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Message: <blockquote data-quote="rounser" data-source="post: 236306" data-attributes="member: 1106">Excellent post - just an addendum to this particular point, though:The DM can roleplay to the hilt and heap on the setting detail until the cows come home, but unless he bothers to integrate the PCs into his world as much as he does the NPCs (such as by providing PCs with NPC family and friends that mean something to them, bothering to develop a background that can come back to haunt them, and letting them go on quests that their characters are personally invested in), then there are unlikely to be enough roleplaying hooks provided by the DM's setting and NPCs for the players to hang onto.  By making the PCs just as integrated into the setting as the NPCs, they are no longer just bystanders watching the DM's NPC puppet show as they go on a tour of the world, but genuinely part of that world.  With contacts and needs that are part of the setting, you often can't help but roleplay when you're accosted by your character's old mentor who accuses your wizard of not washing his hair enough, just like when he was younger, or when the town thugs show up to collect on that bet that the PC's family still owes.A lot of players will not help you with integrating their character into the world - they'll just make stats and have vague notions beyond that.  This is to be expected from many gamers - usually the most enthusiastic person about the setting and campaign is the DM himself, and as you point out above, the DM is almost invariably the one who knows the most about the setting.  In this case, I think it's the DM's responsibility to prepare a draft background based on what information they can get out of the player about how they want their character's personality, friends, enemies, desires and background to be, then present that to the player for their opinion.  It doesn't have to be long - (usually) they're only 1st level so they shouldn't be living in the past.  Revise and negotiate from there if necessary to get it closer to what the player wants (and still suits the setting).  It sounds superficially like control freakery on the DM's part, but every player I've done it for really appreciates the time invested in their character, and usually offers a bunch of ideas to expand on it that can end up campaign fodder.The only problem is getting sidetracked by personal quests - it can get rather old if one of the PCs is always sidetracking the adventure at hand by searching for his lost mother, for instance - but I suppose that's better than no roleplaying at all... <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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