Let me tell you about my character...

[DRD1812]

In an effort to stave off drama, what say we try for a proactive thread? Bearing in mind that "He blocks the door and tells you about his character" is the Bad Stuff on the Wannabe Vampire Munchkin card, how do you tell someone about the glorious, intricately layered majesty that is your character without being obnoxious about it?

Relevant comic. (http://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/backstory-2)

[Vitruviansquid]

I'll bite.

I enjoy playing characters who are not necessarily evil, just kind of bad people. The type of scumbag who might not work with the evil sorcerer lord, but who might borrow your lawnmower, and next week you see it in his shed, like it was his lawnmower all along. Unfortunately, I tend to GM for my group, so I haven't made an actual character in awhile.

[Jay R]

I tend to send my backstory to the email list. If my writing is funny enough, somebody will comment, and then pretty soon half the players have read it. [The other half won't even read their own character sheets.]

[Anxe]

DorkTower has lampooned this many times.
http://www.dorktower.com/files/2013/07/DorkTower1151.gif

What makes it acceptable? Having an audience of more than one usually makes it more fun for me on either side of the story. I feel that if you're talking about RPGs, the conversation flows better if there's at least 3 people.

[RazorChain]

I tend to send my backstory to the email list. If my writing is funny enough, somebody will comment, and then pretty soon half the players have read it. [The other half won't even read their own character sheets.]

I've been supporting what I call open play for a while, where everybody posts their backgrounds on the group email list and there are no secrets, players have to know the difference of OOC and IC.

This has gotten the players much more involved in each others character's personal drama as everybody knows what is happening. Great fun :)

[DRD1812]

I've been supporting what I call open play for a while, where everybody posts their backgrounds on the group email list and there are no secrets, players have to know the difference of OOC and IC.

This has gotten the players much more involved in each others character's personal drama as everybody knows what is happening. Great fun :)

This sounds like an ideal application of "metagame PVP." I wrote about the concept a little bit over here...

http://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/intra-party-romance

...But I'd never thought to put it in writing rather than do it at the table. Neat idea!

Do you ever get any pushback from players that don't feel like writing?

[Jay R]

I've been supporting what I call open play for a while, where everybody posts their backgrounds on the group email list and there are no secrets, players have to know the difference of OOC and IC.

This has gotten the players much more involved in each others character's personal drama as everybody knows what is happening. Great fun :)

It works for many kinds of interaction, but loses the ability to keep a PC's secret until it's time for the big reveal.

1. In a game set in the America west, I told the group that I was planning to pattern my western hero after a TV show. So I showed up with Cali Yang, a Chinese martial artist obviously based on Kwai-Chang Cain in Kung Fu. But he wasn't. In the fourth session, he needed to take off his disguise, and revealed that he was really Cal Young, a disguise-artist federal agent based on Artemus Gordon of The Wild, Wild West.

2. In a game of Champions, Hyperion, my superhero patterned more-or-less on Superman, had been killed, and I was now playing a Plastic Man / Bouncing Boy character named Pinball. Only the GM and I knew that Hyperion hadn't in fact died, and would return at a sufficiently dramatic moment. When we were losing a battle against a giant robot, the GM announced that we heard something flying fast through the air. I looked at him, he nodded, and so I said, "Pinball turns, looks up, and calls out, 'Look! Up in the sky!'"

3. My gnome illusionist has a hooked hammer which is an Ancestral Relic. When he first picked it up, he heard a voice in his head intoning a prophecy. The voice – a god, the power of the hammer, a delusion, who knows? – told him that he must seek out the truth of the hammer. That was the first time he could detect magic on the hammer, and the last. He will not feel its power again until he awakens it. Was it magic from the hammer? A prophecy of the gods? A delusion? He does not know, but he wants to believe it.

The prophecy was great and momentous, but he can no longer remember it. All his mind still holds was the final line: “If you do not discover the secrets of this hammer, they will be lost forever.”

So he is on a quest to do something, given him by he knows not whom, requiring him to learn about the hammer, with no idea of where such knowledge could be found. A human, elf, or dwarf might be discouraged by this. To a gnome’s way of thinking, it’s just a great practical joke, and one he’s willing to play out. It’s an excuse to wander and learn, and avoid having to make more cogs and spokes.

