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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Blue" data-source="post: 8242684" data-attributes="member: 20564">In your backstory I want three things:<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Your Call to Adventure.  What motivates your character/why do you do it.  Vital for me writing compelling hooks.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Connections to the world.  Be it the metropolis you grew up in, the chapter of knights you joined, your childhood friend turned rival, your non-dead mentor, the tribe of bugbears that wiped out your village, the beggar-king who taught the orphans to steal.  Things that when I bring into play there's instant buy-in and engagement.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Whatever you need to feel like you have a complex and rich character.  While I prefer something concise, by the time a campaign is over you'll have heard a lot more exposition from me then your backstory, even if it does run a bunch of pages.</li> </ol>Often there are high level motivators that are not the type that come up at the table.  A recent character started masked and covered - she was covered with burn scars from an attack that killed her child, and then she turned her magical knowledge a more martial way.  While it's all nice to say "I want my character to be generated at the table", those (a) are all shared experiences and we need otehr anchors for our characters to have unique viewpoints and (b) very, very few DM are going to run the first session with a young child, kill them off, and then take a ten year downtime (character was an elf) to go bladesinger.  And if so, would it really be a shared experience?  It also gave a mystery to the character that could come out in play as trust was established.</blockquote>

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