Why meatgrinders are terrible for creating backstory

[Quertus]

For the OP: while your taking the initiative to get that discussion out of the thread it was bogging down is appreciated, telling other people that what they do is badwrongfun is bad form.

If you tell me that you enjoy stabbing your eye with a pencil, I might look at you oddly, ask “are you sure?”, etc. But if you tell me that you’re getting smarter, and it’s because of your hourly regimen of pencil eye stabs, if you state that there is a causal relationship between stabbing yourself in the eye and getting smarter, then you can expect some “citation needed” pushback on that “because”.

Same thing here.

I’m questioning - or, having questioned in the parent thread, I’m rejecting - the notion that a meat grinder can *cause* backstory.

If the discussion of “party cohesion” carries over to this thread, then I’ll reiterate/revise my reasons for believing that a meat grinder is a suboptimal tool for those purposes, as well.

What about prologues and flashbacks? We routinely use them.

There are also systems out there that encourage you to develop backstory in play. Savage Worlds uses Dramatic Interludes, which is a system for when the protagonists are just sitting around having downtime by the fire. One of them tells a spontaneously-invented-by-the-player story about their past (there's random tables to help generate these if wanted) - say, a story of someone they loved but lost. The player may have never thought about their character's romantic past, but then decide on the spot that their character's suddenly-invented old girlfriend Clarice dumped them to go pursue a sailor's life of adventure on the high seas. The player gets a Hero Point, the PC now has a new NPC that can be introduced in the game, and the character might develop personality traits like hating sea travel from it.

There's more than one way to spin a backstory. I have players that show up with anywhere between 'lovingly written multi-page document with family connections' to 'in-character journal explaining my character' to 'I'm a Fighter with a Greatsword'. The third one tends to require more drawing out, but it doesn't automatically have to equal a poor character in play.

Requirements on what characters you can bring, like “you all hate the empire”? Perfectly reasonable, even if they do get a bad rap from GMs who expect inadequate or even unrelated requirements to do all the heavy lifting of adventure buy-in and party cohesion.

Flashbacks? If you want, I’ll wax on for hours about Quertus’ past. During a blizzard, when most of the players were wise enough to skip the session, I once spent a whole session just roleplaying characters on watch having a conversation. Existing characters with long histories with other groups, who has never really talked to one another before. Good times, no post hoc invention required.

“Why” questions? One of the best groups for roleplaying I’ve played with was big on (to paraphrase) “the version of your character who lives in my head would have done X. You did Y. Why did you do Y instead of X?”

Developing backstory in play? Really not my cup of tea.

However, imagine if, every time you say down around the campfire at end of session, half the PCs dropped dead, and then the (other?) players told backstory events. Would that add to the value of the post hoc backstory generation?

Time played isn't story, it's experience. Backstory is, by it's very nature, a story. There's a difference between the two,

The long and short of it is anything written down about a character in advance of bringing them to the table doesn't actually 'exist' yet. It's only once it's revealed or impacts a player decision at the table that it 'exists' and is actually a part of that character. Before then it's all just theoretical.

Although I liked the juxtaposition of “story vs backstory”, I think that your wording of “backstory vs experience” is more accurate.

As to the myth that backstory doesn’t exist until it comes up, I can only say that, if I’m roleplaying Batman, the fact that his parents died in front of him blah blah blah almost certainly informed the nuisance of every decision, from the moment that the curtain rises, and he answers (or has Alfred answer) his front door. The moment I take my first action - or my first inaction - my backstory is already “in play”.

As I mentioned in the original thread, whether or not starting with a meatgrinder is a good idea (I'm not sure it'd be for me, but I can see some of the appeal) I don't see how it could possibly be replacing a backstory or somehow providing a reason for the party to stick together any more than any other intro adventure.

That’s… pretty much my stance, in much more accessible language.

Or you could just take a regular introduction adventure and get the same bondingexperience out of it. Even more as you don't need any "trickle down attachment".

Yeah, I agree that “meat grinder” and “attachment” aren’t usually used in the same sentence the way that line of thought requires.

Frankly, this is a strawman argument. You can't expect a meatgrinder to somehow magically solve all of your problems with backstories ever - it's a tool, and like any tool, it has a time and a place and can be used badly. If you use it badly, well, of course it doesn't work. You can hammer a nail in with a screwdriver, but it won't be easy and will leave you frustrated and your screwdriver cracked.

If you want to run a meatgrinder, all of the people thrown into it need to have a barebones backstory - this is usually "well, I was a carpenter and got conscripted" and left at that. Does that count as backstory? Technically yes, in the DnD sense of two pages with a short novella on them, not really.

Is it just story? Technically yes, but in the sense of "these are the characters I got attached to as a player and want to see their story through", not really. Everyone is just a random gremlin, and it is their survival in this grinder that will at least start to build player attachment. Provided the players are on board with the idea.

It's like complaining that skill checks are a terrible idea because you need to roll them for everything all the time - if you are using them that way, you are using them wrong and shouldn't be surprised they don't work.

Citation needed on what using the tool right looks like. (For clarification, that’s “playing through a meat grinder” “to create backstory”)

(As a corollary, you have to try a method more than once before passing final judgement on it. This very basic principle seems lost on many people.)

I’ve got a new method for increasing productivity that involves chopping off limbs. You sure you want to try it a few times before passing judgement?

But that misses the… subtleties of my statement of having a character die once in backstory. The trick was, everyone can, in theory, imagine how bad it was to have a character die in backstory, even if it only happened once. Now expand that to a meat grinder, where the *expectation* is that it will happen repeatedly. And the question becomes, what can a meat grinder possibly do for backstory that makes it worthwhile? If I told you to bring 4 characters, because we were going to play through their backstories, and, even then, only about half the players will end the “backstory” session(s) with a surviving character, would you really say, “this sounds like a great way to make backstory!”?