Pineapple Express: Someone Is Wrong on the Internet?

[Scribe]

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This has been a hilariously frustrating week. I'm not even at the point of 'oh yay crunch time' because I cannot even factually do the work asked of me because of failures YEARS in the making. This gif, is perfect.

 

[RealAlHazred]

Since I've written material for convention use, I have a general rule on backstories for convention play: no more than three paragraphs. Short paragraphs, not German-style one-page paragraphs. Anything more than that will be too long for most people to read in the amount of time I want to take for choosing characters.

And I always prepare characters beforehand, after experiencing a convention game where the GM wanted to do character creation at the table "to show how fast this system is!" and had two players like the woman who inspired this particular series of posts, who spent half the slot creating and talking about their characters...

 

[TiQuinn]

Adults in the their 20s having apartments like that one in the city is probably the bigger one for me, but why quibble?

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

One of my longest & most complicated backstories was for 3.5Ed campaign that was starting with 10th level PCs. First, I asked the DM if the god Thoth (or equivalent) existed in the setting. He said Thoth existed.

I then created a multiclassed PC who was mechanically for all intents & purposes an “Arcane Paladin”; a member of The Illuminated Society of Thoth- a secular organization connected to Thoth’s church, devoted to the discovery and control of knowledge of all kinds. The society was divided into The Quills (admins & archivists), Swords (adventuring knowledge collectors & controllers), and the Scarlet Ibis (a ruling counsel with rotating membership). My PC was a Sword.

Wrote the whole mess up and sent it to him via email. He didn’t ask me to change a thing about the PC, and adopted the IST.

 

[dragoner]

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.

Sometimes they have interesting ideas, and sometimes it's "see how great I am" meh.

 

[Thomas Shey]

And I always prepare characters beforehand, after experiencing a convention game where the GM wanted to do character creation at the table "to show how fast this system is!" and had two players like the woman who inspired this particular series of posts, who spent half the slot creating and talking about their characters...

Yeah, we might have been able to do that back in the OD&D days, but that's because OD&D characters were almost schematic in their structure, and the longest thing you probably had to do was picking gear. I wouldn't bother with character generation for a con game these days (though I might let people bring characters that were already generated if they looked appropriate).

 

[Thomas Shey]

One of my longest & most complicated backstories was for 3.5Ed campaign that was starting with 10th level PCs. First, I asked the DM if the god Thoth (or equivalent) existed in the setting. He said Thoth existed.

I then created a multiclassed PC who was mechanically for all intents & purposes an “Arcane Paladin”; a member of The Illuminated Society of Thoth- a secular organization connected to Thoth’s church, devoted to the discovery and control of knowledge of all kinds. The society was divided into The Quills (admins & archivists), Swords (adventuring knowledge collectors & controllers), and the Scarlet Ibis (a ruling counsel with rotating membership). My PC was a Sword.

Wrote the whole mess up and sent it to him via email. He didn’t ask me to change a thing about the PC, and adopted the IST.

That's one of the things about backstories; they can sometimes supply useful material to incorporate into the campaign as a whole.

(But then, I spent half my gaming career running superhero campaigns, where having character backgrounds that add pretty big chunks of setting in is kind of business as usual)

 

[Ryujin]

This feels like as good a place as any for this.

For backers, the GenCon cut of the 4th Gamers movie, "The Gamers: Dorkness Falls" is going to be online until 11:59PM PST (US/Canada) on Sunday. You should have received your link and password via Kickstarter update. This is not the final version and has audio balance issues, some incomplete effects, and placeholder music. Didn't want anyone who backed to miss this, given the short time frame it will be available. Andy slaved over editing without much sleep for days, while recovering from Covid, to have this much ready for the con showing.

The completed version should release next year, from what I'm told.

 

[Mannahnin]

I tend to keep backgrounds relatively short & sketchy nowadays, to root the character lightly in the world (and allow for flexibility if the DM needs something to be different) and inform how I play the character. 1-3 paragraphs if that, most of the time.

I can come up with more if the particular game really calls for it (maybe Vampire?), but hopefully I'm working with the GM on it at that point, to really root the character in the setting.

 

[Ryujin]

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).

I'm talking more about the people who claim their 1st level Fighter is "Champion of Greyhawk, Slayer of the Great Wyrm Magnus, ....."