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Made in de
Battlefield Tourist






Nuremberg

Likewise, I don't mind if they have backstories but the expectation that I will do the legwork for them I am resistant to.

   
Made in us
Been Around the Block




 Da Boss wrote:
Likewise, I don't mind if they have backstories but the expectation that I will do the legwork for them I am resistant to.

I understand the collaborative experience as the player cannot expect substantially more effort from the GM then the players put it. Too often a backstory only locks a character's growth down by having completed some or all of it before starting game or has poor relevance if not outright conflicting with the campaign. However, having character goals and ambitions is important to having an arc to give the give the character more life than a recurring extra. This comes from the character's back story but must fit the theme and scope of the game or it becomes a distraction. The best wisdom I have found on that subject is as follows
Either before play begins, or after the first session, create a personal arc for your character, as seen at the end of this section. This is a series of brief suggestions your GM will use to weave an ongoing subplot around your character.

Your personal arc is a narrative hook around which your GM will weave occasional subplots. Over the course of a series, these stories will connect up to deepen, develop, and possibly change your character. Alternately, they might challenge PCs in ways that threaten to change them for the worse. When they overcome these challenges, they prove their heroism by remaining true to their essential selves.

Most contemporary procedural shows use personal arcs to fill out their characters over time. You know the formula even if you haven’t thought about it as such. While the full ensemble of characters tackles the problem of the week, the issues raised by that problem take on a particular relevance for one or two of the cast members. The personal story adds emotional impact to the problem of the week. Over time, as new personal stories build on past ones, the viewer sees a broader narrative linking the episodes.

Format your arc as follows:
1. A brief sentence or phrase expressing your character’s most important goal.
2. (Optional) A second sentence showing how this goal relates to the character's internal conflict between altruism and selfishness.
3. A brief sentence or phrase suggesting an introductory subplot featuring your character.
4. Another subplot that builds on the idea introduced in the previous one.
5. A third subplot concept, again building on the others.

As GM brings your ideas into play, you’ll periodically update your arc list to replace them.

For each of your three subplots, introduce an idea that is specific enough for the GM to latch onto, yet vague and open enough that you’ll still be surprised by the way it unfolds. If you're having trouble writing them, find a set of TV listings. Check out the one or two sentence episode summaries for a show you follow. See how they lay out the premise of the episode without revealing its conclusion. That’s what you’re shooting for here: the basic situation that brings your goal into play and gets your personal story rolling. How it ends up is up to you, the other players and the GM, as you make the story in the course of play.

Personal arcs are a vehicle for you to transmit story requests to your GM. They don’t allow you to circumvent the rules to get more stuff for your character or ship or to secure other
unearned benefits, If you try, you may discover that you have a sympathetic GM. This GM will work with you to remove your attempt to hose the rules, and find an equivalent idea that does fit the spirit of the concept.

On the other hand, you might find that you have a cunning GM, who gives you what you want, and then uses it as a way of getting you into trouble. In the end, you’ll face this interesting trouble, only to have the advantage you were looking for yanked away from you.
   
Made in de
Battlefield Tourist






Nuremberg

For that style of game (which I am totally cool with and I don't think it is bad) I think that is a great way to organise things. Having some structure to it helps keep the players on track.

But I dunno. Maybe I'll be up for it again in a few years but at the moment I'm more in the mood for people who want treasure and adventure, not people who need me to include NPCs they've invented or make the world revolve around them to some extent. Especially since I've found it really difficult to get my play groups to understand that D&D is a group game, and making your character in isolation like you are writing a short story about them is a ticket to an unsatisfying game. It's much more important to have a backstory for the GROUP than it is for any individual member. But most D&D games end up with a disparate group of misfits even if you try to force them to come up with a group backstory. And then each misfit has their own personal goal and quest, I mean at that point why not just go write some fiction about that character? None of that is going to help the game flow in a constructive way and it's all extra mental load for the DM. (I'm really exhausted for a bunch of reasons in my actual normal life so this is definitely colouring my perceptions here. I just want a straightforward game at the moment, just hanging out kicking in doors and beating up monsters.)

Anyway, thanks for that reply. Like I said above, I think the structure you provided is really good and I might use it if I ever perk up and want to have individual plots again.

