes to great lengths in the movie NOT to be the one to take on the bad guys. To get the local cops on it and to duck and hide until he's basically forced to take them on himself.
Matt Colville used it (in a video on engaging players with plot) as a prominent example of a protagonist trying NOT to go on the adventure, and the adventure chasing him up a tree.
payn
Glory to Marik
I've only had 3 players over the decades like this and unfortunately two of them in the same game once...
The Soloist
Hero
As a DM I read some many cliché grim dark backgrounds that all my fantasy characters always have 'happy' childhoods. But they don't want to go into the family business, so they join the guards, or other organizations to make a life for themselves. They are perfectly normal, average Joes that have no trauma. That will come because they go adventuring.
A happy person may want to defend the things that make them happy - easy reason to adventure
Tonguez
A suffusion of yellow
in my teens I did do the Conan the Barbarian pastiche of "last survivor of my village, which was raized to the ground by the Evil Empire when I was a child" with my most edgy being Macabre, an orphan raised in a monastary until it was attacked and the monks slaughtered, Macabre had her face scarred but managed to escape when an elder monk gave his life to save her. Now she is an assasin for hire, seeking vengeance."
But I got over that and now my characters generally have loving parents and happy childhoods, although they do tend to be sent away from home early - Orbril was raised in a gnome clan with 100 siblings, but when his penchant for alchemy became a menace to the burrows, he was sent to the city to become an alchemist apprentice (wherein he is part of a series of unexpected adventures).
Henri de Vaugirard is second son of a minor French noble sent away at aged 12 to join the Corps de Cadets in Paris. He later serves in Flanders in the logistics corps during the War of Spanish Succession (the adventure campaign).
Kebra was an Alladin-type theif in the ghettos of Fez who had a loving but hardpressed mother constantly admonishing him for mixing with the wrong crowd, hanging around the Souk and getting in to trouble with the City guard.
Hakyn Slaazh was a goliath bard/ranger singing Battle Hymns, raised in the mountains by his religious zealot father, he had a reasonable childhood but he's father was resentful of the Empires oppression of giants and passed that to his son as a hatred of humans - I'm not sure if that counts as a happy childhood or not?
But I got over that and now my characters generally have loving parents and happy childhoods, although they do tend to be sent away from home early - Orbril was raised in a gnome clan with 100 siblings, but when his penchant for alchemy became a menace to the burrows, he was sent to the city to become an alchemist apprentice (wherein he is part of a series of unexpected adventures).
Henri de Vaugirard is second son of a minor French noble sent away at aged 12 to join the Corps de Cadets in Paris. He later serves in Flanders in the logistics corps during the War of Spanish Succession (the adventure campaign).
Kebra was an Alladin-type theif in the ghettos of Fez who had a loving but hardpressed mother constantly admonishing him for mixing with the wrong crowd, hanging around the Souk and getting in to trouble with the City guard.
Hakyn Slaazh was a goliath bard/ranger singing Battle Hymns, raised in the mountains by his religious zealot father, he had a reasonable childhood but he's father was resentful of the Empires oppression of giants and passed that to his son as a hatred of humans - I'm not sure if that counts as a happy childhood or not?
All happy backgrounds are alike; each unhappy background is unhappy in its own way.
Not really. Bored with the conversation?Is it possible were all overthinking this?
Fifinjir
Adventurer
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.
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.
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