DM Dilemma: Unknown World vs. Character Context

[Unusual Muse]

While playing in campaign worlds that are well-known and understood is fun, lately I've been pondering setting up a campaign world that is unknown to the players; that is, starting from 1st level, they go forth and discover the world, what's going on it, who's who, etc. I think this could break some very experienced players out of the "been there done that" syndrome, and make for a really engaging set of adventures.

The dilemma is trying to balance that with character backstory... that which gives the character context and purpose in the game. Some of the funnest games I've played lately are ones where the characters have a place in the world: Well-established stories, relationships, and roles. It gives the players a lot of meat to work with in the role-playing aspect of things, and even helps guide the "crunch" end of things to some extent.

I'm trying to wrap my head around ways of incorporating both of these elements. How to create a "blank slate" for the players and still give their characters a well-grounded place in the scheme of things that makes for fun role playing?

Any comments, ideas, or in-game experiences would be heartily welcomed.

[legomaster00156]

The simplest solution is to give them a hub of activity that they know about - be it a city, province, or an entire country. Let them forge their backstories there, then have them set out on their adventures elsewhere.

[Ranting Fool]

The simplest solution is to give them a hub of activity that they know about - be it a city, province, or an entire country. Let them forge their backstories there, then have them set out on their adventures elsewhere.

Granted it's been done many times before but a nice way to do this is have your players live in/be from a big city and have said city (or mages or whatever) open a lovely two way portal to another world. Gives you some nice options for critters to face since its a whole new world you could fill it with all sorts of shiny things.

My last campaign was built around this kind of idea. PC's from a big mega city surrounded by a massive magical barrier (Had clerics making a fake sun/growing food/all sorts of things to keep the city barly ticking over) because of a big apoc 500+ in the past. Heroes find a crack barrier and pop through to find a rather wild and dangerous world outside. Worked well enough though it would have been better if I had more of an end game planned.

[Craft (Cheese)]

How about collaborative world-building? The players decide they have whatever they want in their backstories, and whatever they decide becomes canon.

It can be great fun and very effective so long as everyone's on the same page. You do however run into problems when:

- One player decides to take advantage of this and makes his backstory "I'm an all-powerful Deity who controls the entire world!" or something.

- The different players make contributions to the world that are horribly dissonant from one another. Like if one player tries to mold the world into Post-Cyberpunk while another tries to make Ancient Greece. Though, if you can reconcile the differences you can wind up with very interesting, unique results (it can be very difficult though).

[graymagiker]

Yeah, what Craft said!

What I enjoy doing with this concept is giving players some authority over creating the world as well. Give them some starting points, perhaps the description of the town the campaign starts in as well as the surrounding area and closest other city. Then task the players with coming up with a back-story and reason for being in the town. Make it clear to them that they may create characters to fill their back-stories as appropriate, but this is subject to DM approval.

For example lets use the town I did this with: See here (http://aftermath.twilighteve.com/?p=56&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1)

This was provided to the players and the were given instructions similar to the above suggestion. Here is an example of what you might expect as a back-story. Judge for yourself, but I think it gives the character "well-grounded place in the scheme of things." You can also poke around on the blog and see what my players did with it for their starting characters.

Oldas Dorury is a wayward traveler without a home or a family. 4 years ago he watched as soldiers loyal to Duke Vorian dragged his father off to prison, promising the young lad that his father would stay there until he died. Oldas knew as well as the guards did that his father had killed Herold Ibane, a minor noble in the Duke's court. The elder Dorury planned on just robbing the man blind, but was not as quiet as stealthy as he thought himself to be. Herold woke up and tried to stop Oldas' father, and was rewarded with a dagger in his side. Herold, though only a minor noble, was a friend of the duke. The duke wasted no time in dispatching his men to have his friend's killer brought to justice.

For his part, Oldas was remarkably nonchalant about the matter. He never knew his mother, and he and his father lived in poverty often going nights without dinner. His father was always looking for some way to get rich quick, and probably could have provided better if he settled on a craft and worked steadily at it. By the time of his father's arrest, Oldas had long since turned a deaf ear to his father's stories of "This will be our big break, just you wait and see Oldas my boy".

Being the son of a murderer with no money and only a hovel for a home made the decision to leave town easy for Oldas. Since leaving his hometown, Oldas has tried to put his past behind him. He has traveled and preformed odd jobs for spare change in the towns he has come through. He arrived in Shadyglen about 2 months ago, and has been training with Garius as part of the towns militia. He is not payed full time, and when he is not training as part of the militia he keeps Indag's forge clean in exchange for being allowed to sleep in the shop at night.

