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

[M_Natas]

The amount of actual murder (as opposed to subdual) can vary from campaign to campaign and character to character. Especially in 5E where you can almost always choose to knock people out.

And being discontented doesn't always stem from tragedy at home. As we've seen a bunch of examples of given in the thread. Wanderlust, ambition, religious dedication, a desire to bring justice to the world, to complete a noble quest, to become a hero, to learn arcane knowledge and the secrets of the universe, to serve nature against monstrous invaders or corruptors or exploiters, to become wealthy and able to live a live of luxury and comfort (and/or provide one to your friends and family), or simple boredom can make an adventurer.

It's certainly true that most games have a share of violence that would dissuade most real people, but a lot of D&D campaigns have a more four-color comic take on violence. Characters get scratched and beat up and bloodied but rarely disemboweled or maimed. It's not all survival horror like our beloved OSR can often be.

Yeah, you can always be from a happy knightly family and the family buisness is monster hunting and helping the common folk against bandits.
A devout follower of your god with a happy family who was chosen for a crusade by their God themselves.

 

[Edgar Ironpelt]

My first though was that maybe the players are (perhaps unconsciously) offering broken-shell characters with grim dark backgrounds as sacrificial offerings to the DM, with the prayer that the DM will go easy when it comes to inflicting grimdark horrors on the characters in course of play.

My second though is that it's relatively easy to get abused characters with horrific backgrounds to go on adventures. Depending on just how bad adventures and the adventuring life can get, in the setting, a player might conclude that a character with a happy background would quite reasonably make strenuous efforts to avoid the Call to Adventure, and that trying to play such a character would cause trouble at the game table and be rude to the DM and the other players.

 

[Baron Opal II]

Honestly, it would be so refreshing to see a player come to the table with a character that wasn't another broken shell with dead family and a horrific childhood.

Well, I can think of people who had a driving need to see what was over there. Percy Fawcett, Sir Richard Burton, Zheng He, Abubakari II. Sometimes there was a purely economic motive to place one's self in harm's way.