PC histories/backstories -- help, hindrance, neither?

[Lord Pendragon]

To add to what Quas said, I've seen similar backgrounds - and not only that. They were imprisoned by hobgoblins for a year and then led a slave revolt that allowed them to escape their slave masters by ducking into the dreaded Black Swamp where the band of escaped slaves lost many of their number due to attacks from trolls & ogres as well as the evil swamp lich, who managed to get all the slaves except said PC.

Odd. When I think "background" I think of "where is this character coming from? What has brought this character into his 1st-level class?"

So for my paladin, it was a dream-vision of an angel, followed by four years of apprenticeship to an older knight. His mentor died just before he could be knighted, and he was banished from his mentor's holdings by his mentor's brother. So he winds up joining the party, part of a frontier organization, freshly trained but with no real experience, looking for a way to be a hero now that he's lost his chance to be a knight.

For my recent bard, I wanted to get away from the philandering dandy stereotype, so I decided to give the traditional story a slight twist. He was caught making love to a noble daughter, whom he loved and who loved him deeply. But rather than fleeing an angry husband, he wanted to stay and marry her, and she him as well. Instead, the girl's father--wanting to marry his daughter off to another noble--declares it a rape and has the boy thrown in a crow's cage to die. A passing bard releases him and, having lost his former life, he becomes the bard's apprentice.

Granted, I like to write my backgrounds out with more flair. For the bard, I actually wrote out the scene where the bard is discovered in his lover's bed. But the nuts and bolts of the background are relatively simple. The short paragraphs I wrote above sum up pretty much everything.

In the last campaign I DMd, I was very happy with the campaign backgrounds, which again gave me a good feeling for the PCs and their goals, without really detailing any specifics. I had a royal cousin who's father had been exiled from court by the Queen, a noble son who'd been a royal page, a young woman who was coming to the big city to seek clues to her parents' mysterious deaths, and the son of a foreign baron, come to the capital to seek fame and glory. (I required the PCs to take 1 level of NPC classes. Aristocrat was popular. )

Is this atypical? When people say "detailed background" are we talking about something like I've outlined above, or are we talking about something along the lines of what NewJeffCTHome describes? Because if so, perhaps I'm on the wrong side of this discussion...

 

[kigmatzomat]

Pendragon your backgrounds are fine for low level while the examples given by JeffCTHome are the kinds of "bad" backgrounds.

The reason yours are "good" while the others are "bad" is that they provide distinct motivation and give a history but 1) do not imply the 1st level character is accomplished and b) do not hem in the GM. I could take either of your backgrounds as a DM and make some tweaks that have no affect on the story but integrate it into the world. The paladin's mentor was part of campaign-specific-order and you weren't knighted because that order and your birth-liege are at odds over campaign-related-detail. The Noble and bard-mentor's background and motivations are equally flexible.

The slave-revolt-lich story requires having the swamps, liches, trolls, etc all out there, creating significantly fixed situations the DM has to account for in-game. Furthermore, repeat encounters with trolls, slavelords, liches, and overcoming environmental hazards all result in acquiring XP. Both are bad for low-level PC backstories.