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View Full Version : Roleplaying Killing Orphans; or why your mum is alive and she loves you very much.



Lockles
2018-12-23, 11:06 PM
Are you sick of orphans in every single group you play in? There's always at least 2 players who don't want a family that the DM can abuse in a Kidnapping.

Tell them what I told my players:
Your mum is alive, and she loves your very much. Deal with it.

Examples:

Your mum was a well-known paladin. A proper divine butt-kicker that rode into danger on a white horse for 8 years, before she decided it was time to settle down.
Nowadays, she's the guard captain of your hometown. Crime completely ceased when she took up the mantle.
Inspired by the tales about her, you always wanted to go on quests too. All through your childhood, she's trained you to wield a sword and shield and now that you're old enough, she's gifted you her old blade to start your own adventure.
That's a mum you can come home to, talk with about your own adventure, get advice from.
That's a mum that'll hear of your first adventure, and decide to use her savings to buy you an expensive set of full plate armor. Because she's both proud of you, and very worried that you might get hurt.
That's a mum you don't want to mess with.
The city guard is going to protect their captain, so a gang of thugs isn't going to bother. And the big bad evil guy? He's heard the tales of the proper hero she used to be. Even he will think twice.

Your dad is a sage. He's been studying the arcane arts for decades and even teaches at a college at the capital. He's been trying to teach you too, but you're not the bookish kind of student. You need a hands-on approach to get a feel for what things do, rather than reading the outcome in some dusty tome.
He gives you a small crystal, by which he can contact you from time to time. See how you're doing. And tells you that if you ever need anything, he's here for you.
That's a caring, loving father, who would love it if you would follow in his footsteps. But he also understands you need to find your own way.
That's also a father, who's a good enough wizard, that he's teaching others as a professor.
Imagine the trouble you'd have kidnapping a mage who can teleport around, and hurl fire and lightning at you. Now imagine, you're trying to kidnap that guy from a building where everyone can hurl at least some fire and lightning at you. And that's ignoring the Slytherin-esque bunch, who would take the ones you managed to dismiss, and un-dismiss them in a rather cruel, gruesome manner. (I'm talking necromancy, folks.)
Your bad guy would have to be particularly insane, or very, very adept at dueling mages to pull off a kidnapping like that. Probably a bit of both.

Your sister isn't much of a fighter, but she's studious and smart. Last year, she made it to Lawmaker over at the country's capital.
Where she's protected by it's police force, because she's considered some one who's at a risk of being assaulted or abducted, due to her position in the city. They'll be prepared for bandits, thieves' guilds and other low-lives. So the ones you meet along your travels who'd think "Hey lets kidnap his family, whom we have no idea of who they are or where to find them" won't get very far.
And big bad evil guys who can march into capital cities and take on it's military/police/(royal) guards, is already so strong and powerful, he shouldn't need to kidnap anyone to get to you.

Giving yourself family members that enjoy a position of protection and power, has a great potential to be a considerable asset on your adventures.
You need to get some cooperation from the guards? Your mum is their boss, and you've been training alongside them for years. They'll gladly comply.
Need some advice on a magical artifact that sees to have put a curse on your party's bard, after he tried to produce offspring with it? Dad will know a thing or two about magical STD's.
Run into some trouble with the local thieves' guild? A shop-keep scammed you out of your money? Some Crown's Guard is bullying your friends? Sis can probably sort that out for you.

Now, of course, don't give yourself all 3 examples. If you're giving yourself a family of heroes, you're not going to have much of an adventure for yourself. But daddy's big balls of fire alone can keep the family safe. Mum's such a great warrior, no criminals even dare set foot in town, she's going to keep pops and your brothers safe, no problem.

Your DM isn't going to mind a somewhat powerful person in your backstory. He's seeing a set-piece that can be used as more than Kidnap-fodder. And he's just happy you didn't make that third Orphan in the group.
We're running an Adventure here! Not an Orphanage!

He's also thinking about how he could replace the old sage in the village that you'd have to talk to on your first adventure to get info about the dungeon you're about to enter that's known to be covered in maical traps with Magical Pops.
Or how the cleric in the village is going to be much kinder to you than the rest of the group, because he recognizes you as the daughter of Mommy the Divine Slayer of Evil and Bringer of Light and Stuffs.
Or how your sister might have heard you joined a band of adventurers trying to solve problems in the countryside, and she's pushing the quests with the good rewards your way.

It's opening up a lot of options for you, your group and the DM.

Koo Rehtorb
2018-12-23, 11:11 PM
This is way overstepping your authority and I'd consider this a pretty big red flag from a GM. Unless the game was specifically sold as the GM making your characters for you, in which case I wouldn't join in the first place.

Lockles
2018-12-23, 11:17 PM
These are examples of what your parents might be. I didn't force my players to have a paladin mum and a wizard dad.
I did want them to think about how much it adds to their character and the world they're in if their parents weren't just "lulz I don't have a family because I don't want the DM to force my PC into doing stuff".

Which is a dumb reason for it. You want to play a game where 1 person has agency of everything that's happening in the world. And you want them to find ways to engage you in it.
But you're not giving them anything to work with except for an MMORPG-like "I popped into existance, now entertain me" kind of character.

If your DM's keep kidnapping your family members, they're lousy DM's, because they can't come up with new material.
Your brother got kidnapped. Okay, sure. You save him.
He gets kidnapped again? Really? What kind of bars is he drinking at to get kidnapped twice in a row? Screw it, fine, lets save him again.
Now, what's ne-... He's captured AGAIN? Either he's on some kind of self-destructive quest to his own grave, or "the world" is seriously out to get him. We'd better consult clerics to find out what "the gods" have against him!
Also, lets set some of our earnings aside to buy better locks for my family's home. Maybe ask ma and pa to move to a safer town.

That's the passive-aggressive way of letting your DM know he needs to come up with a better plot hook.
You may just tell him he's a hack and look for some one else to take that role. Or maybe the solution is that your character is now constantly on guard near his brother and won't go more than a few feet from him.
That'll ruin any adventure before it even begins.

"You're going on a quest to find the lost scrolls o-"
"I'm not going anywhere. Everytime I turn around, Billy is being kidnapped!"
Now it's on your DM to find a way to convince you to go on the adventure.
Of course if he's a ****, he'll convince you, run the adventure, and Billy is going to be kidnapped when you get back. But at that point, why are you even playing with this guy?

Mechalich
2018-12-23, 11:59 PM
Traditionally, in the kind of fantasy, science fiction, and other stories that RPGs draw upon, the kind of people who run off to seek fame and fortune at extremely high personal risk originate disproportionally from broken homes, orphanages, and other tragic upbringings. People with two parents who love them very much and have stable employment don't allow their children to run off and risk their lives plundering tombs and roaming through haunted wilderness. Even those that society expects to train to fight for much of their childhood, such as the children of feudal nobles, don't operate under any 'adventuring' expectation though they may fight in wars.

In general, it is extremely common for adventuring types to be 'unable to go home,' for any number of reasons. That may be because they never had a home, or they ran away from home, or they were exiled from home, or their home was destroyed, or the authorities will capture them if they go home, etc. In truth the only common adventurer backstory that is fully compatible with having loving parents and a stable family situation is conscription.

'Orphan' is a perfectly acceptable backstory, especially given the often very high mortality levels of the pre-industrial world's commonly used in games - having Mom die in childbirth and Dad kick the bucket to the plague is garden-variety stuff. Everyone alive would know someone like that. The problem with 'orphan' is that players often try to use it as an excuse to get out of having a backstory, which doesn't actually work. A child has to be raised by someone in order to survive to adulthood, whether it's extended family, an uncaring civic institution, or a nice religious institution (honestly, paladins are probably more likely to be orphans than anything else), and the player needs to generate that and to be aware of how that upbringing would influence their character.

Metahuman1
2018-12-24, 12:13 AM
Any DM I've ever felt I might need to try this on would look at me and say "No, that gives your character too much power!" because of the connections that opens up.

Then agree the kidnapping thing wouldn't be a problem, and either kill them and claim it wasn't a kidnapping, or just kidnap them anyway.

Mendicant
2018-12-24, 12:36 AM
Kidnapping is hardly the only thing keeping people from wanting to create family for their PCs. I think more important than trying to gameplan what the DM might do is simply not wanting to go into a lot of depth on backstory, and wanting a Pony Express rider who doesn't have deep connections to anyplace other than what the choose to connect to during play.

Lockles
2018-12-24, 12:50 AM
If you want to look at things "traditionally" and "rationally" in games about fantasy worlds filled with magic and/or technology that doesn't make sense, then an orphan being trained and experienced enough to take up arms is extremely unlikely.

Who trained them? Not their parents. And not having parents = not having proper food sources (or you'd be adopted, in which case you have adoptive parents which makes the being an orphan somewhat mute, doesn't it?). Which means you're malnourished, making you physically weaker, untrained making you less skilled at combat than anyone who's ever had training.

The problem with orphans isn't whether they fit into a world or not. Anything can fit into a world. But some one who's accomplished nothing but find barely enough food to eat, while apparently never meeting anyone noteworthy enough to have been noted in a backstory is a boring protagonist to any story. And lacking any ties to the world makes it more difficult for a GM to ground you to that world.
And why would you actively make it more difficult for a GM to create the entertainment you want?

You're in a world where half-demons walk around among humans like it's no big deal. Elves are using magic arrows to fight. I even heard of people who can sing others into doing their bidding.
But you're drawing a line at the reason why some one might be interested in seeing that world? Because surely you wouldn't be interested in the marvels of a particularly marvelous multiverse if you had people who loved and cared about you...?

Columbus family was very much alive, and wealthy when he set off to sail to a new world. Quite the adventure for some one who's not orphaned.
Ragnar Lothbruk (is that how you spell his name? The show didn't do much for me.) set sail across oceans while his kids were home on his farm. Didn't say much about his parents, but clearly loved ones didn't tie him down much.
Dirck Hartog sailed to discover Australia, and mapped out it's coastline. His family was fine.
Marco Polo went on his journeys together with his father and uncle. Seems instead of being an orphan, his family was the reason he went on adventure
Walter Raleigh was a soldier, adventurer, spy and even schmoozed up to Queen Elizabeth. His father was Sir Gilbert. A lord. Didn't keep him from seeking out adventure.
Amerigo Vespucci was a diplomat, thanks to his daddy's influences, a banker, thanks to his family's wealth. Had a wife and children. And then went on such an adventure that an entire continent was named after him.

So much for tradition, huh?

Mystic Muse
2018-12-24, 12:59 AM
If a DM is forcing my character to have a family, he better have a good reason in mind.

Using them as bargaining chips is the most boting option available of course, which is why many people don't have their characters have parents.

How likely my characters are to have parents id directly proportionate to how much I trust the GM to leave them be.

Lockles
2018-12-24, 01:02 AM
Having relatives who are accomplished doesn't have to make your character powerful.
Putting them in power structures (Part of a college staff, captain of the guard, lawmaker in a city) means they'd have to adhere to the rules of that power structure. Thrive within that power structure. So we're making them lawful.
And lawful folks wouldn't abuse their power.

And that's why mum isn't sending all the guards under her command with you to defend some town outside her jurisdiction.
(If you were to alert guards to a threat to a town within their jurisdiction they would likely go out to help anyway, so your mum being in charge wouldn't affect this situation much.)

The main difference between the two is how likely the guards would take you seriously. As in.. Show respect. So basically exactly the Soldier Background Feature..? That hardly seems overpowered.

For the wizard it's essentially the Sage's background feature. You don't magically know where the info can be found, which is a silly part of that background, honestly. Instead, you ask Daddy Wise Old Ghandalf where to find the info.

How overpowered that you'd use some one in your backstory to use a background feature.

Lord Raziere
2018-12-24, 01:36 AM
the weirder thing about orphan characters is that in reality, it'd give them a lot of reasons to try and MAKE a family they never had rather than try to ignore the whole thing. I mean, I have orphan characters, I'm guilty of that, but the result is that they always desire a family of their own. its just logical that they would work to find some way of getting the emotional connection others have. the result is that my current orphan character is a mother with her lesbian wife and an adopted daughter and they all kick ass together (granted, there was a lot of time travel shenanigans involved and the daughter isn't even the same species, but since when did those matter?) as well as establishing many friendships with others around her.

but yeah there is a lot of reasons why you make your character an orphan or otherwise have no special notable connections to other people, especially in combat campaigns. roleplaying games can sometimes be like gambling: you hope you play your cards right and have things your willing to put at stake, but sometimes the dice don't always go your way. an emotional connection like a beloved mother of a character (for example, my Solar Exalted character, a sorcerer has a neomah mother whom she loves more than her actual mother who taught her sorcery for reasons) can be something you don't want to risk or put at stake of the whims of the dice. and GMs don't like it when the players have it easy or don't risk things because they tend to want to craft campaigns with Tension and people being safe with no risk of dying doesn't create Tension. and if you don't enforce the consequences of things not going your way....the tension goes away as well.

making sure your character doesn't have anything that makes the PLAYER too emotionally attached to that they won't lose, is a hedging of the players bets. Its making sure that they will have fun without the pain of losing something they don't want to, out of caring for it too much. I want to care about a beloved npc thats related to my character, and I understand that risks are apart of the roleplaying game. that doesn't mean I want those beloved npcs to be what I have to put up at stake for the bet. because every combat is the GM making a bet with the player: "I bet you can beat this encounter, if you don't you lose X, and if you win, you gain Y". and sometimes if I get too invested in an NPC.....I can't risk that bet. I can handle losing money or a piece of equipment, but an NPC is another story.

and unfortunately, making that NPC powerful, just opens up different avenues of how you can be be hurt through them: positions can be taken away. towns can be destroyed. figures of power can be assassinated for all sorts of reasons, power could corrupt the NPC you knew and make them evil, and so on. GMs are gods and if they want to hurt you through your beloved NPC, it doesn't matter what in game precautions you take, they will find a way eventually. the only solution is OOC communication. which not everyone has time to talk out. so you instead you get the default of being an orphan, minimal communication, no connections, no pain.

of course its real funny that the GM never just pulls the classic "you find out your real family" trope to give the player loved ones just so that they can yank it all away. because from another point of view, orphaning is basically giving your GM a blank check to make your real family turn out to be anyone they want for maximum pain. guess not even GMs are that cruel. or simply don't like the work involved.

Koo Rehtorb
2018-12-24, 03:59 AM
Frankly, I rather dislike all of those examples. The way I see adventuring, people with happy stable home lives don't become adventurers. Adventurers are the outcasts, the desperate, the mad, the people who can't fit into normal society.

So, sure, maybe you have parents, maybe you don't. But if you do they're probably drunken and abusive, or deranged cultists, or desperately poor. If you have a famous guard captain for a mother then you better believe you should be enlisting in the town guard yourself and taking a nice safe cushy job there at home behind tall strong walls. Because out in the wilds lies twisted abominations and a gruesome untimely death.

Potato_Priest
2018-12-24, 04:07 AM
I don't think there's anything wrong with orphans per se, just characters who have no connection to anyone in the world. And there's an easy solution for that one: encourage/force the players to make characters that know each other before the campaign. I just did it for a game of my own, and I think it's helped make the PCs' interactions with one another more interesting knowing their shared background.

Kaptin Keen
2018-12-24, 04:15 AM
On the other hand, I'd wager the overwhelming majority of everyone who was ever considered a 'hero' in real life came from an absolutely normal and loving upbringing. I'd wager very nearly everyone who choses a high risk job - whether in military service, law enforcement or as a cartoonist - has an enormously ordinary background.

We feel somehow that our adventurers need to come from some sort of special circumstance, their mothers milk infused with the ability to overcome hardship and wickedness. To a man (m/f/w) they were born under a dark sign, during a thunderstorm, omens and portends in every fibre of their beings - and frankly, the harder we try to make them oh so fated, the more boring and predictable it becomes.

I do it too, mind - I'm not pointing any fingers. But I do think we need to at least be honest about the fact that .... it's the polar opposite of being inventive, creative and original: Our backstories are, generally speaking, utter crap. And, using such harsh words, let's say I'm speaking mostly of myself - unless you agree =)

5crownik007
2018-12-24, 04:31 AM
As a GM, giving your characters backstories and family members makes everything so much more interesting. It's also why I insist that people roll their stats rather than use array or point-buy except for GURPS, but that's a different topic entirely.

I insist that they roll their stats because it makes everything so much more interesting. If everyone was an orphan with arrayed stats and perfect optimization, then you'll literally end up with identical adventuring parties from group to group.

Incidentally, this is why I'm fine with point-buy in GURPS. GURPS has disadvantages, which encourages players to make their characters more interesting and layered.

Anyway, if every character was an orphan, it's not only boring, but it makes the GM/DM's job harder. You have no idea how much time my players spent completely silent because they stood there, waiting for me to push them down the railroad, when I was expecting them to exercise their agency. The problem was that they had no ties to the world and didn't have any personal goals. They were blank slates.

In fact, if you're orphaned, why were you orphaned? Were your parents murdered? Where is the murderer? What are you doing adventuring when you should seek justice for the murderer? Who took care of you when your parents died? (this is how to annoy an orphan player who didn't consider their backstory)

The problem I have with OP is that I don't think that players consider family members a liability/kidnap-bait. I think that players don't consider family members period. The reason so many characters are orphans is because people didn't think through their characters and are now just Bob the Human Fighter.

tl;dr orphans are boring, do something interesting.

Metahuman1
2018-12-24, 04:46 AM
Having relatives who are accomplished doesn't have to make your character powerful.
Putting them in power structures (Part of a college staff, captain of the guard, lawmaker in a city) means they'd have to adhere to the rules of that power structure. Thrive within that power structure. So we're making them lawful.
And lawful folks wouldn't abuse their power.

And that's why mum isn't sending all the guards under her command with you to defend some town outside her jurisdiction.
(If you were to alert guards to a threat to a town within their jurisdiction they would likely go out to help anyway, so your mum being in charge wouldn't affect this situation much.)

The main difference between the two is how likely the guards would take you seriously. As in.. Show respect. So basically exactly the Soldier Background Feature..? That hardly seems overpowered.

For the wizard it's essentially the Sage's background feature. You don't magically know where the info can be found, which is a silly part of that background, honestly. Instead, you ask Daddy Wise Old Ghandalf where to find the info.

How overpowered that you'd use some one in your backstory to use a background feature.

The 1 time I tried 5E, I rolled Noble Background on the table per the GM's directions.

It said for it's ability I should be able to get an audience with certain types of people.

Well, game starts, stuffs going on in the town. Mayor needs help. Mayor is actively calling for adventurers to help. Being an adventurer in a part of them, I decide I will use my Noble Background ability too get an audience with the Mayor to talk about the problem and get the quest.




I will give you exactly 1 guess how successful that was.



If the answer was "You couldn't do it, your ability automatically didn't work be damned that the Mayor was calling for it actively, and the Wizard had to use spells to get the party into the damn Mayor's office to receive our quest." You would be correct.

That was with something that cost a character resource and was on the character sheet, in a slot designated for something that eats a character resource.




Can you conceive of what would have happened if I'd just written a backstory and said "Oh, yeah, My Dad's the local Lords Master At Arms, trains his knights." or "Oh, yeah, Mom's a Powerful Druid, has this freakishly hugh exotic big cat animal companion, runs a Druid Circle in a forest about a half days walk form here. " Or "Oh, yeah, Sisters a Wizard, she's got a teaching assistant gig at the local wizards college and is well on her way to being a tenured professor of Abjuration." or "Oh, yeah, my brother? He's apprenticed to the local lords spy master, he's a fixture in the court with that rapier wit and tongue of his."?

Can you? I can. Nothing that doesn't involve it being a way to get an extra pain in the ass kicking for my character.

And then people wonder why Orphans? If your getting 50% or more of your party as Orphans, particularly if they have played with you before, the real thing you, as GM, need to ask yourself is, "Have I buggered this up? Cause, this is a sign of a lack of trust, meaning I need to earn trust, and not betray it once I do get it.". You should not auto assume the PC's are the problem here.

Knaight
2018-12-24, 04:50 AM
There are easier ways to encourage this. Make families an important part of cultures, run a game where the PCs are operating largely within a culture instead of out past it and occasionally in its margins, and you tend to see PCs that have cultural ties. Make games about wandering adventurers which never really center their ties to the world, and you get characters with no ties to the world, including the occasional orphaned ones.


Having relatives who are accomplished doesn't have to make your character powerful.
Putting them in power structures (Part of a college staff, captain of the guard, lawmaker in a city) means they'd have to adhere to the rules of that power structure. Thrive within that power structure. So we're making them lawful.
And lawful folks wouldn't abuse their power.

Are you seriously saying that anyone who thrived within an organized power structure wouldn't abuse their power? Because that's the implication here, and history is rife with notable counter examples. On top of that most of us probably know a few.

BWR
2018-12-24, 05:27 AM
This seemingly widespread opinion that adventurers must be orphans bewilders me. Our games have never had this. While there is more than a fair share of previous family being irrelevant when we make the character and even during play, there is a general assumption that there is at least some family in the background even if we never touch upon it. Orphans are very rare.
Many characters do have family listed, and sometimes family plays a part in the story. Families help cement and flesh out a character, they give them ties to the setting, and sometimes hooks for adventures.

As for Koo's feeling that adventurers are all mad, well maybe, but the young in seek of excitement, the determined out to fix the world and the free spirit may be mad but they are not desperate nor deranged. Not everyone who does risky things does so because they have no choice.

Just to take our long-running Mystara group:
One was a noble family's son who ran off to seek adventure and prove his worth in battle. One just wanted to see the world and make things right. One, orphan but raised by the local church in a loving and supportive adoptive family and she wanted to spread the blessings of her goddess. Another orphan raised by her granduncle, and she's another runaway who just wanted adventure instead of a life of luxury. The last was married with kids in a respectable social/governmental position before being sent on a quest which kind of ballooned.
While two of these are technically orphans, they are not the kind of orphans apparently common in other peoples' games: the kind without anyone who took care of them and without family to 'be taken advantage of by the GM'. This is also the only time I can recall in 26 years that we've had two orphans in the group.


As for powerful family, either personally or politically: yup. This happens. It doesn't mean they will solve any and all problems for you. it doesn't mean you will automatically be able to abuse your connections to your own advantage. Again, to use the PCs mentioned above: the noble son helped arrange travel permits and an audience with the king. The PCs could have done this without him, but things went a lot quicker and smoother with his family's help. The church that raised one PC gave free healing to the PCs when needed (including expensive stuff, if they had the necessary diamonds), but they did that to everyone in the valley. Granduncle is a king of a tiny country and a 20th level sorcerer and did actually save the party at one point.
All this comes at a cost. A noble son is expected to further his family's goals, even if they conflict with his own. The church may give free healing but that means they sometimes need money, so grateful PCs end up donating a lot to them in any case, more than simply paying for spells would cost. Granduncle was a casually brutal tyrant and had unpleasant interests (the less said about his experiments with the various clones of his grandniece the better).
In no cases did family simply solve every little problem for the PCs. Mostly there is an attitude of "you're an adult now, we can't be wiping your arse forever". If something is really bad, sure. Also, most PCs (and players) don't want to beg others to do the work for them so they don't ask for help.

Families can be useful but they are also a drain on resources. They support but require support. In any case, they have enriched the game because it gives more NPCs to interact with, more ties to work with and more consideration for actual roleplay.

And this is just in our more or less 'standard' D&D games. They have nothing on the alt.u. Rokugan we have where all the PCs are the emperor, his family, the extended family and marriage into the ruling families of several clans. Family relations are all important in games like that.

Lockles
2018-12-24, 06:10 AM
If your DM wouldn't allow you to use the Noble Background's feature specifically to do what it says it does, then that's on him. Not the background feature.
So if your family is backing up that feature, and the DM still dismisses it, that's also on him.
In that situation, just point out to him that your next characters won't be given backstories, because he's ignoring them anyway, and he's a bad DM for doing so.

And no, I'm not saying all the folks who thrive in power structures are lawful good. But you're the one making this NPC, why are you forcefully making your own mother a power hungry chaotic neutral monster? Are you that desperate to give your character a leg up?
The point is to give your character something interesting in their background, rather than "I'm Oliver Twist, but also I have dragon's blood for no reason".
I'm not saying you should immediately exploit any options you're creating for yourself to be crowned emperor of the universe and at least 3 demiplanes and maybe beyond. If that's the first thing your mind goes to, that's on you.

(Exaggerating of course, but you get the point.)

If you create worthwile NPC's that would very much be able to influence your character's decisions and opinions, it helps your DM set, keep and guide you on your adventure.
And do keep in mind, you're likely not the only person in that party. So it's not like your one relative is going to be steering the plot. (Unless of course the entire rest of your group are Orphans with no background or backstory to work with, and that 1 NPC you made is literally the only proper connection the DM can use. But that more reinforces my point, I think.)

Hyperversum
2018-12-24, 06:11 AM
TBH, it's a cliche mixed with a trope. AT TIMES being an orphan makes sense, but it depends on the kind of character/backstory you want to work with. The same goes for having a family.

