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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fba827" data-source="post: 5185258" data-attributes="member: 807">One thing I did with an older group when I used to DM regularly -- the first level at the start of the campaign would actually be broken down into a miniadventure for each PC (individually) with the other players being NPCs that tie to the focused-PC.  Culminating in the PC getting to some point that would tie in with the other PCs.  Thus the campaign with the group as a whole would begin at 2nd level (where 1st level was everyone's 'semi solo' adventure).Example: The person playing the paladin would play his own PC, while everyone else played some premade clergy-type NPCs.  The paladin's player had in his background that he is a local hero to everyone except the sheriff who never liked him.  So, for the miniadventure, this paladin with NPCs would then go off to find the missing townsfolk, and in the course of doing so may get a clue (that is inconsequential at the time but leads to something that makes sense in the later campaign plotline) and the sherriff might have either been involved with enough deniability to save himself or else he is just miffed at the paladin for stealing his spotlight.Next session the rogue player who wanted his background to be about being on the run for a murder he didn't commit might have him trying to flee some area, with the NPCs all being other convicts (if they escaped from jail) or just travelers that he tried to 'blend in' with..And so on until every PC had their own 1st level adventure.Sometimes they would each last half a session, other times it would be an entire one-to-two sessions for each PC... but it was important that each PC had the same length everytime we did this in order to not show favorites.  Of course, we often had at least two PCs have some sort of relation (it was players who were brothers so they often had brother PCs or "old friends" etc and they'd plan spells and feats that worked well off of each other) so they'd have their miniadventure combined into one.It really brought to life everyone's personal goals and made it a) real to the player rather than just words on the background, and b) saw how it tied to the grander campaign arcsIt worked fine for that old group, but I am sure it would not work all groups since some people would scoff at the idea of needing to play an NPC, or playing when the narrative is strongly dictated by the primary PC of that arc.  So I wouldn't advise such a tactic for all groups.But also keep in mind, some DMs may have plans for your background that may just not have come up yet (but they are there)... but then there are other DMs that generally forget/dismiss it if it doesn't come up fairly early in the campaign. So it's really as much as thing with the particular player and how vocal they are (possibly at the detriment of other players), what the DM has is remembering, and what the campaign direction allows...edit: that ended up being much longer than i meant it .. sorry for the wordiness <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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