Best way to incorporate character backstories into your game?

[Bel-Torac]

What's the best way to incorporate a characters backstory into your game?

I've dmed hardcover games/modules and it's the first time I'm creating my own campaign. It will be a Tal'dorei/Ravenloft campaign. Players will get the chance to enter different domains of dread as they explore the lands.

[strangebloke]

I think there are three keys here:

Set limitations as to what they can select.
Still allow a high degree of customization.
limit how much information they can give you, but also require a certain amount from them.


The typical problem with "backstories," I find, is that players either give you nothing ("I'm bob the fighter im a mercenary.") or they give you tons of stuff ("Hey, if you want to see what the politics are like in the society of cat people I created, that's on page five.")

IMO, the key here is to demand that they be tied to factions and places in the setting. Don't let them make up some completely novel thing. Don't let them just be totally vague on the topic.

Typically, what I do is I say, "Okay, you're starting in this city. Here's some local information and history and a list of important persons and organizations you might be affiliated with. Now fill out this questionnaire."

Here's the questionnaire I use:

Front-Facing Backstory
This information will be available to everyone, and represents how your character would be seen by most members of the starting village of Whitford-on-Devan. As such, it is possible that you can put incorrect information here if you are hiding something from the village. (IE, you appear to be a merchant but are actually a smuggler) Do put something in each blank, but you can be as terse or as flowery as you like. Please send me questions if you have any.

Race:

Age:

Appearance:

Family/Guardians:

Background/Occupation:

Associations(groups or persons you would be known to associate with):

General/Other:

Secret Backstory:
This information represents stuff that not everyone would know about your character.

Greatest Fear:

Greatest Regret:

Something your character doesn’t know about themselves:

History(this is the free response section):

The front-facing backstory will be available to anyone who wants to look.

Then, after the fact, I'll write up a page of secret stuff about things that relate to their backstory that they don't know about. IE, the brother that they don't like has become a warlock and is working for a rival organization.

[DMThac0]

Generally I let my players have fun with their backstories, read them over, and then adjust anything that is not a fit for the game we're playing.

"Aerik's father was drafted into the king's army, after 3 months he and his mother got the news that his father had fallen in battle. Aerik became the man of the house, though it was a large farm and took a lot of work. When he became of age his mother left, she joined a nunnery, the loss of her husband never truly passing. Aerik tried to keep the farm running, but eventually it became too much work and he lost it. Forced to move, Aerik found himself in Daggerford alone, poor, and without a place to sleep. He became a street urchin and fell in with some shady people, thieves, burglars, and even assassins. He eventually was approached to become an assassin, he was considered a good fit due to hunting on the farm. His conscience wouldn't allow him to do it, so he stuck to theft and eventually got caught. A group of rangers had set camp outside Daggerford, Aerik set out to steal their coin thinking to earn prestige by making them his mark. They caught him and explained that he had a choice, join their ranks or be turned in for theft, an easy choice for Aerik as this life in Daggerford weighed heavy on him. He became a ranger and has been hunting the undead ever since."

This type of backstory opens the doors to so many different possibilities. The trick is to find places in your world where pieces of this backstory can come to life. Some of it writes itself into the world, other pieces you can just drop in whenever you feel it's applicable.

-The nunnery that his mother joined can be placed anywhere in the world. You simply have the party come across it during one of their quests.
-The thieve's guild that Aerik left could be looking to punish him for leaving as he did. Thieve's guilds exist all over the world, you can have "wanted" posters, bounty hunters, and rival guilds looking to bring Aerik in for rewards.
-The rangers could pop up randomly throughout the world to aid in a quest, give information, guide them through dangerous territory, or simply a random encounter for RP fluff.

You don't have to get very deep either, so long as you start the ball in motion the player(s) will almost always keep it moving. Listen to how they interact during those preliminary scenes and set up the subsequent ones to touch on the good and bad that they bring up.

---

I have a player who was almost impossible to get invested in a character arc that wasn't specific to his desire. His desire was something that couldn't happen for many, many levels. I tried to do smaller arcs to get him invested in something different as filler, but it was not easy. Eventually I got a hook in him, I was just doing something cheesy to get him some better gear, but he took it and actually started to talk about changing his character. He decided to multi-class to really latch on to this "cheesy plot hook" I created. He decided to RP his anger at the situation, his delight in finding a new toy, and he created the foundation for a character arc.

You never really know what will truly capture your players, so just throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks :)

[Corran]

Backstories on their own are not important imo. They can be worth it if they can highlight or justify a character's motivations. A successful backstory is thus one that matches interestingly your character's motivations both with what the DM is throwing at the party and with the motivations of the other pc's. If your character's motivations are simple enough (I am out for gold, or for power, or for glory, or because I am bored), that means you can work with almost anything. If you want sth more convoluted, work with everyone else (mainly with the DM), so that you end up playing and enjoying what you are thinking of (meaning, try to judge beforehand if it will work, to spare yourself the potential disappointment along the road).

Backstories can sometimes contribute to world building, particularly if the DM is using a game world of their own. I know I'd need all the help I could get for slowly filling up a whole world, though having a base to work with (provided by a player's ideas about a particular place in that world) could definitely be helpful.

ps: I make a point to never ever ever design anything (well, anything important) around a pc's backstory when dm'ing. And equally, I wouldn't play a character around which anything campaign related was designed. This approach creates a safety net (or the illusion of a safety net) around such characters, which is something I don't enjoy whatever I am playing (be that the DM, the character in question, or a completely different character).

[MoiMagnus]

For my last D&D campaign as a player, we essentially started with no backstory (well, a very quick description of who we are, some of us giving a little more details), and we added them to the universe progressively

The campaign was divided in 3 narrative acts.

After few sessions, the DM asked from each of us that we started going deeper in our background.

While he didn't said it explicitly, he wanted to obtain from us a personalised madness (paranoia, ...) he could use when we were under mental influence (giving us secret commands on how to adapt our RP) at the end of act 1.

During Act 2, he asked more details from us. He wanted from each of us either a problem unresolved, an old enemy, a deep regret, a big mistake from our past, so that he could build a side quest out of it.

During Act 3, he asked again more details, this time linked to our aspirations as characters, and what we would want to be remembered for in the universe. And gave us the opportunity to release our character's dreams as we were reaching the last levels.