Back Stories

[blackrogue]

Everyone has one...or should. I hate playing without having a back story for my character. I like tying in other characters that I've used before...

Here's the guy I'm using now for my Friday night campaign:

Broderick "The Monty"

He was born in the city of Thistledon. His mother was a court diplomat. He grew up only knowing what his mother told him about his father (a one night stand with a bard who ended up being killed by bandits on the road).
Broderick grew up attending the College in Thistledon. However, he was too much like his father and got so damn bored with it that he left home and tried his luck at being a bard...
...he failed miserably.

He was locked away in a dungeon for what was known in later years as "The Great Dinner Fiasco of Lord Rupert's Court." In his cell he began to resent authority for locking him away for an accident (he hadn't meant to call the Lady fat). He hated his mother for always berating him for his daydreaming.
He organized a jailbreak with a two other cell mates: Gringle Mitchells (a assumed gnome spy sentenced to hang) and Milo Ottis (a halfling who later on taught Broderick the ways of the rogue).

He and Milo headed towards the nearest city where they parted ways and Broderick began making himself known as Broderick "The Monty."
How he became "The Monty" is another story...i.e. I haven't made that up yet ;-)

[MrNexx]

My back stories have gotten upwards of 10 pages. We had a DM who would award XP on a per-page basis.

[Zincorium]

My back stories have gotten upwards of 10 pages. We had a DM who would award XP on a per-page basis.

Which leads to rambling and forgettable drek if a player takes it to the logical conclusion.

In games I DM, I award xp for remembering and playing out their backstory, what they have written down counts for nothing unless it directly translates into in-game behavior. Similiarly, you can have nothing actually written down and still get xp for a backstory.

What I have a very large problem with is people who create a completely outlandish backstory (bastard daughter of an emperor who doesn't exist in the campaign world and they assumed did without asking, etc.) and attach it to a mundane character, yet expect me to incorporate aspects of their backstory into every session. The occasional tip of the hat to a character's past I'm all for, but if you want to have the spotlight more than the other PC's, you've got to do something to grab it.

[Viscount Einstrauss]

I came up with an extremely long-winded backstory for my most frequently used roleplaying character, but I can recite the vast majority of it, including names, from memory. It would take far too long to actually mention it all here, so I'll just sum it up as saying he was once a great adventurer for a powerful secret kingdom that was betrayed by his country and now rebels against it to return the royal lineage to it's rightful heir. Also, he was then attacked by a lich queen that has a sort of love/hate relationship with him and was drained nearly to death. So now he has to regain his former strength and organize an army strong enough to invade his old home and place the proper princess on the throne. Meanwhile, the other characters in the game don't know who he really is, as he uses a large and wide variety of aliases and often will go at great lengths to conceal his true identity, inventing other long-winded backstories about people that don't actually exist.

Now, this is the short version. The long version is not only a well-written novella, but also COMPLETE game mechanics and stats for everything in it, which I can't recite from memory because I have trouble remembering individual stats for a couple dozen different characters/character types/prestige classes/creatures/templates/items. I've actually been thinking of compiling it all (a good 200-300 pages) and sending it to WotC as a new setting.

[ampcptlogic]

In a structured game, I've never had a character long enough to worry about this. Most of the sessions I was in died. GM absentmindedness and moving-away-edness, I think. Or maybe it was just me.

For the one game I'm in now, I think if I went back to write it all down, it would get around a page and a half or two, typed. Mostly because I keep adding stuff and had a fairly vague back story when things started.

[X15lm204]

I just wrote a fairly long backstory for my Human(Sossrim) Fighter named Mitzi (http://www.thetangledweb.net/profiler/view.php?id=7518), born and raised in Luskan, so I may as well post it here:

Growing up a street waif in the city of Luskan, the child of a pair of luckless, and likely dead, adventurers, Mitzi joined a group of young beggars and pickpockets at a very young age. Finding in herself a natural motherly instinct and a talent for combat, she used her impressive size, agility, and alternitively frightening glare and kittenlike eyes to defend the other children from rival gangs, older thieves, angry watchmen, and the occasional massive sewer rat. While she never openly led the group, having no talent for theft or onganization, her protection gave her immense loyalty from the other children, and the gang's 'actual' leader almost never took action without her approval.

As it's members approached adolescance, the gang slowly drifted apart, and Mitzi found herself alone. Other than the few members of the gang she kept in contact with, most children her age were far too afraid of her to associate with her, so she spent most of her time with people far older than herself. With no real skills to speak of and no money, an honest job or apprenticeship was out of the question, so she supported herself over the next few years by begging and occasional odd jobs. Then, a tenday after her fifteenth birthday, an encounter occured that would change her life forever.

