Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6118426" data-attributes="member: 4937">Frankly, I think that's way overreacting.  I'm not sure that I've ever had a player who would object strongly to a Darth Vader moment.  Instead, my expectation would be a responce like this: "Wait a minute... does this mean the second most important person in the galaxy/world/nation/village is may dad!?!?  Awesome!!!  If I join with him, I gain an enormously powerful ally.  And if I don't join with him, I can kill him and take his stuff!"  And of course, the thespians are just happy to be able to say, "N0ooooo!!  It's can't be!!! That's impossible!!!" in a really angsty way.This isn't possible.  In D&D, there is nothing that is 'reliably dead' for example.  This is a classic comic book complication.  Pa Kent is reliably dead in your backstory, Superman, then who is this guy that looks just like your Dad and claims to be your Dad and why is Pa Kent's grave now empty?  I've seen that before, usually in players that are power gamers and/or express a preference for sand box style play.  I'm an orphan, I was raised by a martial arts master (who I'm estranged from and who is now dead), I have no friends and no enemies.  This is a player signalling - "Don't hook me."  I'm ok with that, I just tend to find that players who do do that often get jealous of players that don't do that.  And besides, it's not like I can't hook those players.   They have really simple levers if you want to hook them - money, power, fame, etc.  I've had a player of this sort once say something like, "I wrote I was an orphan so that you'd make me the long lost heir to a king or something, but you aren't doing anything with my backstory."   I'm like, "Errr.. if you wanted something like that maybe you should have talked about it before hand.  Every orphan isn't the lost legitimate heir to a kingdom you know.  I'm sorry you feel that the characters that worked out their backstory in great detail are more connected to the world and influential because of that.  Your backstory explicitly said you didn't know anyone and know one knows you.  I thought you were indicating you wanted to make your own fortune.   You are doing that.  What's the problem?  Do you really want to play out the story of being the king's son, or are you happy becoming king by your own hand like Conan?"  As I expected, it was the later.I'm largely in agreement with you on this, but I'm not quite so hands off of the empty spaces in the background.  If you leave part of your background open, I consider it implicit permission to mess with you at least a little.  Just because you don't mention a family, doesn't mean you don't have one.  The mess with it value of having the quest giver be your sister and the lost kid being your nephew is in my opinion 'low', especially if the players have already agreed to 'Adventure Path' style play.  I'll freely adapt modules so that the NPC's - even the monsters sometimes - are prior friends and relatives.  In general, if I think that I might be adding something someone might find really objectional (like deciding that the character has the 'Innsmouth look'), I'll ask, "On a scale of 1 to 10, how much can I mess with you?" without necessarily specifying how I'm planning to do it.  If I get a '10' as an answer, don't be surprised if all heck breaks lose in the unexplored spaces.  If I get some low value, I'll play it entirely hands off but don't expect then to have interesting connections to the world.   Generally people who write long backstories expect them to matter.  Those with short backstories don't expect or want this, and I'll stay off them.   Over time, I find people decide that they want the treatment the player with the longer backstory is getting, because backstory complexities generally equal both screen time and potential rewards as well as dangers.  The stakes are higher, so the rewards are higher too.  Even enemies are resources.   An enemy is just someone whom you are allowed or expected to kill and take their stuff.  Often not having a backstory relegates you in the eyes of society to being the follower of someone else in the party who has one.   If you are largely a cypher then you'll tend to remain that unless you are really proactive in making yourself a hero (or villian!) in the eyes of the game world.</blockquote>

Verification