I thought you guys might get a kick out of this, my newly finished tile sets:


And here's a wizards tower from an adventure module:






The small 2x2s are sculpted in milliput and then cast in resin with magnets inside so they "click" together. The magnets are spherical and so they can always rotate to find their polarity and you don't have to worry about alignment. The bigger tiles are foamboard with magnets in the bottom layer and texture drawn on with a pen and a ball of tinfoil on the top. Water tiles are blank resin or foamboard with acrylic caulk on top over a watery paint scheme. Furniture is mostly mantic, some D&D stuff.

   
Made in gb
Is 'Eavy Metal Calling?





UK

That's really cool, must taken you ages to put together but well worth it! I really need to kick my 3d printer into terrain mode at some point soon and churn out some DnD scatter elements, even though I use map books the 3d elements I did make added a lot.

As for the idea of backstory, I honestly think having one is a dozen times more important for the player than the DM. Sure, as a DM it's nice when a player has put in enough effort to present me a few pages that tie their character into my setting and maybe give me some plot hooks down the line, but really, the reason I consider them necessary at my table, however simple or brief they are, is that character need to know who they are.

I know a lot of people take the route that starting an adventure is what makes your character, but I look at it like this: a 'normal' person doesn't decide that they're going to spend their life chopping up monsters and raiding tombs for a living. Simply by being an adventurer, you're playing someone who sit outside of a 'regular' life and as such, I feel you need to know why that is. There has to be an inciting incident somewhere, and while that can be session 1 of a campaign, it's a hell of a contrivance for the DM to set up why Billy the Sorcerer discovers he can do magic at the exact same time Sally the Barbarian figures out she really likes hitting things with a battleaxe, and Rod the Rogue develops a penchant for stealing things. Session 1 is obviously the inciting incident for this story and the group as a whole, but presumably to have been level 1 in something means at least some effort or lived experience has led you to that point.

Player characters aren't born when they take their first level in a class, and however simple or mundane or dramatic it is, they've lived a life before that moment they decide to solve their problems with spells and swords. Those experiences might have no bearing on the plot whatsoever, but what they will do is inform the way that person acts and sees the world. Even as simple a difference as an urban versus a rural childhood will have a character perceiving things differently, let alone all the usual wackiness of a PC backstory.

A backstory is an anchor, something to which your character's later actions are inevitably tied to, even if it's far removed from the actual plot unfolding. The trick to good roleplaying is being able to quickly and consistently work out how your character responds to the situations around them, and a backstory is your toolkit for that, especially early on. The details you have in your head about where they came from, how they were raised, what they did before the crazy life of an adventurer are the fulcrum around which their actions in the moment are going to pivot.

So ultimately, as a DM I'm every bit as fine with 'I was raised on a farm, and nothing at all weird happened, and I'm just going to wander around the world to get away from it for a bit' as I am with what people generally think of when you say backstory, that almost inevitably involves a lost sibling or an absent parent or a vague prophecy or a shadowy cult or whatever other clichés you want to throw in (sidebar: clichés are great storytelling tools, I'll never knock them). I don't ask that you hand me a novella or a day by day account of your character's tortured childhood, but I do ask that when I say 'who is this character?', you can answer with more than just a gender, race, class, level.

Short version: Steve Rogers can stand alone against Thanos' army because he's a kid from Brooklyn who doesn't like bullies. He was that person long before took 20 levels in Fighter and got a +3 shield.


The caveat to all of this is obviously that for my game, these things really do matter. For a loot-hunting, monster-slaying affair I definitely concede it's a little less important, though even in such a campaign as a player I'd still need some level of background to know who I was playing.

 
   
Made in de
Battlefield Tourist






Nuremberg

The game comes with backgrounds as part of character creation. So I think it's fine to have just class, race, background. My Cleric of Tyr is a Noble, and I decided she has disowned her family because they tried to use her position in the church to get out of difficulty.
That is a very short backstory, but I know who Iudex Camilla is. She's stern and unforgiving, the kind of person so dedicated to the idea of justice that she would disown her own family. But she's still a privileged noble at heart who doesn't really enjoy the rigors of adventuring and secretly yearns for the days of having servants and being clean all the time.
Why is she adventuring? To destroy the Cult of Orcus of course!

I think "I am this class, I used to be this, I became an adventurer because of [reason]" can lead to perfectly satisfying characters. There is no reason for multiple pages of bad fiction, it has no relevance for the game unless you are expecting your DM to read and include it all, which is generally my experience (people constantly guessing that this or that thing is connected to their backstory when it really isn't, because their backstory is not part of the campaign).

