I was a blacksmith when raiders attacked my village...

[JellyPooga]

How much thought or effort do people put into the backstory of their characters?

Most of the players I (like to) game with in my area role-play their characters very well, in regards to having an interesting character and playing to their personality, quirks and foibles, but they always play characters with no real background much beyond "I grew up in a city", "I joined the military at an early age" or the like. Further, they tend not to reflect what little backstory they have, or their characters personalities in their characters game-stats. This means that their characters' stats tend to be nothing more than something to roll dice for (to make it fit whatever game they're playing) and have little bearing, beyond the very basics, on who their character is or was.

On the other hand, I tend to put a lot of thought and effort into creating backstory for my own characters and from this background, I create the personality, quirks and foibles to role-play. I then assign the characters stats based on who the character is now and who the character was then, regardless of whether it makes a "good build" or "powerful character" or whatever (by the way, I'm not trying to say that un-optimal characters are better for roleplaying...just so you don't get the wrong idea).

As a result of this, at least to my mind, by looking at one of my characters' sheets, one could divine much of their history and even some of their personality, to a fair degree of accuracy. The same could not be said for the players I game with. Sometimes, this can get annoying when the effort I've put into crafting (as opposedto just creating) the characters I play is completely ignored. I am the only player I know to have had a character leave a game because I (the player) deemed the game not good enough for that character (in short, it was a hack'n'slash that was supposed to be a RP-heavy...I still played in the game with a new character, but my original character just left the party...everyone else just played the characters they had originally created, because they didn't actually put any effort into their characters from an RP stance). Perhaps it's in part due to bad role-playing on my part (i'm something of an introvert...one reason why most of my characters tend to be introverts or loner types), but it is frustrating nonetheless.

Anyway, the point of all this is to ask how many of you guys put ranks in Profession (herbalist) because that's what your characters mum was and taught you before gnolls killed her in a raid, or Craft (blacksmith) because he was apprenticed to a smith before he was conscripted, or take a level or two of Bard before taking Cleric levels as your main (adventuring) class because you were raised in a tavern and learned to play the flute before you found your faith?

Or am I just being silly by putting stats to backstory?

Thoughts?

JP

[Citizen Joe]

Professionals don't go adventuring... they already have a job. Likewise for craftsmen. Adventurers are literally the dregs of humanity whose only skill seems to be killing green things and taking their stuff. Thus no skills useless in an adventure setting.

Now, it is conceivable to use DND as a ruleset for portraying non-adventurers, but it isn't really geared for that sort of thing.

[Zincorium]

An interesting backstory is always good, a long backstory is not necessarily so. As long as it's helping you get into your character's head and gives an adequate explantion of why you're adventuring, in the general sense and not just for a single specific goal, it's only going to help.


The key point of having a PC class is that you've both had training in that direction and that it's a part of who you are (at least the way D&D is set up). As a paladin, you might be a samurai, a champion of the peasants, or any number of other things, but the fact that you are a warrior serving a cause can't and shouldn't be waved away.

As far as the 'stats that reflect background', it's a fair idea, but it should be practical. A rogue with all his skill points spent on profession and crafting skills may make some sort of sense from a certain perspective, but that character is simply not as suited to dungeoneering as other possible characters. I think the fact that the party keeps that rogue, because they're a PC, rather than tell them to scram and get someone who suits the overall goal better, is a break in verisimilitude and outright metagaming. It goes against common sense, you may love the guy like a brother, but when the hard times come, you're going to want that guy somewhere safe and take along someone you're less likely to lose.

As long as the business of adventuring is taken seriously by the character, no conflicts should arise.

[Dode]

I did, then I realized that my DM would keep trying to hose me using it (ie: fining my family 27000 gp for attempted bed burning in the course of stopping a necromantic ritual), then I stopped.

[Saph]

I generally start with a maximum of one page of backstory for my characters, including personality and description, and sometimes with none at all.

However, as my characters last longer and longer and develop more and more of a personality, I lengthen the backstory and description, sometimes making up extra things, sometimes taking into account what they've done in game.

My longest-running character had four A4 pages of backstory at the time the campaign finally ended, not counting the in-character campaign diary, and you really could tell pretty much everything about her by reading it.

- Saph

[Avor]

Skills NEVER hurt. ie-my rouge, a cold blooded pychopath, started with 2 ranks in craft(basket weaving). Give a huge bonus your bluff check when the city gaurd looks at your party and asks what your going to be doing.

I find it better to make something, then find a story for it.

I made my character, put in that lame move, then said he learned it from his aunt before he left his family.

