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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elder-Basilisk" data-source="post: 1859507" data-attributes="member: 3146">My experience is that it is different with different groups but that an open invitation to just "write a backstory" is asking for trouble.In one campaign, for instance, the game was set in the Savage Coast. I decided to play an Aragorn as ranger of the north type character whose family had lost their holdings before the invasion of Turrosh Mak but still defended the land and people out of a sense of noblesse oblige. There was also a rogue who was on the run from the Safeton guild for some reason, and a pair of elves who were human-hating kleptomaniacs. Needless to say, the elves never did anything but cause trouble and it was a happy day when their players decided to quit. The rogue wasn't really working with the party, and I spent the entirety of the campaign wondering "what's going on? why am I here?" The basic problem was that the DM didn't want to tell us what the campaign was about so we had a bunch of backstories and goals but they did nothing to tie us into the campaign.As a DM, I've recently had some success with backstories. I described the campaign to the players, told them the basic premise, and the kind of characters I was looking for (they would all be questors, looking for a mystical chapel whose appearance was supposed to portend great things for the kingdom). So, I ended up with a deposed noble pretending to be a peasant, a huntsman whose lord had been killed in a blood-feud, an older noble who joined the quest to get back to an environment where he was more comfortable and get out of his wife's way as she married off their daughters, and a few other characters. I was able to tie some of the characters together and started developing a few threads from the get-go. Overall, the ability to include specific challenges--like, does a character delay his quest to seek revenge upon a bandit he recognizes from his past, or does the deposed noble defend his people against a raid or go on to get an artifact in a later quest--enabled me to provide role-playing challenges to the group that would otherwise not have been possible.So I've seen character backgrounds both get in the way and enhance games.</blockquote>

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