But forcing a thing is never good. Simply because "No you can't" without a reason sounds to many player like a... useless rule. Because that's what it is. And it rarely works, if you ask me.
In particular if the player is one who likes roleplaying and the background isn't just something for the DM to work with, but also something he truly uses to RP his character.

My first character was an elven wizard, who was pretty young for his race in starting his adventure. He was was the son of a "cross-race" elven couple (dad was a Grey Elf and the mother was a normal High Elf) who were travellers, merchants and low level spellcasters, after years they settled down but here and now they left home to travel again. Also, he had another sister who became basically the village chief, a priest of Correlon (I thought of her as an adept, not even a cleric).
A wholesome family as background but one of the reason for his leaving the school of magic was the fact that the parents at a certain point were not returning home and his sister was searching for them. So he decided to search for her and offer his help, which could prove useful as a wizard.
Wholesome past but also a fear of losing such family. TECHNICALLY he was an orphan at the start of the campaign tho.

One of the character I am playing now otherwise is a paladin; a bastard son of a noble and famous paladin and a noblewoman he worked for a bit. Sadly, this woman was married and in order to avoid the wrath of the husband, the mother asked the paladin to take with him the baby while she acted like he was born dead.
Therefore, he technically he has a family, but it's a single father and never knew his mother. She isn't a part of his life. He doesn't even know her name, to avoid problems since that wrathful noble became even more important in the years.

The second character I am playing as of now is, on the other hand, a plain old-school orphan, an Archivist-Malconvoker Tiefling.
She never knew her family, not a single one of them, as she was abandoned in front of the a church as soon as she was born, since she was a Tiefling in an area where Tiefling are heavily hated (D&D 3.5 here tho, old school Tiefling, not fiendish-heavy looking. Also they can simply be born from a warlock or someone who dealt with devil too much).
This being an orphan obviously influenced her life and moving from a religion to another while escaping the persecution on Tiefling (which was developing even more when a cleric of Hextor became the king of her kingdom) was the plot-device to make her move from a bright and somehow fun childhood with the cult of Pelor to Wee Jas, where she became a more brooding and serious person, pretty hateful about humans and the masses of ignorant commoners.
And again, this was used to develop the character who changed her attitude after a certain event and decided to not hate but too become a positive figure herself, an hero, to show how those individuals are wrong, even if she kept her brooding attitude and hostile behaviour when it comes to the opinion and action of common, uneducated people.

The facts that the first character has family and a place to return, the second has something but missed something for his whole life and the third had nothing if not her fellow students and master are relevant components of their backgrounds, defining not only their past also how I wanted them to think about the experiences of others.
Forcing a mother and a father on this third character would just be asking me to change what I was thinking when I created her, forcing me to play a completely different character.

She isn't a "Oliver Twist with demon blood", as her blood was obviously meant to be a side-quest and possible plot-device as the hate and racial tension towards planetouched was a relevant detail of the setting.
And to give another fun fact, my best friend played another female orphan tiefling who practiced black magic (in her case, necromancy to spam Enervation and debuffs) but rather than being a serious&cold good character his character was a humorous&cheerful one, but evil and egoistic.
In this case playing a bunch of orphans had a reason, not just cut off connection with the world and give us a way to play an edgy character.

TL;DR The problem isn't being orphan, but playing it at random.

gkathellar
2018-12-24, 07:13 AM
Frankly, if your players are so automatically terrified of their characters' families being kidnapped that they don't want any, there's a deeper problem here.

Knaight
2018-12-24, 08:05 AM
Frankly, if your players are so automatically terrified of their characters' families being kidnapped that they don't want any, there's a deeper problem here.

It's an established thing - part of the reason I tend to favor new players is that there's an alarmingly high chance that experienced players have developed a real sense of paranoia around weirdly ubiquitous bad GMing practices.

Berenger
2018-12-24, 09:48 AM
First: I agree that orphans (or characters so thoroughly estranged from their families that there is no functional difference) are a bit of an overused cliche and family ties are a great and generally underused tool to integrate characters into a setting.

However, you seem kind of fixated on the idea that people make such characters specifically to avoid kidnappings when in my experience there are multiple reasons.

1. It's work. Making a characters background is work and this work multiplies if you have to work out the personality of several family members, close friends or mentors and their relationship to each other and the character. While I personally enjoy designing such, I often don't have the leisure to do so when character creation is spontaneous.

2. It's work that might not be appreciated. For some GMs, the amount of text you used for your example npc parents is approximately the amount of text they are willing to read for the whole main character - in this case the work may be actively detrimental. Some GMs are not interested in your backstory at all and will ignore it - in this case the work is merely wasted. A red flag for the latter type of GM are the words "You can play whatever you want." - I have come to interpret this as "I won't bother to make the effort to tailor this standard campaign to your individual characters anyway."

3. In D&D, it may create weird power gaps between player characters and their families. Think mundane adoptive parents aware of their childrens superpowers, it's just weird and just doesn't lend itself very well to normal family dynamics. Imagine a father that is an Aristocrat 2 / Warrior 2, a mother that is an Aristocrat 3, a daughter that is an Aristocrat 1 and a hero son that is a Paladin 15 and plain superior to all of them in every way. The alternative are dynasties of medium-level hero-classed families but these open a whole other can of worms. I noticed a lot less orphans in systems in which power curves are more nuanced and competent contacts can stay viable yet balanced sources of help for the duration of a whole campaign.

4. A family well established in society and dedicated to the advancement of its children is the main key to success even in the modern world. This goes double and triple for any fantasy world derived from the cultures of antiquity and the middle ages because there are fewer attempts by society to mitigate this disparity. A young Fighter 1 hailing from a noble family should have resources, skills, connections and opportunities that are totally unbalanced in comparison to those of a Fighter 1 militia peasant boy, but the D&D system does not really support such different concepts. So your concept isn't really backed up by mechanics (e.g. a prince getting the same or maybe double or triple starting money complared to a peasant, which is an utter joke) or the GM is backing up your character background description and you get a serious advantage that feels unfair. This not being a thing because all the parents are "lawful" or want their kids to "earn everything the hard way" needs a very specific setting and does not match the patterns observable throughout history at all - a desire to make things easier, better and more accessible for the own children seems to be a predominant trait and crass nepotism was often regarded as a basic fact of life. Interestingly, I noticed a lot less orphans in systems which give the option of background resources such als Allies / Contacts / Social Rank / Resources / Henchmen / Base of Operations from level one as family members and family holdings could be fleshed out as such.

5. Parents are nosy as heck and more so in ancient cultures. If you want to play a young unmarried person*, caring parents in an average medieval setting can be expected to literally physically restrain you from most of the utterly disreputable activities commonly termed "adventuring" (unless it's straight-up warfare, that might be okay and expected). Double so if you are noble, triple so if you are a girl. Imagine: the earls daughter sleeping in some peasants' barn in the company of a handsome harbour rogue, some buff half-orc barbarian and some untrustworthy elven enchanter? Instant ruination of marriage prospects and family honor, even if nothing happens at all. "But daddy, the party needed a healer!" might just not cut it in this case. Thus, you often have to get the parents out of the picture. Killing them is an efficient and plausible way to do so. Being estranged or on the run from an unwanted marriage is another classic, but more complicated and only slightly less tired than orphans. Granted, there are other ways to get a character "on the road" and away from home, but they are somewhat more convoluted and setting-dependent. I have always wanted to play a rogue that is no criminal at all but a journeyman locksmith with a charming smile and a proper letter of recommendation and all that travels to learn from masters in foreign cities.



*Starting age is 16-19 is standard for several classes, contrary to popular belief marriages at age 15 were not that common in Ye Olde Tymes.

Mechalich
2018-12-24, 11:28 AM
4. A family well established in society and dedicated to the advancement of its children is the main key to success even in the modern world. This goes double and triple for any fantasy world derived from the cultures of antiquity and the middle ages because there are fewer attempts by society to mitigate this disparity. A young Fighter 1 hailing from a noble family should have resources, skills, connections and opportunities that are totally unbalanced in comparison to those of a Fighter 1 militia peasant boy, but the D&D system does not really support such different concepts. So your concept isn't really backed up by mechanics (e.g. a prince getting the same or maybe double or triple starting money complared to a peasant, which is an utter joke) or the GM is backing up your character background description and you get a serious advantage that feels unfair. This not being a thing because all the parents are "lawful" or want their kids to "earn everything the hard way" needs a very specific setting and does not match the patterns observable throughout history at all - a desire to make things easier, better and more accessible for the own children seems to be a predominant trait and crass nepotism was often regarded as a basic fact of life. Interestingly, I noticed a lot less orphans in systems which give the option of background resources such als Allies / Contacts / Social Rank / Resources / Henchmen / Base of Operations from level one as family members and family holdings could be fleshed out as such.


Earlier editions of D&D were fairly explicit in stating that PCs were supposed to 'come from nothing' and that playing the children of nobility was not something you should do. Those characters might exist in the game world, but they were intended to be NPCs. Achieving noble status was, by contrast, an explicit goal and something you received upon leveling to a certain point and building a stronghold, and was also the point at which the traditional dungeon-crawling gameplay was largely expected to end. This intent never held up, of course, because people wanted high-level play, but that was the idea.

Lemmy
2018-12-24, 12:01 PM
No matter how many times this subject comes up, the answer remains the same:

There are three main reasons orphan PCs are so common:

- It's a lot less work than creating names, stories and/or relationships for all of your character's friends and family.
- It's an easy way to justify your character not just settling down and having a job in his city. If you don't have to worry about taking care of your young daughter or aging father, you're free to explore the world!
- It safeguards the player against the old "the villain kidnapped your family! Follow the railroad to save them!" trick so many GMs like to pull. It gets really old, really fast. I had a GM who was particularly bad about this, despite otherwise being a great GM... So after the second time it happened, all player characters in his games were orphans with no family or childhood friends.

Nowadays, I explicitly promise my players not to mess with their characters' family unless they get actively involved in the plot (through the players' action).

That is... If your character's family is just background and/or roleplaying fun, of no real consequence to the campaign, like visiting your parents once in a while, sending money to your sister or adopting a dog, they'll be left in peace. In fact, I'll even give small rewards for that in order to encourage roleplay, like getting an small discount in your family's shop or having an slightly easier time meeting the leaders of the community where you grew up, that kind of thing...

However, if the player wants things like asking his military-career father for supplies and/or reinforcements, asking for favors from his politician brother or wanting an steady income from your noble family, he's allowed to, but these are major influences on the effectiveness of the party and how they influence the story, therefore, it's only fair that the PCs' antagonists will take notice of it. Of course, I'll give players a warning when I think they're starting to blur the line between "having a full-fledged background" and "getting too many free benefits". Once the warning is given, players are given the choice between toning it down or having said background be fair game to be used against them by the antagonists (within the antagonist's abilities, of course. Just because the enemy would like to use your family against you, doesn't mean they'll be able to... Although it's quite difficult to prevent them from doing so in a world with high magic and/or advanced technology, like the usual D&D setting).

I think that's the fairest and most productive way to handle it.

SodaQueen
2018-12-24, 12:17 PM
Are you sick of orphans in every single group you play in? There's always at least 2 players who don't want a family that the DM can abuse in a Kidnapping.

Tell them what I told my players:
Your mum is alive, and she loves your very much. Deal with it.

Examples:

Your mum was a well-known paladin. A proper divine butt-kicker that rode into danger on a white horse for 8 years, before she decided it was time to settle down.
Nowadays, she's the guard captain of your hometown. Crime completely ceased when she took up the mantle.
Inspired by the tales about her, you always wanted to go on quests too. All through your childhood, she's trained you to wield a sword and shield and now that you're old enough, she's gifted you her old blade to start your own adventure.
That's a mum you can come home to, talk with about your own adventure, get advice from.
That's a mum that'll hear of your first adventure, and decide to use her savings to buy you an expensive set of full plate armor. Because she's both proud of you, and very worried that you might get hurt.
That's a mum you don't want to mess with.
The city guard is going to protect their captain, so a gang of thugs isn't going to bother. And the big bad evil guy? He's heard the tales of the proper hero she used to be. Even he will think twice.

Your dad is a sage. He's been studying the arcane arts for decades and even teaches at a college at the capital. He's been trying to teach you too, but you're not the bookish kind of student. You need a hands-on approach to get a feel for what things do, rather than reading the outcome in some dusty tome.
He gives you a small crystal, by which he can contact you from time to time. See how you're doing. And tells you that if you ever need anything, he's here for you.
That's a caring, loving father, who would love it if you would follow in his footsteps. But he also understands you need to find your own way.
That's also a father, who's a good enough wizard, that he's teaching others as a professor.
Imagine the trouble you'd have kidnapping a mage who can teleport around, and hurl fire and lightning at you. Now imagine, you're trying to kidnap that guy from a building where everyone can hurl at least some fire and lightning at you. And that's ignoring the Slytherin-esque bunch, who would take the ones you managed to dismiss, and un-dismiss them in a rather cruel, gruesome manner. (I'm talking necromancy, folks.)
Your bad guy would have to be particularly insane, or very, very adept at dueling mages to pull off a kidnapping like that. Probably a bit of both.

Your sister isn't much of a fighter, but she's studious and smart. Last year, she made it to Lawmaker over at the country's capital.
Where she's protected by it's police force, because she's considered some one who's at a risk of being assaulted or abducted, due to her position in the city. They'll be prepared for bandits, thieves' guilds and other low-lives. So the ones you meet along your travels who'd think "Hey lets kidnap his family, whom we have no idea of who they are or where to find them" won't get very far.
And big bad evil guys who can march into capital cities and take on it's military/police/(royal) guards, is already so strong and powerful, he shouldn't need to kidnap anyone to get to you.

Giving yourself family members that enjoy a position of protection and power, has a great potential to be a considerable asset on your adventures.
You need to get some cooperation from the guards? Your mum is their boss, and you've been training alongside them for years. They'll gladly comply.
Need some advice on a magical artifact that sees to have put a curse on your party's bard, after he tried to produce offspring with it? Dad will know a thing or two about magical STD's.
Run into some trouble with the local thieves' guild? A shop-keep scammed you out of your money? Some Crown's Guard is bullying your friends? Sis can probably sort that out for you.

Now, of course, don't give yourself all 3 examples. If you're giving yourself a family of heroes, you're not going to have much of an adventure for yourself. But daddy's big balls of fire alone can keep the family safe. Mum's such a great warrior, no criminals even dare set foot in town, she's going to keep pops and your brothers safe, no problem.

Your DM isn't going to mind a somewhat powerful person in your backstory. He's seeing a set-piece that can be used as more than Kidnap-fodder. And he's just happy you didn't make that third Orphan in the group.
We're running an Adventure here! Not an Orphanage!

He's also thinking about how he could replace the old sage in the village that you'd have to talk to on your first adventure to get info about the dungeon you're about to enter that's known to be covered in maical traps with Magical Pops.
Or how the cleric in the village is going to be much kinder to you than the rest of the group, because he recognizes you as the daughter of Mommy the Divine Slayer of Evil and Bringer of Light and Stuffs.
Or how your sister might have heard you joined a band of adventurers trying to solve problems in the countryside, and she's pushing the quests with the good rewards your way.

It's opening up a lot of options for you, your group and the DM.It's pretty presumptive and even a little insulting of you to assume that people are making their characters parentless solely because they don't want the DM messing with their family.

I'm playing a human warlock whose mother OD'd when she was very young and she was partly raised by her older sister who was apprehended by the tyrannical empire over a false accusation of theft. And the woman who adopted her later was killed for being a sympathizer of the rebels. This led her to make a pact with a demon who was at just the right place in the character's absolute lowest most vulnerable moment.

I'd be more than a little peeved if I brought this character to your table and was told that "no you actually have a loving mother" because nothing about my character concept works if she's always had a loving parent. Hell, she wouldn't even be a warlock because she wouldn't have had a moment at her lowest where she sold her soul for power.

I'd probably just leave and say good riddance because I'm not rewriting my entire backstory and changing my character concept just because you don't like this trope.

Draken
2018-12-24, 12:29 PM
Take the next step. Play a warforged, shardmind or some other manner of artificial lifeform (ideally self-spawning), have no family to begin with.

Koo Rehtorb
2018-12-24, 12:53 PM
I'm going to quote my favourite passage from any RPG on the subject of adventurers. From Torchbearer:


Adventurer is a dirty word. You’re a scoundrel, a villain, a wastrel, a vagabond, a criminal, a sword-for-hire, a cutthroat.

Respectable people belong to guilds, the church or are born into nobility. Or barring all that, they’re salt of the earth and till the land for the rest of us.

Your problem is that you’re none of that. You’re a third child or worse. You can’t get into a guild—too many apprentices already. You’re sure as hell not nobility—even if you were, your older brothers and sisters have soaked up the inheritance. The temples will take you, but they have so many acolytes, they hand you kit and a holy sign and send you right out the door again: Get out there and preach the word and find something nice for the Immortals.

And if you ever entertained romantic notions of homesteading, think again. You’d end up little more than a slave to a wealthy noble.

So there’s naught for you but to make your own way. There’s a certain freedom to it, but it’s a hard life. Cash flows out of your hands as easily as the blood from your wounds.

But at least it’s your life.

And if you’re lucky, smart and stubborn, you might come out on top. There’s a lot of lost loot out there for the finding. And salvage law is mercifully generous. You find it, it’s yours to spend, sell or keep.

Silly Name
2018-12-24, 01:35 PM
The issue isn't orphans, honestly. You can have orphaned character who have meaningful relationships in their backstory: best friends, mentors, bullies, rivals, love interests, etc. This is what should be encouraged - meaningful relationships, not just parents and siblings.

Reasons for adventuring are another topic altogether, but it can't be denied that characters with few ties have an easier time being adventurers: if you already don't have a place to call home, or a group of people you want to spend your life with, there's little stopping you from going on journeys across the world which may take years or decades. You don't have to worry about bringing bread home, or how your spouse and children are doing, or if dad's broken leg has healed. You can just pick up your backpack and go out of the door with no worries. After all, Frodo is an orphan when his adventure begins, and he never has to worry if the people he left behind are worried about him, but he still has ties to his friends, and in fact those friends do help him. The reason Harry Potter is ok with going to a boarding school is because he lacks loving parents, and he would do anything to be away from the Dursleys. But they exist and have an impact on Harry's life.

I would be very cross with a DM who tells me my character has to have a family. I am ok with them asking for a detailed backstory with a few important characters in it, but I want to be free to decide what is of my family. Perhaps what I had in mind was a character who is looking for his parents, or a man seeking revenge for the murder of his family; maybe she escaped from an abusive husband, or her children have been kidnapped by a mad mage. Or maybe my character is Roy Greenhilt, and even if his parents are dead they have still had a role in shaping him as a person.

"My family is all dead/missing" doesn't necessarily mean a poor or un-invested backstory, and forcing players to include a full, happy, stable family in their backstory doesn't actually help, because I can still decide to ignore that family.

comk59
2018-12-24, 01:43 PM
I'm going to quote my favourite passage from any RPG on the subject of adventurers. From Torchbearer:
Ah, thank you for reminding me why I don't play torchbearer anymore.

Clistenes
2018-12-24, 01:44 PM
If you force a player's character to have a family of your choice and design, you risk encouraging them to create only NE or CE *******s who don't care anything save themselves, and you will end with a game with way less depth and social interactions than it would have been otherwise, instead of the opposite...

King of Nowhere
2018-12-24, 02:05 PM
No matter how many times this subject comes up, the answer remains the same:

There are three main reasons orphan PCs are so common:

- It's a lot less work than creating names, stories and/or relationships for all of your character's friends and family.
- It's an easy way to justify your character not just settling down and having a job in his city. If you don't have to worry about taking care of your young daughter or aging father, you're free to explore the world!
- It safeguards the player against the old "the villain kidnapped your family! Follow the railroad to save them!" trick so many GMs like to pull. It gets really old, really fast. I had a GM who was particularly bad about this, despite otherwise being a great GM... So after the second time it happened, all player characters in his games were orphans with no family or childhood friends.


I am going to add a 4th reason: not wanting to clutter the narrative.
The DM has a story in mind that will take time. then each and every player will add family connections, intrigue, personal quests, and all those take time. sometimes you just don't want to add more. especially when you don't know much about the world and the setup and the rest of the party, you may want to introduce a generic concept that will work in most situations and will not create problems.

I made my monk with that concept.
His parents were dominated and used as cannon fodder by some evil overlord when he was young, and so he was raised in a monastery. because of his past, he dedicated himself mostly to resisting magic, especially charms (high focus on getting good saving throws, especially will, and on anti-caster build). Having been powerless gave him insecurity problems, that he tries to compensate by fighting and bravado: by going toe-to-toe against deadly odds and surviving, he can feel powerful, and that makes him feel better. Having suffered because of evil people, he wants to fight evil, but he's not really compassionate; he needs to fight to feel better, and he simply sees evildoers as acceptable targets.
I went for this character concept because I didn't knew the DM and all exept one of the players; so I created a character that would always be motivated to seek adventure in any form, and that would be compatible with most groups - he prefers good parties, but he has no problems working with moderately evil people, as long as they don't actively hurt innocents for profit. the party wants to give up the reward to help the poor? sure, my monk is fine with that, he was in for the action anyway. the party wants to kill the prisoners? cool with it, they deserved it anyway.
I also left the evil overlord who killed his parents intentionally vague, so that it could be expanded if needed, or abandoned. after a while i discussed it with the DM and we decided that our plate was already full of quests and we didn't need some other goal, so the evil overlord was already dead. if we had been lacking for a quest, it would have been a good excuse for one.

Max_Killjoy
2018-12-24, 03:51 PM
- It safeguards the player against the old "the villain kidnapped your family! Follow the railroad to save them!" trick so many GMs like to pull. It gets really old, really fast. I had a GM who was particularly bad about this, despite otherwise being a great GM... So after the second time it happened, all player characters in his games were orphans with no family or childhood friends.


At least in my estimation, this is the number one reason players do this -- they get sick of anyone important to the character being under constant threat of "The Fridge (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StuffedIntoTheFridge)" or some less-lethal variation thereof.

icefractal
2018-12-24, 05:14 PM
Personally speaking, I like (for many characters, at least) for a family to exist, but not be on-screen. But since many GMs (and players) think that the point of having a family is to have them in the spotlight, usually under threat, I sometimes skip having one for that reason.

Making the GM's job harder? IMO, I'm saving them time. I'm preventing them wasting prep time on a plot-line that would be for my benefit but I wouldn't enjoy. Instead, they should use that time for a player who would enjoy the "your family has been kidnapped" hook - or use a different kind of hook. IMO, "you must or else" hooks are less interesting than "you'd want to because" hooks anyway.

Why? Two factors:
1) I've tried the "your family/friends are in peril" hook from several different GMs, and enjoyed it never. At this point, no thanks.
2) I find it difficult to roleplay a deep emotional connection on demand. I might be able to build one up with an NPC that I repeatedly interact with in-game, but not when that interaction happened in the backstory. And so my interactions with family members / old friends / lovers from before the game started tend to feel fake and dissatisfying.

But it's hard to explain this, and some people consider it basically crazy (why would you ever not want your character in the spotlight?), and so sometimes I go the orphan route.

Lemmy
2018-12-24, 05:25 PM
I am going to add a 4th reason: not wanting to clutter the narrative.
The DM has a story in mind that will take time. then each and every player will add family connections, intrigue, personal quests, and all those take time. sometimes you just don't want to add more. especially when you don't know much about the world and the setup and the rest of the party, you may want to introduce a generic concept that will work in most situations and will not create problems.

I made my monk with that concept.
His parents were dominated and used as cannon fodder by some evil overlord when he was young, and so he was raised in a monastery. because of his past, he dedicated himself mostly to resisting magic, especially charms (high focus on getting good saving throws, especially will, and on anti-caster build). Having been powerless gave him insecurity problems, that he tries to compensate by fighting and bravado: by going toe-to-toe against deadly odds and surviving, he can feel powerful, and that makes him feel better. Having suffered because of evil people, he wants to fight evil, but he's not really compassionate; he needs to fight to feel better, and he simply sees evildoers as acceptable targets.
I went for this character concept because I didn't knew the DM and all exept one of the players; so I created a character that would always be motivated to seek adventure in any form, and that would be compatible with most groups - he prefers good parties, but he has no problems working with moderately evil people, as long as they don't actively hurt innocents for profit. the party wants to give up the reward to help the poor? sure, my monk is fine with that, he was in for the action anyway. the party wants to kill the prisoners? cool with it, they deserved it anyway.
I also left the evil overlord who killed his parents intentionally vague, so that it could be expanded if needed, or abandoned. after a while i discussed it with the DM and we decided that our plate was already full of quests and we didn't need some other goal, so the evil overlord was already dead. if we had been lacking for a quest, it would have been a good excuse for one.
Indeed. The 3 reasons I listed are just the most common ones, but by no means the only ones. Sometimes players simply have a character concept that legitimately works better with a background that excludes any family ties. Your monk is a great example.

