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[dragoner]

As a GM I'll take ideas from backstories, though I think they are mostly for the player. Though a lot of this falls into the "all generalizations are false" because if one has a lifepath generation and a 42 year old character, who is on that last run at success because they are a loser, is a different deal than an 18 year old just starting, clean slate.

 

[trappedslider]

 

[Thomas Shey]

I wouldn't be willing to run an on-going campaign for someone that puts that much thought into their backstory, let alone a 2 hour convention playtest session.

I don't even want to know how someone that puts that much thought into their backstory would respond if that character was killed.

While its a risk, its not a given they'll be hostile to it. I generally have pretty substantial backstory for most characters, but if I'm a game where death is on the table, its on the table.

(I wouldn't bother with that for a one-off game like a con game though; even if I had some of it in my head there's no point in writing it down unless I think I'm going to recycle the character at some late point, and even in that case the con gms and players aren't going to really care).

 

[Ryujin]

I make a reasonably detailed, but short backstory for a character if I'm making up a character that already has experience. Say, for creating a 9th level D&D character. If I'm making up a new, 1st level character then it's a couple of sentences, at best. What life experience does that character have? Pretty much just getting to 1st level. I don't understand how people can claim their 1st level character has done a ton of heroic things, before their essential 'birth' as a PC.

And I think that I've used the usual tropes maybe twice. Once was for a 4e Feylock who was orphaned when his (minor Feywild noble) parents were murdered and he was thrown out into the Prime, to die. That was as a nod to why he made a Pact and why he hated one of the main antagonists in the campaign. The other was for a Pathfinder Evil campaign. He was a street urchin who had a somewhat high CHA and was recruited, trained, and finally sent to a rival nation as an insurgent. Ended up as a FTR/Ninja, at later levels. the orphan thing was just an expedient to explain why he was where he was.

 

[dragoner]

I make a reasonably detailed, but short backstory for a character if I'm making up a character that already has experience. Say, for creating a 9th level D&D character. If I'm making up a new, 1st level character then it's a couple of sentences, at best. What life experience does that character have? Pretty much just getting to 1st level. I don't understand how people can claim their 1st level character has done a ton of heroic things, before their essential 'birth' as a PC.

And I think that I've used the usual tropes maybe twice. Once was for a 4e Feylock who was orphaned when his (minor Feywild noble) parents were murdered and he was thrown out into the Prime, to die. That was as a nod to why he made a Pact and why he hated one of the main antagonists in the campaign. The other was for a Pathfinder Evil campaign. He was a street urchin who had a somewhat high CHA and was recruited, trained, and finally sent to a rival nation as an insurgent. Ended up as a FTR/Ninja, at later levels. the orphan thing was just an expedient to explain why he was where he was.

These are good because you are centering your character in the setting. It's the role part of role playing. Treating them as a playing piece, just to interact with the rules is ok, except that is more like playing as a boardgame.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I make a reasonably detailed, but short backstory for a character if I'm making up a character that already has experience. Say, for creating a 9th level D&D character. If I'm making up a new, 1st level character then it's a couple of sentences, at best. What life experience does that character have? Pretty much just getting to 1st level. I don't understand how people can claim their 1st level character has done a ton of heroic things, before their essential 'birth' as a PC.

It isn't necessarily about heroic things, but how their life lead them to be an adventurer in the first place. When I wrote the backstory for Kedric, the aasimar Champion/Bard I had in a PF2e game, the backstory was mostly family history explaining his aasimar-ness, and then a bit of story informing how he'd become a hybrid Champion/Bard (hybrid classes are not a common case in PF2e, and in fact require GM permission, but the whole group was in this case because we were an undersized party for what's known to be a somewhat rough Adventure Path and the GM figured we could use a leg-up).

 

[gnarlygninja]

I've swung around hard on backstories. When I first started playing I went all out on them, but then I realized that no one else I played with did and the people running almost never cared. Now I just come up with enough to have something, and the last time a DM asked me to write them a backstory it just annoyed me.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

If I'm making up a new, 1st level character then it's a couple of sentences, at best. What life experience does that character have? Pretty much just getting to 1st level. I don't understand how people can claim their 1st level character has done a ton of heroic things, before their essential 'birth' as a PC.

Depends on the setting & the PC.

I once ran a 1st level ranger whose origins were based on a sub-Saharan African tribe’s culture. In that tribe, a young man’s passage into adulthood involved hunting & killing a lion. Until he did so, he was just a boy in the eyes of his people. So, by necessity, this Ranger had to have experienced a pretty significant combat before becoming an adventurer.

Spoiler: Amusing side note:

This was one of the two most cursed rangers I’ve ever played. Per the DM’s suggestion, I chose a particular kind of supernatural being as his Favored Enemy, because they would be common in the campaign. Makes sense, right?

Except that this PC was victimized by TERRIBLE attack rolls seemingly every damn time we faced those critters. Whiffs galore!

 

[Velderan]

I think the longest backstory I have had for a PC I've played was for the first 5e campaign I played in. The DM was running Curse of Strahd and wanted some specific details to work with for purposes of visions and hallucinations we might encounter in Barovia. Mine ended up being 3 paragraphs, the first explaining some info about his family, the second an important person to him, and the third how he ended up in Barovia to begin with. Given the nature of the campaign, it gave the DM some ideas to use against me while not tying his hands to having to include any of it if he didn't want to.

 

[Velderan]

I have had the opposite, with a player had a long back story, they thanked me for not fudging the dice when their character died.

That's awesome. To be fair on my previous statement, if one of the people I play with now showed up to our next campaign with a long backstory it wouldn't bother me so much because we've played together for ~7 years now and I've already killed all their characters once (TPK in our 1st PF2e campaign). We all had a good laugh and then discussed what happens next.