[Ascension]

I generally put together the stats I want and then create backstory to fit it. I've already explained the over-complicated backstory of my current character twice on these forums, so I won't do it again, but suffice it to say that when I multiclass (rogue/scout in this case) I put extra effort in justifying the choice. "Dips" are great for optimization, but without a good bit of justification they make for unbelievable backstories.

Basically what I would say is that a build that is mechanically simple needs only a simple backstory, but a complex build needs a similarly complex backstory. Some PRCs even enforce this with non-mechanical requirements for entering the class.

[Grug]

I once played a fighter that used a long sword and nothing else. He had always dreamed of growing up in the military, and was very military minded. He got Knowledge: War. Also: He sold his own sister into indentured servitude to pay his way through military school.

[Cybren]

I try not to write out a detailed character background because I don't want to subject the DM to cliched amateur fantasy hour. That said I will take a profession or craft skill if i can fit it. Some classes have greater need for their skill points than others, after all.

[Chronos]

If it's just a one-shot adventure and I don't already have a character made, I'll just decide "I want to play a ranger", or whatever, and toss together a suitably generic backstory (abandoned as an infant, raised by the old hermit in the woods, took up adventuring when old hermit was killed by bugbears). But if it's a character I expect to be doing anything significant with, I'll start with the backstory, and then build the stats to match. In fact, I'll do this sometimes even when I'm not expecting to play any time soon, so I've currently built up something of a backlog of characters waiting to be played. One advantage to building characters story-first like this is that they're more translatable that way: If I find myself in a 4th edition game, I'll probably just be able to dust off one of my reserve characters and play em.

[mabriss lethe]

I try to blend a little of both backstory and optimization into a character when I put one together.

I have an idea about how I want the character to play. I'll then fill in the numbers to best express that. I'll usually select some feats and a general idea on what skills they focus on first, then start working on attributes and the like. As the numbers start filling out, I tend to refine the backstory further. a tweak here or there to reflect what I'm trying to accomplish. Then go back to shuffling numbers, then refining story, rinse and repeat until I have a character I like. They're hardly ever fully optimized, unless that optimization is to cover some rather obscure niche I want them to fill while still being useful as a whole. (lots of my characters tend to fall into the "obscure and arcane past-times" niche.) What they do may not be the best way to do things, but they'll be the best that I can make them at their style of play.

[Erom]

I think it has to depend on what kind of campaign you are showing up too. If one of my players showed up to one of my 5-6 session mini-campaigns with more than two sentences of backstory, I don't care, won't give them a chance to tell me, and want to get my damn game started. In general, I think playing DnD well is a _lot_ easier than good writing, so unless you're a published author, take your long backstory to a different campaign.

[Stormcrow]

Each person has their own ability to consider. I have a player who provides his bio's in point form because he isn't good at writing. He's still a good player...

This thread gives me mind to take a whole party of Blacksmith's from different villagers that were attacked by raiders.

[Fhaolan]

I tend to work both ways from the middle. Some people do backstory, then stats, some people do stats, then backstory. I do personality, then stats and backstory simultaneously. What would it take to get to this personality, and what effect would that have on his skills/feats/etc?

Then many times I pick a feature, like an unusual race, or a class I haven't done in a long time, or something along that lines, and build around that. It depends on the game. Some games it's not worth putting a lot of thought into it, because likely your character is going to open door #3 and just fall over dead for no apparant reason. Such is life.

[Talya]

I took a feat because of my character background (Harem Trained.) Also wasted two caster levels (2 bard, 6 sorceror, 6 heartwarder) thanks to it being appropriate to the background.

[GammaPaladin]

I generally pick a race and class, not a specific build, but a general idea of what I want him to be able to do, and then come up with a backstory that fits it, and then build the actual character.

[Mut]

Fun topic.

Lots of variation in how people go about it. Personally, I like to have a decent idea of where the character is coming from and how they act, but to keep my options open so that the PC can be fleshed out in play. Stuff that sounds cool in the abstract may just plain not work with a particular setting, party, or group of players, so sometimes I have to let things go. And no matter what's written on a notebook or character sheet, what really matters is how the character is played and how the other PCs react to them -- the first couple of role-playing sessions are what really establishes the character.

(An example: I played a PC who was, in a nutshell, the world's smartest, weakest fighter. His charisma was through the roof, too. His background was as a squad leader from the army of his human kingdom, and I had this vision of him as a tactical genius and a great leader. A nice idea, but it turned out that the other PCs were a gnome and a wild elf -- not the best-suited for orders and discipline -- and his first, defining interactions with them were based around his naivety and cultural ignorance of anything non-human. So he went in a completely different direction.)

