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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chaosmancer" data-source="post: 7601914" data-attributes="member: 6801228">So, you chose to cut it off exactly where I thought you would. But you haven't answered the underlying question. Does Francis the Guard exist? Can the player track them down in that town, now that they have pulled that from their backstory? I see three major paths: 1) Frances exists and is a guard, the player changed the world. 2) Francis did exist, but either quit the guard or was eaten by wolves, players backstory was true, but things have changed and you are denying them a friendship within the guards. 3) Francs does not exist, and never did, you are telling the player their memories of their past are false. Yeah, I saw that. It is one way to play, but I think it has some major flaws since it really cuts players off and makes caring about things other than themselves far more difficult. Also, it seems to go against a lot of background traits and flaws. How are you supposed to deal with being the black sheep of a noble family, or contend with figures in your church as an acolyte, if you are so far away you never meet family members or people you knew growing up. I think that portion of the Basic rules is more about establishing a land of High Fantasy, than it is telling DMs they should cut off PCs from home, friends, and family. Wow. I'm sorry that I saw your answer as reasonable and a fair point to the disconnect I was talking about. Next time I won't include your name when I quote a relevant passage that I agree with. So, at my table, I don't necessarily disagree with any of this. I would say that it is a bit harsh to lock a player into only the backstory they come up with before play begins, but only because I often have players who can't come up with a backstory until two or three sessions in. In fact, even on fairly robust backstories, I, myself, and my players have found new inspiration which led to refining and adding details to those. So, knowing my full backstory is locked after session one is fair, but not something I would do personally. However, I also feel the need to point out, I was posting these questions for iserith. And, iserith has said that backstories in their games should be kept to the size of a tweet. That is about two sentences, maybe three. More details can be pulled from that, if I remember their position correctly,  but combining that with their insistence that one can never tell a player what their character thinks, led me to establishing the absolute base before moving my way up.  No, I am not advocating for this style of play. In fact, in the original post, you will note this is where I said the likely break point was, because it is the point between the player establishing minor details and the player establishing a major point in the scene. However, if you cannot tell a player what they think, which was iserith's position both in this thread with the orc elder telling stories about monster weaknesses and the insight thread, then even getting to this point can be troublesome. Because the player may have established that the guard named Francis does exist. IF we cannot ever tell a player what they think, and they state "I once saved this Red Dragon's life by healing it of Dragon Pox" then we have a disconnect in the game reality. The player believes this, something must have triggered this belief, but the DM says it never happened. So why does the player have these memories? This is where the "false dilemma" you see comes from. In my games, I just tell the player no. "Sorry, that sounds like a cool idea, but it doesn't fit with what we have going on, your character never did this/this never happened" and because I, and my table, are fine with occasional overlap, we establish that the PC does not actually believe these things happened. The Character is not delusional, the player is simply trying to eke out an unfair advantage by calling upon their backstory in a way the game does not support. But, if I cannot tell a player what their character thinks, then either the player backs down, or I am forcing the situation to turn to "the Character is delusional and has memories of events that never happened" Honestly, part of what drew me into this example was how close it was to the Elder telling the character how to slay various monsters when they were a child, which everyone on one side accepted this was perfectly fine, but this example raised an outcry of players far overstepping their bounds and declarations they would be better off playing a different game. The difference between the two, in a narrative sense, is minimal. The only difference is one establishes knowledge a player likely already had and would use in fights, and the other gives them a social benefit in a situation.</blockquote>

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