One evening, as she was resting in the common room of a local tavern, a young street waif so like those she had defended years ago entered and approached a city watchman who had been drinking there for some time. They traded a few whispered words which Mitzi couldn't hear, then the watchman struck the girl with a backhand blow that sent her sprawling. Outraged, MItzi lept to the girl's defense, loudly berating and threatening her attacker. Suprised and angry, he attempted to draw his sword, but she tore it from his hand, struck him in the neck with its pommel, and, when he fell, kicked him repeatedly in the groin 'til he stopped moving. Her battle won, she looked up into the shocked faces of three more watchmen standing in the doorway.

Rather than arresting her as she had expected, the middle man, a captain, shook her hand, informing her that the man she had beaten had been corrupt, an informer for a local assassin's guild, and that she had saved them the trouble of defeating him themselves, as he would surely have resisted arrest. Impressed by the skill she had shown in the fight, he offered her training and a position as a Luskan City Guard. At first she was apprehensive, remembering well the cruelty watchmen had shown the members of her gang, but this captain and his men seemed honest and kind enough, so she accepted his offer, promising herself that she would be a true and just watchwoman.

While her training went with amazing success, especially with the zweihander, longbow, and unarmed combat, she became more and more cynical of her home city as she discovered more and more corruption from the lowest to the highest levels of Luskan's infrastructure, especially when an agent of the Arcane Brotherhood tampered with the trial of the corrupt watchman, allowing him to go free. Still, she was never more proud than the day a year after she began her training when she was given a beautiful set of full-plate armor and a masterfully crafted sword to bear to her official inductment into the Luskan City Guard. Deciding to thank her captain personally before the ceremony, she began to walk to his quarters when she happened to see three men, including the corrupt watchman she had fought, stealthily escaping over the compound wall. Knowing she had no hope of catching them, and fearing the worst for her captain, she ran on to her destination, but it was already too late; she found him lying on his bedroom floor, his throat cut wide. Severely traumatized and terrified for her own life, she took her armor and weapons and fled the city.

Over the next two years she wandered northern Faerun as a mercenary and adventurer, including a fruitless trip to Sossal, which she had learned had once been the home of her parents. Now, having sold most of her armor, keeping only the breastplate (with it's Luskan insignia removed) and guantlets, she has returned to the Sword Coast to find her fortune in the great city of Waterdeep...

[Saph]

My favourite character is a long-running one.

Her name's Niriel, a sun elf enchanter. I originally created her as a low-level NPC for a game I was DMing - the party's job was to escort her across Faerun. She'd grown up in Evermeet in a completely sheltered and safe environment, and as a result was used to trusting everyone she met and believing everything she was told. She was incredibly strongly good-aligned, hated killing things, and always treated everyone else as though they were good people too. Think a younger version of Piffany from the Nodwick comics.

I'd originally thought it would be funny just to watch the party trying to protect her as she got them in trouble, but to my surprise she turned out more often than not to be the one helping them. I liked the character so much that I kept the character file and ended up using it when I started playing D&D again. After playing her in a couple of one-offs, I got a chance to use her in a proper campaign that was just starting up.

She's now 6th level, and her backstory is so long that to fit it onto a single page of A4 I've had to make most of it into bullet points. Reading it makes me laugh, because most of the points the kind of thing that normally would be a whole story in themselves - "Had her entire party killed by wererats, escaped", "Got captured by a family of red dragons", "Sent 15 years into the future, met some weird demon with a fiddle, sent back again", and so on. But since I actually played her through most of those events, I don't need to write them all down - I can remember what happend. :) It makes the character feel much more like a real person.

- Saph

[Shazzbaa]

I've never been good at writing backstories, and quite frankly, I don't like doing it past a point. If I want to write a story, I'll write a story in a world I make that I have full control of. With RP characters I don't like doing that so much; I just want an idea of who the character is and a bit of background, and I'll work with the DM to tie it in with the world; past that, I don't want to invent much else. Writing multi-page backstories for an RP character has never really appealed to me.

I find it more fun to discover them through actually playing them than to define every aspect of who they are in words. They make themselves more clear to me that way than they ever would in a ten page backstory.

[Scorpina]

I tend to only have a couple of paragraphs of backstory, the rest of the blanks get filled in through RP. In the past I've done really long backstories, but then I find that they end up becoming a restraint and getting in the way of the character's natural development.

[Diggorian]

I usually only write as much backstory I need to justify the kind of character I want to play. It shows the roots of their attitudes and values mainly, then training in their chosen class and future goals.