There was a time in which he considered turning away from his quest. He eventually realized that it would be impossible to turn away from the quest until he found out where the quest was supposed to take him. This seems to him like the greatest joke of all – a quest he cannot undertake, and cannot avoid.

This led to the following conversation on the second adventure
Gwydion: I'm on a quest.
PC2: Oh, what are you supposed to do?
Gwydion: I don't know. I need to find out.
PC2: Well, where are you supposed to go to find out?
Gwydion: I have no clue.
PC2: Who put you on this quest?
Gwydion: No idea.
PC2: This is dumb why don't you abandon the quest?
Gwydion: How? Until I know where the quest is supposed to take me, how can I turn away from that path?


In all three cases, the fun for all the players would have been much less, and the reveal far less interesting, if everybody had known my PC's entire background.

Again, I like the idea in general, and it works for most players and most situations. But there are still exceptions.

[RazorChain]

It works for many kinds of interaction, but loses the ability to keep a PC's secret until it's time for the big reveal.

1. In a game set in the America west, I told the group that I was planning to pattern my western hero after a TV show. So I showed up with Cali Yang, a Chinese martial artist obviously based on Kwai-Chang Cain in Kung Fu. But he wasn't. In the fourth session, he needed to take off his disguise, and revealed that he was really Cal Young, a disguise-artist federal agent based on Artemus Gordon of The Wild, Wild West.

2. In a game of Champions, Hyperion, my superhero patterned more-or-less on Superman, had been killed, and I was now playing a Plastic Man / Bouncing Boy character named Pinball. Only the GM and I knew that Hyperion hadn't in fact died, and would return at a sufficiently dramatic moment. When we were losing a battle against a giant robot, the GM announced that we heard something flying fast through the air. I looked at him, he nodded, and so I said, "Pinball turns, looks up, and calls out, 'Look! Up in the sky!'"

3. My gnome illusionist has a hooked hammer which is an Ancestral Relic. When he first picked it up, he heard a voice in his head intoning a prophecy. The voice – a god, the power of the hammer, a delusion, who knows? – told him that he must seek out the truth of the hammer. That was the first time he could detect magic on the hammer, and the last. He will not feel its power again until he awakens it. Was it magic from the hammer? A prophecy of the gods? A delusion? He does not know, but he wants to believe it.

The prophecy was great and momentous, but he can no longer remember it. All his mind still holds was the final line: “If you do not discover the secrets of this hammer, they will be lost forever.”

So he is on a quest to do something, given him by he knows not whom, requiring him to learn about the hammer, with no idea of where such knowledge could be found. A human, elf, or dwarf might be discouraged by this. To a gnome’s way of thinking, it’s just a great practical joke, and one he’s willing to play out. It’s an excuse to wander and learn, and avoid having to make more cogs and spokes.

There was a time in which he considered turning away from his quest. He eventually realized that it would be impossible to turn away from the quest until he found out where the quest was supposed to take him. This seems to him like the greatest joke of all – a quest he cannot undertake, and cannot avoid.

This led to the following conversation on the second adventure
Gwydion: I'm on a quest.
PC2: Oh, what are you supposed to do?
Gwydion: I don't know. I need to find out.
PC2: Well, where are you supposed to go to find out?
Gwydion: I have no clue.
PC2: Who put you on this quest?
Gwydion: No idea.
PC2: This is dumb why don't you abandon the quest?
Gwydion: How? Until I know where the quest is supposed to take me, how can I turn away from that path?


In all three cases, the fun for all the players would have been much less, and the reveal far less interesting, if everybody had known my PC's entire background.

Again, I like the idea in general, and it works for most players and most situations. But there are still exceptions.


Don't get me wrong...but 30 years of big reveals are like....they aren't so big anymore.

"I'm really the villain behind it all" and there was a much rejoicing
"I'm the prince that everyone though was dead" and there was much rejoicing
"My character wasn't really dead you know" and there was a much rejoicing

Maybe I'm just jaded. But it helps my newbies to keep track of each others background and be involved.