[Zarrgon]

When you make a world for experienced players, it often works best to crank the fantasy up to 11. After all, most experienced players have done all the classics at least dozens of times. So when you do the same old same old it can get very boring. You don't need to turn the world upside down, even just tiny things. For example make a shopkeeper a ghost who is cursed to run the shop forever, until someone buys one special item(that the ghost can't tell you about, of course).


I'm not a big fan of 'backstory character context' myself. Far too often it is just dull and boring for someone to write down 'I like red apples' or 'I hate orcs' or 'I'm the son of a king' and then for the player to 'pretend' like that means something to them. You can get a lot of 'I hate orcs as they killed my dad...er, um...because my backstory says so'(or the worse ''I must be an orc killing robot my whole life''). I like it much more to add 'character context' through actual game play.

[Craft (Cheese)]

I'm not a big fan of 'backstory character context' myself. Far too often it is just dull and boring for someone to write down 'I like red apples' or 'I hate orcs' or 'I'm the son of a king' and then for the player to 'pretend' like that means something to them. You can get a lot of 'I hate orcs as they killed my dad...er, um...because my backstory says so'(or the worse ''I must be an orc killing robot my whole life''). I like it much more to add 'character context' through actual game play.

Two things.

First, people don't start the game as being a completely blank slate. An adventurer has 20-something (if not more) years of life behind them, and this previous life should inform their current beliefs and perceptions.

Second, aspects of a character are important to the extent that they cause a character to have to make choices. "I like red apples" is a frivolous backstory element because, really, when will that ever come up in the game?

Racism against orcs is something meaty, if the DM takes advantage of it appropriately: Just being an orc-killing robot because of it is a wasted opportunity. Imagine the character has another goal, like overthrowing a corrupt dictator. But the best way to accomplish this would be to ally himself with a local orc tribe. So you have to make a choice: Do you set aside your hate of orcs for the greater good, or do you allow it to get the best of you? It's choices like these that make the really memorable moments in roleplaying.


(However, I'll grant that the decision has no meaning if you, the player, don't care about orcs one way or another and thus don't really care what your character does. This mechanism is profoundly effective, however, if it's the player who has to conquer their hangups in order to accomplish something meaningful. Have YOUR beliefs challenged in a game, and suddenly it becomes a lot more painful for your character to fail.)

[Zarrgon]

Two things.

First, people don't start the game as being a completely blank slate. An adventurer has 20-something (if not more) years of life behind them, and this previous life should inform their current beliefs and perceptions.

Second, aspects of a character are important to the extent that they cause a character to have to make choices. "I like red apples" is a frivolous backstory element because, really, when will that ever come up in the game?

I often have this problem with backstories: The character has a huge five page backstory all about their father, brother, uncle, a businesses partner, a thief and a shipping guild. And it's a great story. But then the character will be heading off on an adventure to the Black Dismal Swamp to fight some frog men. So you only have two choices, to just absolutely forget the whole backstory or worse, have the player whine and cry every second they are 'forced' to go on an adventure and not monotonically follow their backstory.

And it only gets worse with something like five players, as then you have five stories. And that gives you five chances of ''oh, I don't want to adventure, I just want to monotonically follow my backstory''.

And then you have this problem: once the character 'does' the backstory, they are just a boring blank slate. So once Dorn clears his fathers name and saves the family business...he just sits around and watches the grass grow.

And the above all assume you have a relatively reasonable players. It's far too common to get players that want 'crazy and wild' histories that are hard to fit into the game. I've seen way too many Aragons, for example, with ''I want to be the King of the World, but, um, er, I'll pretend to be just a simple ranger called 'Wolf' and I'll pretend like I don't have 1 trillion gold and a sword plus ten, um, er, right up until I decide to stop pretending that I don't have all that cool stuff and that will be like ten minutes into the game..hehe''.

I just like the 'background' to be from real game play, involving the whole group. So they might find out Kozar stole gold from all of them and he is also a character's brother...

[Craft (Cheese)]

I often have this problem with backstories: The character has a huge five page backstory all about their father, brother, uncle, a businesses partner, a thief and a shipping guild. And it's a great story. But then the character will be heading off on an adventure to the Black Dismal Swamp to fight some frog men. So you only have two choices, to just absolutely forget the whole backstory or worse, have the player whine and cry every second they are 'forced' to go on an adventure and not monotonically follow their backstory.