Cluedrew
2018-12-24, 06:22 PM
Tell them what I told my players:
Your mum is alive, and she loves your very much. Deal with it.I wouldn't make it mandatory, not as a standard campaign rule. But in general I agree with the idea of making characters more involved with the setting. Maybe not family, but friends or contacts and a history in the world. I played a character who wasn't an adventurer at all. Registered guild crafter who got involved in the action, partially to keep an eye on those outsiders.

Personally I leave family details unspecified on characters. Even if I know, or have a rough idea, I will leave it open until it looks like it might come up.

gkathellar
2018-12-24, 07:52 PM
At least in my estimation, this is the number one reason players do this -- they get sick of anyone important to the character being under constant threat of "The Fridge (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StuffedIntoTheFridge)" or some less-lethal variation thereof.

I'm feeling increasingly lucky that I've never run into this, because it seems like it's A Whole Thing.

And that's really bad. Seriously, if your players are building social outcasts because they don't want you to mess with them, just give them an explicit promise not to do so.

Silly Name
2018-12-24, 08:09 PM
I'm feeling increasingly lucky that I've never run into this, because it seems like it's A Whole Thing.

And that's really bad. Seriously, if your players are building social outcasts because they don't want you to mess with them, just give them an explicit promise not to do so.

One of my favourite characters I've run was a Paladin for whom I had written an extensive backstory, consulting with the DMs about the various elements which tied into his homebrew setting.

As the campaign progressed, I witnessed the death of my brothers as the army they were in was annihilated, and had to learn about the heroic sacrifice of the love interest whom I had been looking for (which was what prompted me to become an adventurer). I suspect my father survived only because we never visited the city he lived in.

So, yes, it's a thing GMs do, mostly because it's a quick and easy way to deliver an emotional punch to the player. But it also burns players off, because, well, if all the meaningful relationships in our backstories get used against us, we end up not wanting to have those ties anymore.

If this never happened to you, consider yourself lucky, as your GMs have been people who understand that tormenting PCs eventually leads to uncaring, unconnected characters.

Mind you, I don't want to say that GMs should never target the important relationships of a PC, but it should be done in moderation and in a way that makes sense. Has a demon decided to impersonate you while you were away dungeon-delving? Well, it makes sense it enthralled your wife, so that's fair game. But if the BBEG just kidnaps/kills Mama and Papa for no real reason than to hurt you, it steers into "dastardly moustache-twirling ass" territory.

Max_Killjoy
2018-12-24, 08:17 PM
I'm feeling increasingly lucky that I've never run into this, because it seems like it's A Whole Thing.

And that's really bad. Seriously, if your players are building social outcasts because they don't want you to mess with them, just give them an explicit promise not to do so.

It is a WHOLE thing, and in fact I'd say it hangs on / propagates in part because it's such a trope in fiction that people don't stop to think how horrible it is (even without the added layer of it overwhelmingly happening to female characters). And it's not just villains threatening people important to the protagonist, more broadly it's the idea of characters that exist ONLY to give motivation to another character or be saved by another character or whatever.

It's a trope that I LOATH to the extent that I've got a character whose backstory is (in part) a direct inversion from the supposed "motivating NPC's" point of view.

Pauly
2018-12-24, 08:36 PM
On the other hand, I'd wager the overwhelming majority of everyone who was ever considered a 'hero' in real life came from an absolutely normal and loving upbringing. I'd wager very nearly everyone who choses a high risk job - whether in military service, law enforcement or as a cartoonist - has an enormously ordinary background.

We feel somehow that our adventurers need to come from some sort of special circumstance, their mothers milk infused with the ability to overcome hardship and wickedness. To a man (m/f/w) they were born under a dark sign, during a thunderstorm, omens and portends in every fibre of their beings - and frankly, the harder we try to make them oh so fated, the more boring and predictable it becomes.

I do it too, mind - I'm not pointing any fingers. But I do think we need to at least be honest about the fact that .... it's the polar opposite of being inventive, creative and original: Our backstories are, generally speaking, utter crap. And, using such harsh words, let's say I'm speaking mostly of myself - unless you agree =)

Victoria Cross winners most often comes from homes where one or both parents had died when the children were young. They were pushed into the ‘protector’ role early in life.

Mechalich
2018-12-24, 08:54 PM
With regard to kidnapping, murdering, or otherwise threatening everyone and everything the PCs love, part of the reason this is a thing has to do with the power imbalances common in TTRPGs and in the attendant fiction, in the same way they impact the superhero genre.

Normally, threatening innocent people who are merely related to your enemy has consequences. If you're the villain it means you're committing crimes wholly unrelated to your actual scheme and therefore bringing in unrelated institutions to investigate your activities. So the villain really has to weigh the pros and cons and think about how they might maintain plausible deniability.

The problem you have, in the superhero genre and likewise in upper-level D&D (which is firmly within the superhero genre), is that the institutions are powerless and therefore no one exists to enforce the norms against harming bystanders. Superman provides a nice, tidy example of how this works. Superman loves Lois Lane - a completely ordinary human - her ability to materially impact any conflict in which Superman is involved is zero, her only influence over any story involving Superman is in how she impacts his mental state. At the same time, anyone in any position to actually threaten Superman in a fight couldn't care less about what the cops or even the army would think about kidnapping Lois Lane.

Once you have a setting wherein the masses truly are powerless, the only function any member of those masses has is as a prop to support the story of one of the tiny group of people in the setting who are powerful enough to matter.

Erloas
2018-12-24, 09:22 PM
I would add that 2 of my last 3 characters never even mentioned their parents. And yes, the third one did have his parents killed, but I didn't care about anything happening to them, I simply wanted a good reason for the character to be fully committed to the church. Being raised by the church was a good way for the character to be dedicated to the church but not be a paladin or cleric. The other two I didn't mentioned them at all because they aren't really important to the character. This isn't the story of "son of Bill and Michelle." It doesn't matter if they're servers in an inn, a fisherman, or dead. They make no difference to the story.
If the DM really wants to make something of it I can do something latter. But at a low level a villain knowing about my parents, or my parents being of any value doesn't make any sense. And at high levels where the character is known enough that someone might want to target them and have the ability to figure that out... well the stakes are probably already bigger than a couple people, even if they are important to me, and not really going to be enough to drive a story.

But really, even in computer games and such, the "you must save your family" storyline really has no appeal to me. It is just lazy.

Cluedrew
2018-12-24, 10:22 PM
If this never happened to you, consider yourself lucky, as your GMs have been people who understand that tormenting PCs eventually leads to uncaring, unconnected characters.Why do people play with these GMs? Seriously, I would drop the game and go back to writing out the story about my PC and their family if that came up.

Also I image it starts losing its effect at high levels: "You killed my father and forced me to go to the party cleric to resurrect him."


Victoria Cross winners most often comes from homes where one or both parents had died when the children were young. They were pushed into the ‘protector’ role early in life.Then couldn't just being the oldest sibling and charged with the protection of your younger siblings have the same effect.

As a bonus comment, I go for undefined families in role-playing games. My major fantasy stories tend to have protagonists with big supportive families who would be harder to kidnap than the protagonist. Still they are usually separated from the protagonist, if not by distance/a war zone than their own responsibilities.

Max_Killjoy
2018-12-24, 10:31 PM
With regard to kidnapping, murdering, or otherwise threatening everyone and everything the PCs love, part of the reason this is a thing has to do with the power imbalances common in TTRPGs and in the attendant fiction, in the same way they impact the superhero genre.

Normally, threatening innocent people who are merely related to your enemy has consequences. If you're the villain it means you're committing crimes wholly unrelated to your actual scheme and therefore bringing in unrelated institutions to investigate your activities. So the villain really has to weigh the pros and cons and think about how they might maintain plausible deniability.

The problem you have, in the superhero genre and likewise in upper-level D&D (which is firmly within the superhero genre), is that the institutions are powerless and therefore no one exists to enforce the norms against harming bystanders. Superman provides a nice, tidy example of how this works. Superman loves Lois Lane - a completely ordinary human - her ability to materially impact any conflict in which Superman is involved is zero, her only influence over any story involving Superman is in how she impacts his mental state. At the same time, anyone in any position to actually threaten Superman in a fight couldn't care less about what the cops or even the army would think about kidnapping Lois Lane.

Once you have a setting wherein the masses truly are powerless, the only function any member of those masses has is as a prop to support the story of one of the tiny group of people in the setting who are powerful enough to matter.

I can't remember who the characters were or what comic, as it's been YEARS, but I recall it had a couple of different twists on this.

The first one was a Superman-like character (in power level) who had a strict code about how much force he used, how lethal he'd be, and would "play the game" with villains, etc... but he expected his opponents to abide by some rules too. At one point a villain kidnapped someone really important to him, roughed them up, and threatened to kill them if he didn't cooperate with some scheme... 30 seconds later he'd found the "secret" lair, ripped out a wall, and killed the villain.

The second was a villain who tried to "fridge" a superhero's supposedly "normy" girlfriend, who turned out to be the secret identity of some eldritch power from another universe exiled to earth...

Max_Killjoy
2018-12-24, 10:32 PM
I would add that 2 of my last 3 characters never even mentioned their parents. And yes, the third one did have his parents killed, but I didn't care about anything happening to them, I simply wanted a good reason for the character to be fully committed to the church. Being raised by the church was a good way for the character to be dedicated to the church but not be a paladin or cleric. The other two I didn't mentioned them at all because they aren't really important to the character. This isn't the story of "son of Bill and Michelle." It doesn't matter if they're servers in an inn, a fisherman, or dead. They make no difference to the story.
If the DM really wants to make something of it I can do something latter. But at a low level a villain knowing about my parents, or my parents being of any value doesn't make any sense. And at high levels where the character is known enough that someone might want to target them and have the ability to figure that out... well the stakes are probably already bigger than a couple people, even if they are important to me, and not really going to be enough to drive a story.

But really, even in computer games and such, the "you must save your family" storyline really has no appeal to me. It is just lazy.

Yes... one of the things that ruined Dragon Age 2 for me...


...was the cliched, unavoidable, and just stupid thing with Hawke's mother.

Silly Name
2018-12-25, 04:02 AM
Why do people play with these GMs? Seriously, I would drop the game and go back to writing out the story about my PC and their family if that came up.

It's more of a pattern. It's not like they wear a big hat saying "I'll torment the PCs through their families" when we meet those GMs. It takes a bit of time for these things to happen, and even then, you might be willing to let it slide the first few times. It's only when you start noticing the pattern that you understand what's going on.


Also I image it starts losing its effect at high levels: "You killed my father and forced me to go to the party cleric to resurrect him."

Ah, my greatest enemy as a GM: cheap resurrection magic.

Kaptin Keen
2018-12-25, 04:45 AM
Victoria Cross winners most often comes from homes where one or both parents had died when the children were young. They were pushed into the ‘protector’ role early in life.

And I know dozens - literally - of soldiers and policemen. Not a single one of them has any sort of orphan-y og tragic background. So unless you happen to have a source to some actual statistics, for a wider group than recipients of one order, I'll stick with my reasonably thorough personal experience.

Metahuman1
2018-12-25, 06:35 AM
I'm feeling increasingly lucky that I've never run into this, because it seems like it's A Whole Thing.

And that's really bad. Seriously, if your players are building social outcasts because they don't want you to mess with them, just give them an explicit promise not to do so.

There are a lot of them out there and have been for a long time. After all, the Trope was good enough for people who wrote the stuff the creators of D&D stole or borrowed ideas form. Its good enough for them and for you.

@Lockles

And if he won't let me use something to do what it says it does, what, precisely, makes you think he would let me go outside the rules to engineer having family, but to also make them functionally unreachable as targets?

Please. I really want a direct answer from you too that direct question. What, precisely, make you think he'd let me have the family, but also have them not be just an easy target/cudgel to beat on my PC with, given that he wont, according to you, even let the background do what it says it does?

As too your insistence that it's not on the feature, it's on the GM, so? Your point? Making Orphan characters is on the GM as well. Your not pushing back on GM's to fix that though, your putting it in the players laps. I'm trying to show you that you've selected an ineffective target if you wish to fix that problem.


Incidentally, most DM's would just say that that means I'm being a bad player and a power gamer and boot me in my experience over that sort of thing. IF I told them I wasn't going to give them backstory's, just a sheet with mechanics and a name. Don't you know that pages of backstory are usually required, even though it's not read by in the range of 9 to 9.9 DM's who require it, which is an overwhelming majority of GM's in my experiance?

Max_Killjoy
2018-12-25, 09:40 AM
Hell, as a GM even, I try to invert this trope... in one campaign, one of the PCs married a noblewoman from a magic-heavy culture, and then when her parents' home was attacked by assassins, he rushed there fearing the worst, only to find out that she had killed one with mind magic and the others had fled. So instead of the start of a revenge arc, it became the start of a mystery arc -- who were these attackers, and what was going on.

Koo Rehtorb
2018-12-25, 01:10 PM
And I know dozens - literally - of soldiers and policemen. Not a single one of them has any sort of orphan-y og tragic background. So unless you happen to have a source to some actual statistics, for a wider group than recipients of one order, I'll stick with my reasonably thorough personal experience.

Neither of those things have much, if anything, to do with fantasy adventurers. Those would link to town guards or... soldiers.

There isn't really a good modern counterpart to adventurers, but I'd say professional mercenaries like Blackwater, or professional criminals, especially international ones, would probably be a closer fit.

Kaptin Keen
2018-12-25, 01:20 PM
Neither of those things have much, if anything, to do with fantasy adventurers. Those would link to town guards or... soldiers.

They are real life heroes - well, some of them are. No, there's not really any good comparison between what are essentially fantasy super heroes, and anything in real life. Blackwater ... would be closer to fantasy villains, right?

It's about backgrounds. My point is that I see no real tendency among those from a hard background (I work with such people), they may be slightly attracted to a type of work (military) that lends itself to it - but the great majority of those I meet tends towards gangs, crime, drug abuse .. and so on.

On the other hand, people who work for others - most soldiers (that I've met), policemen, nurses, social workers - come from stable, happy childhoods.

Koo Rehtorb
2018-12-25, 01:30 PM
On the other hand, people who work for others - most soldiers (that I've met), policemen, nurses, social workers - come from stable, happy childhoods.

This is what I'm saying. These are people with steady, stable, productive employment. These are pretty much the exact opposite of adventurers.

It's not really about "hero" vs "villain", you can have good or evil adventurers (though I would personally say that adventuring lends itself more easily towards evil alignments). It's about whether you fit into the social norms and have a place in society or not.

Cluedrew
2018-12-25, 01:54 PM
OK, two things.

First unless there is a sociologist in the audience actually mapping the demographics of these professions and figuring out exactly what that all means might be beyond us. I mean how does being an orphan with a good foster family (which I hope is common than scavenging on the streets now a days) compare with having divorced parents or a dysfunctional but not abusive parent?

Second I'm not sure it really matters. Do you want to see stories about, play as or with, these characters: yes or no? That I think is the main question here. Personally I am board by these "island people" (aka murder-hobos) who have no meaningful connections with other people in the setting. But I don't care where they came from. Ammanda was one of my few characters whose parents were explicitly laid out (sort-of), but they never came up in play. The fact she knew all the other mercenaries in town did.

RazorChain
2018-12-25, 02:05 PM
Frankly, if your players are so automatically terrified of their characters' families being kidnapped that they don't want any, there's a deeper problem here.


It's an established thing - part of the reason I tend to favor new players is that there's an alarmingly high chance that experienced players have developed a real sense of paranoia around weirdly ubiquitous bad GMing practices.


I run a lot of character driven campaigns where family and the PC's personal pursuits are the focus of the game. Everybody is supposed to make at least 3 NPC's that are a family/friend/rival/enemy but most show up with a lot more. The family isn't as important as the connection to the world through NPC's that the PC's know from the past

Sometimes I'll even introduce a NPC and ask a player how his character knows said NPC and the players can also spend bennies to introduce a relation to an NPC. This might be a guard that served in the same mercenary unit as the PC, a wizard that went to the same wizards college etc.

This helps with immersion, world building and making the PC's connected to the world.

Buuuuut.......then you have players that just really don't want to play ball. They know that to make drama you have to expose yourself to it and they know that family, friends and aquintances can be used against them and I'm not even talking kidnappings or murder. I'm talking about drama and social leverage. It's harder to say no to a friend in need than a stranger.....let's not even talk about saying no to your own mother.

Strangely the players that want their characters to live in dumpsters and not know anybody have been very inclined to abuse the systems we have been playing or making the absolutely most mechanically powerful chacacters

icefractal
2018-12-25, 05:05 PM
Buuuuut.......then you have players that just really don't want to play ball. They know that to make drama you have to expose yourself to it and they know that family, friends and aquintances can be used against them and I'm not even talking kidnappings or murder. I'm talking about drama and social leverage. It's harder to say no to a friend in need than a stranger.....let's not even talk about saying no to your own mother.
I love cilantro, but I know several people who can't stand it. If I were hosting a party, I wouldn't put cilantro in all the food and demand they eat it.

Sure, you may need family tensions for some kinds of drama, and you need cilantro for the classic taco experience. But not everyone cares about that kind of drama (or that kind of tacos), and telling them that they should isn't going to result in a good time.

Now if the players in question were trying to get lots of family advantages without any downsides, I might agree they want to have their cake and eat it too. But if they're willing to "live in dumpsters" then that doesn't seem like the case.

Kaptin Keen
2018-12-25, 05:23 PM
This is what I'm saying. These are people with steady, stable, productive employment. These are pretty much the exact opposite of adventurers.

It's not really about "hero" vs "villain", you can have good or evil adventurers (though I would personally say that adventuring lends itself more easily towards evil alignments). It's about whether you fit into the social norms and have a place in society or not.

No. They're the opposite of your preconception of what an adventurer is. That's what I'm saying. The people most likely to perform heroics are good people from good backgrounds (so to speak - no alignment parallels intended). Whereas, as nearly as I can tell, people from various kinds of rough backgrounds wind up .. well, it's a little complicated, but to oversimplify immensely, they turn out dumb, emotionally stunted and broken, prone to making really counter-productive life decisions - until they get kids, at which point they tend towards getting their stuff together, and straighten out to a remarkable degree.

I'm not claiming to be an expert. I work with unemployment, and I see all kinds - at least one locally quite famous gunman has crossed my desk, along with all kinds of other unfortunates - and for the samle size I'm have access to, the conclusion is crystal clear: You want to make criminals better people? You make them care about someone else, preferably a little girl child.

Irrelevant to the discussion except to say that .. as far as I can tell, having a rough background places you about as far from adventurer as it's possible to come. Sure, some of them become criminals, but any romantic idea of what it's like to be a criminal - thinking it's somehow comparable to our fantasy ideal of adventuring - is as wrong as it's humanly possible to be.

Marcloure
2018-12-25, 05:49 PM
Why do people don't like when personal names connected to a character gets threatened? I mean, I understand that you don't like when the first thing that happens to them is some random dude to kidnap them. But if there is a villain, way wouldn't it attack your family to hurt you? Especially if it's a recurring villain that already knows the player's characters.

RazorChain
2018-12-25, 06:12 PM
Why do people don't like when personal names connected to a character gets threatened? I mean, I understand that you don't like when the first thing that happens to them is some random dude to kidnap them. But if there is a villain, way wouldn't it attack your family to hurt you? Especially if it's a recurring villain that already knows the player's characters.

Because some players are true murder hoboes. They want no way that the villains can get at them. If they have no home then they are hard to find. If they no friends or family the nobody has leverage. If they kill everybody, allow no witnesses to live and leave a scorched earth then there is no one to tell it was them or take revenge. If they are mechanically powerful enough then nobody can beat them.

Koo Rehtorb
2018-12-25, 06:19 PM
No. They're the opposite of your preconception of what an adventurer is. That's what I'm saying. The people most likely to perform heroics are good people from good backgrounds (so to speak - no alignment parallels intended). Whereas, as nearly as I can tell, people from various kinds of rough backgrounds wind up .. well, it's a little complicated, but to oversimplify immensely, they turn out dumb, emotionally stunted and broken, prone to making really counter-productive life decisions - until they get kids, at which point they tend towards getting their stuff together, and straighten out to a remarkable degree.

I'm not claiming to be an expert. I work with unemployment, and I see all kinds - at least one locally quite famous gunman has crossed my desk, along with all kinds of other unfortunates - and for the samle size I'm have access to, the conclusion is crystal clear: You want to make criminals better people? You make them care about someone else, preferably a little girl child.

Irrelevant to the discussion except to say that .. as far as I can tell, having a rough background places you about as far from adventurer as it's possible to come. Sure, some of them become criminals, but any romantic idea of what it's like to be a criminal - thinking it's somehow comparable to our fantasy ideal of adventuring - is as wrong as it's humanly possible to be.

This whole thing seems to be from you thinking that "adventurer" means "good heroic person" for some reason, which is just a total misconception of what an adventurer even is. "Adventurer", as a term, has absolutely nothing to do with the person's particular moral standing.

An adventurer, in the context of a fantasy setting, is someone who is not gainfully employed in society, and instead goes outside of society in search of dangerous and/or profitable endeavours. This can be someone who goes off into the wilderness to fight dragons to protect the countryside. But just as equally it can be someone who goes to a far off jungle on another continent to slaughter the locals in search of golden treasures. If you have steady employment as a town guard you may well be a stable, emotionally balanced, and even goodly person, who does what's right and helps defend his town. But you're not an adventurer, by definition.

Florian
2018-12-25, 06:24 PM
I share RazorChains experience on this.

I mostly play L5R 4th in "Samurai Drama"-mode and for drama, things need to be a bit more personal than usual.
For example, three of the ongoing personal story arcs that ran parallel to the main arc:

The Crab Bushi: Locked in an unhappy political marriage, with a good-for-nothing brother in law acting a steward of the estate, squandering money due to incompetence. The high point came when the wive was actually kidnapped, the player was really torn about willfully botching the situation and get rid of her, or be dutiful and save her.

The Phoenix Shugenja: We played the full stages of matchmaking, dating and marriage to an Imperial noble, her true love. The high point here was that the noble always wanted to impress his fiancé and prove that he's not just a pampered bureaucrat, so he regularly went into competitive mode and tried to solve a case or scenario on his own.

The Scorpion Bushi: A total failure as a Scorpion: Honest, absolute conviction in Bushido... and a full Ninja and assassination training. The high point was that the character was rather high up in the chain of succession and was often contacted by his father and uncle to deal with some missions, the Scorpion way of doing it, which he despised, but he also didn't dare show his true colors.

Good, that really works for the system because those things are covered by Disadvantages and you're rewarded pretty good for coming up with those things, talk about them with the GM, how to incorporate them. In addition, the system is deadly enough that you don't have to go to the same extremes like in D&D-style games to keep the tension high.

RazorChain
2018-12-25, 06:24 PM
I love cilantro, but I know several people who can't stand it. If I were hosting a party, I wouldn't put cilantro in all the food and demand they eat it.

Sure, you may need family tensions for some kinds of drama, and you need cilantro for the classic taco experience. But not everyone cares about that kind of drama (or that kind of tacos), and telling them that they should isn't going to result in a good time.

Now if the players in question were trying to get lots of family advantages without any downsides, I might agree they want to have their cake and eat it too. But if they're willing to "live in dumpsters" then that doesn't seem like the case.

I know! Some people just want to kick down the door, kill the monster and grab the loot. But why do they then want to participate in my character driven game?

I have a lot of players that want to participate in my games and I tell people it's not dungeon crawling combat games. It's games that focus more on drama, character goals and interpersonal relations.But then some players show up want more dungeons and mega boss monster fights, try to make the most powerful fighting characters by bending the rules, kill everything while living in a dumpster.

It just ends one way, me sending them off to ruin somebody else's games

Silly Name
2018-12-25, 06:39 PM
Why do people don't like when personal names connected to a character gets threatened? I mean, I understand that you don't like when the first thing that happens to them is some random dude to kidnap them. But if there is a villain, way wouldn't it attack your family to hurt you? Especially if it's a recurring villain that already knows the player's characters.

The issue I have experienced, personally, arises when those personal names get used exclusively as a way to hurt the character. If you feel like giving your GM a list of people your character cares for ends up amounting to giving them new, exciting ways to torture your character, you end up not wanting to do it anymore.

Do I accept that those side-characters could be put in situations of danger? Of course, it can actually be good drama fuel! But if all loved ones are good for is getting/being put in danger, this stops being good drama fuel and more of something that reeks of railroading ("oh, your brother got kidnapped by the evil wizard Maleficus!" well, of course I'm going to save him, he's my brother!). When I make those side-characters in my backstory, I expect them to be used as plot hooks or connections or other stuff which doesn't necessarily revolve around them being in deadly danger. Maybe pa and ma need help with a deliver, or my young sister who studies at the magical college is willing to enchant my sword if I can help her with her research. My best friend might have stumbled upon the Talisman of Azerath and contact me to help understand what the hell it is, or maybe my old mentor has found out that the recent virus outbreak is actually engineered.

IMHO, there are also villains who don't really care about hurting the PCs personally. The tyrannical ruler of the empire might despise those adventurers who always interfere with his plans, but at best he wants the adventurer themselves eliminated, and doesn't care for spending resources on kidnapping their dogs. The villain who threatens your family should be very personal and "close" enemy, one who has a specific grudge with you and wants to see you suffer.

