Who creates your character backgrounds?

[Oryan77]

My long time friend is starting up a 4e game and a few of us have been creating our characters. The DM has taken it upon himself to completely write each of our PCs history himself.

I've never done it like that myself when I DM. I'll give ideas or inform the player of details that don't work in the setting I'm running so they can tweak it. But overall, I let them create their backgrounds.

The DM has been very enthusiastic about writing our histories. I guess I'm ok with the 3 pages worth he wrote for my PC. I probably would have come up with something a lot different, and I'm not really sure I like being told that my PC was in love, but overall, it's not a bad background.

It just got me to thinking, how often do DMs do this? Are people ok with this in general? It seems like it crosses that line of controlling the PC, but for PC backgrounds, does it really matter? Sure, I'm told that my PC was in love, but once I start to play the PC, if I ever met that lover, I could bash her head in if that's what I chose to do (not that I would do that).

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I've only seen it with pure pre-gens. Every other time, I've done my background myself, with input from the DM as needed.

 

[Scott DeWar]

Every dm, to the best of my memory, had me make my own history. As such I am not so sure I would be comfortable with the dm writing a history.

with input from the DM as needed.

of course there is always that.

 

[Umbran]

That's the usual way things are done for one-shot games, or when you're playing a pre-generated character (campaign or otherwise).

I don't think I'd have much problem with a GM writing backgrounds in principle. In practice, of course, it would depend on the GM.

 

[Mark CMG]

If the setting is very specific, the GM might be the best person to write the background, though some input from the player is a good idea. Otherwise, I prefer the players to make their own backgrounds with approval, and line-item veto power, from the GM.

 

[Patryn of Elvenshae]

I've only seen it with pure pre-gens. Every other time, I've done my background myself, with input from the DM as needed.

This.

 

[Patryn of Elvenshae]

Doubleposten!

 

[ThirdWizard]

We have a player is was notorious for having no backstory to his characters, so the current DM told him that if he didn't have anything by the time the first session started, he was going to write it himself. The player didn't, so the DM did, and it was a pretty awesome back story.

When I was DMing a game for him, I did the same, along with another character. No backstory, so I gave them 10 questions while the group waited, and filled in the rest.

I've also given small pushes. I might say "Dragnborn? You know, there are roaming clans to the west that you could be from. It would give you a reason to travel there eventually if you wanted, too." Or something like that, but I think that's pretty normal for every game.

But, I've never seen a player willing to make their own back story and the DM take over. That doesn't sound like something I'd be comfortable with for the most part, unless I really trusted the DM in question and who was going to work with me on the kind of character I wanted to play. So, if I wanted to play a joking gambler, and he handed me a brooding cutthroat, I might be skeptical.

 

[Lanefan]

Most times we don't bother with character background, unless a player wants to, until the character has stuck around long enough to become significant and-or something has come up in the game requiring us to know some background info on the spot. (an example that came up last year was a wild magic surge that teleported one PC to the place of his birth - except we had no idea where that was other than we knew what realm he was from; so a few dice rolls later we'd figured it out, and on we went)

In either case, I and the player do some random dice rolling (where born, parents' professions, parents alive or dead, number of siblings, etc.) and within reason the player can take it from there if so desired. Some do, some don't.

Lanefan

 

[Thasmodious]

The closest I've come as a DM is I used to give out fairly lengthy background questionnaires for the players to answer, then I would fill in relative details (names, locales, etc.) and then write it up into a background, but it was their choices and their ideas, I just edited, added details about the game world, and wrote it up.

I would not like a DM telling me what my background was and what choices my character had made in the past. Those are my decisions. That said, I'm not going to add "I would walk away from this table and burn an effigy of that DM and salt the earth where the ashes lay". I'd just tell the DM that I'd much prefer to write my own or collaborate with him if there are specific things he wants to work in that tie us to the game world.