While there's something to be said for basing the crunchy part of the character design around the concept, I think it's OK (and even kind of fun) to work in the other direction, too -- in the terms of the OP, putting ranks in Profession(Herbalist) and deciding on that basis what business his family was in. Or even, in a flash-back to first edition, rolling up the stats in order and building the character around them. Having something concrete like that as a skeleton can spur the creativity.

[Renegade Paladin]

When I sit down to write a backstory, it almost always turns into a novel in very short order, sort of like this. I therefore only do it for long-term characters; all the others get a page of scribbled notes.

[Snadgeros]

Quirks are what drive me. I refuse to play any character until I have an interesting and fun way to roleplay him. For example, my half-orc monk/drunken master was a raging alcoholic who was depressed when sober. My human sorcerer was a hippie/conspiracy theorist with a d100 sheet of possible conspirators (rolling that thing was always hilarious).

In general, I pick a class first, and a quirk to go with it. I won't make the character until I'm sure there's a fun and unique way to roleplay it (insane, egocentric, overly confident, etc.). Race, stats, feats, skills, etc. are decided later, with a bit of min/maxing, but no cheese.

I choose classes I like and that seems fun to play, which might be why I love monks (unarmed combat is COOL) and hate wizards (blech...paperwork).

Once I have the crunch done, I build a personality around that, making sure that the quirk I created is the central motif. If he has high charisma, I'll make him talkative and forceful in personality. If his wisdom is low, he'll struggle to make connections between himself and what's going on.

None of this ever affects my in-combat actions, and I still play competently, but when roleplaying, I'll try and stick to my created personality.

Backstory, however, is dead last. I make it last minute, in about half an hour, and build it around the character and personality I've already made. Usually it's just a summary of his motives and a description of how he got this way (why is he a monk? how did he get 19 str? what made him lawful neutral?)

[rockdeworld]

Heh. I started reading this thread because the topic is essentially what I used for my first RP character, who came back to find his town burned to the ground, forged weapons, became an assassin and was hence known as a scourge to his enemies. It's a favorite of mine, I guess because I love playing assassins (not the DnD assassin - I mean assassins in general RPs).

As far as my character sheets go, the sheet matches the backstory, but it doesn't define the backstory. I might pick a class I like and make a character of that class, give him/her stats, skills (including spells), feats, and lastly items appropriate for what I think the class/character should have for optimization, then I'll make a backstory to support the character I have.

I think Saph has the right idea about backstories - you don't want a backstory to be too long, especially when a "short" backstory for you means 1 paragraph of 3 sentences or so. Generally when I make a character's backstory, I do a basic overview of his/her life - going into more specific detail for the more important parts, even to the point of having a miniature story in the backstory for critical points in my character's life.

I also tend to make backstories longer or shorter depending on how much experience the character has. For a 1st level character this usually means "not much," but take for example an 11th level character I recently created. His backstory is... really long (I don't know exactly how Saph measures hers), because he has a lot of story to tell - how he first recognized his psionic powers, how he joined the army, how he became a general, and how he got to where he is now. I don't normally spend anywhere near this much time on just one character sheet, but I felt like this guy deserved it.

This isn't to say that a higher level character should necessarily have a much longer backstory - indeed, many higher level characters' backstories can be summarized in 1 word: training. However, I feel that a backstory should help other players, the DM, and even you better understand your character, to get a feel for how your character would act so that even if you traded places they could perform the part of your character reasonably well compared to how you yourself would act - although this might be discouraged for other reasons

Also: 1 very important thing about backstories (perhaps the most important) is that they should never be tedious or boring to the reader. No one wants to read a dull backstory

So that's my take, hope you found it at least somewhat enlightening

[SoD]

As long as it's helping you get into your character's head and gives an adequate explantion of why you're adventuring, in the general sense and not just for a single specific goal, it's only going to help.

I disgree with the general/specific. I sometimes find my characters backstories to be a mix of general and specific.

For instance, my goblin warmage//swashbuckler wants to train to become a paladin (general) and, someday, wants to find Prators Sheild (specific).

[Chronos]

Also: 1 very important thing about backstories (perhaps the most important) is that they should never be tedious or boring to the reader.

This assumes that there is a reader. When you introduce a new character to the other guys at the gaming table, you give them about two sentences or so... There's no need to recite the character's entire history. But if it's there, and you know it, bits and pieces of it will surface naturally over the course of a campaign. It doesn't have to be all at once, and it's fine if some things never come up, but I find it helps tremendously to have them there.

[Zincorium]

I disgree with the general/specific. I sometimes find my characters backstories to be a mix of general and specific.

