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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Thomas Shey" data-source="post: 8448411" data-attributes="member: 7026617">I want to use Pemerton a little bit here to illustrate a bit from my prior post.The above paragraph and most of the rest of the post leading to it has an unstated but (I think) pretty clear assumption: that the purpose of backstory is overwhelmingly to engage the PCs' interests.  Given the time and mode of the books he's talking about, this is not an assumption I'd guess those books were making; that the purpose of the backstory was to set up a dynamic setting, and that it was not necessary for the PCs to interact with all of it for that to be a virtue.The significance of this is that for a person who thinks the latter is true, a critique based on the former is going to evoke, to one degree or another, a response of "And?"  That's likely even to be true if they understand the difference between the two positions, as they presumably consider the latter as a virtue that someone with priorities toward the first won't, so it may be hard for them to sympathize with the aims of the first.</blockquote>