Back stories are bad, you are not who you think you are going in, you are the meme about having to magic away your butt crack to prevent getting caught while sneaking cut cheese.
A level 1 with more than a few bullet points of backstory doesn’t make a ton of sense to me
I mean really your first few levels should be your backstory. You don’t have to complicate that
I like a short backstory that provides hooks. “Disgraced son of a noble family that became a warlock when everyone expected a sorcerer” is fine.
12 pages where all the cool stuff already happened is bad. Write that as a book.
My backstory is I joined this party to forget about my backstory.
Genius
My backstory is 12 pages, but I wrote it in very big letters and I used chalk and smudged it quite a lot
My backstory is 3 pages. I picked the noble knight background and they’re my retainers.
My backstory is one page long, I’m looking for a girl named Page, that’s it, just any girl named Page.
ah, a barbarian
I tried this in first grade once. The teacher was not a fan lol
My backstory: I am a [[class]] who is excited to go adventuring with my best buddies who I have no conflict with at all, and I am willing to die for them.
If you write it down you have to pay attention to it.
Back filling as you go is easier, and the other players can hold min maxers in their place as well as a DM.
Like, I never played much but we knew a dude who would always claim undisclosed knowledge or experience relevant to whatever was happening. So eventually in-game we just started calling him a liar, and the DM went with.
For example we needed food so he suddenly was an expert in foraging, but he really wasn’t so no one else ate the berries and he had severe diarrhea the next few game days.
It’s self regulating, don’t try stupid shit or stupid shit happens to you.
It’s nice to have a few hooks and characters and things that a DM can use if the player wants them, but player interest is the key part. A character’s background is there to allow for opportunities to tie the character into the world and vice versa, but you can also achieve the same thing by just giving weight to interactions and having them reverberate through the campaign.
Like, in the campaign I’m running now my players came across an ancient shrine to an axolotl-folk storm deity that was built as a sensory stone playing a ritual, with a hallowed ground spell creating a tongues area of effect. Some spiders had made a nest around it and were communing with it, but rather than talking to the spiders, they immediately shot them and lit the forest on fire. So I added a spider-folk cleric of said deity, gave them some ettercap followers, and had the surviving spiders that ran from the fight go fetch them to get their revenge. Now they’ve got someone extremely formidable that they have to deal with who is only there because they burned the forest around the shrine.
They weren’t initially intended to be in the campaign at all, and even the shrine was initially mostly a throw-away set piece to make a bit of forest more interesting. But because there was a significant interaction there that ought to have consequences, it made sense to add more context around that location.
Letting the players determine which bits get fleshed out on the basis of which bits they show interest in or interact with gives weight and substance whether they go in with a backstory or not. Some players are going to want to load up on backstory and give the DM plenty to work with straight from the beginning, some won’t. As long as you’re responsive to what your players do show you they’re interested in, it’ll benefit your campaign when you lean into it.
meh. This is HIGHLY table dependent. Some groups want deep narrative drama. Others just wanna get high on the confiscated goods and smash goblin face
Some people want to try their hand at writing, which is totally fine. You can even be super proud of your work.
The problem comes from expecting others to read it. Especially the DM, whose job it is to incorporate your backstory somewhat. So it is like forcing someone instead of on their own accord.
You know I like my characters when they show up as “I don’t have a backstory” and you get so invested in them that they end up with “I have, like, seven characters with full sheets who are all linked to this character, and a whole culture to their site of origin.”
Source: Ask me about my Tabaxi (-… acutally, Tabaxi is its own plural)
I have a vague concept of how they grew up around highschool-ish, but motivation is little more than “here for the vibes” lmao
So your character just pooped into existence without any characteristics?
Yep. Wizard did it.
The wizard wanted to fuck her, but there was some weird virgin/whore stuff going on in their head when they threw the wish spell, so she’s a succubus who cannot comprehend the concept of sex-but is still entirely a succubus in drive and demeanor. She’s very bad at it.
Parents dead. Given up as an orphan at some church or academy (depending on class and race).
End of story!
