D&D 5E Players railroading dungeonmasters

[Maxperson]

Right. I have no objection to what they're saying other than calling it "railroading" or implying the DM is forced into doing anything with a character's backstory. Some DMs use player backstories to build a campaign around. I don't. But either way, that's the DM's choice. Nobody's coercing them.

Right. I don't feel compelled to use any particular thing from a background, or anything really. However, I do like to sometimes pull something from it and bring it into the game in some way, because it makes the players happy to have a tie like that happen. I've never made a background into the focal point of a campaign, though. They're just minor tie ins when they happen.

 

[CleverNickName]

Maybe I'm in the minority, but I kinda like a bit of railroading from my players. I encourage my players to give me all the backstory they can muster...entire paragraphs, pages, essays even, so that I have ample fodder to work with.

Later, offline and over several weeks, I'll work with the player to incorporate various elements of that backstory into the campaign. I'll look for ways to stitch the backstory of Character A into Characters B and C, and over the course of a year or so, everyone will be amazed at how they have all grown together over the story.

That's the goal, anyway.

Every now and then, we have one of Those Players, who will try to skillfully write away certain restrictions and exceptions through clever backstory. Like a warlock who conveniently is his own patron somehow, or a wild magic sorcerer who has conveniently learned to control his wild magic, or the character who isn't technically a (insert restricted race/class/subclass here) but is equivalent in every way except name, and carefully explained through My Special History^TM or whatever. I have to be pretty watchful for this stuff, because my players are pretty clever when it comes to circumventing restrictions.

 

[iserith]

Right. I don't feel compelled to use any particular thing from a background, or anything really. However, I do like to sometimes pull something from it and bring it into the game in some way, because it makes the players happy to have a tie like that happen. I've never made a background into the focal point of a campaign, though. They're just minor tie ins when they happen.

Yeah, we just do tie-ins during play when it there's the inspiration for it. A character's bond might be relevant so I just tack that on to whatever I already have prepared. Orcs killed your parents you say? Okay, well this is the same tribe of orcs right here. What do you do?

 

[Lanefan]

Now, a good background isn't about length really but it is about information. It should tell me, the DM, what sort of character they want to roleplay and where there interests in my world lie. It should tell me how they are connected to the world. It should tell the player what their motivation is, it should inform them of WHY they are doing what they are doing. It should help provide consistency to their roleplay which, imho, makes for a better experience for everyone at the table.

Thing is, the bolded parts are fine if it's my fifth character in that campaign and I've had time to build up some familiarity with your setting and what makes it tick; but if it's my first character I'm coming in blind unless you've provided a hella-big pre-game setting info dump.

And this is even true even if you're using a pre-fab setting e.g. Eberron or FR or wherever, as while I can read up on the setting-as-written it's all irrelevant until I know what you're changing about the place.

IMO the italicized bits are all that matters, and truth be told a backstory written with those purposes in mind might be something the DM never needs to see.

 

[Lanefan]

I've never had a player submit a written backstory in 30 years of GMing.

As a player, I'll submit one if asked, but I prefer to let the details emerge in play. It irritates me if GMs start adding to my backstory, so I prefer not to give them the opportunity.

I've maybe once, long ago, had a player hand me a written backstory without any input or prompting from me - and if memory serves that character was a one-hit wonder in any case: dice are cruel sometimes. On a few other occasions I've had characters come in with backstories established elsewhere, as they were previously played in another campaign and have jumped across.

Far more often I've sat down with a player and gone through some background construction together. After initial roll-up we know the characters race, gender, age, spoken (and sometimes written) languages, past profession/secondary skill(s), and optionally maybe a quirk of some sort e.g. it might for some reason be down a couple of toes on one foot; and until-unless the character shows it's going to last longer than the ice cube in my drink that's all we need.

At some point later, the backstory kinda gets built around those elements - or at the very least can't ignore them - and we then factor in some other randomly-generated elements e.g. number of living siblings and-or half-siblings, are parents still alive and-or together, what are each of those people doing, etc. The player might then factor in the character's established personality and maybe figure out events or details that made it that way. From here the player's pretty much free to dream up whatever she likes, within reason and within the guidelines already established as noted here.

As a player I don't worry much about backstory until-unless my character lasts a while, with rare exceptions if-when something too good not to use leaps to mind right away.