Kaptin Keen
2018-12-25, 07:03 PM
This whole thing seems to be from you thinking that "adventurer" means "good heroic person" for some reason, which is just a total misconception of what an adventurer even is. "Adventurer", as a term, has absolutely nothing to do with the person's particular moral standing.

An adventurer, in the context of a fantasy setting, is someone who is not gainfully employed in society, and instead goes outside of society in search of dangerous and/or profitable endeavours. This can be someone who goes off into the wilderness to fight dragons to protect the countryside. But just as equally it can be someone who goes to a far off jungle on another continent to slaughter the locals in search of golden treasures. If you have steady employment as a town guard you may well be a stable, emotionally balanced, and even goodly person, who does what's right and helps defend his town. But you're not an adventurer, by definition.

No.

First off, the overwhelming majority of fantasy adventurers in literature are good. But that's irrelevant, because I'm not referring to that.

Second, if we're disregarding literature and focussing only on RPG's, there still remains a very definite bias towards adventurers also being heroes. But that's still irrelevant, because that's still not what I'm talking about.

There are things that will drive certain people to do things that are outside the norm. Things that are, for lack of a better term, adventurous. In so far as I'm able to determine, anyone who ever gets close in real life fits neatly into two categories: People in certain jobs - and criminals.

I have some experience with both groups.

Being a criminal, so far as I can determine, consists mostly of being afraid: Afraid of getting caught, afraid of getting killed, afraid of rivals, afraid of friends, being unable to sleep because you're afraid - all the time, every day of every month of every year, always. This is interspersed with irregular bouts of testosterone-fuelled camaraderie with people you don't actually like, but who happen to be what passes for 'colleagues'.

I'm still not an expert. I happen to work with violent criminals, gunmen, drug dealers and so on, but it's not the primary focus of my job - I help everyone find employment, the criminals are incidental.

But for a real life comparison to an adventurer, there is no worse fit than a criminal.

But I think we quite simply disagree on the definition, which makes further discussion pointless =)

Marcloure
2018-12-25, 07:21 PM
Being a criminal, so far as I can determine, consists mostly of being afraid: Afraid of getting caught, afraid of getting killed, afraid of rivals, afraid of friends, being unable to sleep because you're afraid - all the time, every day of every month of every year, always. This is interspersed with irregular bouts of testosterone-fuelled camaraderie with people you don't actually like, but who happen to be what passes for 'colleagues'.

Well, stuff like Tiny Hut exists because adventurers are afraid of getting killed in their sleep. Also, insight/sense motive maniacs are around there too. And as far as stories go, it's not uncommon for a group to fight among themselves after finding a great pile of gold, so they are more like comrades on the road than friends.

Not that I think adventurers are like criminals. The whole thing about fantasy adventurers is that it's a position of dreams, that none can actually achieve in real life.

ross
2018-12-25, 07:40 PM
Gee I can't wait for my family members to get taken hostage / killed and raised as undead / mind-controlled into attacking me and my party and / or killing themselves!

Mechalich
2018-12-25, 07:52 PM
First off, the overwhelming majority of fantasy adventurers in literature are good. But that's irrelevant, because I'm not referring to that.

You can be good and still be a criminal. That's pretty much the whole point of the Chaotic Good alignment.

Anyway, there's two kinds of fantasy adventurers: those who choose to adventure and those who have adventuring forced upon them.

The former group is famous for having characters of extremely dubious morals as their representatives and to be borderline if not actual criminals. Conan, one of the most famous such characters, absolutely is a criminal. He's a thief and a pirate and a pillager of great renown, he just spends a lot of his time encountering people who are worse than he is.

Most modern 'heroic' fantasy adventurers, by contrast, belong to the latter category. They are forced into adventuring, and this forcing most commonly involves something horrible happening to them that either destroys their home or forces them to leave. Take the Wheel of Time: Rand, Mat, and Perrin all come from the same small region and all have relatively happy home lives (Rand's mother is dead and Mat has something of a bad reputation but it's nothing serious). None of them have any intention of going on adventures until the Dark One's forces attack their homes and try to murder them and they have to run away or see everyone they know and love die. They don't want to be adventurers and all three expend considerable effort over the course of the series trying to find sufficient stability so that they can stop adventuring. Perrin in particular finds sufficient stability that he manages to step out from the plot almost entirely for several books until events conspire against him to force him into further adventuring.

The thing is, characters in D&D and other RPGs are more likely to represent the former class of adventurers. They deliberately choose to go out in search of treasure in an astonishingly high-risk fashion and they keep doing it even after achieving immediate objectives and securing enough treasure to live comfortably for the rest of their lives. This is not the approach of the highly stable.

RazorChain
2018-12-25, 08:29 PM
Gee I can't wait for my family members to get taken hostage / killed and raised as undead / mind-controlled into attacking me and my party and / or killing themselves!

I think this is more of a antagonist GM issue than your character has friends/family/allies

So what you are saying that your character should never get close to anybody so they can't be used against you?

Maybe you should consider wearing glasses when you are not adventuring. Works for Superman

Erloas
2018-12-25, 08:43 PM
Why do people don't like when personal names connected to a character gets threatened? I mean, I understand that you don't like when the first thing that happens to them is some random dude to kidnap them. But if there is a villain, way wouldn't it attack your family to hurt you? Especially if it's a recurring villain that already knows the player's characters.
Look at so many movies and games, the "family/lover in trouble I have to save them." It gets old after a while. Mario and Link have been saving the same family member for 30 years now. Popeye started doing it 100 years ago. It isn't that it isn't a good reason to go out and do something you wouldn't normally, but any more it is essentially just "I can toss this out there as a backdrop and the audience (players) will buy into it without having to do any actual storytelling."



Because some players are true murder hoboes. They want no way that the villains can get at them. If they have no home then they are hard to find. If they no friends or family the nobody has leverage. If they kill everybody, allow no witnesses to live and leave a scorched earth then there is no one to tell it was them or take revenge. If they are mechanically powerful enough then nobody can beat them.
Really it is just because it is lazy writing. If you can't think of anything better to motivate your characters you're not really trying very hard. It is also probably not an actual motivation for 75% of your party. "Looks like the cleric's mom was abducted, lets go save her. No I've never meet her, but she must be nice, she keep him alive as a kid." A few weeks later "The rogue's favorite uncle is trapped in the forest? Lets go. He's never been mentioned in the few years we've been adventuring together, but it is really important to her." The only reason the rest of the group cares at all is because it is, in theory, important to one of them. Why not have someone the whole party has meet and interacted with, someone that means something to more than one of them, need saving instead? Why not have a story for the whole group? One that actually has some real history to the party.
People need saving, monsters/savages attacking a city, cults abducting people, they all work as story drivers without ever having to stick a backstory character in there.

That isn't to say that it never has it's uses, but in the scheme of a campaign it should be pretty minor. I would say that the family of the OOTS members did add to the story, but in the end they have all been relatively minor sub-plots and side quests. They developed the characters, rather than provided the story. You could remove any of them and it wouldn't really change the direction of the story (well maybe with V, we'll see there, but even then it was like 5 strips actually dealing with V's partner, the rest was V's development as a character).

If a party is ignoring all of your hooks, then that is a completely different problem. Trying to force them to care by forcing it on a family member from their background isn't going to fix the issue either, it will at best mask it for however long your side-quest lasts.

Marcloure
2018-12-25, 09:08 PM
Well, the problem then seems to be that the players don't have actual reasons to care about that person or the villain related to the characters.

Now, if the players are fighting this vampire time and again, and they have been bothering his plans for a while, and ultimately they receive this letter: "hey, remember your young sister? I have found and captured her. Come and face me at my domain or she'll become a vampire too". Classical right? But I guess it works if the players or the vampire already met the sister in game, afterall, I agree that caring for names in a background can be hard. And you know what more? It could even be a bluff. If the players try to contact the sister, they will find she there, well and happy.

Also, of course using it again and again will eventually fail. As with any trope.

Max_Killjoy
2018-12-25, 09:20 PM
I love cilantro, but I know several people who can't stand it. If I were hosting a party, I wouldn't put cilantro in all the food and demand they eat it.

Sure, you may need family tensions for some kinds of drama, and you need cilantro for the classic taco experience. But not everyone cares about that kind of drama (or that kind of tacos), and telling them that they should isn't going to result in a good time.

Now if the players in question were trying to get lots of family advantages without any downsides, I might agree they want to have their cake and eat it too. But if they're willing to "live in dumpsters" then that doesn't seem like the case.



I know! Some people just want to kick down the door, kill the monster and grab the loot. But why do they then want to participate in my character driven game?

I have a lot of players that want to participate in my games and I tell people it's not dungeon crawling combat games. It's games that focus more on drama, character goals and interpersonal relations.But then some players show up want more dungeons and mega boss monster fights, try to make the most powerful fighting characters by bending the rules, kill everything while living in a dumpster.

It just ends one way, me sending them off to ruin somebody else's games


Keep in mind that "drama" and "character-driven" are not synonyms or matched sets. And the opposite of "dramatic" is not "murder hobo". Character goals, interpersonal relations, having an actual life outside of adventuring, etc, doesn't have to become all dramatic, especially in the sense that ends up "justifying" everyone the character knows being under constant threat by "rule of narrative causality".

icefractal
2018-12-25, 09:36 PM
I know! Some people just want to kick down the door, kill the monster and grab the loot. But why do they then want to participate in my character driven game?
There's more out there than havk-n-slash vs a specific type of character-driven drama. Not all RP is character-driven, and not all character-driven RP is based on family ties.

It sounds like you do advertise your game as interpersonal-focused, but that doesn't necessarily imply being based on pre-extant family relationships, as opposed to, say, relationships that develop in-game.

Mechalich
2018-12-25, 10:15 PM
It sounds like you do advertise your game as interpersonal-focused, but that doesn't necessarily imply being based on pre-extant family relationships, as opposed to, say, relationships that develop in-game.

If a game is focused on interpersonal relationships, and the characters are human (or something suitably human-adjacent) then family relationships are going to come up, simply because kin-based relationships are some of the strongest relationship bonds humans possess. People will make sacrifices for family members that they despise, or are far away, or they haven't spoken to in years that they would never, ever do for mere friends, ideological allies, or teammates. That's why 'No, I am your father' is so effective, it's how humans are fundamentally wired. Even psychopathic monsters who care about nothing else may be moved by the bonds of blood - witness Cersei Lannister in the TV version of Game of Thrones.

This is actually one of the reasons the orphan dodge is so common. A character who doesn't have a family is actually more believable than a character who has a family and doesn't care about them at all, whether positively or negatively.

So in a story which both has relationship drama and family members are referenced at all, some level of family drama should crop up. That doesn't necessarily mean the villain kidnapping family members, or in fact the villain having anything to do with the family at all, but it does mean the family will occasionally be used as a plot element.


Keep in mind that "drama" and "character-driven" are not synonyms or matched sets. And the opposite of "dramatic" is not "murder hobo". Character goals, interpersonal relations, having an actual life outside of adventuring, etc, doesn't have to become all dramatic, especially in the sense that ends up "justifying" everyone the character knows being under constant threat by "rule of narrative causality".

I do think that power disparities have a real tendency to result in the reduction of NPCs with whom the PCs share interpersonal bonds to prop status in this fashion. If the main characters: good, bad, and neutral, are playing on power tier 10 and all the NPCs with whom they share bonds are on power tier 1, then this sort of thing is almost inevitable, because the NPCs in question have no agency. There's absolutely nothing they can do that actually matters. For an extreme example of this, there's DBZ, in which characters like Bulma and Chi-Chi remain part of the cast despite being unable to do anything functional except convince other characters of what they should or should not do.

Certainly in a game context, if the mechanics reduce bystander characters to prop status, the Players will be encouraged to treat them that way, and one would expect them to be upset when the GM formulates such events that the players are robbed of decisions by otherwise agency-less props. The is similar to how many video game players hate escort missions - because success or failure is often tied not to anything the player does but to the erratic behavior of the AI controlling whatever must be escorted.

Erloas
2018-12-25, 10:26 PM
I would also add that there isn't anything wrong with having a strong family backstory. But as a DM I don't want someone to write a backstory so that their mother/father was some super powerful wizard, monarch, or merchant.

Of course if a DM wants to run a story where the Prince/Princess or heir to some vast merchant empire is the center of the story and they want to let a player take up that role, then that is perfectly fine too.

That should be done before a game even starts though and not just some contrived prop thrown out randomly part way through a campaign.

Quertus
2018-12-26, 12:15 AM
So, as should come as no surprise to those who are familiar with my post history, I'm going to complain that there's a lot of conflating of different ideas going on in this thread. Which, of course, is quite understandable, given the topic, and the human tendency to correlate data (often poorly).

So, orphans. There's lots of reasons for making PCs orphans, and lots of possible effects that could have.

Personally, I care about the character of my character, the psychology of the character. I create backstories full of details designed to help me explore certain facets of humanity. And then, having tailored the specific character that I want to explore, I make my character "not from around here". Why?

Hmmm... I guess, at the risk of myself conflating things, I think that I can generalize my many answers into two categories: compatibility, and gameplay.

So, I create a very specific playing piece, because that's the particular facet of humanity that I'm currently interested in exploring.

The GM also has a very specific adventure in mind, say, involving taking a ship on a one-month voyage to explore a remote island to collect the McGuffin.

So, we put those together. No, I couldn't possibly leave my ailing grandfather alone for that long... so I should bring him with me. We're from a merchant family - perhaps we could use our family's boat? Oh, and I'm a crazy cat lady, I've got to hog the spotlight to find a sitter for all my cats - and borrow money (perhaps from the other PCs?) to pay the butcher to keep delivering their food while I'm gone.

And now, because the real game that the GM had planned required interactions with characters aboard the specific ship we were going to take (one of whom dies on the voyage), the GM can't imagine any way that the world doesn't end, because now there's no way for the PCs to learn the critical detail and go on the real/next quest. True story.

If you read "In the Beginning was the Command Line", it may give you a better understanding of my PoV on interface, but... suffice it to say that there are different kinds of power in general and specific interfaces. My characters are, by necessity, very specific, because that's simultaneously what I enjoy running, and what is of value to my exploration of humanity. So, to make them more compatible with a wider range of stories, they are "not from around here", to allow them to emulate the different kind of power inherent to more general interfaces.

-----

So, my "science" is often outdated, but, last I heard, humans are designed to have thirty-some-odd active connections to other people. Thus, "orphans" (as they are being described, as having fewer than the average number of active connections the world, which is not necessarily true of real orphans), or my characters who are "not from around here" - or, more generally, any characters with fewer active connections - have a much easier time connecting to the world. GM introduces a new NPC? "**** them, I've got my connections already", vs someone who is hungry to make those connections - which do you think makes for better gameplay? I know my answer.

-----

Also, much like how time actually played is better than backstory (otherwise, we'd all just write backstories rather than play RPGs) connections made during the game are far more interesting, far more vivid than background connections.

If the GM wants PCs with connections to the area, he should make an area with NPCs worth connecting to. And, if the GM has made NPCs worth connecting with, he should want PCs who are likely make those connections. And, as - all things being equal - humans with fewer connections should be hungrier make connections... it sounds to me like "orphans" are the win.

-----

And, sure, there's always "the GM is uninventive, and threatening my backstory again" vs a GM who presents an engaging story that draws the PCs in without such tactics. Not having such connections does have the added bonus of setting the GMing bar higher, of requesting that the GM build their skills to create an environment naturally more engaging than "Bobby feel down the well again". But that feels like a minor detail, an advantageous side effect, compared with the true power of beginning play with limited connections.

RazorChain
2018-12-26, 01:29 AM
Keep in mind that "drama" and "character-driven" are not synonyms or matched sets. And the opposite of "dramatic" is not "murder hobo". Character goals, interpersonal relations, having an actual life outside of adventuring, etc, doesn't have to become all dramatic, especially in the sense that ends up "justifying" everyone the character knows being under constant threat by "rule of narrative causality".

No drama and character-driven aren't synonyms, on that we agree on. Drama is when there is a friction, disagreement or complications in a interpersonal relationship that most often doesn't lead to murder. Having interpersonal relationship can lead to drama but if you just go around and murder everybody or choose not have relationship with other people then that reduces the chances of drama.

So Drama rarely happens when everybody is in agreement, interpersonal relations don't have to lead to Drama but they may....or at least there is a better chance for Drama if a character has some interpersonal relations with other people rather than none.


Threat doesn't even enter the picture. Drama can just be the character's mother vehemently objecting to him going adventuring or his family arranging a marriage that he wants no part in. Drama can just as well be when you exchange veiled threats with the villain during a high society masquerade ball.

Character centric or driven means that the narrative is based around the characters goals rather than random quest givers that send them off to do whaterver needs to be done. It means the players present a problem, a goal or a mystery they want to solve during play and introduce NPC's that they want to be part of the game like a vengeful ex lover or an overbearing mother. It means they are solving problems closer to home.

I mean if I'm playing Cyberpunk 2020 in Night City and my character is from there and the whole campaign is supposed to take place there then it feels pretty stupid that my character doesn't know anybody. That's why we always made some contacts, friends, family, rivals and family, but it mostly boiled down to the rule of 3. Name at least 3 NPC's that are going to play an active part of the campaign.

RazorChain
2018-12-26, 01:48 AM
I would also add that there isn't anything wrong with having a strong family backstory. But as a DM I don't want someone to write a backstory so that their mother/father was some super powerful wizard, monarch, or merchant.

Of course if a DM wants to run a story where the Prince/Princess or heir to some vast merchant empire is the center of the story and they want to let a player take up that role, then that is perfectly fine too.

That should be done before a game even starts though and not just some contrived prop thrown out randomly part way through a campaign.


Yeah I want to add that I'm not advocating for that you need a strong family backstory, only prior relations be it friend, lover, rival, mentor, co-worker, contact, enemy or even just a friggin aquaintance. It's the part where the player maintains that his character doesn't know or care about anybody that I resent.

If Quertus shows up with his signature mage with his extensive backstory and his large family in faraway land I might just ask him if he has made some friends, aquaintances or enemies along the way. If he really wishes to explore a character that is the new kid on the block or a stranger in a faraway land and that fits within what I'm running then that is fine by me. I mean one of the PC's in the game I'm running is a viking that had been asleep in the faerie world for 300 years and was rescued by the other PC's in the year 1194, he literally knew nobody but reeaaallly wanted to play a anachronistic viking

PersonMan
2018-12-26, 03:28 AM
People with two parents who love them very much and have stable employment don't allow their children to run off and risk their lives plundering tombs and roaming through haunted wilderness.

The question is whether they can stop them, though. Especially for the strongly Good-aligned sorts, I can imagine it being rather difficult to convince the paladin-to-be, or freshly-blessed divine caster, to stay home and learn to be a shoemaker.

Berenger
2018-12-26, 03:41 AM
The question is whether they can stop them, though. Especially for the strongly Good-aligned sorts, I can imagine it being rather difficult to convince the paladin-to-be, or freshly-blessed divine caster, to stay home and learn to be a shoemaker.

Yeah, why would lawful good types honor a social contract designed to ensure the wellbeing of their elderly parents?

Kaptin Keen
2018-12-26, 03:55 AM
Well, stuff like Tiny Hut exists because adventurers are afraid of getting killed in their sleep. Also, insight/sense motive maniacs are around there too. And as far as stories go, it's not uncommon for a group to fight among themselves after finding a great pile of gold, so they are more like comrades on the road than friends.

Not that I think adventurers are like criminals. The whole thing about fantasy adventurers is that it's a position of dreams, that none can actually achieve in real life.

Well, only really stupid adventurers are not afraid. But it's not something that has a prominent part in our stories, right?

But I see grown men, muscled and tattoo'd, cry their eyes out on a regular basis. In literature, movies, games, I've never seen one of those.


You can be good and still be a criminal. That's pretty much the whole point of the Chaotic Good alignment.

Anyway, there's two kinds of fantasy adventurers: those who choose to adventure and those who have adventuring forced upon them.

The former group is famous for having characters of extremely dubious morals as their representatives and to be borderline if not actual criminals. Conan, one of the most famous such characters, absolutely is a criminal. He's a thief and a pirate and a pillager of great renown, he just spends a lot of his time encountering people who are worse than he is.

Most modern 'heroic' fantasy adventurers, by contrast, belong to the latter category. They are forced into adventuring, and this forcing most commonly involves something horrible happening to them that either destroys their home or forces them to leave. Take the Wheel of Time: Rand, Mat, and Perrin all come from the same small region and all have relatively happy home lives (Rand's mother is dead and Mat has something of a bad reputation but it's nothing serious). None of them have any intention of going on adventures until the Dark One's forces attack their homes and try to murder them and they have to run away or see everyone they know and love die. They don't want to be adventurers and all three expend considerable effort over the course of the series trying to find sufficient stability so that they can stop adventuring. Perrin in particular finds sufficient stability that he manages to step out from the plot almost entirely for several books until events conspire against him to force him into further adventuring.

The thing is, characters in D&D and other RPGs are more likely to represent the former class of adventurers. They deliberately choose to go out in search of treasure in an astonishingly high-risk fashion and they keep doing it even after achieving immediate objectives and securing enough treasure to live comfortably for the rest of their lives. This is not the approach of the highly stable.

I kinda agree with all of that, although .. not entirely.

Take Drizzt. He's had it pretty rough, but everyone else comes from a loving normal home, as far as I recall. Not sure about Entreri, but then he's a villain. But an adventurer, sure.

I wonder how many fictional adventurers have the plot forced on them, vs how many go out and find it on their own. There seem to be a lot of plots driven by ambition, but I agree that quite a number follow a pattern of 'everything was fine, then plot happened'. Unsure about that.

Conan is, btw, the only 'hero' I can think of who has such highly dubious morals. Others from (approximately) the same era include Tarzan, Philip Marlowe and Sherlock Holmes.

Who else, besides Conan? There's Porter, from the Payback movie, and the books that inspired the movie. But I don't think actual criminals are all that common. At least I can't think of many.

Erloas
2018-12-26, 04:26 AM
Almost every antihero fits that general theme. Anything that tends to be labeled as gritty probably has a few.

Pleh
2018-12-26, 06:11 AM
1. I don't consider a PC's family to be the exclusive jurisdiction of the player. Those are still NPCs and the DM has final say. Now, they do also belong to the PC's backstory, so the Player should probably set the tone for family characters and the DM should try to work within the narrative tone being set. But the DM has a right to really do anything. I'd say it's fair to ban orphan backstories, but it has to be justified at session 0. Note that Justified is a higher requirement than Explained. You need a good reason to suggest everyone confine themselves to having the vulnerability of targetable family.

After all, there's more than a dozen ways to make a character effectively orphaned, if you want to cut them off from family. A DM needs to explain what kind of game they want to run and why PC family members are important to the fun the players are meant to be having.

2. If the only use you have for family members is kidnapping them for plot hooks, you aren't dreaming big enough.

Make them a quest dispenser, a shop keeper, or an innkeeper. They don't have to get grabbed. In fact, having a several pleasant and helpful family NPCs who don't get kidnapped in your games will make it all the more motivating to players when one of them finally does get kidnapped. ("Woah, without Kaylee's brother, we'll have to haggle with strangers to work them down to selling wares at the rulebook's listed price.")

The "mandatory quest to rescue family" trope shouldn't hog the spotlight (it should probably pop up no more frequently than once in 3 campaigns). There are far too many fun fantasy tropes to use and this one isn't even the best.

3. Backstory death of family members shouldn't stop a sufficiently creative DM.

"We were resurrected, but we couldn't find you afterward."

"I faked my death because I needed our political enemies to leave you alone while I continued my work."

"You find a message from your dead relative implying that they have hidden an important family heirloom for you to recover when you were ready and you'll have to return to the abandoned homestead to find it."

"I am the ghost of your [insert relation] and I've come back to give you guidance about [plot related X]."

Pelle
2018-12-26, 07:02 AM
Wanting to play an orphan character is fine. Wanting to play an orphan character because you don't want any ties into the setting and are afraid the DM might do something with your bonds to hurt you is a sign of a problem player. This is a social collaborative group activity, so try to contribute a little to everyone's fun. Refusing to engage with the world/game is just annoying. I read the OP as a fun tongue in cheek response to that attitude.

And no, from the DM's side it's not about kidnapping and murdering your familiy. It's about playing a game with believable characters that belong to the world, and a way for the DM to provide opportunities for adventure by way of "at sunday dinner with your parents, your professor mother tells you about something mysterious happening at the university..." etc.

Quertus
2018-12-26, 09:18 AM
Personally speaking, I like (for many characters, at least) for a family to exist, but not be on-screen. But since many GMs (and players) think that the point of having a family is to have them in the spotlight, usually under threat, I sometimes skip having one for that reason.

Making the GM's job harder? IMO, I'm saving them time. I'm preventing them wasting prep time on a plot-line that would be for my benefit but I wouldn't enjoy. Instead, they should use that time for a player who would enjoy the "your family has been kidnapped" hook - or use a different kind of hook. IMO, "you must or else" hooks are less interesting than "you'd want to because" hooks anyway.

