Sociopathic PCs -- an epidemic?

[ConcreteBuddha]

The thing is, no one in fiction or real life lives in a vacuum. Someone who HAD lost their entire family to rapacious ogres would likely be OVERJOYED to find out they had family left alive, somewhere. Even Orphans would LIKE a family, and likely at least had a kind adult who mentored them, by accident or design. NO ONE has NO family, except for a golem. (I take that back - even Frankenstein's Monster had Frankenstein.)

Agreed. But I'm talking about the relationship between the DM and the player, not the story. I dislike games where the DM railroads the PCs by using family/friend NPCs. Just my XP.

As a DM, I don't want ten pages, I want ONE paragraph. Something that shows that the character was not the product of spontaneous generation from a pool of amino acids. Give me something as a DM I can work with, because when I play I return the courtesy.

True that. I would like to play in that game. However, some DMs of which I have played with (especially when using a module), do not give a second glance to the history of each character and proceed to spew the plotline of said module, even when it has nothing to do with the PCs and their motivations.

**ConcreteBuddha, just so you know, the above was more rhetorical, and wasn't directed at you. I just saw your points and saw a great jump-point.

No problem. I am more of playing the devil's advocate, anyway.

 

[Vymair]

Every character I make generally has at least a one-page background if not more. I need to know what motivates this person to have any idea of how they make decisions.

I find that as a player, this helps the DM tie my character into the world. I've found that my DMs will use my background from time-to-time. This always provides wonderful role-play moments and break the party out of the mode of us vs the world that sometimes occurs.

I had a hilarious scene once between my Druid who had left his rich merchant family and was very anti-business and his cousin, a cleric of Zilchus when he needed to raise some funds by selling his magic items.

As a DM, I love the number of plot hooks I can get out of well-written background. I've had entire story arcs come out of backgrounds that I would have never thought of on my own. The beauty of them is the player will want to follow hooks associated with their life story and since I tend to run very open campaigns (meaning the players often drive the story), it helps to understand what incidental things happening in the world will grab their attention so I can prepare.