Oh, I completely agree: If the DM doesn't work the character's goals and backstories into the adventure, the backstory becomes a waste at best and an active hindrance at worst. Still, this can be dealt with quite well by the DM working to establish appropriate expectation of the campaign they're planning. It's as simple as "Okay guys, I wanna run a basic dungeon crawl to find some super-valuable treasure. Show up with characters built for that."


And then you have this problem: once the character 'does' the backstory, they are just a boring blank slate. So once Dorn clears his fathers name and saves the family business...he just sits around and watches the grass grow.

If the player refuses to retire the character, or give the character a new twist in their story that requires them to keep adventuring even after the initial problem is solved, sure. True, you don't see people do it very often but there's nothing wrong with retiring a character because it makes in-story sense for them to do so.

[HeadlessMermaid]

I'm trying to wrap my head around ways of incorporating both of these elements. How to create a "blank slate" for the players and still give their characters a well-grounded place in the scheme of things that makes for fun role playing?
Humble origins.
Your players know everything their characters are expected to know about their humble village. People, places, shops, families, local culture, the farms around the settlement. Beyond is a mystery. They've heard tales of wondrous places and scary beasts, but they're just tales. Could be true or false, and there's one way to find out. Go out there and explore.

This works best with characters from the same race and culture, if not the same village. A vanilla human village, an isolated dwarf settlement, a goliath tribe, a forgotten bunch of wild elves in the forest etc. It might be a mixed-race community, but not too mixed. For a wide variety of races, try an urban environment - the poorest part of the city, normally, to justify the characters' lack of education and knowledge about the world at large.

The whole thing presupposes very low level (or a couple of NPC levels for starters, or generic classes, that sort of thing). If your players are OK with that, it offers an opportunity for fantastic role-playing, and you have free reign to populate the world as you see fit. It will never conflict with what the players/characters know, because they hardly know anything of importance. But they still have a background story, and a life before adventuring, and a place in the community, and context and everything.

Portal to another world
Already mentioned, and self-explanatory.

Reincarnation/Other shenanigans with transferred consciences
The classic trick of beginning the game with waking up in another body somewhere else and discovering your new abilities - you may know why that happened, or you may have to discover that, too. The characters will certainly have a background which determines their personality, but their past didn't happen in the world they're currently acting in (this world is what you make it), so they can be both fleshed-out personalities and completely ignorant about what's in store for them.

Crunch-wise, this works at any level, high or low, and it's very appropriate for Gestalt, if you like that sort of thing (old personality//new body combined).

Uncharted territory
The characters discover and explore a new continent, with entirely different flora and fauna, and even weird energy fields that affect the laws of magic. The humanoid cultures are completely alien, too. What the players know is applicable, but only back home, so not particularly useful here.

This can be pulled off in a number of ways (teleportation gone wrong, a shipwreck, a wizard did it, whatever). It works fine for less radical deviations from the norm - I wouldn't use it if I wanted to completely overhaul the cosmology for example.

[HeadlessMermaid]

Oh, I completely agree: If the DM doesn't work the character's goals and backstories into the adventure, the backstory becomes a waste at best and an active hindrance at worst.
I disagree. Not using the background at all is a waste of resources, sure. As a DM, you should find a way to incorporate some elements into the story. But it's never a waste of time.

As a player, a solid background functions for me like the Method in method acting (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_acting). (I used this analogy recently, and loved it - it's spot on.) The background may never ever come into play. But I don't care, because that's secondary. Primarily, it's there to help me understand my character, her personality, where she comes from, why she is the way she is. So it makes it a lot easier for me to roleplay consistently.

Additionally, it helps me make a more rounded and believable character. I start with a rough sketch of a personality and background, then I go into details on the background, and what do you know, all sorts of details about the personality emerge, too. And since they're tied to the character's experiences, they all make perfect sense, and nothing seems arbitrary or out of place.

In the end, it makes the whole experience more fulfilling - and that's a big deal as far as I'm concerned. :smallsmile:

P.S. A lot of people prefer to create their character's personality during play. That's fine. And in fact, it happens to some degree even if you have decided everything in advance. But I've found that making up a background improved dramatically both my roleplaying skills and my enjoyment of the game, and I ain't going back to one-liners ("my uncle taught me to fight at 16, and I left the village to seek my fortune" :smalltongue:).