Why? Two factors:
1) I've tried the "your family/friends are in peril" hook from several different GMs, and enjoyed it never. At this point, no thanks.
2) I find it difficult to roleplay a deep emotional connection on demand. I might be able to build one up with an NPC that I repeatedly interact with in-game, but not when that interaction happened in the backstory. And so my interactions with family members / old friends / lovers from before the game started tend to feel fake and dissatisfying.

But it's hard to explain this, and some people consider it basically crazy (why would you ever not want your character in the spotlight?), and so sometimes I go the orphan route.

You get my vote for "best post on this topic".


Victoria Cross winners most often comes from homes where one or both parents had died when the children were young. They were pushed into the ‘protector’ role early in life.


Then couldn't just being the oldest sibling and charged with the protection of your younger siblings have the same effect.

Eh, there's a lot of subtle differences between those two scenarios, and those differences could have significant impact on how the events shape the psyche.

Trying to explore that kind of thing is pretty much the biggest draw of RPGs for me.


Wanting to play an orphan character is fine. Wanting to play an orphan character because you don't want any ties into the setting and are afraid the DM might do something with your bonds to hurt you is a sign of a problem player problem GM in the player's background, and an opportunity for you to show them that better GMs exist.

FTFY.

Everybody at the table is trying to have fun. Everybody is doing what they think is optimal to their fun, and, occasionally, you get players good enough to be trying to be optimal to everyone else's fun as well.

The easiest answer to idiot GMs of the type we're discussing is to run exclusively orphan characters. When you run a few one-shots with players, and find that that's what they do, it's a great opportunity to show them a better way, to engage the other characters' families, to encourage them to have a family in the next one-shot, or to straight up have a conversation with the player about it. To build that trust to enable the players to have the type of fun you want to create, rather than accusing them of BadWrongFun.

Now, sure, maybe they've got other reasons for running orphans, like hating their own IRL family, and therefore either being unable to conceive of "family" as a good thing, or even being an orphan is part of the wish fulfillment fantasy for them. Or maybe they just straight up don't enjoy your brand of fun. Then you've probably got incompatible play styles, which makes you a problem GM no more than it makes them a problem player.

Personally, one of my reasons for making my characters "not from around here" is that, much like horrible fanfic or other multi-author failures, anytime the GM tries to run one of my backstory characters, my immediate response should be to kill the imposter, and use Speak with Dead to interrogate them regarding what their game was, why they were impersonating someone I knew. "You're not my Hanna!". Not to put too fine a point on it, but if the GM is going to run a character for me, it should be solely theirs, and not involved in my backstory.

Another advantage to only connecting to characters of the GM's creation is that, IME, GMs tend to care about such characters more, put more thought and effort into such characters. They aren't just a prop to be abducted, they are more likely to be actual characters.

So, wins all around.

The GM wants my character to have interactions with and connections to the world? They need only make a world worth connecting to. Forming those connections in-game is what I care about, is far more interesting to me than "the plot".

Max_Killjoy
2018-12-26, 09:42 AM
Personally speaking, I like (for many characters, at least) for a family to exist, but not be on-screen. But since many GMs (and players) think that the point of having a family is to have them in the spotlight, usually under threat, I sometimes skip having one for that reason.

Making the GM's job harder? IMO, I'm saving them time. I'm preventing them wasting prep time on a plot-line that would be for my benefit but I wouldn't enjoy. Instead, they should use that time for a player who would enjoy the "your family has been kidnapped" hook - or use a different kind of hook. IMO, "you must or else" hooks are less interesting than "you'd want to because" hooks anyway.

Why? Two factors:
1) I've tried the "your family/friends are in peril" hook from several different GMs, and enjoyed it never. At this point, no thanks.
2) I find it difficult to roleplay a deep emotional connection on demand. I might be able to build one up with an NPC that I repeatedly interact with in-game, but not when that interaction happened in the backstory. And so my interactions with family members / old friends / lovers from before the game started tend to feel fake and dissatisfying.

But it's hard to explain this, and some people consider it basically crazy (why would you ever not want your character in the spotlight?), and so sometimes I go the orphan route.

Somehow missed this post originally.

Your position on this is very close to mine. I don't want the "drama spotlight" on my character, either. I don't like the "drama" of this context.

For some reason, there are those who think this means rejecting roleplaying, rejecting the character having any connections, etc, and that's just not true. It just means that I, as a player, would rather focus on my gaming time on other things that I enjoy.

What I don't understand is the insistence some gamers have that everyone must enjoy the same thing. Why can't a campaign lean to the dramatic for the player who enjoys that, and lean toward the "problem solving" for the players who enjoy that? And why must some insist that if you don't do X, then you've "rejected" roleplaying?

Let's say someone wants to do "detective drama in fantasy gaslight London". Why can't some players lean more to the "detective" side and others more to the "drama" side? Why not try to give the players what they like?

Pelle
2018-12-26, 10:08 AM
FTFY.


Having bad experiences is not an excuse for bringing a bad attitude to new tables. Don't assume new DM's you don't know are going to be bad people, that makes you the problem. Blaming previous DM's for your bad behaviour is just dodging the responsibility for your own actions.

Now, as I said, there are other acceptable reasons for wanting to play an orphan.



The GM wants my character to have interactions with and connections to the world? They need only make a world worth connecting to. Forming those connections in-game is what I care about, is far more interesting to me than "the plot".

Reading this, it sounds like you expect a lot of the DM, without wanting to contribute yourself. Why not help the DM out by providing some seeds for the DM to work from? Being open about your preferences for work and responsibility distribution is fair enough though.

The Jack
2018-12-26, 10:53 AM
The most diplomatic way that i can put this is that i think the Op is severely misguided, and that his or her approach creates player dissatisfaction, that his or her ideas are between bad and terrible, and that....

If players want one thing, they don't want you to force the antithesis upon them. Imagine wanting a vegan option in a restraunt, only to recieve steaks because the chef fundamentally disagrees with your decison and what he assumes to be your way of life . oh, and he expects you to pay for the pricey steak too.
As a DM, you are expected to moderate what players want; that diner might find unexpected sweet potato or be told there's none of that very specific brand of drink they want... but you dont throw steaks around when they want a veg curry.

More to the point, the sample characters given are awful special snowflakes. Not only are you giving your player a steak when they wanted veg curry, you're giving them some exceptionally well done steak; it looks like coal with a little meat inside. Nobody will have faith in a gm that insists on overriding what they want with something not only completely out if touch, but of definite lower quality than their own ideas. These players may have spent days or weeks finetuning their character and their thought process is often intertwined with how they lived so far, and if you flip that on its head, they will be lost for what to do with their character. The only way for a player to do justice to their concept is to scrap it and wait for a GM who can do things right.

there's plenty of ways to play disatached without being a literal orphan.
-playing someone with an unhappy domestic life who needed an escape.
-Playing a character who is old enough to have everyone he/she cares about die or move away. the end of a family is a good way to become an adventurer. Maybe only you made it through a famine or a sickness, your spouse and children didnt make it through.
-dingos couldve eaten your baby.

Characters with nothing to lose make the best instigators, so i guess you'd shut that down if you lived railroading.

zinycor
2018-12-26, 11:11 AM
As a player, If my GM tried to pull this, I would either have my character's family killed or run away from them.
As a Gm, I know my players would try to do the same if I tried to force this upon them

BUT, I would have no problem if a player came to me with these ideas.

Erloas
2018-12-26, 01:57 PM
One good thing for "not from around here" types is you don't have that issue of growing up in an area and not being able to find the store or where the main gate is or how dangerous the local forest is. Learning about some major event from two years ago. That sort of thing.

Florian
2018-12-26, 02:03 PM
One good thing for "not from around here" types is you don't have that issue of growing up in an area and not being able to find the store or where the main gate is or how dangerous the local forest is. Learning about some major event from two years ago. That sort of thing.

Yeah, it´s "sort of a thing". The thing is called plain and simply: Lazy. RTF and engage with the setting.

Quertus
2018-12-26, 02:19 PM
Having bad experiences is not an excuse for bringing a bad attitude to new tables. Don't assume new DM's you don't know are going to be bad people, that makes you the problem. Blaming previous DM's for your bad behaviour is just dodging the responsibility for your own actions.

Now, as I said, there are other acceptable reasons for wanting to play an orphan.

You missed my main point, so I'll say it again with fewer words: it is not bad behavior. Unless what the players want is inherently abusive / D&D Evil, like an inability to tolerate anyone else getting any spotlight time, or intentionally sabotaging another player's actions just to make them have less fun, you shouldn't accuse people of BadWrongFun just because they prefer a different play style.

I won't say it's what you should do, but WWQD? Well, investigate whether they are interested in having the type of fun you're peddling, and, if it's different, whether you're interested in vending the type of fun that they're after.


Reading this, it sounds like you expect a lot of the DM, without wanting to contribute yourself. Why not help the DM out by providing some seeds for the DM to work from? Being open about your preferences for work and responsibility distribution is fair enough though.

I really didn't think "having NPCs to interact with" would be a big hurdle for a GM who cares about such things...

But, sure, much like the GM who throws out a dozen plot hooks that the PCs all ignore, I'd happily have a conversation with a GM who was frustrated by my character ignoring multiple NPCs that they can't understand why they aren't great for my character.

Just... most of the people I've gamed with recently seem allergic to having actual conversations, so I doubt that would work with any of my recent groups. But, if I gamed with a GM that was willing and eager to talk to make a good game, like you come off as, they'd find me a happy and active participant in such conversations.

flond
2018-12-26, 02:41 PM
This whole thing seems to be from you thinking that "adventurer" means "good heroic person" for some reason, which is just a total misconception of what an adventurer even is. "Adventurer", as a term, has absolutely nothing to do with the person's particular moral standing.

An adventurer, in the context of a fantasy setting, is someone who is not gainfully employed in society, and instead goes outside of society in search of dangerous and/or profitable endeavours. This can be someone who goes off into the wilderness to fight dragons to protect the countryside. But just as equally it can be someone who goes to a far off jungle on another continent to slaughter the locals in search of golden treasures. If you have steady employment as a town guard you may well be a stable, emotionally balanced, and even goodly person, who does what's right and helps defend his town. But you're not an adventurer, by definition.

This is a fine conception of adventurer. And I love torchbearer. But it's tremendously narrow.

Other fine games with "adventurers"

1. Blue Rose: You play members of the queens guard who work at large, only rarely reporting but with a support structure.
2. Pendragon: You are noble knights with a household, but take up arms and go on, yes adventures for Glory. (This is also an interesting note because it's a game where you must have heavy duty ties to family, but also at least one of your parents must be dead (otherwise you'd be playing them).
3. Lord of the Rings: Important elf of a KING going on an important ADVENTURE.

zinycor
2018-12-26, 03:04 PM
3. Lord of the Rings: Important elf of a KING going on an important ADVENTURE.

Or a gardener who ends up saving the world

Erloas
2018-12-26, 03:35 PM
Yeah, it´s "sort of a thing". The thing is called plain and simply: Lazy. RTF and engage with the setting.
I'm not sure what you're actually trying to say. I can't play a "local" if I have to role knowledge local or ask the DM to know the name and size of a forest 100 yards outside of town.
That doesn't mean I wouldn't engage with the setting.
But it's just the classic game amnesia if I was supposed to have grown up in an area and have to ask an NPC for very simple information.

Florian
2018-12-26, 04:24 PM
I'm not sure what you're actually trying to say.

In my experience, it is rare for games with either a strong social, regional or historical component to just hand the players the character generation rules and that's it. In most cases, the actual game world description, common knowledge, culture and heritage and such is partitioned into "common knowledge" and "gm knowledge" sections and the players are expected to do their homework and actually read into that stuff to be able to participate in a game in a meaningful way. Heck, even a standard dungeon-romp like most PF APs comes with a player guide, describing the home town, local NPC, environments and the common knowledge expected from someone hailing from there.
Yet, it is still common to see quite a lot of players sinking tons of time into their builds and not even trying to read some odd 30 pages and do their homework.

Erloas
2018-12-26, 05:16 PM
Heck, even a standard dungeon-romp like most PF APs comes with a player guide, describing the home town, local NPC, environments and the common knowledge expected from someone hailing from there.
Sure, in a known setting, especially with a good primer then that's a different issue than an unknown setting. Or a even a known setting where the DM decides their races work differently or nations have changed extensively.
It only takes about 30 seconds on these forums to see how often people want to drastically change things about the game and setting.

Then there is also the characters\races that are rare for a given area but your concept is pretty standard a few nations away.

The point being that it isn't good or bad, and each have their place in any given game.

Pelle
2018-12-26, 05:36 PM
You missed my main point, so I'll say it again with fewer words: it is not bad behavior. Unless what the players want is inherently abusive / D&D Evil, like an inability to tolerate anyone else getting any spotlight time, or intentionally sabotaging another player's actions just to make them have less fun, you shouldn't accuse people of BadWrongFun just because they prefer a different play style.


I am not saying prefering a different playstyle is badwrongfun. I am saying coming to a new table and assuming you can't trust the DM without knowing the person, is bad behaviour. It's not about playstyle, it's about thinking the worst of fellow human being before you get to know them. Having different playstyle than me is ok, assuming I will try to make you have a bad time is not.

Edit: to be clear - it is not bad behavior, what does "it" refer to here? Wanting to play an orphan? That's not what I call bad behaviour, quite the opposite, I said that was fine. What I call bad behaviour is the blanket assumption of thinking the DM will try to make you have a bad time. If that is the sole reason for playing an orphan, that's where the problem comes in. Or are you calling prejudice a playstyle?

Knaight
2018-12-26, 06:01 PM
I am not saying prefering a different playstyle is badwrongfun. I am saying coming to a new table and assuming you can't trust the DM without knowing the person, is bad behaviour. It's not about playstyle, it's about thinking the worst of fellow human being before you get to know them. Having different playstyle than me is ok, assuming I will try to make you have a bad time is not.

That's less bad behavior and more pattern recognition. If all your previous GMs have done something it's not unreasonable to assume that it's part of a standard style, and while this can be frustrating for those of us who don't do that as GM's it's hardly unreasonable for the players.

Pelle
2018-12-26, 06:04 PM
That's less bad behavior and more pattern recognition. If all your previous GMs have done something it's not unreasonable to assume that it's part of a standard style, and while this can be frustrating for those of us who don't do that as GM's it's hardly unreasonable for the players.

Yeah, it's understandable, but not an excuse IMO.

Quertus
2018-12-26, 06:23 PM
I am not saying prefering a different playstyle is badwrongfun. I am saying coming to a new table and assuming you can't trust the DM without knowing the person, is bad behaviour. It's not about playstyle, it's about thinking the worst of fellow human being before you get to know them. Having different playstyle than me is ok, assuming I will try to make you have a bad time is not.

Edit: to be clear - it is not bad behavior, what does "it" refer to here? Wanting to play an orphan? That's not what I call bad behaviour, quite the opposite, I said that was fine. What I call bad behaviour is the blanket assumption of thinking the DM will try to make you have a bad time. If that is the sole reason for playing an orphan, that's where the problem comes in. Or are you calling prejudice a playstyle?


Yeah, it's understandable, but not an excuse IMO.

... It's not about it being an excuse, it's about it being the only thing that they know, and your opportunity to teach them a better way, rather than calling them bad for having lived through an abusive relationship.

I've had plenty of players who came from abusive GMs, who would show all manner of classic symptoms (running exclusively orphans just being the one we're discussing). Simply showing them a better style is often all it takes to have a good gaming partner for life*.

Piling on abuse, calling them bad for being a product of their environment, is not a productive response, nor a good one.

* OK, "for life" may be overstating it a bit, but you get the idea.

Pelle
2018-12-26, 06:47 PM
... It's not about it being an excuse, it's about it being the only thing that they know, and your opportunity to teach them a better way, rather than calling them bad for having lived through an abusive relationship.

I've had plenty of players who came from abusive GMs, who would show all manner of classic symptoms (running exclusively orphans just being the one we're discussing). Simply showing them a better style is often all it takes to have a good gaming partner for life*.

Piling on abuse, calling them bad for being a product of their environment, is not a productive response, nor a good one.

* OK, "for life" may be overstating it a bit, but you get the idea.

That's probably a more productive response. I still think you* need to take responsibility for your own actions, and not blame other people for them. It is only you who can change your behaviour.

*hypothetical gamer with bad experiences

Knaight
2018-12-26, 06:56 PM
That's probably a more productive response. I still think you* need to take responsibility for your own actions, and not blame other people for them. It is only you who can change your behaviour.

*hypothetical gamer with bad experiences

The thing is the actions they're taking are entirely reasonable. That they're also unhelpful is a matter of information that they not only don't have but effectively can't have, and I for one am unwilling to hold that against people.

War_lord
2018-12-26, 07:07 PM
I mean, my characters are always either orphans or just don't bring up their family because I personally can't rp a loving family because I didn't grow up with one. But yeah, go ahead and assume that every D&D player grew up in a middle class idyll and are just being edgy OP, really makes me think you're a great person.

Quertus
2018-12-26, 08:53 PM
That's probably a more productive response. I still think you* need to take responsibility for your own actions, and not blame other people for them. It is only you who can change your behaviour.

*hypothetical gamer with bad experiences

Here we are in agreement (although I'd happily use Mindrape to make that be wrong, and change other people's behavior myself if I could, it is thankfully not generally necessary to do so in this scenario :smallwink:).

Pauly
2018-12-26, 11:53 PM
Context is also fairly important. You need the characters to fit into the world and into the appropriate social setting you are planning to run your adventures.

The campaign I”m running now is an Honor + Intrigue (3 musketeers era Europe) campaign. At session zero I explained to the players that:
- The adventures were for characters of the lowest rungs of the upper classes
- Every character had “lack of cash” as a disadvantage. (Which was the plot hook for why they would be working together)
- the plot will be centered around Seville so the characters had to be fluent in Spanish if it wasn’t their native language and have a reason to be in Seville.

My players came up with a whole variety of backgrounds, from bastard son of a cardinal, from a prominent family unjustly harried into poverty by the king, poor country nobility trying to make his mark in the big city, a scion of a rich colonial family to a noble who had a gambling addiction. None of the characters are orphans, although some are estranged/separated from their families. But the main reason why no one is an orphan is that in the setting the players were given there plenty of paths they could choose that would get then to “You are in a tavern when a [questgiver] walks up to your table”.
But if any of my players wanted to be an orphan/stepchild they could have chosen that path without it disrupting the adventures.

On the other hand many years ago I DMed a campaign in Warhammer Fantasy set in the dregs of the slums of Reikland. Available careers were things like ratcatcher, beggar, tavern wench, bouncer. From memory 5 of 6 of the PCs were orphans or otherwise abandoned by their parents. But given the setting and social situation of the campaign it was entirely appropriate. And some of the ways they were orphaned were truly inventive such as being squashed by a crashlanding dwarven gyrocopter.

From my perspective a lot of the perceived problem comes down to:
DM: You are generic adventurers in a generic fantasy setting.
Player 1: OK then, I”ll choose generic background 1a “The orphan”.
Player 2: Hmmm I think I will choose generic background 1b “the foundling”

The point is that if you want the players to get out of the habit of choosing generic backgrounds, you have to give them something to work towards. I find social status a good trigger because an adventuring party is unlikely to be for ed if their social status is too far apart from each other, with maybe one outlier. Another trigger could be some form of joint venture like a trading company, bounty hunting group, or being in a lord’s service.

For example if we look at OOTS, there really is no co-ordinated reason for the group to be together. It is a classic gaming adventurer’s group that’s come together on the basis of “I wanna play an [X] in this campaign”.

PastorofMuppets
2018-12-27, 10:16 AM
These are examples of what your parents might be. I didn't force my players to have a paladin mum and a wizard dad.
I did want them to think about how much it adds to their character and the world they're in if their parents weren't just "lulz I don't have a family because I don't want the DM to force my PC into doing stuff".

Which is a dumb reason for it. You want to play a game where 1 person has agency of everything that's happening in the world. And you want them to find ways to engage you in it.
But you're not giving them anything to work with except for an MMORPG-like "I popped into existance, now entertain me" kind of character.

If your DM's keep kidnapping your family members, they're lousy DM's, because they can't come up with new material.
Your brother got kidnapped. Okay, sure. You save him.
He gets kidnapped again? Really? What kind of bars is he drinking at to get kidnapped twice in a row? Screw it, fine, lets save him again.
Now, what's ne-... He's captured AGAIN? Either he's on some kind of self-destructive quest to his own grave, or "the world" is seriously out to get him. We'd better consult clerics to find out what "the gods" have against him!
Also, lets set some of our earnings aside to buy better locks for my family's home. Maybe ask ma and pa to move to a safer town.

That's the passive-aggressive way of letting your DM know he needs to come up with a better plot hook.
You may just tell him he's a hack and look for some one else to take that role. Or maybe the solution is that your character is now constantly on guard near his brother and won't go more than a few feet from him.
That'll ruin any adventure before it even begins.

"You're going on a quest to find the lost scrolls o-"
"I'm not going anywhere. Everytime I turn around, Billy is being kidnapped!"
Now it's on your DM to find a way to convince you to go on the adventure.
Of course if he's a ****, he'll convince you, run the adventure, and Billy is going to be kidnapped when you get back. But at that point, why are you even playing with this guy?


I see this as a great set up for Billy being involved in a cult or something. Billy is faking the capture thing to cover his tracks as he is using these various groups to learn from them. He wants his evil cult to really make it in the long run so he joins up, studies what they do well and what they suck at. When he thinks he learned what he needs, and perhaps stole a few neat things for later, the Help I’m kidnapped routine starts up again.

Tanarii
2018-12-27, 09:03 PM
I like the 5e route, using personality traits to capture the defining things/hooks about your characters. In this case, Bonds. From the PHB: They might inspire you to heights of heroism, or lead you to act against your own best interests if they are threatened.

As far as I'm concerned, anything listed as Bond is fair game as a DM Plot Hook. Anything not a Bond (or other explicit personality trait) is dressing as far as I'm concerned as a DM. It still might be important to the players conception of character to know growing up and family details about their PC, a useful roleplaying tool. But it's not for me to Hook with as a DM.

Several other systems have something similar. Some even more bound to mechanics.

Max_Killjoy
2018-12-27, 09:38 PM
I like the 5e route, using personality traits to capture the defining things/hooks about your characters. In this case, Bonds. From the PHB: They might inspire you to heights of heroism, or lead you to act against your own best interests if they are threatened.

As far as I'm concerned, anything listed as Bond is fair game as a DM Plot Hook. Anything not a Bond (or other explicit personality trait) is dressing as far as I'm concerned as a DM. It still might be important to the players conception of character to know growing up and family details about their PC, a useful roleplaying tool. But it's not for me to Hook with as a DM.

Several other systems have something similar. Some even more bound to mechanics.

A bit like HERO.

If you got character points for it, it was fair game for the GM to "mess with" your character via that connection.

If you didn't get points for it, then it was generally not fair game to "mess with" your character, but they could still incorporate it into the campaign and the roleplaying without threatening it.

So if you took Dependent NPC as a Disad for X points, because you character has a kid, then it was fair and fine for the GM to have a villain try to kidnap your kid, or have you get a call that your kid get hurt while you're trying to follow a criminal, or have parent-teacher night come up during an important stakeout, or whatever, at least once during the campaign.

But if your character has a kid but didn't take that Disad, then the GM generally shouldn't do those things, but can still make it a point that you have a kid when it would come up, but in ways that aren't major trouble, because it's still a fact within the "fiction".

Tanarii
2018-12-27, 10:14 PM
If you didn't get points for it, then it was generally not fair game to "mess with" your character, but they could still incorporate it into the campaign and the roleplaying without threatening it. Yeah, I'm a fan of that kind of thing in point based-character generation. Works well for all kinds of sure-fire connections, both positive and negative.

For that matter, it can work to have to spend points on signature gear. I believe Amber DRPG, and certainly it's redo as Gossamer, if you wanted Gear that you could couldn't permanently lose, you spent points on it. Of course, in that game signature gear was generally very powerful to boot.

Max_Killjoy
2018-12-27, 10:48 PM
Yeah, I'm a fan of that kind of thing in point based-character generation. Works well for all kinds of sure-fire connections, both positive and negative.


And it's also a way to signal to the GM, "This is something I'm willing to have happen to/involving my character".

I'm a big fan of GMs listening to those kinds of signals, regardless of how they come, even if they come from s player just plainly not being interested.

GMs -- it really, really is OK to not give every PC their "time in the drama spotlight" if that's not what the player enjoys about gaming. Let them have their spotlight time some other way.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-12-27, 10:56 PM
And it's also a way to signal to the GM, "This is something I'm willing to have happen to/involving my character".

I'm a big fan of GMs listening to those kinds of signals, regardless of how they come, even if they come from s player just plainly not being interested.

GMs -- it really, really is OK to not give every PC their "time in the drama spotlight" if that's not what the player enjoys about gaming. Let them have their spotlight time some other way.

