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<blockquote data-quote="Cadfan" data-source="post: 4785874" data-attributes="member: 40961">Our characters rarely start with backstories.&nbsp; Certainly nothing beyond &quot;tiefling orphan raised by humans.&quot;&nbsp; But they tend to develop personalities through play, and since I freely permit retconning this sort of thing, they retroactively develop backstories.&nbsp;This may seem really haphazard, and to a certain extent it is, but it tends to lead to tightly knit groups of PCs with backstories that reference one another.&nbsp;I also incorporate something I stole from Og: Unearthed.&nbsp; Within reason, you can suddenly discover mid game that you know how to do something you've never done before.&nbsp; Og does this by permitting PCs to choose their skills during the game instead of before hand.&nbsp; I do the same thing for non adventuring skills, with the caveat that you have to explain how you know how to do whatever it is, and that this is now part of your backstory.&nbsp; So we have one PC who knows how to captain a sailing vessel.&nbsp; She decided this because we needed someone who knew how to do this.&nbsp; She gave me a plausible reason for how it related to her existing backstory, and now its worked in and now she has this skill.&nbsp; If she wants to discover a skill again she'll face some difficulty because she'll have to work it into her existing backstory, which now has less &quot;empty space&quot; in it.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Cadfan, post: 4785874, member: 40961"] Our characters rarely start with backstories. Certainly nothing beyond "tiefling orphan raised by humans." But they tend to develop personalities through play, and since I freely permit retconning this sort of thing, they retroactively develop backstories. This may seem really haphazard, and to a certain extent it is, but it tends to lead to tightly knit groups of PCs with backstories that reference one another. I also incorporate something I stole from Og: Unearthed. Within reason, you can suddenly discover mid game that you know how to do something you've never done before. Og does this by permitting PCs to choose their skills during the game instead of before hand. I do the same thing for non adventuring skills, with the caveat that you have to explain how you know how to do whatever it is, and that this is now part of your backstory. So we have one PC who knows how to captain a sailing vessel. She decided this because we needed someone who knew how to do this. She gave me a plausible reason for how it related to her existing backstory, and now its worked in and now she has this skill. If she wants to discover a skill again she'll face some difficulty because she'll have to work it into her existing backstory, which now has less "empty space" in it. [/QUOTE]

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