 

[Jaegermonstrous]

I might be in the minority, but I tend to look at D&D as a collaborative process. I come from a background in theatre, so I tend to use the rules of improv when I'm working on D&D. There are four answers to any question in improv; "Yes, and...", "Yes, but...", "No, and...", or "No, but...". Using that framework allows me to write a massive, sprawling world and campaign with a huge amount of flexibility for whatever the players throw at me.
While I as the DM hold a lot of the cards, my players are in on the story too, and I find that getting your players to buy into the world and get excited about it by elaborating on their character's backstory can be really beneficial. I don't mandate an in-depth backstory, but I do ask a lot of leading questions when my players are creating their characters: Why are they adventuring? What questions do they seek to answer? What is this character's goal? With only a few exceptions, players make the world better and more interesting when they go down a rabbit hole and write an amazingly elaborate backstory. I've had everything from a several-page biography to "I want to become the best gladiator in the world."
Do they occasionally get murderized by a goblin in the first battle? Sometimes. But them's the breaks. Same way that I can spend hours building an adventure, or a really cool monster, only for my players to hang a hard right and wander off into the sunset with Jeff the Throwaway NPC.
But that forces me to be creative. Why do my players love Jeff? How can I use Jeff to bring them back to main plotline? Is Jeff really as he appears, or is he eeeevil?
There are of course things I don't allow, or things I will reframe as goals, like the example @CleverNickName gave of the warlock who wanted to be their own patron. That's the kind of thing I'd allow as an end goal that would take the PC out of the campaign and make them an NPC.
It can be really daunting to allow your players to put their grubby little dice-goblin hands all over your campaign baby (ask me how I know), but I've never found it to be an overall bad idea. It makes me a better DM, and gets my players to buy in to the world and get excited about the game.

 

[Lanefan]

In my games, at 1st level, you are barely more than a nobody, and any backstory you write needs to reflect that. Notable figures in my Greyhawk campaign are at least 5th level. If you want to be a renowned warrior who led the conquest of some foreign land, well, you'll have to actually do that. You aren't a famed monster-hunter or respected archmage. If you were anything of the kind, you'd be much higher level.

Thing is, you and @DEFCON 1 are both right. 1st-level characters are pretty much nobodies at the moment, and this works just fine for Humans and Part-Orcs and Hobbits, but a new-to-adventuring Elf* might have several centuries of prior life to account for (including prior adventuring!) and this runs hard aground on game mechanics.

* - to a lesser extent this can also apply to Gnomes and Dwarves, depending how long-lived one has them in one's setting.

An assumption the game makes, kind of, is that levels once gained stay with you for life. There's no mechanic (and never has been) for what I call "rotting skills", where the abilities gained with adventuring levels slowly fade over time due to disuse. Were there such a mechanic then yes, that 250-year old 1st-level Elf Rogue could have been the 14th-level Fighter who led the Elves into the Battle of Bonbai 184 years ago shortly after singlehandedly slaying Fintixxa the Green Dragon; and who after Bonbai gave up fighting and let those skills rot and memories fade. Now she's trying to start over, and away we go.

 

[Lanefan]

If I'm remembering things you've said previously in other threads correctly... you also are a DM who has very slow leveling, correct? If I'm not mistaken in that, your style does help illustrate a way to ameliorate that disparity between mechanics and story. If characters do not level up until after like a year or more of in-game (and even out-of-game) time... it becomes easier to make the narrative fit the board game. Slowly gain new mechanics after months and months (if not years and years) of adventuring (and which I'd imagine might even potentially have the training or researching of those mechanics possibly reflected in the story itself) makes it easier to come to terms with it in the story.

I have rather slow levelling, but nose-to-the-grind adventurers can still pick up a few levels a year.

What's very slow is non-adventuring levelling for stay-at-home types e.g. lab mages, temple clerics, etc., or for career soldiers. Here, a level every few years if they stick at it is about the best they can expect, with cultural variants in long-lived races to slow it down to roughly Human-year equivalents.

 

[Stormonu]

I prefer at least a half-page of backstory. I don't set requirements, but if it's at least a half-page, I can get a much better idea of what the PC is about and where he came from. If it's more than a page, though, it starts dragging on and generally includes a lot of minutiae that don't add a whole lot.

I also am not railroaded by it in the least and fail to see how it could railroad a DM.

I do encourage my players to create backstories (I love the tables in Xanathar to help with this), but after we had an instance where a player wrote a 3-page background only to have the same character die in the first session - well, let’s just say for both sides of the table’s sanity I ask backstories to be on the brief side.

 

[iserith]

I do encourage my players to create backstories (I love the tables in Xanathar to help with this), but after we had an instance where a player wrote a 3-page background only to have the same character die in the first session - well, let’s just say for both sides of the table’s sanity I ask backstories to be on the brief side.

Yeah, or consider the plight of the DM who prepares a campaign based on backstories then a player leaves the group. Depending on how much the campaign (or part of it) hinged on their character being there, the DM now has a potential problem. It's not insurmountable, but it's also completely avoidable in the first place.