[Zarrgon]

Oh, I completely agree: If the DM doesn't work the character's goals and backstories into the adventure, the backstory becomes a waste at best and an active hindrance at worst. Still, this can be dealt with quite well by the DM working to establish appropriate expectation of the campaign they're planning. It's as simple as "Okay guys, I wanna run a basic dungeon crawl to find some super-valuable treasure. Show up with characters built for that."


I guess I have just found many backstories too limiting. Too many players fall into the trap that ''unless it has something to do with my backstory I won't play''. And with like five players, each one needs a 'backstory' reason to go on the adventure. And that just has the DM doing dumb 'soap opera' plots. ''Ok, it turns out that Korg the slaver lord, was part of the orc horde that killed Zor's family, stole Flan's fathers business, is the wicked step brother of Alina, sold Dorn's family into slavery and is, in fact, Mort's father''. So, yea, now everyone in the group has their backstory tied into the single orc slaver lord just so they can go on a simple adventure. And if Korg is 'just and orc bad guy', you will get ''Oh, it's 'just' an orc..well I'll sit in the corner and whine and complain about my backstory and not contribute until you cave into my demand to have it be part of the game all the time''.

[Craft (Cheese)]

I guess I have just found many backstories too limiting. Too many players fall into the trap that ''unless it has something to do with my backstory I won't play''. And with like five players, each one needs a 'backstory' reason to go on the adventure. And that just has the DM doing dumb 'soap opera' plots. ''Ok, it turns out that Korg the slaver lord, was part of the orc horde that killed Zor's family, stole Flan's fathers business, is the wicked step brother of Alina, sold Dorn's family into slavery and is, in fact, Mort's father''. So, yea, now everyone in the group has their backstory tied into the single orc slaver lord just so they can go on a simple adventure.

That... yeah, I'll agree, that's pretty ridiculous. A better method, I've found, is to link the characters in the party together directly instead of giving them all a personal reason to want the BBEG dead. For example, in one Eberron campaign I played in, my character had no reason to go adventuring (at first) except that her husband (another PC) wanted to go, and god dammit she didn't want to sit at home and wait for him.

Later on, she found a more personal reason to stay with the party as she learned the location of a schema that could be used to finish The Becoming God.

[Duke of URL]

Similar to the "home base" idea, you can establish the characters in one locale and have them magically transported to a new location. I'm in two unfortunately stalled PbP games using this concept

1) Fleeing a dying Eberron through a mysterious portal to a lush and supposedly uninhabited "new world" to start anew.

2) A pirate ship enters a strange patch of sea and finds themselves in an entirely new sea on a different world.

n both cases, you can have rich character backstory but still have an open world to explore.

[Unusual Muse]

That... yeah, I'll agree, that's pretty ridiculous. A better method, I've found, is to link the characters in the party together directly instead of giving them all a personal reason to want the BBEG dead.

This is more like what I was referring to; something that gives the players a context, rather than a railroady story arc. For example, I'm playing in a game now where all of the characters are either members or servants of a wealthy merchant family engaged in a census and land-grab against several other merchant houses. Some of the characters are brothers; one cousin, one uncle, and two household servants. Everyone has a sense of their "role" in the family and a few details about their histories with each other. At the beginning of the campaign, the DM had each player come up with one tidbit of story, some event or interaction, that occurred between their character and each of the others. All of this, taken together, created an amazing context for everyone, without needlessly complicated backstory. It's been one of the funnest games we've ever played.

[Unusual Muse]

Reincarnation/Other shenanigans with transferred consciences
The classic trick of beginning the game with waking up in another body somewhere else and discovering your new abilities - you may know why that happened, or you may have to discover that, too. The characters will certainly have a background which determines their personality, but their past didn't happen in the world they're currently acting in (this world is what you make it), so they can be both fleshed-out personalities and completely ignorant about what's in store for them.

Crunch-wise, this works at any level, high or low, and it's very appropriate for Gestalt, if you like that sort of thing (old personality//new body combined).

Ahh, we may be on to something here... this is the direction I've been thinking of going, but while it sounds great in theory, but I'm unsure of how to implement it. Does anyone have any playtested examples of this kind of scenario that were particularly enjoyable/effective?

[Andorax]

Another twist?

Dragon 354 had an article on "ancient" PCs, characters who are for one reason or another completely "out of time"...including a fairly nifty set of feats you can choose from.

