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

[Remathilis]

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

It's like rumspringa, but with more violence!

 

[Simon The Hunter]

I've had my fair share of anti-hero backgrounds, but these days when I solo rpg, I like to have my PC's have a relatively regular upbringing (a <insert class here>who grew up in a warm conclave but now needs to go out into the world as part of their training is pretty common for me) and I just roll some random background notes for them, usually 3 to 4 keywords that I'll use later on as they are travelling to push story.

Thinking back, a LOT of my PCs had minimal bad backgrounds when I first started playing and for a few years after, stuff was kinda made up on the fly. It was only a lot later that I even thought about having dark histories. The one time I was specifically asked to make an in-depth background was when our 4e toons got boring (around lvl11 at the time I think), so the DM let us roll new ones to take over but wanted something interesting as to why these new PCs would take over... I may have gotten a bit carried away, I still have the 26-page pdf here on my computer, and it gets a read every couple of years hehe.

 

[Composer99]

Speaking of tragic backstories, I'm playing right now (we're paused while someone has a must-take call), and we just came up with the idea of a slaad adventurer. Their birth made them a murderer and an orphan all at once. Tragic!

 

[Seramus]

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.

It was never the kleptomania specifically that bothered me about Kender. It was the absolute insistence beyond any reasonable deduction that they had done nothing wrong. Even people of dubious intelligence can notice how often strange things end up in their pockets, how often they get accused of having stolen something, and say "Wow, I think I have a problem. I'm so sorry, here is your stuff back. I'm going to find some coping method to keep my snaffy hands under wraps more often."

You might still cause problems, but at least you're aware you've got wandering hands and it's upsetting people.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I see why and the dark backstory trope is funny to grating sometimes depending on the level of edge the player inserts, but on the other hand I always think: Why would a happy character with an intact social network and support system and a loving family... why would they go on deadly adventures? If they are happy, would they not stay in their happy life with their family, farming and enjoying life?

While this is a question worth asking, it's not a particularly difficult one to answer.

Perhaps the character just felt called to do it--maybe they saved someone's life and now feel that, since they can save lives, they need to do so. Great power and great responsibility. Or, for a religious character, maybe their faith motivates them to it. There are a dozen gods in Faerun alone who would be likely to have worshipers with healthy family lives with living relatives, and yet who would be likely to encourage their worshipers to set aside creature comforts and help make the world better.

Perhaps the character is intensely curious, and just needs to know--the adventure is secondary to the knowledge and experience. I could see plenty of spellcasters taking this path, and not just Wizards either. Gleaning the nuggets of true enlightenment or perfecting a true masterpiece can be powerful motivators even when someone has a loving, happy home.

Perhaps something has put that family under threat, and it's for them that the character is adventuring. Someone has grown ill, maybe. Or someone went missing, and the character has taken it upon themselves to find out what happened (that one actually was a character's backstory in Hussar's LMoP/PaB campaign). Heck, it could be that someone came back, injured, and asked the character to take up the mantle on their behalf.

Perhaps the character has gotten bored with their safe, cozy life. They want to feel risk and danger--something they've never really had to face, because they've always had a robust support network, stable family finances, and caring family members always present, always right there. Getting away from their family so they can actually experience the adventure they want. It might end up being too much for them, or it might galvanize them because they can draw on that solid foundation.

Perhaps a relative of theirs was an adventurer, and they're inspired to follow in their footsteps. Doubly works if said relative earned a great deal of money from adventuring, and that seed is what allowed the family to live comfortably and focus on building one another up. Building up a tradition, like how Bilbo's adventuresome past helped give Frodo a good home after his parents' death, and was part of the inspiration for the four hobbits going off to join the Fellowship.

Point being: There are a lot of reasons why even someone from a good home, with a loving family, overall stability, and a lack of Horrible Awfulness in their past, could still want (or need) to adventure.

 

[Hussar]

Merely curious but in this campaign, did the table runner do anything with the fact the majority of players had something dark in their PC's past?

Separately, if I were at this table, I'd be heartened to see a character who was stable and well-balanced!

Unfortunately, real life stepped on the neck of this particular campaign before it gained much legs. It was actually a heck of a lot of fun being the one character with a fairly normal, mundane background but was a real jerk, in this group of broken, horrifically scarred individuals who were just trying to regain some semblance of happiness.

As a person, I truly hated the character I was playing. He was an awful jerk. But, it was so much fun.

The other campaigns - Hoard and Avernus were tons of fun and played out to the conclusion. The other characters in those campaigns were not quite so tragic in their backstories.

 

[Hussar]

For myself, I know that a lot of the PC's I create often come with the basic idea of a quest. I gravitate towards religious characters a lot - clerics, druids, paladins, that sort of thing - so, it isn't much of a leap at all. My character is searching for a relic or something of importance for his faith. Heck, thinking about it, I was in a fantastic Ravenloft campaign a few years back and it was the first and only time I played a female character. I wanted to see if I could do it.

The human ranger was a young woman whose father had been killed (damn, even I do it) but had then been reincarnated by the local druids into a wolf. The young woman was taken in by the druids, trained as a ranger and kept the wolf close by and cared for it. The wolf was then taken by the mists of Ravenloft and my character followed her father into the Mists in order to get him back. Of course, the nature of Ravenloft meant that as a wolf, her father was slowly becoming something more - a lycanthrope maybe. The character spent most of the campaign hunting for the wolf in order to bring her father home.

I really, really enjoyed that campaign and I was so bummed when real life stepped on its neck and it ended rather abruptly.

But, as an aside, I don't think I gave a cringey performance of my character. I think I pulled it off pretty well, although, when she took on the were-raven thing and had to lose her clothes a bunch, that did result in a lot of hiding behind trees.

 

[Jeremy E Grenemyer]

Sometimes I think tragic backstories have become the default for want of information about a game world. By that I mean practical stuff like family surnames, family history, what the family does for a living, and stuff like that.