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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Herpes Cineplex" data-source="post: 1575979" data-attributes="member: 16936">I've seen that before, too.  It usually goes hand-in-hand with games where every NPC (down to the cuddliest little cleric) has some kind of dark, malicious, secret agenda aimed against the PCs, and if someone's spent a lot of time playing with a GM who pulls that kind of crap, it can take a lot of work to rehabilitate them.The other reasons people have advanced are also good ones.  I'll add another one to the list:  making a character an orphan is faster than giving them a family.  D&D is a high-character-mortality game, and if the players are expecting that the GM's not going to pull any punches, they're less likely to want to invest two or three hours into detailing the parents and six siblings of their character, their place in society, the name of their childhood pet, and all that good stuff, and then have that character catch fifteen points of damage to the face when he only had 2 hit points left.  Lot of good knowing his half-sister's husband's son's name is going to do anyone when the character's dead and no one can afford to raise him, right?Also, if a game's starting at 1st level, I can't think of anything more useless than a long and detailed character background; the character hasn't really done anything worth mentioning yet, or he'd have earned some more experience.  So I generally just aim for having all the PCs have a place where they came from and a reason to be interested in being a professional sociopath...er...adventurer.  Anything else they want to tell me about what their character was like before he decided to go do something really interesting and dangerous is just gravy, and I try to make them understand that everything that happens between 1st level and 10th is most likely going to be a billion times more interesting than what happened before 1st level.And I try to find positive ways to use character background (relatives who actually help the PC instead of asking favors or being targets for the bad guys, for example) on the off chance that it'll encourage someone to go for a non-orphan beginning.  Sometimes that works.--unless they've been conditioned by a bad gm to expect a trap, anywayryan</blockquote>

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