I've been thinking about character backgrounds again.
The perceived wisdom is that a 'good' character background should answer such questions as: what family does the character have? who were your parents? where are they now? do you have any siblings? are you married?
And so on.
On the other hand, if one looks at shows like Buffy/Angel, Star Trek, Babylon 5, and the like, which tend to have a lot of wisdom to offer RPGs, they tend not to have fully developed character backgrounds from day one. There is always some flexibility, so that you can introduce new characters. Suddenly, Angel has vampires whom he has sired. Troi's mother shows up (and a hundred fans cry out in dismay). Sheridan just happens to have an ex-wife who can come in and replace Ivanova.
Perhaps the quest when creating backgrounds should be to aim for a comfortable middle ground. Where something is important to the character, it needs stated, of course (we need to know that Giles is a Watcher from England, that Wesley's father died under Picard's command, and that Garibaldi has been bounced from one job to the next). When something isn't important, though, it should probably be left blank.
This allows the player to bring in elements that he hadn't thought of at day one (oh, yes, my father had business dealings with the Knights of Malice. Perhaps one of his friends can sponsor my petition for entry?). It gives hooks for new PCs to come in (Your brothers are dead. I've been sent to take you home for the funeral.). And it give the DM all sorts of leeway for evil plots (Obi-wan never told you what happened to your father...).
Of course, there need to be some ground rules:
1) The player can't bring in something relevant to the current situation without DM approval. It's one thing for a character's merchant father to have had shady dealings in the past; it's entirely another for that character's father to have saved the life of the crime-boss who is in the process of roasting the rest of the party.
2) The DM shouldn't be consistently evil when using the empty spaces. Otherwise, next time the player will either provide a background with no empty spaces, or will just not have a background at all.
I think every PC should have at least a basic background with some their family history (like "my father is a noble lord" or whatever) and then can work with the DM to flesh out the story in-game when required so that a background won't ruin a campaign.
ReplyDeleteI think this works best in situations where the main campaign is a published one so that if a certain situation is required the DM can discuss bringing in the history with a player to help in the next weeks session.
Being evil with background stories is one of the thing's that really annoys me though if it happens too often so a DM should always keep a balance between good/bad events happening to a PC because of it.