But the real reason is through the decades I've played with a lot of players that had extreme need for secrecy. That secrecy tended to ruin the fun for others both in the sense that GM's took those players aside while the rest of the group was yawning in boredom while the other player was having a private session with the GM. Then there was the note passing, the secrecy player and the GM frantically scribbling notes and passing to each other, cutting into other people's play time.

And what did that secrecty bring to the game? Nothing, if anything it detracted from the other players fun and half the time those secrecy players were betraying the rest of the group. Usually it was the same guy who would try to grab some extra loot while the others werent looking, keep important information from the group or just waste time because nobody could know they had hidden poisonous dagger in their boot or something insignificant like that.

If I could go back 30 years ago to speak to young me, I would tell me to go for open play, it weeds the phallus heads out of the game.

[ImNotTrevor]

I dodge this by making up the backstory as I go, or deciding ahead of time that their backstory is just not a thing they will talk about, and if there IS a backstory, it can be told in 2 sentences or less.

Example:
From a Blades in the Dark campaign I have Professor Bernard Buckman, also known as the criminal mastermind/childrens-song boogeyman Mr. Rattlebones.

Mr. Rattlebones comes from far away, was a professor, and now is a criminal. Fairly straightforward, and will generally go unexpanded except when vitally important.

Errant, a Faceless from another campaign had the entire backstory of "he was brainwashed into murdering his wife and went nuts, now he thinks he's a Knight Templar and murders everything."

I find that complicated backstories are a waste.
Harry Potter's backstory is fairly straightforward.
"Magical war orphan raised by normal folks learns he's a wizard." Done.

I stick to the following: If the coolest part of your character's life is during a time other than the campaign... why are we following them for THIS part instead of THAT one?

[Samzat]

The only kind of backstory I put in is location and motiviation, because most of my characters are fairly normal people (by their locations' standards) whose only outstanding feature is ambition. For example:

in a viking campaign, a young warrior who wanted to become famous enough of a warrior to join the Varangian Guard (the Byzantine Emperor had norse bodyguards called the Varangians)

A down on his luck craftsman from a large city who made a dark pact to get revenge on his rivals and became an adventurer because he realizes its a step towards the many particularly tempting applications of his new abilities.

I dunno why I am so attracted to "a handful of resources and a dream" stories, but I always like those.

[Altair_the_Vexed]

Romantic, adventurous, clever, but naive, Talsarios is a second son of a successful upper class family, determined to make a name for himself and step out from under the shadow of his famous parents. A magic-user of some sort. Posh. Rash.

I've played a few setting variant versions of him - Prince Talsarion of Sumeria was the first, son of the King and Queen, forever running away to go on adventures, hating it when his parents bailed him out of trouble; Alastor Talsarios, wannabe anthropologist from Thyatis who tried to study goblins, but got in too deep; through to the Gas-light Fantasy Edward Talsorian, who ended up being investigator and spy extraordinaire, just like Daddy (dammit).

Off topic (ish) - I've been a victim of some bizarre Backstory Exposition. I was on a sci-fi LARP, and my character had just been outed in front of the rest of the player characters as a secret corporate spy. I was still essential to the dangerous task at hand, so begrudgingly, they let me live. Maybe an hour later, while I was getting a coffee, one of the other players started telling me his character history in the kitchen - really opening up with some important secrets about himself and his employers.

Me: "You were there just a momnent ago when everyone found out I'm a spy for your rival corporation, right?"
Him: "Yeah, that must be hard for you. Anyway, after I'd stolen all the data, I had to go hide out with my criminal buddies on Station Alpha... etc, etc"

[Tinkerer]

If your players are capable of producing a 5 minute story off the cuff then the Savage Worlds method of backstory can definitely help. Essentially the idea is when your characters are sitting around the campfire you can have one of them draw a card and tell a story about their character relating to the theme of that suit (romance, tribulations, loss etc...).

Aside from that I've played around with a few different ideas such as a meet and greet session for when I had a group full of characters with extensive backstories, Going through each characters history and turning each plot point from their history into a session for a group with light backstories (that was a neat "Season 1"), having the characters develop their backstories as a group for a tight gaming group, and a few others. I really enjoy the characters developing the backstory together but lots of groups aren't quite as fond of it. So many introductions are cliche that at least at the start I prefer the group know each other.