And sometimes DMs should just ask the player first. "Hey, I'm thinking of using your relative as a plot point in the upcoming adventure. You cool with that?"

I've only done this whole "family drama" thing once--the character's whole goal as an Adventurer was to find her brother. So I asked if she'd be ok with me working him in--they ended up rescuing him from a cult that he had gone to crush with a paladin order, but had been defeated. Him being there just added some urgency to the mission; they also had other reasons to be there.

RazorChain
2018-12-28, 02:17 PM
For me this all starts to sound like:

Player: "You can't hurt MY NPC's! They are MINE"


So in a sense that the player wants some kind of ownership over his NPC's or that they are just some kind of window dressing.


So what is the difference between NPC's that the GM has introduced and the player has introduced?
Do they follow the same rules?
Does the player "own" the NPC's he has created?

Max_Killjoy
2018-12-28, 02:39 PM
For me this all starts to sound like:

Player: "You can't hurt MY NPC's! They are MINE"


So in a sense that the player wants some kind of ownership over his NPC's or that they are just some kind of window dressing.


So what is the difference between NPC's that the GM has introduced and the player has introduced?
Do they follow the same rules?
Does the player "own" the NPC's he has created?

It's less about ownership, and more about what sort of things the player does and does not enjoy in the game.

Regardless of whether it's which Disads are chosen, or backstory is written, or directly with the GM during session zero or down time, the player is telling the GM "this is not the sort of thing I would enjoy, please focus elsewhere when it comes to my character".

So for example, the player whose character does not have a "Dependent NPC" Disad is telling the GM via that choice "I'd rather not do 'arcs' that involve the people this character cares about being repeatedly under threat or repeatedly creating major complications".

IMO, this is better than players feeling they need to create friendless orphan loners or drifters for every campaign, AND better than the "we're going to do drama in this campaign and damn it you're going to get your fair share!" approach that some GMs have.

Tvtyrant
2018-12-28, 03:33 PM
Are you sick of orphans in every single group you play in? There's always at least 2 players who don't want a family that the DM can abuse in a Kidnapping.

Tell them what I told my players:
Your mum is alive, and she loves your very much. Deal with it.

Examples:

Your mum was a well-known paladin. A proper divine butt-kicker that rode into danger on a white horse for 8 years, before she decided it was time to settle down.
Nowadays, she's the guard captain of your hometown. Crime completely ceased when she took up the mantle.
Inspired by the tales about her, you always wanted to go on quests too. All through your childhood, she's trained you to wield a sword and shield and now that you're old enough, she's gifted you her old blade to start your own adventure.
That's a mum you can come home to, talk with about your own adventure, get advice from.
That's a mum that'll hear of your first adventure, and decide to use her savings to buy you an expensive set of full plate armor. Because she's both proud of you, and very worried that you might get hurt.
That's a mum you don't want to mess with.
The city guard is going to protect their captain, so a gang of thugs isn't going to bother. And the big bad evil guy? He's heard the tales of the proper hero she used to be. Even he will think twice.

Your dad is a sage. He's been studying the arcane arts for decades and even teaches at a college at the capital. He's been trying to teach you too, but you're not the bookish kind of student. You need a hands-on approach to get a feel for what things do, rather than reading the outcome in some dusty tome.
He gives you a small crystal, by which he can contact you from time to time. See how you're doing. And tells you that if you ever need anything, he's here for you.
That's a caring, loving father, who would love it if you would follow in his footsteps. But he also understands you need to find your own way.
That's also a father, who's a good enough wizard, that he's teaching others as a professor.
Imagine the trouble you'd have kidnapping a mage who can teleport around, and hurl fire and lightning at you. Now imagine, you're trying to kidnap that guy from a building where everyone can hurl at least some fire and lightning at you. And that's ignoring the Slytherin-esque bunch, who would take the ones you managed to dismiss, and un-dismiss them in a rather cruel, gruesome manner. (I'm talking necromancy, folks.)
Your bad guy would have to be particularly insane, or very, very adept at dueling mages to pull off a kidnapping like that. Probably a bit of both.

Your sister isn't much of a fighter, but she's studious and smart. Last year, she made it to Lawmaker over at the country's capital.
Where she's protected by it's police force, because she's considered some one who's at a risk of being assaulted or abducted, due to her position in the city. They'll be prepared for bandits, thieves' guilds and other low-lives. So the ones you meet along your travels who'd think "Hey lets kidnap his family, whom we have no idea of who they are or where to find them" won't get very far.
And big bad evil guys who can march into capital cities and take on it's military/police/(royal) guards, is already so strong and powerful, he shouldn't need to kidnap anyone to get to you.

Giving yourself family members that enjoy a position of protection and power, has a great potential to be a considerable asset on your adventures.
You need to get some cooperation from the guards? Your mum is their boss, and you've been training alongside them for years. They'll gladly comply.
Need some advice on a magical artifact that sees to have put a curse on your party's bard, after he tried to produce offspring with it? Dad will know a thing or two about magical STD's.
Run into some trouble with the local thieves' guild? A shop-keep scammed you out of your money? Some Crown's Guard is bullying your friends? Sis can probably sort that out for you.

Now, of course, don't give yourself all 3 examples. If you're giving yourself a family of heroes, you're not going to have much of an adventure for yourself. But daddy's big balls of fire alone can keep the family safe. Mum's such a great warrior, no criminals even dare set foot in town, she's going to keep pops and your brothers safe, no problem.

Your DM isn't going to mind a somewhat powerful person in your backstory. He's seeing a set-piece that can be used as more than Kidnap-fodder. And he's just happy you didn't make that third Orphan in the group.
We're running an Adventure here! Not an Orphanage!

He's also thinking about how he could replace the old sage in the village that you'd have to talk to on your first adventure to get info about the dungeon you're about to enter that's known to be covered in maical traps with Magical Pops.
Or how the cleric in the village is going to be much kinder to you than the rest of the group, because he recognizes you as the daughter of Mommy the Divine Slayer of Evil and Bringer of Light and Stuffs.
Or how your sister might have heard you joined a band of adventurers trying to solve problems in the countryside, and she's pushing the quests with the good rewards your way.

It's opening up a lot of options for you, your group and the DM.

It sounds like what you are saying is that players shouldn't even have the power to make their own characters. The DM has control over the rules, the setting and all NPCs, now you want control over the player characters.

Even your reasoning, that your players are afraid you are going to use their backgrounds against them, is a red flag.

I think a better way to get players to invest in their characters is to cultivate their trust. Don't murder favorite BPCs and pets, let their plans for houses abd fortresses work, talk to them abput what they want to accomplish and work together towards that.

If a DM forced me to accept their control of my background I would either quit or play a character who doesn't care about their background.

Quertus
2018-12-28, 06:58 PM
For me this all starts to sound like:

Player: "You can't hurt MY NPC's! They are MINE"


So in a sense that the player wants some kind of ownership over his NPC's or that they are just some kind of window dressing.


So what is the difference between NPC's that the GM has introduced and the player has introduced?
Do they follow the same rules?
Does the player "own" the NPC's he has created?

Well, at the tables I'm used to,

A) most "adventuring families" are composed primarily or exclusively of former PCs (belonging to one or more players);

B) said PCs continue to belong to their respective player(s) regardless of their status in the current adventure.

The notion, then, of an adventuring family that was the province of the GM is rather foreign to... as much of my gaming experience as my senile mind can recall at this moment.

Of course, if you look at it a little closer, it probably looks a little different under the hood.

So, probably the most I learned about role-playing was from as group that recognized that, if a GM sits down with 4 players, there aren't 4 characters, there are 20 - there is the version of each of the 4 PCs that lives in each of the 5 people's heads. The "correct" copy of each is the one that lives in the head of its creator. The goal, then, is to fix your understanding other players' characters. It was common to hear comments like, "the version of your character who lives in my head wouldn't have done x, he would have done Y instead. Why did your character choose to do x?".

Anyway, what I'm getting at is, most often, if player x runs a character who is a child of PCs run by players Y and z, that character is actually the child of the version of its parents that live in x's head. But, as the goal is for them to be as close to their real versions as possible, if players Y and z are present, they still retain authority over the version of their characters that live in x's head.

Or, put another way, it's much like the horror of humanity: humans never know one another, never love one another. They only care about the version of the other person that lives in their head. Humans only care for illusions, and those who "care about them" only care about the illusion of them that they project in their own mind.

Does that clarify or obfuscate my position?


It's less about ownership, and more about what sort of things the player does and does not enjoy in the game.

Regardless of whether it's which Disads are chosen, or backstory is written, or directly with the GM during session zero or down time, the player is telling the GM "this is not the sort of thing I would enjoy, please focus elsewhere when it comes to my character".

So for example, the player whose character does not have a "Dependent NPC" Disad is telling the GM via that choice "I'd rather not do 'arcs' that involve the people this character cares about being repeatedly under threat or repeatedly creating major complications".

IMO, this is better than players feeling they need to create friendless orphan loners or drifters for every campaign, AND better than the "we're going to do drama in this campaign and damn it you're going to get your fair share!" approach that some GMs have.

There's this, too.

For me, which parts of the game I'm interested in interacting with will vary by charterer. The Playground classic example of this is the Wizard with Teleport. This choice communicates that the player is probably not interested in playing the "overland travel" minigame. If I know what minigames the GM is offering, I can choose a character who is interested in an appropriate subset of those minigames. Similarly, if I know the expected "power level", I can choose a character who will get an approximately appropriate amount of spotlight time between those minigames. Or, if I lack sufficient information, I can try to wing it.

I currently suspect that this is part of why Quertus, my signature tactically inept academia mage, for whom this account is named, was my most-requested character - he was able to kind of minimally engage most minigames, often in a distinctive, memorable, and/or humorous way. He was (somewhat) ready to adapt to most styles of play.

Celestia
2018-12-28, 11:23 PM
I object to DMs that force players to write a backstory. Coming up with a personality and life goal is important information for the game, but a backstory is just extra fluff. It can add context to your character, and the DM can use it to make adventures more personal, but it's not really needed. As long as the player has enough stuff to make sure the character is interesting and has a reason to actually adventure, it's fine. Forcing them to write backstories is like giving them homework, and no one likes homework.

RazorChain
2018-12-29, 02:50 AM
I object to DMs that force players to write a backstory. Coming up with a personality and life goal is important information for the game, but a backstory is just extra fluff. It can add context to your character, and the DM can use it to make adventures more personal, but it's not really needed. As long as the player has enough stuff to make sure the character is interesting and has a reason to actually adventure, it's fine. Forcing them to write backstories is like giving them homework, and no one likes homework.

Really? So a one time investment is too much to ask for by the person that might pour hundreds of hours into a campaign for their players enjoyment?

If a player can't be bothered to invest a little bit of time in his character and the game then why should I as a GM?

BWR
2018-12-29, 03:09 AM
Really? So a one time investment is too much to ask for by the person that might pour hundreds of hours into a campaign for their players enjoyment?

If a player can't be bothered to invest a little bit of time in his character and the game then why should I as a GM?

As someone who loves setting and hates writing backstories, I agree with Celestia. Less because of putting effort into making a backstory and more because I so often don't know what the character will be when I create it. It usually takes a few sessions before their personality solidifies and anything other than a very basic background ('adventurous child runs off to make their own way in the world' sort of thing) may easily end up being the wrong background for what the character becomes.
Background for most of my characters and in most games we have, works best as a very basic skeleton which is fleshed out during play, with details added as personality becomes clear or more details are useful.

The only real exception to this approach is when we play characters in legacy campaigns. For instance we have one very alt.u. Rokugan where my first PC is a greatgrandfather and all subsequent PCs are his descendants, so obviously there is an existing backstory, very detailed, for each PC. In this case, we have one existing background with virtually no freedom for deviance from the established story.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-12-29, 09:00 AM
I object to DMs that force players to write a backstory. Coming up with a personality and life goal is important information for the game, but a backstory is just extra fluff. It can add context to your character, and the DM can use it to make adventures more personal, but it's not really needed. As long as the player has enough stuff to make sure the character is interesting and has a reason to actually adventure, it's fine. Forcing them to write backstories is like giving them homework, and no one likes homework.

I would never force a backstory, for a few reasons.

1) What happens in play is more important than what happened before play. I'm totally ok with people retroactively discovering their backstory during play to explain why they act a certain way.
2) How much backstory does a level 1 PC actually have? They're late teens or early 20s. If they had any grand dramatic events, they're likely not level 1 anymore. And I always start from level 1.
3) I don't want player characters that have a fixed mindset, where they've got the whole thing planned out. I want them to organically grow based on the events and actions of the campaign.

But I do require the following (in 5e D&D terms):

0) a background (what you were trained to do before you started adventuring/what you did growing up)
1) personality traits (one or two quirks)
2) ideal (what do you hold most "sacred")
3) bond (something you'd sacrifice for)
4) flaw (something that gets you in trouble)
5) a region of origin in the setting. This tells me what you'd know baseline, with no need to role. It also tells me how people from that region will react to you, at least in part. This is partially set by your race, but we discuss it at session 0.

Pauly
2018-12-29, 09:41 AM
Really? So a one time investment is too much to ask for by the person that might pour hundreds of hours into a campaign for their players enjoyment?

If a player can't be bothered to invest a little bit of time in his character and the game then why should I as a GM?

If you look at some of the most famous heroic adventure stories most of the main characters get a backstory that fits fairly neatly onto one page or less. In the Three Musketeers D”Artagnan, Aramis and Porthos get backstories that fit onto one page, with Athos, possibly, being a contender for a longer backstory. The only character who definitely has a longer backstory is Milady de Winter.

Even characters with more developed back stories like Indiana Jones, Luke Skywalker and Harry Potter the developed back story only becomes relevant in the later episodes,

You can evenhave huge ongoing series with a character with essentially no back story, for example James Bond and Doctor Who (and I’ve been watching Dr Who since Patrick Troughton was the Doctor, only William Hartnell was before my time).

So no backstoryis not essential

Quertus
2018-12-29, 11:06 AM
I so often don't know what the character will be when I create it. It usually takes a few sessions before their personality solidifies and anything other than a very basic background ('adventurous child runs off to make their own way in the world' sort of thing) may easily end up being the wrong background for what the character becomes.
Background for most of my characters and in most games we have, works best as a very basic skeleton which is fleshed out during play, with details added as personality becomes clear or more details are useful.

I wonder if I've just had an apostrophe (I don't feel like lightning has just struck my brain, though). So, I create very specific backgrounds for my characters, based on my role-playing stretch goals, and what aspect of humanity I'm interested in exploring at the moment.

I wonder if I could perfect this technique of not caring about what character I end up with, and just creating a skeleton & letting it develop a personality in play, if I would have a greater percentage of "successful" characters, and wouldn't need to "take a 20" on character creation to get something worth playing.

I just have to find a way to stomach creating and playing such a blank slate...



2) How much backstory does a level 1 PC actually have? They're late teens or early 20s. If they had any grand dramatic events, they're likely not level 1 anymore. And I always start from level 1.

Who said backstory had to be grand?

I mean, Armus had a huge, grand backstory of titanic battles involving armies and epic foes. But, by RAW, there was never anything that he would earn XP for (aside, perhaps, from the mysterious death of his teammates...).

But, for most of my characters, their backstory informs what they're familiar with, and how they view events. Things like...

* Quertus lost family in the war.
* Quertus had never seen an elf, but had heard and marveled at stories of them, and their magic.
* Quertus was trained at the academy as an academia mage (not a war Wizard)
* Quertus received basic HTH combat training.
* The academy was quite proud of the fact that a Druid decided to join the academy briefly; this occurred during Quertus' training.
* Quertus was unfamiliar with the concept of slavery.
* Quertus never owned a pet.



3) I don't want player characters that have a fixed mindset, where they've got the whole thing planned out. I want them to organically grow based on the events and actions of the campaign.

Well, Quertus' hatred of Druids (and Barbarians) certainly grew organically by meeting them...

So, I guess I'm confused - are you saying that you prefer an unrealistically not fleshed out skeleton, a caricature or playing piece rather than a character? Or just that you want characters that are open to growth? Because, IMO, even epic level Quertus, whom I've played for decades, is eligible for character growth, given the correct stimulus.


But I do require the following (in 5e D&D terms):

0) a background (what you were trained to do before you started adventuring/what you did growing up)
1) personality traits (one or two quirks)
2) ideal (what do you hold most "sacred")
3) bond (something you'd sacrifice for)
4) flaw (something that gets you in trouble)
5) a region of origin in the setting. This tells me what you'd know baseline, with no need to role. It also tells me how people from that region will react to you, at least in part. This is partially set by your race, but we discuss it at session 0.

Curiously, the only thing that "gets Quertus in trouble" is his friends. :smallamused:


So no backstoryis not essential


Really? So a one time investment is too much to ask for by the person that might pour hundreds of hours into a campaign for their players enjoyment?

If a player can't be bothered to invest a little bit of time in his character and the game then why should I as a GM?

I guess that this begs the question, what style of game do you run, that you view backstory as essential? Because many Playgrounders (to my bafflement) view backstory as not only not essential, but an active detriment.

I view backstory as essential, but "for player's eyes only". It informs who the character is, but should be irrelevant to "the plot". If I need plot-relevant connections, I prefer to make those in-game.

But, again, in what style of game is background essential?

BWR
2018-12-29, 12:22 PM
I wonder if I've just had an apostrophe


I believe you mean 'epiphany'.


So, I create very specific backgrounds for my characters, based on my role-playing stretch goals, and what aspect of humanity I'm interested in exploring at the moment.

I wonder if I could perfect this technique of not caring about what character I end up with, and just creating a skeleton & letting it develop a personality in play, if I would have a greater percentage of "successful" characters, and wouldn't need to "take a 20" on character creation to get something worth playing.

I just have to find a way to stomach creating and playing such a blank slate...


Don't play a blank slate then. Give a one-sentence background, and a one-to-two sentence personality to start off with and see what happens. Don't worry about sticking to what you have already established, just let it flow and if you end up with something radically than your initial vision, fine. You can add to backstory during play to explain why you act in a certain way or to flesh out personality as needed.
E.g. I played a Hiruma in an L5R game. Since this was the Topaz Championship set right after the first Daidoji War, he was obviously the best the Crab had to offer and was expected to behave himself well enough to not start the war again. I first envisioned him as super serious and grim and precise, but half-way through the first session he became a joker. Played pranks*, told tall tales about his tanuki ancestor (basically Pecos Bill stories refluffed for Rokugan), and annoyed people with his humor. Sure, he could be serious and silent and all business when necessary, but he was a much more fun character to play once I discovered who he was during play than if I had forced him to stick to the original idea I had.

*his best/most dangerous was putting up a sign that said: "Alpha male needed, inquire within" on the tent of the Lion's Pride members his unit was working with.

Max_Killjoy
2018-12-29, 01:08 PM
As someone who loves setting and hates writing backstories, I agree with Celestia. Less because of putting effort into making a backstory and more because I so often don't know what the character will be when I create it. It usually takes a few sessions before their personality solidifies and anything other than a very basic background ('adventurous child runs off to make their own way in the world' sort of thing) may easily end up being the wrong background for what the character becomes.
Background for most of my characters and in most games we have, works best as a very basic skeleton which is fleshed out during play, with details added as personality becomes clear or more details are useful.


I need to know that stuff before I start building a character, let alone playing, or I'm lost and have no idea where to begin.

I can't start with a "build" and then work backwards to the character, I need to start with the character and then "map" them in the system.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-12-29, 01:30 PM
I need to know that stuff before I start building a character, let alone playing, or I'm lost and have no idea where to begin.

I can't start with a "build" and then work backwards to the character, I need to start with the character and then "map" them in the system.

I can go both ways, at least for a generic "concept"/role. My current character started out like this:

1) I need to play a support character, since the others are a wizard, a barbarian, and a paladin.
2) Bard. Haven't done bard yet.
3) Bard needs offensive oomph, so...warlock dip?
4) Going with a warped-Disney-princess aesthetic, so--celestial?

In thinking about how to make him different, I ended up going with

Flynn is an urchin who was sponsored to minstrel school in Waterdeep, but was cut after puberty when his voice turned out...wrong. Back on the streets, he made a deal with one of Milil's minions for a great voice in exchange for going adventuring & "being a hero". Turns out the voice came with a catch--it's a woman's voice and the voice came with a body attached. So now he is a she.

Started out fame-grubbing, now has become a standard snarker with an abiding distrust for anything cult related and a bit of a hard edge. Doesn't mind killing cultists in cold blood if they're not being useful. Nice to others though. Likes to show off her new figure.

So I started with the seed of a build (a couple levels of warlock + the rest lore bard, support build) and then the rest built together.

RazorChain
2018-12-29, 02:13 PM
If you look at some of the most famous heroic adventure stories most of the main characters get a backstory that fits fairly neatly onto one page or less. In the Three Musketeers D”Artagnan, Aramis and Porthos get backstories that fit onto one page, with Athos, possibly, being a contender for a longer backstory. The only character who definitely has a longer backstory is Milady de Winter.

Even characters with more developed back stories like Indiana Jones, Luke Skywalker and Harry Potter the developed back story only becomes relevant in the later episodes,

You can evenhave huge ongoing series with a character with essentially no back story, for example James Bond and Doctor Who (and I’ve been watching Dr Who since Patrick Troughton was the Doctor, only William Hartnell was before my time).

So no backstoryis not essential

Nobody is expecting a novel. One page is more than enough, I'm rather discussing the attitude that the effort in making a background is too much and feels like a homework. I mean next time around the players don't have to familiarize themselves with the setting or learn the rules. You know too much bother, feels like homework.

RazorChain
2018-12-29, 02:39 PM
I guess that this begs the question, what style of game do you run, that you view backstory as essential? Because many Playgrounders (to my bafflement) view backstory as not only not essential, but an active detriment.

I view backstory as essential, but "for player's eyes only". It informs who the character is, but should be irrelevant to "the plot". If I need plot-relevant connections, I prefer to make those in-game.

But, again, in what style of game is background essential?

Somebody who sits down and says that he's playing a fighter with so and so stats doesn't tell me much about a character.....in fact it isn't a character until it has some background and personality.

I'm used to classless systems so I don't think in the terms fighter/wizard/rogue/cleric which means I develope a concept and build upon that and that involves backstory and personality. The backstory doesn't need to be grand but I need to know why this person is there at this point of his life, where does he come from.

It can be really simple like grew up on a farm with loving parents, liked to pretend he was a knight with his best buddy, Kenny and they would fence with wooden sticks. Then one day he stole away with his grandpas armor and sword and joined a mercenery unit but finally got fed up and wanted to make fortune plundering dank caves filled with monsters.

Stats are usully what comes last when I'm creating a character.

Backgrounds in my game are usually dealt with in session zero and everyone has done their "homework" before the game starts as my games are long lasting affairs (my main game is entering it's fourth year)

Psyren
2018-12-29, 02:46 PM
As someone who loves setting and hates writing backstories, I agree with Celestia. Less because of putting effort into making a backstory and more because I so often don't know what the character will be when I create it. It usually takes a few sessions before their personality solidifies and anything other than a very basic background ('adventurous child runs off to make their own way in the world' sort of thing) may easily end up being the wrong background for what the character becomes.
Background for most of my characters and in most games we have, works best as a very basic skeleton which is fleshed out during play, with details added as personality becomes clear or more details are useful.

Yeah, I think there's a big difference between "no origin at all" and "here's a very basic skeleton, which I'll flesh out more as I get to know the character through playing them." Because the latter is how I make characters, and I see nothing wrong with not having a full-blown novel ready to go before the campaign begins.

Koo Rehtorb
2018-12-29, 02:52 PM
Some characters/games need backstories. Others don't.

Sometimes someone's past heavily determines what they'll be doing moving forward. Sometimes they'll have unfinished business to take care of, or demons in their past that will come back to torment them. Other times, someone's previous life is mundane and irrelevant and what matters is what happens and what they do going forward.

The Jack
2018-12-29, 03:03 PM
My bottom line is that the OP is a monster GM I wouldn't want, but let's go into something.


What game I am playing matters.


If I'm running DnD, I'll tell my players what kind of game I'm running, they'll throw me an idea, I'll ask them to amend anything that 'doesn't work' and make suggestions, they'll come back to me and we can repeat that last process.

It's rare that being an orphan 'doesn't work'. If I have four players at the table wanting to be orphans, I'll either make some light suggestions to move towards either less-orphans or go the other road with a same-orphanage, but it doesn't not-work, so I won't demand a change.


If I'm playing say, vampire, where interpersonal relationships are much of the game, I will closely vet your character that they fit into the world of vampire, as the players were chosen, and players often try to make characters that would never be sired. Still, you're expected to have a sire and you're expected to have left your mortal family and friends behind. The players primarily use their old backgrounds to get the foot into the door for their new backgrounds.

In a perfect world, backgrounds are like that; they exist to give you a foreground. Backgrounds are stepping stones. Your mother doesn't matter, your future wife and children do. Your nobility is cool, but there are ranks for you to climb. Your tribe may have exiled you, so you need to find your home.

