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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 8215955" data-attributes="member: 1465">I have always started a campaign at levels 1-3, so generally speaking yeah I am against long background stories.In general, I think that too much effort spent on background is one possible indication that the player is more interested in scripting their character's story than to actually play it out in the game and maybe even that the player is unlikely to accept the inherent randomness of the game and resent and blame the DM when things won't go according to the player's own plans... Maybe the player really just wants to be a storyteller, in that case why not just asking the player to narrate the whole story of their character while everybody else listens, instead of playing a RPG?A couple of things I particularly dislike, is having a young (in age or level terms) character with a background as long as a soap opera season plot, with more stuff happened before than what is probably going to happen during the campaign itself, and the other is having a background made up of blunt cheap turnarounds like "was brought up as a wizard then decided to switch to cleric but took a year off as a ranger then enrolled into a bardic college before striking a deal and becoming a warlock" only to explain their dumb mechanical combinations which were really only motivated by optimization.OTOH the worst thing that can happen is when the DM themselves require their players to write up an extensive background and then completely ignores it... I have become VERY suspicious of DMs who ask such a thing, and I have learned to never ask it myself.</blockquote>

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