My avatar is my a mostly LN Hobgoblin fighter/warblade, Noriyuk the Clanless. Essentially the warrior elders of his clan were dishonorably assassinated by ambitious young upstarts; their evil overcame their lawfulness, which is a curse in the eyes of the hobgoblin god Nomog-Gea the Torturer. This is why Noriyuk values unity of purpose and brutal honesty over selfishness and insincere politeness.

Shamans, whom teach the young, protested this coup. Many were shamed into silence (to save their youth from being killed as tainted) or suicide. Noriyuk's did the latter but instructed his five charges to flee the corruption of their clan and maybe one day return with the power to redeem it. This is my hobgoblin's mission/goal. We use allegiances instead of alignment, his top one is excellance followed by honor.

Hobs are very social creatures (believe it or not) that view their clan the way humans view their family. The clan forms a perimeter composed of the awareness/fighting space of all it's members: a unified defense against a hostile world. Nori's never knew his parents, but both were successful warriors (or they wouldnt be allowed to breed) and that's why he is. Without a clan, and hounded by the greater world, he is a very defensive minded fighter (Dodge, Expertise, Defensive strike, etc.).

[CuthroatMcGee]

I'm too lazy to think up or write out a whole backstory for my characters, but I sort of have one in my mind. I live LN for my alignment, so both my characters are that. My wizard's is really boring: he was a librarian who got tired on just reading about adventures, so he quit his job, bought some adventuring gear, and went on the road (to learn about real-life idiots who did that, read up on Stede Bonnet and maybe Chris McCandless).
My fighter-cleric's story is cooler. He lived on a farm in the north. And these armies of elves and orcs and paladins and hobgoblins and dwarves and what-have-you kept raiding across his land. One day, as one might expect, his house got burned to the ground. The warriors of Heironeous (spelled right?) and Pelor and Corellan Larethian and Kord and all them won't repay him, claiming their defence of his land is payment enough for him. But St. Cuthbert's priests do try to repay him, and with their weregild he goes South, to adventure to rebuild his home and to join the clergy of St. Cuthbert.

[Zincorium]

Figured I should probably contribute to the actual discussion, note that this wasn't all up front at first but developed gradually.

Vikors Forgeater was the child of a dwarven 'lady of the night' in a frontier town in the spine of the world, catering to dwarven merchants and mercenaries. He never found out who his real father was, and his mother said she didn't know, but he found a father figure in his mother's brother, a battle rager of much renown. While initially content to craft the weapons and armor for the clan, a tumble into a forge (he suspected the foot that tripped him wasn't accidental) just as he was nearing the end of his apprenticeship scarred his skin, permanently removed all the hair on his face, left him with a persistent fear of fire, and inspired the moniker which he took as his surname. Vikors became sullen and quick to anger, embittered by the constant taunts of other dwarves and the looks of disgust from all races.

He became a battlerager in the image of his uncle, and carved a swath south until meeting a band of welcoming adventurers who had just started on their path onwards to glory. They all became fast friends, and they chose to name the tavern that they jointly owned after him, and the Company of the Beardless Dwarf Inn commenced business.

[Saph]

I find it more fun to discover them through actually playing them than to define every aspect of who they are in words. They make themselves more clear to me that way than they ever would in a ten page backstory.

That's why I like using old characters. That way, their "backstory" really IS a back story - it's the story of what happened to them while you were playing them. I find it much more fun. Obviously, this only works if your character lives a while, though . . .

- Saph

[Last_resort_33]

I don't like writing too much of a backstory... mainly becasue there are a lot of people that not much happens to before they start on "The Adventure" in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings for example, the whole point of the hobbits it that they eat, drink and be happy without going on any silly adventures... also you have the task of actually making the character interested in what is going on... If your backstory includes a raid on hell and killing dragons and the like... then it makes it more diffucult for your character to actually be motivated by the plot. I usually like to be able to sum up a character in an A4 page at 12 pt. For my Character, James Christopher Spafford in Em's Vampire: The requiem game, I wrote 3 pages and I kept wanting to trim it, so I'm not constricted.

Possibly the best way that I have found to work things, Is when you get some fresh characters with two sentances about why they are their class(es), toss them into a world, do a little prologue for 3 hours or so and THEN get a backstory... you can't write about someone unless you know what they are like... characters are more organic than people give them credit for... you can't write your 10 pages about a character if you don't know what they "play" like... The point is not to force a backstory, and don't do it too soon... if you have an idea, then write it down, but don't set out to write a book.