Start your campaign off conventionally, throw them in a Stasis trap, compensate them for their trouble with a bonus feat, and show them how much has changed in your setting in the last...thousand years.

[Duke of URL]

Ahh, we may be on to something here... this is the direction I've been thinking of going, but while it sounds great in theory, but I'm unsure of how to implement it. Does anyone have any playtested examples of this kind of scenario that were particularly enjoyable/effective?

One of the more peculiar ways I've seen this tried (but no idea how successfully) was for players to play the same character at two entirely different levels, switching back and forth as the lower-leveled characters' actions affect the future characters in some kind of bizarre time paradox situation.

[Lord Il Palazzo]

How about collaborative world-building? The players decide they have whatever they want in their backstories, and whatever they decide becomes canon.

It can be great fun and very effective so long as everyone's on the same page.This is basically how my current campaign's setting was created. I gave the players a quick description of how they ended up adventuring together ("You've all been hired by a merchant's guild in a city named X to go to a town called Y to solve problem Z.") I got an assortment of NPCs, organizations, cities, nation, descriptions of how the merchant's guild came into contact with the PCs and assorted plot threads from my players and their backstories and set to work weaving them into the vague idea of a plot that I had come up with beforehand. If someone's grandfather was a dimension hopping genie who wanted children on the material plane, I have to figure out why and how it ties into the larger events. As the DM, I'm free to add whatever features to the world I want, need or think would be cool, as long as it doesn't negate anything established in the players' backstories.

At least one character did give himself a very powerful ally (as in, a wizard so powerful she's rumored to make the sun rise each day) but it was done in such a way that the ally isn't really free to come tagging along on the PCs adventures, and probably wouldn't do so even if she were so it really isn't a problem.

[Fitz10019]

I listened to the Fear the Boot podcast for a while, and they had a "group template" concept that is meant to unify the players' characters. It becomes the players' collective responsibility to have a reason to adventure together.
http://www.feartheboot.com/ftb/wp-content/uploads/resources/2_GroupTemplate.pdf

Whatever the unifying theme is, it should be 'deep enough' to account for future replacement characters, too.

[Ranting Fool]

Another twist?

Dragon 354 had an article on "ancient" PCs, characters who are for one reason or another completely "out of time"...including a fairly nifty set of feats you can choose from.

Start your campaign off conventionally, throw them in a Stasis trap, compensate them for their trouble with a bonus feat, and show them how much has changed in your setting in the last...thousand years.

Been tempted to do that once or twice.... the longer a campaign goes on with PC's making major changes to the world (Be it by slaying a whole host of evil beasties/cults of evil making the world safer, helping out young McNoob and coming back to see him as a old famous do-good-er all because of the advice given to him by some heroic PC types) but i've not yet played the "Lost some time" card yet. Very much a go into some magic woods, fall asleep and come out the world has changed :smallbiggrin:

[roguemetal]

Ahh, we may be on to something here... this is the direction I've been thinking of going, but while it sounds great in theory, but I'm unsure of how to implement it. Does anyone have any playtested examples of this kind of scenario that were particularly enjoyable/effective?

I've run a game, same campaign twice, using the modern world as the place of origin of characters, and a world of fairy tales turned on their heads in the actual campaign. Had everyone design backgrounds using a questionnaire I set up, including a few questions about why the character does not fit in modern society. I allowed them to choose a profession or craft for free, representing their original world skills. In addition, they have their real-world equipment on them, though only a single on of their items (based on the questionnaire) is actually still usable.

Players would move between the two worlds via a number of methods, the first being an old shack in the woods which they camp in during a storm. When they leave, they're no longer in Kansas. I start with them trying to find a way back, or if they decide to stay, start creating reasons for their return. For example I allowed one person to have their cell phone work, and they kept getting threats of being fired, and concern from family. Another character was given a bunch of gold from Mother Holle, and realized how much more it was worth in the modern world. A bard was hearing their songs being accredited to another person over the radio. Upon returning to the modern world, time has passed, yet the characters are still pressed to solve the campaign in their 'fantasy world' at the same time. In addition, certain characters from their fantasy world are leaking into society, while nobody else seems to notice. They go back and forth a few times before finally solving the conflict between the Fey Lands and Prince Charming's Lands, and halt the invasion of Wonderland from ever reaching the real world.

It worked very well in alienating players while simultaneously having the subtle enjoyment of revisiting childhood cliches in new light. When players recognized the characters from the stories this helped to shortcut long explanations of a world that is familiar, but very different from traditional gaming.