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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6118627" data-attributes="member: 42582">You may have misread - I wrote "without the player's permission".That's fair enough. In my own case, I'm relying on the fact that I've been friends with this particular player for over 15 years, and been GMing for him for 10 or so.Another factor was that his PC backstory had a comic element of failure to it - in the dwarven culture he described, you don't get to graduate as an "adult" dwarf until you're killed your first goblin, but Derrik - his PC - had never got to kill a goblin despite years of military service, because every time the goblins attacked he was somewhere else (cleaning the latrines, running an errand for a more senior dwarf, etc). Hence Derrik had left the dwarfhold and set off into the world to try and kill his first goblin (this was also how the player satisfied my requirement at the start of the campaign that the PC be ready to fight goblins).With that backstory, I knew that the player was happy to have a bit of fun poked at his PC, and that contributed to my willingness to introduce a weakness/flaw into the history of the dwarves - also one thta his PC was in a special position to do something about (because the PCs' adventures have taken them deep into the backstory and history of the minotaurs in the land).Dunno. It would depend a lot on context and the nature of the objection. It can be a myth - it was revealed as a "truth" in the game by an NPC talking to the PCs, and that NPC could have turned out be wrong. It can be the reverse - that the dwarves taught the minotaurs, but then suffered in some way (perhaps at the hands of the goblins) and had to relearn their culture from their former pupils.There are a lot of ways of digging out of this sort of hole, if one has to! The reason for doing it the way I did, though, is because it can serve as a dramatic reveal. Whereas asking for the players' permission ahead of time tends to blunt the force of that.Anyway, I think this is another illustration of the fact that there are many viable approaches to RPGing. (For instance, I could imagine a lot of people reading my post and not having your response, but rather taking the view that the history and culture of the dwarves is not an element of player-author backstory at all, but rather a setting element completely under the GM's control.)</blockquote>

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