For instance, my goblin warmage//swashbuckler wants to train to become a paladin (general) and, someday, wants to find Prators Sheild (specific).

Er, I think you may be mistaking me. There's nothing wrong with specific goals, but I think you should have general ones as well if you want to have a believable character. You, from your post, have both.

In the above instance, if your character's only goal was to find Prator's shield and you had no other reason for leaving the kobold caves, why on Athas would you be mucking about with all these other adventurers on a completely different errand? It doesn't make much sense.

The desire to be a paladin is your balancing factor, it's why you're out doing any good deeds you get the opportunity to do. And it means you're not going to get bored when the adventure isn't focusing on Prator's shield, because you have a legitimate reason to be where you are (presumably).

[horseboy]

The problem being that D&D mechanics don't really support characters, they support killing monsters. In other systems, I'll do much more back story.

[valadil]

I tend to go for longer backstories than the rest of you, but I write pretty well and my GMs usually encourage it. One page is the bare minimum for my character history.

I like to give a paragraph to the biographical information. That stuff is important, but doesn't come up all that often. Most of my time is spend telling a narrative of how the character got where he is right before game start. It really helps me feel out the character and figure out how to play him. A lot of the time I have trouble finding the correct voice when I'm new to a character. This has always frustrated me since I'm expected to make a first impression when I hadn't even figured out the character for myself yet. An in depth backstory with lots of dialog helps solve that problem.

[Morty]

I personally don't tend to write long backstories for my chracters. I usually come up with a brief story that describes my character's upbringing, goals, personality, likes/dislikes, how did he or she get his/her training and why did s/he went on adventuring. I prefer to define my character by what the character does in game, and I'm also lazy. That only applies to 1st level characters of course. When I was rolling a 5th level Goblin Beguiler, I had to describe how did he get those levels.

[MorkaisChosen]

I tend to think of a cool concept (i.e. feminist knight, Mind Flayer Paladin of Freedom), then think about the background they'd need to get there. After the background's done I grab a couple of thematically-appropriate skills and stuff (that Knight I mentioned has 2 ranks in Knowledge: History, despite it being cross-class and not having all that many to play with, because she was fascinated by stories of her incredibly heroic ancestors as a child). They are often a bit generic-fantasy, but they exist- there's always some reasoning behind it.

OK, the Mind Flayer PoF (haven't played it yet, but I want to...) is a bit difficult, but I've got some ideas for that!

[Rutee]

I concur with Morkai's Chosen. I tend to start with the concept, then create a backstory after that. And they have an annoying tendency of being gargantuanly long. You know what they say, brevity is the soul of wit. Regardless, I tend to make the mechanics reflect the character, and the character reflect hte mechanics. It's a two way street for me, with the concept and mechanics mingling together to form a coherent whole at the end.

[Ceaon]

I always play history- and RP-heavy characters, but that usually doesn't get in the way of building a strong character.

I've played a loner - an introverted ex-disciple of a Green Dragon looking for a new Dragon to gain power from, who had a very high charisma, despite never engaging in much of the conversations except for a rare snide remark or short comment on opposing everything that has been said by others. Even though his high charisma was useless in combat, he was still a powerful character. Because he was a succesful mercenary, I had an excuse to make him as powerful as he could get, because that was what he would want to achieve. I turned him into a grappling, tripping and slashing machine of capture and/or death.

I've also played a powerstripped Wee Jas, trapped in a mirror, functioning as a genie. Great roleplaying since she was too proud to tell others she once was a goddess, and yet because of her high charisma, others wanted to know everything about her. A wizard/sorcerer/ultimate magus build, that, because of some smart build choices, was still powerful even though she had a level adjustment because of her level 0 Divine status.

What I'm trying to say is, one can make a character with interesting roleplay capabilities and a brilliant history that still make fun characters to play with in combat situations. I have never created the perfect example of this, and I doubt anyone ever will. But I feel that every player should try to aim for a RPable combat master with a very rich history, whose abilities ingame reflect his personality and history. Of course, some people create powerhouses and have fun with that, others play Othello's or other RP-heavy characters and have fun with that.

But I think the 'best' character is one that combines RP, history and power.

Anyway, just my 2 cents.

[/ramble]

[Chronos]

The problem being that D&D mechanics don't really support characters, they support killing monsters. In other systems, I'll do much more back story.

Why would you need any rules to support backstory? I'm picturing something like "Characters with the Orphaned trait can purchase the Burning Desire for Revenge motivation at a cost of only one background point, as opposed to the normal two-point cost for that motivation." The rules cover combat and not backstory because combat needs rules, and backstory doesn't.