I want my players to be instigators. Most aren't, many of those will never be, but I like a reactive world.
A weird thought; I used to pride myself on my ability to give players characters they'll get so attached to that they'll cry and make everyone uncomfrotable should I kill them off. You're never going to get that result if you force these characters onto them.

Erloas
2018-12-29, 03:54 PM
I think one other problem with bringing background characters into the game is that, as mentioned, they are essentially NPCs and should be under the DM's control. But assuming that the background character had enough impact on the character to be worth noting (child, parent, sibling, close relative, mentor) they probably also have a particular set of traits (good or bad) that helped define the character as they are today. If the DM takes control of those characters and puts words and actions to them, unless they get the character traits just right, they are essentially redefining the character. If how poorly your sister treated you is a defining part of your character, then having your sister show up and be super friendly and helpful, or trying to make you "save" her when you had previously disowned her, then the DM is changing the player's character.
Which isn't to say a background character can't ever be used, but it should take more work and fleshing out beforehand rather than forced on the player.

Tvtyrant
2018-12-29, 04:20 PM
Nobody is expecting a novel. One page is more than enough, I'm rather discussing the attitude that the effort in making a background is too much and feels like a homework. I mean next time around the players don't have to familiarize themselves with the setting or learn the rules. You know too much bother, feels like homework.
I would prefer to write my back story once I have explored the character a bit, which is how most writers make characters. I might decide my character has an irrational hatred of horses and thinks women are all conniving, but those grow out of playing them.

So then I can go back and say he fell off a horse as a child, broke his leg and had to walk home alone. His first girlfriend used him as a springboard to make his best friend jealous and they are happily married back home, etc.

Tanarii
2018-12-29, 08:16 PM
Because many Playgrounders (to my bafflement) view backstory as not only not essential, but an active detriment.IMX backstory is primarily detrimental when folks use it as a substitute for figuring out and explicitly listing clear character motivations.

Pauly
2018-12-29, 09:32 PM
For me the most important question the backstory needs to answer is “why is this collection of characters an adventuring party?”

If you want to create a novel length backstory for your character, that’s fine by me. What is important is
- why is this group together?
- why do I trust the other members with my life?
- why do I want to keep working with these peo0le?

If the backstory fails to answer these questions positively then it takes me out of the immersion.

Backstory isn’t your own head-cannon about your character, it’s the glue that keeps a coherent group together.

Red Fel
2018-12-29, 09:52 PM
In a perfect world, backgrounds are like that; they exist to give you a foreground. Backgrounds are stepping stones. Your mother doesn't matter, your future wife and children do. Your nobility is cool, but there are ranks for you to climb. Your tribe may have exiled you, so you need to find your home.

I'm going to piggyback off of this.

Fact is, not all of my characters are orphans. Some have only one parent in the picture, but there's a reason for that; for example, in one 3.5e epic campaign I played, my character's Celestial father ditched his mortal wife and son when he found out that the son (my character) possessed a Devil Bloodline. The Celestial is still out there, somewhere, but he's very much not in the character's life, and it's very much not a loving, close relationship. Can the DM still use that character? Absolutely. (Did so, in fact.) In another case, I had a PF Ifrit who had no parents because his Efreeti ancestor came to the Material plane and murdered them before abducting the PC and his siblings to the Plane of Fire, to raise as his own, for reasons. Character had siblings and a very terrifying grandpa, but no parents. Lots of characters for the DM to use, including a parent-figure; just no parents per se.

Others don't have parents in the picture for the simple fact that they're already older. Fact is, if your PC in a high-level game is starting in his 60s, there's a reasonable chance that his parents are dead, simply because that's how age works. He's not an orphan, at least not in the traditional sense. And if you tell me that his parents are still alive and well, I will be shocked and immediately embark on a quest to determine the miraculous source of their apparently eternal youth.

Others don't have parents because they come from a race without parents - like my Warforged - or because they have long since left their prior life behind - like my Hellbred. The character they are is not a person with parents.

Know what these all have in common, though? Connections with other people. Not just with the PCs, or NPCs they meet over the course of the campaign. (Aside: If you aren't using well-liked NPCs for your plot hooks, you have nobody to blame but yourself.) My characters have connections written into their backstories. My Dragonborn still remembers the wrongs committed that drove him to atone, and the people who helped him find the light. My Warforged still remembers the monastery where he was trained, and the young lord he served as a butler. They have backgrounds. They don't need to have backgrounds specifically including parents.

If your analysis begins and ends with, "Yes, but are there parents?" You have nobody to blame but yourself. There are legitimate story reasons to choose a character with one or more parents dead or missing, and it's DM overreach to rewrite that part of a character's backstory. "Orphan" does not equal "no NPC connections to use."

But as for the people saying, "Man, the OP wanting to give PCs parents for the sole purpose of using them as hostages is kinda creepy..." I get that. Look, I get your frustration if the PCs have no personal connections in the world. But there is more to making NPCs plot-relevant than simply saying, "Oh, is this a thing you like? I'mma set it on fire now." And if that's your approach, it's kinda no wonder your players make PCs with no personal connections in the world.

Background NPCs are like expressed character goals and interests - it is possible to weave them into the world in a compelling or entertaining narrative, without using them exclusively as threats to hang over the players. Using them as rewards works just as well, frequently better.

Quertus
2018-12-29, 10:38 PM
I believe you mean 'epiphany'.



Don't play a blank slate then. Give a one-sentence background, and a one-to-two sentence personality to start off with and see what happens. Don't worry about sticking to what you have already established, just let it flow and if you end up with something radically than your initial vision, fine. You can add to backstory during play to explain why you act in a certain way or to flesh out personality as needed.

I already said it *didn't* feel like lightning struck my head... :smallwink:

-----

As to the rest, I'll have to think about it. It feels like giving a mech arbitrary stats, and trying build it after the fact, or declaring what cards you're playing while having never built the deck. But, since I fail about 95% of the time at creating an acceptable character already, I suppose I've not got much to lose by trying.


Somebody who sits down and says that he's playing a fighter with so and so stats doesn't tell me much about a character.....in fact it isn't a character until it has some background and personality.

I'm used to classless systems so I don't think in the terms fighter/wizard/rogue/cleric which means I develope a concept and build upon that and that involves backstory and personality. The backstory doesn't need to be grand but I need to know why this person is there at this point of his life, where does he come from.

It can be really simple like grew up on a farm with loving parents, liked to pretend he was a knight with his best buddy, Kenny and they would fence with wooden sticks. Then one day he stole away with his grandpas armor and sword and joined a mercenery unit but finally got fed up and wanted to make fortune plundering dank caves filled with monsters.

Stats are usully what comes last when I'm creating a character.

Backgrounds in my game are usually dealt with in session zero and everyone has done their "homework" before the game starts as my games are long lasting affairs (my main game is entering it's fourth year)

I fully agree that "Fighter" is a playing piece, not a character. But that wasn't my question. My question was, what is the style of games that you run?

See, some games, all you need is a playing piece. Some games, you need a character (like Bond. James Bond). Other games, such as yours, would find neither of those acceptable, because they lack backstory.

My question was (and remains), if you find backstory essential to your games, what is it about the games that you run that makes backstory required? (Or, if I've misunderstood, and it's not required, then why do you care whether or not anyone has a backstory?)


IMX backstory is primarily detrimental when folks use it as a substitute for figuring out and explicitly listing clear character motivations.

And why do you believe that "explicitly listing clear character motivations" is advantageous?

Max_Killjoy
2018-12-29, 10:56 PM
Yeah, I think there's a big difference between "no origin at all" and "here's a very basic skeleton, which I'll flesh out more as I get to know the character through playing them." Because the latter is how I make characters, and I see nothing wrong with not having a full-blown novel ready to go before the campaign begins.

It's a bit funny that your post saying that is right below one where it's pointed out that no one is asking for a novel.

Tanarii
2018-12-29, 11:18 PM
And why do you believe that "explicitly listing clear character motivations" is advantageous?
Because those help you make decisions for your character. And making decisions for your character is what roleplaying is.

Psyren
2018-12-30, 04:37 AM
It's a bit funny that your post saying that is right below one where it's pointed out that no one is asking for a novel.

Putting aside that I hit reply before that other post existed on my end, "novel" was intentional hyperbole on my part. My point is that you're going to get a couple of sentences at best until I've actually played a session or two, unless I truly had something I was passionate about in mind before I sat down to play. Better?

Max_Killjoy
2018-12-30, 09:27 AM
Putting aside that I hit reply before that other post existed on my end, "novel" was intentional hyperbole on my part. My point is that you're going to get a couple of sentences at best until I've actually played a session or two, unless I truly had something I was passionate about in mind before I sat down to play. Better?

I wasn't saying you did it on purpose, just that I found it funny that it worked out that way.

But, describing a page or less of background as a "novel" isn't hyperbole, it's either absurd or distorting -- whether it's a player saying "I'm not going to write a novel" or a GM saying "I don't want to see a novel", then, great, because a page or less isn't a novel. No one is asking for a novel. It's not just exaggeration for effect, it distorts the discussion to be about an absurd extreme. Some think they're going to have to write something a lot like a novel if they do any backstory, others think they're going to get something a lot like a novel if they allow or ask for any backstory.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-12-30, 09:32 AM
I wasn't saying you did it on purpose, just that I found it funny that it worked out that way.

But, describing a page or less of background as a "novel" isn't hyperbole, it's either absurd or distorting -- whether it's a player saying "I'm not going to write a novel" or a GM saying "I don't want to see a novel", then, great, because a page or less isn't a novel. No one is asking for a novel. It's not just exaggeration for effect, it distorts the discussion to be about an absurd extreme. Some think they're going to have to write something a lot like a novel if they do any backstory, others think they're going to get something a lot like a novel if they allow or ask for any backstory.

For me as a teacher, "you don't need to write me a novel" is a standard warning. It means "you can answer that with a sentence or a phrase, don't write paragraphs I'm not going to read. More is not necessarily better."

The same applies to backstories IMO.

Tanarii
2018-12-30, 09:52 AM
For me as a teacher, "you don't need to write me a novel" is a standard warning. It means "you can answer that with a sentence or a phrase, don't write paragraphs I'm not going to read. More is not necessarily better."

The same applies to backstories IMO.Agreed. "Don't write (me) a novel" is a fairly standard English slang.

Also I feel the same way about backstories.

Max_Killjoy
2018-12-30, 10:03 AM
For me as a teacher, "you don't need to write me a novel" is a standard warning. It means "you can answer that with a sentence or a phrase, don't write paragraphs I'm not going to read. More is not necessarily better."

The same applies to backstories IMO.


Agreed. "Don't write (me) a novel" is a fairly standard English slang.

Also I feel the same way about backstories.

That may be the case, but in the context of these discussions, it always seems to devolve into an absurd argument between no backstory at all, and 50 pages of single-spaced narrow-margin 8-pt-font backstory.


What GMs in the extended gaming group I was part of often did was figure out what sorts of things were important for a player to think about when it came to their character, and give each player a list of questions to reflect that, to have in hand while creating their character. Often it wasn't even something they had to answer right away, it was just things that they should be thinking about.

So for a Vampire campaign, it was stuff like "Are you from this city, or somewhere else? If somewhere else, where? Why did you come to this city? Was it before or after your Embrace? Who was your Sire? Why did they Embrace you? Do you have any contact with mortals from before your Embrace?" And so on. Now, some of those, would need to be answered because where a character fits into a city's community of vampires does matter in most campaigns / individual GM's settings. But others could just be "Hey! This might help you get a handle on your character."

Pleh
2018-12-30, 11:09 AM
Curiously, the only thing that "gets Quertus in trouble" is his friends. :smallamused:

"Keeping to dangerous company" could easily be a 5e flaw. For whatever reason, you always find yourself associated with the type of people that are currently stirring up trouble.

The fun thing about having this flaw is that it doesn't just describe your friends. Now the DM is motivated to make sure your NPC affiliates fit the paradigm as well.

Quertus hires a gentle old lady to bake cookiees for his dinner party. When he comes by to pick up his cookiees, gangsters accost the premises looking for Granny, who calmly retrieves her greatclub from the back room and enters a blood frenzy to once again ward off her old business associates with whom she long ago had a falling out.

On the topic of backstories, the real problem with exhaustive backstories made before the game is that they set a tone for the character's arc, which will either constrain the game to harmonize with that theme or trivialize the significance of the backstory.

Honestly? It's the classic Paladin problem. "I can't do THAT. I swore an Oath." Technically, that Oath is backstory. The character's starting condition is taking authority to define how the gamestory moves forward. This kind of game can work, but very limitedly.

Now, when we're honest, many of us know why Paladins are still fun despite this. It is fun to play a character who is actually tied to something outside themselves, like a sacred oath. This is where the desire to write an exhaustive backstory comes from: to make a character that is part of the world they are in and not just passing through. This is fantastically fun, but tricky to get right since the mechanics weren't built with this setup in mind (or they were, but they left this portion blank for the table to fill in the blank). The table needs to work together to plan how to incorporate it.

Then we find the classic blunder in exhaustive backstories. For whatever reason (probably to enhance the specialness), the player and/or DM decide to keep the backstory secret from the table until the story uncovers it naturally. For a form of gameplay that is already somewhat fragile, this is trying to run a hail mary pass with grandma's fine china. Best of luck to you.

Cluedrew
2018-12-30, 03:14 PM
I think The Jack & Red Fel have pretty much hit the issue on the head. I think Lockles might be right to encourage existing NPC connections.* I think a hard rule on it is not the way to go, not the least of which your parents might not be the most relevant characters for play, but I think it is something that should be encouraged generally.

* Assuming they aren't just going to be kidnapped.


But, describing a page or less of background as a "novel" isn't hyperbole, it's either absurd or distortingMost hyperboles are absurd, that is part of what marks them. This really clicked for me when I found myself calculating how many times everyone in town would have met my friend's mother for her to of actually run into 12 million people on the way to the store. The imperfections of human communication aside I wanted to weight in on the backstory thing.

After long consideration I have given up on trying to create a general set of guides on how to flush out your character's personality & decision making. Some use goals, some use back-stories. I use what-ifs myself. If my character encountered this situation (regardless of whether or not they ever had) how would they react? I can't cover all of them but after a few I get a feel for them and can answer on the fly.

And once I did write a short story, not a full novel, about my character before a campaign started. It was sort of backstory because it was cannon but not much of significance happened in it, most of the significant backstory events had already happened and this just showed the character as they were at the beginning of the campaign.

Elvensilver
2018-12-30, 06:54 PM
Gee I can't wait for my family members to get taken hostage / killed and raised as undead / mind-controlled into attacking me and my party and / or killing themselves!

If anyone else enjoys things like that, here's a fitting link.
http://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/drama

__________________________________________________ ______________
A reason why I may have a less devolped family -if any- next game:
Backstorys and family mostly come by playing the character for me. Sure, in the beginning I say: "Yes, I have a father, mother and older sister back home, and I have to earn back glory for our old noble family", but while playing, as I get emotionally invested in my character, I also care about where they come from, and really start fleshing out the backstory, creating scores of distant ancestors and college friends.


Sadly, my GM started to use my fictional familiy too, after I mentioned them in character a few times. So a sending came from back home: "We have mummy rot here (really bad, certainly deadly disease), come back and bring a cleric." My character, currently trying to save the world from a tarrasque hurried home. Here, our team roleplayed how we tried to get a nursing system going, brewing coffee for anyone left standing, struggling whether we could afford to leave the ill to get another cleric.

And then the GM says: "Your sister will care for everything, she says:"just do your adventuring stuff!" We were railroaded pretty heavily to search for a necromancer poisoning the well. So, after this was taken care of we tried to help the poor ill elves, burying dead, cooking dinner, you name it. But alas: "You want to have an eulogy, after half your family died? Really? Just roll perform. Okay, now what about going in the next town, to buy some new magical swag?"

"Who died in my family?"
"3 Cousins, some grandparents...."
Since this is all the info I get, I roll which of my 7 cousins died.
"Little Elarin died! That is terrible, he was only 74, and since his father became crazy he lived here with us! We have to raise money for a resurrection!"
(As my characters sister):"Really, don't do that. You sure have adventuring to do!" And OOC:" No! No child died! only adults, okay? You can't want to raise all the adults, too!?"

Our GM was frustrated, telling us we were weird, I was frustrated, having my lovingly crafted PC-NPCs killed of unceremonously and played as stupid plot-traindrivers. :smallfrown:

Quertus
2018-12-30, 09:13 PM
On the topic of backstories, the real problem with exhaustive backstories made before the game is that they set a tone for the character's arc, which will either constrain the game to harmonize with that theme or trivialize the significance of the backstory.

Honestly? It's the classic Paladin problem. "I can't do THAT. I swore an Oath." Technically, that Oath is backstory. The character's starting condition is taking authority to define how the gamestory moves forward. This kind of game can work, but very limitedly.

Now, when we're honest, many of us know why Paladins are still fun despite this. It is fun to play a character who is actually tied to something outside themselves, like a sacred oath. This is where the desire to write an exhaustive backstory comes from: to make a character that is part of the world they are in and not just passing through. This is fantastically fun, but tricky to get right since the mechanics weren't built with this setup in mind (or they were, but they left this portion blank for the table to fill in the blank). The table needs to work together to plan how to incorporate it.

I find this part of your post thoroughly confusing.

I would certainly hope that a character's backstory would affect their personality and outlook. And I would certainly hope that a character's personality and outlook would affect the tone, and how they approach "the plot". And I should hope that PCs have agency to determine how the plot moves forward through their actions. This is sounding like all good stuff - where's the bad? :smallconfused:

Next, you're claiming that people can have fun in spite of player agency... for reasons... that don't have anything to do with why people enjoy player agency, at least IME.

That's what I heard, but I figure you've gotta be trying to say something else, right? This is just me rolling a "1" on Reading Comprehension, right?


Then we find the classic blunder in exhaustive backstories. For whatever reason (probably to enhance the specialness), the player and/or DM decide to keep the backstory secret from the table until the story uncovers it naturally. For a form of gameplay that is already somewhat fragile, this is trying to run a hail mary pass with grandma's fine china. Best of luck to you.

Then we've got this. In all my decades of play, I have never seen "the players being ignorant of a backstory" to cause a problem at a table. But I have many times seen "players knowing backstory information out of character" cause problems many times. So I can only conclude that we're accustomed to very different styles of games.

So, I come from a background that views role-playing as Good, and metagaming as Evil. So, obviously, the less OOC information that the players possess, the less opportunity they have to engage in the evils of metagaming, and the less likely they are to ruin the story by doing things that their character realistically wouldn't. The story is whatever realistically comes out of this particular combination.

So I'm guessing - and correct me if I'm wrong - that you are accustomed to creating characters with prescripted story arcs in mind, where the other players knowing and buying in to those arcs is of benefit to creating those stories in play.

RazorChain
2018-12-31, 12:02 AM
I fully agree that "Fighter" is a playing piece, not a character. But that wasn't my question. My question was, what is the style of games that you run?

Through the decades I've run a lot of different types of games with different systems and I still do.



See, some games, all you need is a playing piece. Some games, you need a character (like Bond. James Bond). Other games, such as yours, would find neither of those acceptable, because they lack backstory.

I agree. When one of my groups was running a Black Ops campaign as a filler or secondary campaign we took turns game mastering and each adventure was just a new mission. There was no focus on our backgrounds and we really didn't have anything much going there mostly just an englishman that served with SAS, a swede that served in 2nd REP an american that served with the Navy Seals etc.
The focus was just on the mission no background needed really.

So different types of games have different needs. If the game is about exploring a megadungeon that you are stuck in then character background is really just fluff that helps in defining the character



My question was (and remains), if you find backstory essential to your games, what is it about the games that you run that makes backstory required? (Or, if I've misunderstood, and it's not required, then why do you care whether or not anyone has a backstory?)


When I run character driven games that revolves around the characters then I need a backstory, not a long one mind you, but something. In such a game the players ask me questions or pose a problem they want to solve. One game for example focused on that they were all from the same barony that got taken over by the Dread Lords. One was playing the barons daughter and they were trying to reclaim the barony. So who they were in relation to each other and why they were banding together was just as important as what they could do.

In my current Mythic Europe game the PC's have a home base in the city of Tarento in Italy and most of them hail from southern Italy. They don't need to detail every second of their lives but just paint their lives in broad strokes and name at least 3 NPC's that I can use in the game. Most of them give me 5 to 10 that range from relatives, mentors, rivals, friends, contacts, ex lovers to enemies.

I use this information as building blocks that personalizes game and I tailor it to their characters. Roberto the merchant's son he solved the bandit problem that was plaguing his family's caravans only to find out that the criminal Kingpin of Tarento, Francis Corleone, was behind it. Corleone had his Ranch burnt down and bought out his debts to the Venetian Merchant Bank so now Roberto is in serious debt to Corleone & Associates and has 5 months to pay his debt. Now the PC's are going after Corleone and trying to bring him down but the sisters Alma and Sylvana (PC's) don't know how to go about it as their brother is working for Corleone. Do they endanger him to get dirt on Corleone?

Alma wants revenge on Helmut Stahl, one of Corleone's henchmen after he chopped of her hand in a trial by combat, the PC's had him tried for burning down Roberto's ranch and they lost the trial so he walked away a free man.

This is just one of the stories that have spun from the background of one character, Roberto Boerio. He still has to resovle the issue of the demon the PC's call Jo and how to turn his girlfriend back to normal after she got turned into a statue when they set Circe free from her prison on Monte Circeo...and that also has ties to his background.

This January I've been running this game bi-weekly for 3 years and my players are mostly worried that I'll suffer from a GM burnout before they can bring the campaign to an acceptable conclusion.

When we sat down for session zero all I had was a basic structure for the first session and that it would happen in the Kingdom of Sicily based on Ars Magica's Mythic Europe setting but using Gurps as the system. 3/4 of the things I've been runnig is based on their backgrounds and the consequences that have come from how they handled those things.

Drascin
2018-12-31, 05:44 AM
I... kinda get where the OP is coming from? It gets real tiring to have time after time a bunch of perfect spherical characters in a vacuum, with no connections to anything. Parents missing, no living friends, nothing that binds them to anyone or anywhere, just a drop in and drop out figure. And I can picture myself saying as much during a session zero with my friends building characters around the table - "guys, seriously, do you have any idea how ****ing boring it gets to gamemaster for a bunch of vagrant cyphers who are just waiting for a plothook? Come on, give me an old master, a parental feud, an annoying rival, guild connections, something I can build on! I can give suggestions if anyone is stuck!".

But straight up dictating the kind of connections involved seems rather a bridge too far. At that point you might as well play pregens.

5crownik007
2018-12-31, 05:57 AM
And I can picture myself saying as much during a session zero with my friends building characters around the table - "guys, seriously, do you have any idea how ****ing boring it gets to gamemaster for a bunch of vagrant cyphers who are just waiting for a plothook? Come on, give me an old master, a parental feud, an annoying rival, guild connections, something I can build on! I can give suggestions if anyone is stuck!".

But straight up dictating the kind of connections involved seems rather a bridge too far. At that point you might as well play pregens.

This post is correct.
I don't have to picture myself being in that situation, I've BEEN in that exact situation. Unfortunately at the time of session 0 I didn't see this issue coming because I had the hope that the players would take initiative. I was wrong.

In the next game that I'm running with that group I'm hoping to do two things, 1) have them generate satisfactory backstories and 2) give them a definite long term goal straight out of the gate.

I don't just think it's bad to write your player's backstories for them, I straight up refuse to do it. If you hand a player a backstory, they will be far less invested in the character than they would otherwise be. If a player ASKS you to write their backstory for them, that tells me that they don't care about the story. Note, helping someone write or come up with ideas is not the same as writing the character FOR them.

Florian
2018-12-31, 06:00 AM
But straight up dictating the kind of connections involved seems rather a bridge too far. At that point you might as well play pregens.

Not really. Ok, I only gm very story driven and thematic campaigns, am very open and up-front about it and don't shy away from small spoilers if that is necessary to get a good game going.

I don´t have a problem with stating something like this in the session zero: Ok, the bulk of this campaign is taking place in the city of Kintargo and is entirely centered on your characters being the leaders of a rebellion. Your characters should be either citizens of Kintargo or outsiders with a heavy interest in Kintargo. Both approaches should have a major connection to one or two of these individuals, noble houses or organizations, reflected in one of the campaign traits you can chose at character creation. This is PB20, no multi-classing, one archetype only, medium EXP track, WBL modified by using ABP, the Downtime rules, Research rules and Infernal Contract rules will be used.

BWR
2018-12-31, 07:55 AM
I... kinda get where the OP is coming from? It gets real tiring to have time after time a bunch of perfect spherical characters in a vacuum, with no connections to anything. Parents missing, no living friends, nothing that binds them to anyone or anywhere, just a drop in and drop out figure. And I can picture myself saying as much during a session zero with my friends building characters around the table - "guys, seriously, do you have any idea how ****ing boring it gets to gamemaster for a bunch of vagrant cyphers who are just waiting for a plothook? Come on, give me an old master, a parental feud, an annoying rival, guild connections, something I can build on! I can give suggestions if anyone is stuck!".


