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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6335744" data-attributes="member: 4937">Yes, good policy.I also have had a player come to me and say, "You know how I gave you permission to mess with my character's backstory.  Well, last week I was enjoying that, but my dad just died and I'd appreciate it if you stopped because suddenly it's too personal and I can't handle it right now.""Yes. No problem.  Consider that plot line on hold until you say otherwise."What's more common though I think, and something I think Dave was touching on is that a player has a hook in there backstory or an idea about their fore story that probably isn't the best idea for a story for some reason.  Probably the most typical problem I see is that the player puts some cliché in their backstory and has a vague notion of it being used in the most clichéd way imaginable, and a vague idea that that is going to be fun because it worked for the trope setter, when in fact, if you gave the player the cliché he'd be really disappointed because the story had no twist and no creativity, but if you really deconstruct or subvert the cliché then that is also going to disappoint the player because it's not who he saw himself as.To give an example, almost every player in some fashion draws on the mysterious birth cliché.   It's like the default backstory.  Sometimes you end up with 6 guys who all have this dangling hook that they are orphans/bastards/or otherwise have missing fathers but their parents where possibly seriously important, which borders on the ridiculous if you pay attention to all of that (unless incidentally, the backstories converge and provide for a conspiracy).   IMO, the only character you actually want to play that cliché straight up on is the one guy that didn't and doesn't see it coming.  Everyone else will only really enjoy it if they are ok subverting the trope and giving them a twist    If a player sets up his character's dad to be Darth Vader, or sets himself up to be the mysterious orphan whose actually the heir to the throne, often he's going to actually be disappointed no matter what you do with that hook especially in the short term.  The guy who wrote the cliché about being the mysterious orphan who is actually the heir to the throne would be just going through the motions if you followed up on that, so instead you should probably leave the plot hook alone and work on fulfilling the real metagoal involved.   Or sometimes you can just ignore a hook long enough that the player gives up on the plot, and then you actually can use it.But in many ways, playing on the player provided hooks is still like writing a novel for an audience.  They still don't actually want to know what is going to happen because nothing is more boring than a perfectly predictable story. If you give up on have twists in the plot, then it puts a really heavy burden on the other aesthetics of play to pick up the slack.In a certain sense I'm in a good place with my current group.  All of them are so genera unsavvy and have such poor narrative sense, that everything I pull no matter how clichéd is a twist they didn't see coming.  I've got three mysterious birth plotlines going in some form or the other, which I think I a record for a single group, and I don't think any one of the three players has a clue where I'm going to pull the rug out from under them or where I think their story goes based on their backstory.</blockquote>

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