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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8242797" data-attributes="member: 18">Yeah if a player wants that, great. If not, fine.What I've never seen go well is "basically no backstory at all, I'll come up with it at the table", like they maybe have a vague concept, which in 5E is usually just race + class + background and thinking very briefly about how that would look. I've just never seen someone pull this off in 30+ years of TT RPGs. If they've got nothing at all beyond that (which like in 2E would be race+class+kit, for example), my experience, countless times, has been they come up with nothing consistent or interesting, the best they possibly do is come up with a gimmick or a catchphrase.If they're like at least able to articulate why their character isn't totally generic Dwarf Fighter w/Mercenary background or w/e, to like articulate some really basic backstory like where they're from, and if they had any formative/significant experiences, then we're golden. For example, we had a Human Barbarian in one game, and he's basically a Viking but he can tell us he's the youngest son of a big family, out for adventure, and very boisterous.Pretty basic? Sure. Pretty trope-y? Sure. Good enough? Definitely. And that actually became a great character. It's a pretty thin line and I think it speaks more to state of mind and approach to the character than to whether it's really detailed or not - like, maybe this guy only spent 1-2 minutes thinking about it, but somehow his state of mind was envisioning the character, whereas the "I'll come up with it at the table" guy just doesn't have that state of mind, and never achieves it (in my experience, again, I'm sure others have seen it).Personally I like elaborate-ish backstories but what I have learned is you have to put your character at the beginning of a road, not the end. I once wrote an incredibly elaborate Werewolf: The Apocalypse background and realized, that in doing that, I'd basically gone through everything that interested me about the character, and wasn't really that excited to play them!Then again I wrote an Exalted character with a three page backstory, a sketch and a ton of ideas and I'd almost never been more excited to play a character, because of where he was going to go. Then the Exalted campaign never happened. SIGH.</blockquote>

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