Conversely, I've seen (and heard far more accounts of) people who create characters with a ton of baggage they expect the GM to run stories around, nevermind if it hogs the spotlight or is incompatible with what the GM is planning. IME it's easier to get a handle on what the GM is running through play and adapt to that than expect the GM to put in even more effort to appease my snowflakey ego.
These background things mentioned can easily be slotted in after the game starts, if desired.

Pleh
2018-12-31, 04:15 PM
I find this part of your post thoroughly confusing.

I would certainly hope that a character's backstory would affect their personality and outlook. And I would certainly hope that a character's personality and outlook would affect the tone, and how they approach "the plot". And I should hope that PCs have agency to determine how the plot moves forward through their actions. This is sounding like all good stuff - where's the bad? :smallconfused:

Again, look at the Problem of Paladins.

It isn't that the player has the agency to play all the Paladin tropes. It's that this now limits the agency of other players to be Evil or Chaotic and it limits agency of the DM to set the tone in their scenarios.

It's not compatible with generally most choices the other players might make.


Then we've got this. In all my decades of play, I have never seen "the players being ignorant of a backstory" to cause a problem at a table. But I have many times seen "players knowing backstory information out of character" cause problems many times. So I can only conclude that we're accustomed to very different styles of games.

So, I come from a background that views role-playing as Good, and metagaming as Evil. So, obviously, the less OOC information that the players possess, the less opportunity they have to engage in the evils of metagaming, and the less likely they are to ruin the story by doing things that their character realistically wouldn't. The story is whatever realistically comes out of this particular combination.

So I'm guessing - and correct me if I'm wrong - that you are accustomed to creating characters with prescripted story arcs in mind, where the other players knowing and buying in to those arcs is of benefit to creating those stories in play.

Yes and no. I'm accustomed to players either wanting to discover their characters as they go (making their backstory somewhat superficial to their character's gameplay value) or that they have some idea of where they want to see the character arc go. I would counsel most people against a literally prescripted arc because of how heavily that would constrain the game, but if someone want to say, "I want to play the selfish rogue that discovers an honorable hero in themselves," it DOES constrain the game, but not in a major way (there are still hundreds of ways to do that, if not as many ways to play a rogue generically and let the chips fall where they may). The DM will probably have to run the game less flexibly to maintain the player's character's narrative tone, but this isn't badwrongfun. It's just more fragile and needs more work to get it going.

Knaight
2018-12-31, 05:42 PM
I don´t have a problem with stating something like this in the session zero: Ok, the bulk of this campaign is taking place in the city of Kintargo and is entirely centered on your characters being the leaders of a rebellion. Your characters should be either citizens of Kintargo or outsiders with a heavy interest in Kintargo. Both approaches should have a major connection to one or two of these individuals, noble houses or organizations, reflected in one of the campaign traits you can chose at character creation. This is PB20, no multi-classing, one archetype only, medium EXP track, WBL modified by using ABP, the Downtime rules, Research rules and Infernal Contract rules will be used.

Exactly this, albeit with different setting and system elements. I've nearly universally found that "play anything the system allows" leads to boring games, especially with the sort of systems I tend to play (they're usually more universal than D&D). Coming up with a general party structure which implies a campaign structure is totally fine, and leaves plenty of room for defining particular characters. "You're all members of the Port Alhabri Alchemist's Guild", "You're the crew of the Schrodinger's Hummingbird", "You're all either members of this wizard tower and surrounding village or of this crashed spaceship", even "You're all nomads who just lost the rest of their tribe to a terrible plague" have all worked fine and produced varied and surprising characters.

Quertus
2018-12-31, 06:23 PM
I... kinda get where the OP is coming from? It gets real tiring to have time after time a bunch of perfect spherical characters in a vacuum, with no connections to anything. Parents missing, no living friends, nothing that binds them to anyone or anywhere, just a drop in and drop out figure. And I can picture myself saying as much during a session zero with my friends building characters around the table - "guys, seriously, do you have any idea how ****ing boring it gets to gamemaster for a bunch of vagrant cyphers who are just waiting for a plothook? Come on, give me an old master, a parental feud, an annoying rival, guild connections, something I can build on! I can give suggestions if anyone is stuck!".

But straight up dictating the kind of connections involved seems rather a bridge too far. At that point you might as well play pregens.

I tend to agree on the pregens comment, as I have little interest in either GMs making my background, or in playing pregens.

Why do you find "spherical" characters difficult to GM for? Or, perhaps i should ask instead, if you give your pitch, including intended hooks, and the players bring characters appropriate to said adventure and hooks, why does it matter how difficult to hook they may be otherwise?

Or is it that you aren't interested in building a pitch, or in building an adventure by yourself? Or that you've had issues with players whose characters aren't connected losing interest in the game? Or, like the Snarl of a certain webcomic, do you find the adventure more "real" the more colors that are used in the pallet? Or...

In other words, you say that you get where the OP is coming from, but why do you get where they're coming from?


So different types of games have different needs. If the game is about exploring a megadungeon that you are stuck in then character background is really just fluff that helps in defining the character

Hmmm... I suppose I agree that background defines character, and that characters having a personality other than the perfect Determinator is "fluff". But I feel that the tone of this paragraph rather undersells the value of the character interaction minigame. I mean, sure, we're trapped in the megadungeon, but how an individual character responds to the unique challenges presented by that scenario is still a matter of personality. And answering those questions (and exploring the results of those choices) is pretty much the main reason why I roleplay.


When I run character driven games that revolves around the characters then I need a backstory, not a long one mind you, but something. In such a game the players ask me questions or pose a problem they want to solve. One game for example focused on that they were all from the same barony that got taken over by the Dread Lords. One was playing the barons daughter and they were trying to reclaim the barony. So who they were in relation to each other and why they were banding together was just as important as what they could do.

In my current Mythic Europe game the PC's have a home base in the city of Tarento in Italy and most of them hail from southern Italy. They don't need to detail every second of their lives but just paint their lives in broad strokes and name at least 3 NPC's that I can use in the game. Most of them give me 5 to 10 that range from relatives, mentors, rivals, friends, contacts, ex lovers to enemies.

I use this information as building blocks that personalizes game and I tailor it to their characters. Roberto the merchant's son he solved the bandit problem that was plaguing his family's caravans only to find out that the criminal Kingpin of Tarento, Francis Corleone, was behind it. Corleone had his Ranch burnt down and bought out his debts to the Venetian Merchant Bank so now Roberto is in serious debt to Corleone & Associates and has 5 months to pay his debt. Now the PC's are going after Corleone and trying to bring him down but the sisters Alma and Sylvana (PC's) don't know how to go about it as their brother is working for Corleone. Do they endanger him to get dirt on Corleone?

Alma wants revenge on Helmut Stahl, one of Corleone's henchmen after he chopped of her hand in a trial by combat, the PC's had him tried for burning down Roberto's ranch and they lost the trial so he walked away a free man.

This is just one of the stories that have spun from the background of one character, Roberto Boerio. He still has to resovle the issue of the demon the PC's call Jo and how to turn his girlfriend back to normal after she got turned into a statue when they set Circe free from her prison on Monte Circeo...and that also has ties to his background.

This January I've been running this game bi-weekly for 3 years and my players are mostly worried that I'll suffer from a GM burnout before they can bring the campaign to an acceptable conclusion.

When we sat down for session zero all I had was a basic structure for the first session and that it would happen in the Kingdom of Sicily based on Ars Magica's Mythic Europe setting but using Gurps as the system. 3/4 of the things I've been runnig is based on their backgrounds and the consequences that have come from how they handled those things.

So, what if the players aren't into personal drama fun?

What if, instead, they hand you a list of elements to add, like my favorite example of an unexplored magical place where rocks just float through the air? Or their decreased second-cousin, the mad inventor, who created lots of gadgets and golems and robots, and whose latest project was a central battery to power them all, purported to run on dragon poop?

Or, what if they do want character drama, but not with existing connections? They're looking to find a wife, settle down? Or looking to perform Mindrape-fueled hostile takeovers of seemingly random local businesses in order to destabilize the economy to blah blah blah insert Tzeentch-worthy machinations here.

Do they need to have specific NPCs in their backstory for you to tap, or can they just be orphans with big dreams?


I don´t have a problem with stating something like this in the session zero: Ok, the bulk of this campaign is taking place in the city of Kintargo and is entirely centered on your characters being the leaders of a rebellion. Your characters should be either citizens of Kintargo or outsiders with a heavy interest in Kintargo. Both approaches should have a major connection to one or two of these individuals, noble houses or organizations, reflected in one of the campaign traits you can chose at character creation. This is PB20, no multi-classing, one archetype only, medium EXP track, WBL modified by using ABP, the Downtime rules, Research rules and Infernal Contract rules will be used.

You: (the above)

Me (as a player): OK, so... What are the rebels rebelling against, and why? Who are the rebels, how numerous, how are they organized, and, perhaps most importantly, what if any qualifications does a "rebel leader" require? (Also, why no multiclass?)


Conversely, I've seen (and heard far more accounts of) people who create characters with a ton of baggage they expect the GM to run stories around, nevermind if it hogs the spotlight or is incompatible with what the GM is planning.

So much this.


IME it's easier to get a handle on what the GM is running through play and adapt to that than expect the GM to put in even more effort to appease my snowflakey ego.
These background things mentioned can easily be slotted in after the game starts, if desired.

A little less this. By which I mean, I think it's easier to listen to the GM's pitch for the game, and build / choose a character that will be appropriate, rather than to rely solely on one's ability to adapt on the fly.

Quertus
2018-12-31, 06:42 PM
Again, look at the Problem of Paladins.

It isn't that the player has the agency to play all the Paladin tropes. It's that this now limits the agency of other players to be Evil or Chaotic and it limits agency of the DM to set the tone in their scenarios.

It's not compatible with generally most choices the other players might make.

Yup, personality conflicts are a thing. Yup, some games, the Paladin is appropriate; other games, he isn't. Some games, the Reaver is appropriate; other games, he isn't. Other than maybe the GM deciding which this is without communicating that fact, I'm not seeing the problem here.


Yes and no. I'm accustomed to players either wanting to discover their characters as they go (making their backstory somewhat superficial to their character's gameplay value) or that they have some idea of where they want to see the character arc go. I would counsel most people against a literally prescripted arc because of how heavily that would constrain the game, but if someone want to say, "I want to play the selfish rogue that discovers an honorable hero in themselves," it DOES constrain the game, but not in a major way (there are still hundreds of ways to do that, if not as many ways to play a rogue generically and let the chips fall where they may). The DM will probably have to run the game less flexibly to maintain the player's character's narrative tone, but this isn't badwrongfun. It's just more fragile and needs more work to get it going.

Yeah, that's just baffling to me. I'm more, "I want to play this character, and I want to see where it will go".

IMO, It's like watching a new episode of your favorite series - if you didn't know the characters, you wouldn't be looking forward to it, but you wouldn't be as excited to watch it if you'd already seen that episode.

Pauly
2018-12-31, 10:56 PM
Exactly this, albeit with different setting and system elements. I've nearly universally found that "play anything the system allows" leads to boring games, especially with the sort of systems I tend to play (they're usually more universal than D&D). Coming up with a general party structure which implies a campaign structure is totally fine, and leaves plenty of room for defining particular characters. "You're all members of the Port Alhabri Alchemist's Guild", "You're the crew of the Schrodinger's Hummingbird", "You're all either members of this wizard tower and surrounding village or of this crashed spaceship", even "You're all nomads who just lost the rest of their tribe to a terrible plague" have all worked fine and produced varied and surprising characters.

Totally agree, if you look at real life equivalents of adventuring groups (train robbing gangs in the wildvwest, explorers going into the wilderness for example) they are never a bunch of randoms that randomly bumped into each other.
They usually feature bonds such as:
- blood connections usually at sibling or cousin level
- childhood/school/university friendships
- experience of working together before
- vouchsafed by a trusted source
- nterviewed by the group/leader and review of qualifications.
Yes you do sometimes get random bumps leading to one member joining the group, but the core of the group is an interconnected series of bonds from what in RPG terms is the backstory.

I encourage my players to create these types of connections in their backstory in session zero.

Quertus
2019-01-01, 12:13 AM
- experience of working together before

Now, this might be a chicken and egg problem, but... How did they get that experience?

RazorChain
2019-01-01, 01:01 AM
Hmmm... I suppose I agree that background defines character, and that characters having a personality other than the perfect Determinator is "fluff". But I feel that the tone of this paragraph rather undersells the value of the character interaction minigame. I mean, sure, we're trapped in the megadungeon, but how an individual character responds to the unique challenges presented by that scenario is still a matter of personality. And answering those questions (and exploring the results of those choices) is pretty much the main reason why I roleplay.

For the rest of the group your backstory isn't significant if it won't be explored ingame. It matters to your character to help define him but you can make up a personality without a biography. But your characters irrational fear of bats due to the traumatic incident when your character fell down into a batcave as a child in a game where you are exploring a megadungeon isn't going to make much of an impact during the game unless you encounter bats. In my experience such games often do not dwell on the character background where the characters sit down around the camp fire, eat lunch and swap childhood stories. It could happen.....especially in my group where they get tired of exploring a dungeon and kill monsters and spend the rest of the evening just having a in character dialogue during their lunch pause.





So, what if the players aren't into personal drama fun?

What if, instead, they hand you a list of elements to add, like my favorite example of an unexplored magical place where rocks just float through the air? Or their decreased second-cousin, the mad inventor, who created lots of gadgets and golems and robots, and whose latest project was a central battery to power them all, purported to run on dragon poop?

Or, what if they do want character drama, but not with existing connections? They're looking to find a wife, settle down? Or looking to perform Mindrape-fueled hostile takeovers of seemingly random local businesses in order to destabilize the economy to blah blah blah insert Tzeentch-worthy machinations here.

Do they need to have specific NPCs in their backstory for you to tap, or can they just be orphans with big dreams?




Even orphans know people, orphans don't exist in vacuum and yes they can have big dreams. But if the players show up with characters with no backstory, no connections to other people and no dreams or goals then my players are clearly communicating that they don't want such a game. Then I'll just boot them out the airlock and find a new group to run games for because clearly they don't like my playstyle and I don't like theirs and everybody wins, except the ones that got booted out the airlock of course.

I'm a selfish GM, I pitch an idea or two and if they don't want to play then I can always just get other people who want to play in my games.

Pauly
2019-01-01, 01:52 AM
Now, this might be a chicken and egg problem, but... How did they get that experience?

If you’re not starting with level 1 characters perhaps that is how they got the XP.

Also you need to work to get a class, you are not born with all your class attributes. Some example players came up with from campaigns:
- the local crime boss needs fighters and rogues so that’s how the rogue and the fighter met. Rising from hired goon to skilled minion.
- joining the army leads one character to be a scout (i.e. Ranger) and another to ge a healer (i.e. Cleric) and they get to do some basic training type missions together.
- they had a part time job earning coins in a tavern while they studied in school, which is how the wizard and the bard met.
- retainer of the local nobility continuing to work for the family when the second son is sent into the world to bring fame and fortune to rhe family. Although this strictly speaking isn’t “working together”, more “working for”.

Most of the time my players only use it for fighter type classes being in the equivalent of the army or police together.

One thing I forgot is real life criminal gangs are/were often connected by serving time together in prison (adult or juvenile).

Quertus
2019-01-01, 08:20 AM
@RazorChain - speaking of character backstories, talking to you helped me see something I'd somehow never noticed before.

So, this one time, I was playing the party's primary DPS, and the GM (let alone the rest of the party) was quite shocked the first time we had an encounter where my character fled.

Funny thing is, pretty much the entirety of the backstory that I had shared with them involved my character fleeing from seemingly overwhelming odds. So how this behavior came as a shock to them is a mystery to me.

Apropos to this thread, said "overwhelming odds" murdered his entire village. The weapon he carries was the one that murdered his village - he started the campaign having just completed his "revenge" story arc.

Seemingly not much for a GM like you to work with, I know, but he was very much intended to be a "blank slate" character, looking for a new purpose in life. I chose this style of background because I was largely unfamiliar with this group OOC, and had no idea what type of character would be compatible with their style.

Pleh
2019-01-01, 11:29 AM
Yup, personality conflicts are a thing. Yup, some games, the Paladin is appropriate; other games, he isn't. Some games, the Reaver is appropriate; other games, he isn't. Other than maybe the GM deciding which this is without communicating that fact, I'm not seeing the problem here.

Backstories are rarely intrinsically problematic. It's the nature of their control over the future that empowers them to create problems if you aren't accounting for it.

The nature of this thread is expressing the contention between players and DMs in utilizing characters from a PC's backstory as a plot hook without the consent of the player. Likewise, it concerns players constructing backstories that resist this kind of DMing behavior. This is exactly the problem of utilizing a backstory's power to influence the future without truly clearing it with your playing partners. It's avoiding working things out OOC and trying to enforce your gamestyle on others through game elements.

That's what's wrong here, and no, I don't expect you've likely experienced it much considering what you've shared about your gane experiences

Talakeal
2019-01-01, 12:46 PM
I find some of the views in this thread puzzlingly extreme. I have always had the PCs backstory and their parents be a collaboration between the players and the DM. This has been pretty constant across 25 years of gaming, both good and bad.

I don't think I have ever played an orphan personally, although I have played several characters whose parents are currently dead or estranged. The death of one's parents is often, in my experience, a good catalyst for the start of the adventure as it shakes up the status quo of normal life.


My current campaign is about a city controlled by several large merchant houses like renaissance Italy. All of the players are members of the same family, by blood, marriage, adoption, or even indentured servitude, but they all have to be members of the same household because that is the core premise of the game.

The idea that I wouldn't be able to create NPC family members for the PCs in this situation or that it is somehow a bad game for being based around an extended family seems very weird to me.

PhoenixPhyre
2019-01-01, 12:53 PM
I get around the "how did the group start working together" by saying that all 1st-level parties start graduation from Adventurer Training, a 6-month course in not dying out there in the wide world where they've been a team the whole time. This explains why they're working together (because they chose to).

For the types of games I run, the presence or absence of family is (generally) less important. Few of the PCs were important enough to have significant enemies or allies and often we're playing in a region foreign to all of them. But knowing where they came from and what they did growing up (the background) is important to know what they'd know without thinking about it and what they'd be surprised by.



The idea that I wouldn't be able to create NPC family members for the PCs in this situation or that it is somehow a bad game for being based around an extended family seems very weird to me.

For me, personally, I would object to unilateral DM creation of NPC family members, at least ones that the character should know. That long-lost uncle would not be a problem, but if they're making decisions about who my parents were without talking to me about it, I'd get a bit peeved.

Talakeal
2019-01-01, 12:59 PM
For me, personally, I would object to unilateral DM creation of NPC family members, at least ones that the character should know. That long-lost uncle would not be a problem, but if they're making decisions about who my parents were without talking to me about it, I'd get a bit peeved.

I have always seen it left kind of in the air, with either the GM or the player being able to invent or detail family members as needed.

In theory I would think the other party could veto or modify the decision, but I have never actually seen anyone object to it.

Florian
2019-01-01, 01:15 PM
You: (the above)

Me (as a player): OK, so... What are the rebels rebelling against, and why? Who are the rebels, how numerous, how are they organized, and, perhaps most importantly, what if any qualifications does a "rebel leader" require? (Also, why no multiclass?)

The country of Cheliax descended into civil war and lost quite a lot of its provinces to sedition during that time.
The noble house of Thrune managed to be ascendant to the throne by forging a pact with Hell and latter moved on to bind the whole country by infernal contracts.
Various knightly orders were fed up with the primary human nation being bound to Hell and started a crusade to purge the country of infernal influence. Kintargo is already a very cosmopolitan metropolis due to being a major trade hub, featuring one of the most important harbors and markets of the region. The city is placed under severe martial law and the governing council replaced by a fanatical member of the house of Thrune, enacting more and more punishing laws.

If that is not enough, I don't know.

Karl Aegis
2019-01-01, 09:01 PM
I feel like the DM introducing characters that could single-handedly resolve the plot themselves is counterproductive. They either don't participate in the plot and are irrelevant or participate in the plot and the players are irrelevant. Neither option is particularly interesting. Getting free items from a backstory also isn't interesting. Especially items that allow you to bypass otherwise interesting characters such as a mailman or some guy hanging out in a bar who explains the plot to people who disrespect him.

The example parents are people who would normally only work with the standard adventurer in extremely niche situations. You'd need to be an extremely specialized character like a private investigator to cross paths with a normal city guard captain regularly or actually work for your parent as a field research assistant in the case of the professor. The backstory the DM handed you limits the amount of characters you can create to make that backstory relevant to the actual story. I guess that's fine if the game you're running is extremely limited in options, but I haven't seen that kind of game. I think that game would be indistinguishable from a game with pregenerated characters only. Or the backstory would remain irrelevant to the game, in which case the backstory was unnecessary in the first place.

Morgaln
2019-01-02, 01:08 PM
To me, both as a DM and as a player, parents and other relations only figure into a background if those relations have a bearing on who the character is. For many of my characters, the question where their parents are never got answered, because it has no bearing on the character concept. For others, I will have a rough idea. If the parents have an important impact on the character's story, however, it will certainly be mentioned. If the DM asks specifically, I will come up with an answer that fits the character concept.

For example, my favorite character, Bosjew, is a rogue from a primarily city-based campaign in the "Dark Eye" setting. He's the typical son of a poor farmer family and one of eight siblings. He came to the big city because he heard that you could make a fortune there, and he fully expected to be back with his family in a year or two with enough wealth to provide for his parents until their deaths. Obviously, that's not how it works, and he's now barely eking out a living by doing odd jobs on the docks and selling some stuff that "fell" off the occasional ship.
I did specify some facts about the family here since it explained the motivation for why the character came to be where he is today. I don't expect his family to ever come up during the story.

Incidentally, I have another character in the same story that I made for one part of the story; the party had to take an extended trip into the surrounding marshlands. Not only is Bosjew not suited wilderness adventures, he had important plots going on in the city that really couldn't have him leave for several weeks. So the DM and I agreed that I would create a different character to accompany the other characters on that trip. That character, Bjuro, is a herbalist who settled down after a injury and is mainly earning his keep by telling stories on the street. He's a member of a nomadic people with extended clan ties, yet I never specified any of these ties except the name of the clan he is part of, since it had neither bearing on his past nor on the ongoing story. Should the DM ever require more information, I'm ready to come up with something, though.

My third example is an (as of yet unnamed) Werewolf: the Apocalypse character. We'll call him Leif for the purpose of this excerpt. He's a Get of Fenris (think Norse/Viking heritage), however he was born Black Spiral Dancer (think, evil depraved werewolves bent on destroying everything the other Garou hold dear). When he was a baby, the hive he was born in was destroyed by a war party of Get of Fenris. One of them came across the baby and couldn't bring himself to kill a new-born. So he hid the child and later brought him to the Caern, claiming Leif was his own son from an affair. Only the alleged father was married and already had another son, and the invented affair caused the family to break up. His "father" stuck with Leif, but both his step-mother and step-brother are partly blaming him for their family getting destroyed.
Here the family ties are obviously of major import to the character's background. The reason he's as of yet unnamed is that I'm still waiting for a DM and group that I think will be willing and able to do this character concept justice, since not everyone will want to incorporate this into their campaign. Once I find such a group, I will certainly flesh out all three members of the broken family for the DM to work with.


When I DM, I treat family ties for my players' characters the same way. If the didn't specify anything about their parents, I will assume those are Shrödinger's parents, both existing and not existing at the same time. In other words, no one can interact with them but they're not automatically assumed not to exist either, if the player decides to flesh things out further at a later date.
If their background includes parents but keeps them vague, I'll use them as background features is possible. Meaning, the parents will show up/call occasionally and maybe inquire about their offspring's wellbeing, but they won't be plot-relevant in any shape.
However, if a player fleshes out their parents to a point where they are distinct characters that have a bearing on who they are, I will take them and run with it. That kind of parent will become plot-relevant, usually in form of a recurring NPC that will sometimes provide help, but also ask for assistance periodically. That will never be the main story (unless a player specifically wants it to be) and always be relegated to a secondary plotline that can safely be ignored if the players don't want to engage in that story. My aim is to provide opportunities for stories and flesh out the ones the players are interested in, not force them into interactions they don't want. As such, orphans are no problem for me

I don't think inventing family members is something a DM should be doing. That kind of background information should be firmly in the hands of the player, except that the DM has the right to veto background of any kind that is too powerful or won't fit into the campaign.
Since I'm usually DMing Werewolf: the Apocalypse, though, I have an additional tool there; that game includes the Ancestors background, giving those characters that have it the ability to connect with the spirits of dead ancestors. The way I handle it these ancestors are distinct personalities, and a character will have access to one such distinct personality per point they invest in the background. These ancestors are created by me as the DM, although I'll let the player have a say if there's a specific ancestor they'd like to have in the roster of available personalities. However, as a rule, all of these ancestors have been dead long enough that the character never met them alive, so parents and other close relatives are not part of that.