You're Doing It Wrong: Using Character Backstories In Your Game
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 16 มิ.ย. 2024
- First I came for the players, now I come for the GMs.
Struggling with player backstories and their roll in your game? You're probably doing it wrong.
That's OK, I'm here with the tips and tricks - เกม
Good video and good timing. I’m starting a new campaign with three people I’ve played with before and two newbies. I’ve been looking for a way to get everybody on the same page with backstories, and I think that a loose template and a thumbnail sketch of the campaign beforehand might make life easier for everybody.
The more you reveal about your me the easier backstories get... But it's also a balancing act, you don't want to give it away either.
@@drivinganddragons1818 generally how much should one reveal in order to balance between making backstories easy but also not spoiling the adventure?
@@displayter.2095 that's the million dollar question isn't it. Honestly, that's going to vary alot from table to table and campaign to campaign but generally you can reveal a lot more than you think without ruining the surprise.
Its like the "players aren't as smart as you think" principle when it comes to traps and puzzles. It seems more obvious to you because you know all the twists already, but to them it's not obvious until it's too late.
I guess this comment fits better in the previous video, but whatever, I'm assuming every comment helps. Your gnome hating dwarf reminded me of another one of Seth Skorkowsky's skits. It's one with two versions. One where the players wait for the GM to make their backstory relevant and one where the players use their backstories to shape their characters' moment to moment actions instead. I mean, writing a good backstory as a player and then having the DM work it into the game works best when players make use of those elements all the time, and it allows the players to use the backstory elements that the DM doesn't work into major events. Putting the onus on the player to make use of their backstory saved me from a terrible evening. I'll put the story in a reply so it doesn't clutter up this comment. Maybe you could talk about using your backstory as a player as an addition to the last two videos. I'm sticking around whether you do or don't. I just thought it would fit thematically with the recent topics.
Here's the story: I was invited to a New Year's Eve party where the main entertainment was to be a 5E module that came with level 1 premade characters. The host was DMing, and it was his first time running a game. The party attendees would all be playing. When I showed up the players were his daughter who was playing D&D for the first time, my brother who is experienced but doesn't like to take center stage (this will be relevant later), and me. Everyone else bailed on the event.
I realized very quickly that we were in for a rough night as the new DM was having trouble keeping us engaged. Every player was soon staring at their character sheet unless they were directly interacting with the DM. I had just enough experience as a DM myself to know that we needed something, a hook of some kind, to rally around to get people invested in what was happening in the game. I need something to prime the pump of my creativity, so I started skimming the provided character sheet for anything I could use to get me started. I discovered that the character sheet had a filled in backstory, and the character I was playing was looking for a fabled golden pyramid. That's when I remembered Seth's skit about how it was my job to play my backstory instead of waiting for the DM to play it for me.
This pyramid had nothing to do with the provided module, but I started acting like everything was either a clue or an obstacle on my characters _grand quest._ I was asking every NPC if they had heard of the pyramid. I offered the orcs a chance to escape from combat if they would give me clues to its location. I had my character ask the other characters if anything they found when searching rooms looked like it could be a book or map that would hold clues to the whereabouts of the pyramid. When my HP were low in a trap filled room and the other players suggested caution, I vowed to never give up until my search was complete and pushed on.
It was just stupid little stuff that I could insert into the game any time things were slowing down to keep my engagement up and to try to keep people's attention focused on what was happening. Once my brother got over his initial confusion at my sudden transformation from bored generic fighter to questing hero, he had his character start helping in my character's search for clues or quipping that my character would never make it when I flubbed my skill checks. That allowed us to get some in-character banter going when the DM was looking stuff up that helped us to keep engaged and keep the energy level at the table up. We never did manage to fully get the daughter's attention away from her phone.
I'm not saying I single handedly saved the session or anything like that, but I did save _my_ evening and kept my brother from dying of boredom. I had a lot more fun as a character who was laser focused on his quest for the golden pyramid than I had been as "generic fighter with great axe" when I first sat down. Either way my character was going to be wandering around a dungeon getting wrecked by traps and bonking orcs, so at least I got to have some fun with it regardless.
Having written it out, I suppose this story is only tangentially about using your backstory. It's more about making sure as a player that you engage with the game instead of waiting for the DM to engage you.
Eh, worth it. "Take responsibility for yourself," is an important lesson to learn in general not just for enjoying D&D, so I don't mind putting out a story to support that. If more people took responsibility for their own entertainment and followed the basic social rule of "Don't be a dick" which solves so many other problems people seem to be having, there'd be less crappy D&D advice channels out there because there wouldn't be an audience for them. That'd make it a lot easier to find content with actual quality and useful advice.
@@CowCommando those last two paragraphs certainly hit the bullseye.
It certainly does sound a lot like Seth... Mainly because there really isn't that much to being good at TTRPGs. The dark and horrible secret of the hobby is that there really isn't that much you need to do to have a good time, it's not that complicated so the good advice that's there just gets rehashed in different ways, or in this case, we look at the same concept but from a GM perspective instead of a player perspective.
I seem to recall a quote that was something to the effect of "if the players ever realize that they don't need character sheets, books, or dice to play the game, the business will really be in trouble".