This may seem really harsh, but I think the trend toward long backstories is a bit...selfish? Like it excludes the other players from that part of your character. I think a cool group backstory is much more useful at the table to provide a context for the relationships in the group. The foibles of your PC are less important than how and why they are working with these other PCs.

If you give me a 4 page backstory I'm probably going to give it back and ask for a shorter summary, unless you're a great writer. And anything with hidden prophecies and secret royalty is probably not going to be a goer in my campaign unless we discussed it beforehand. Part of this is me not wanting to set up unrealistic expectations for the players - I am probably not going to follow through on that stuff, so you may as well leave it out.

I also think that you can have great roleplaying and character moments in loot hunting and monster slaying games. I'm playing in a game at the moment which is us tackling a megadungeon, and I'd say the quality of the roleplaying is equally good as any plot heavy intrigue game I've played. It might be because all of the players are DMs themselves though.

   
Made in gb
Is 'Eavy Metal Calling?





UK

Funny you mention the 'secret royalty' thing, I've been waiting for a player to come to me with something like that for ages, because the way I see it, that's free plot! Admittedly if you're running a pre-written adventure it's just a burden, but for the kind of game I run I'm perfectly happy for a player to have a Chosen One destiny or an Aragorn-esque path to royalty. At a bare minimum, that character is then chasing something and will actively follow that instead of bumming around taking merc jobs or murderhoboing. You can definitely argue it hogs the spotlight, but I'm lucky enough to have a group that is a) small, so everyone gets plenty of time, and b) happy to have a given character be the focal point of an arc or even a campaign.

I rarely do group backstory, simply because one of the things I enjoy most about early campaign play is watching the players figure out how their various PCs fit together (or don't! I've had lots of fun with fractious early-game dynamics, but then I'm the kind of DM that'll happily let PCs draw swords on one another). It's certainly a useful tool, a campaign I played in last year used it to good effect placing us all as captains in the same army, but that was a level 10 start so we had to have had careers before the game started or it'd be very jarring, and that campaign was very linear with no real room or desire to go chasing personal plots because we had a murderous dragon to track across one of the Nine Hells... In that scenario, the shared origin was necessary, as there was no prior campaign and we were thrown right into the action, but for low-level starts I really do enjoy the 'misfit strangers coming together' angle.

I do agree that if a few lines and the Background trait is all you need to have an idea of who your character is then that's perfectly sufficient, and I'd not quibble with a player that brought that to me. Where I'd draw the line is someone saying that they don't know who their character is, only what they can do, and they'll figure out the personality while playing. That to me is just asking for inconsistency, erratic characterisation and personality retconning unless the player is very good (which, to be fair, I'd trust most of my regulars to be at this point, but fortunately for me they're mostly backstory fans as well). Ultimately, my rule is 'as much or as little as you need to know who your character is'. That can be a sentence or a short story, bullet points or prose fiction, and yes, good or bad in terms of quality. Writing for DnD is not writing a novel or a screenplay, and doesn't have to be nearly as good, just good enough that it gives a bunch of friends something to have fun with. I'll take 20 pages of bad fanfic, in-jokes and pop culture references over just a character sheet or a PC built solely for a mechanical gimmick.


I think I'd disagree with the 'selfish' angle for the most part, as when playing I'm still spectating the stories of my fellow players and a big reveal for them is something I can still very much enjoy, especially if that leads into further narrative impetus or the DM has worked elements of the A plot or other character's B plots into that arc. Again, depends on the campaign and the group, and it can definitely be taken too far (I've been in games where one player and the DM were cooking up so much between them that the rest of us had no chance to do anything of any value, but that's an extreme case and a bad game), but for the most part, for my tastes I'm happy to tag along for someone else's story if that story is good enough. The nature of a party as a group with at least mostly aligned goals and shared interests means that if player A needs to go and resolve some Haunted Past elements, B and C will have at least some reason to go along with it, if only to further the ends of the party. And if it takes the group too far off track, boom, you've got conflict, and conflict is drama, and that's what I'm here for.

You can certainly have good roleplaying without extensive backstory, my point was more about challenging the idea that backstory is for players to give to DMs in exchange for plot tokens, and instead framing it as a toolkit for those early sessions of roleplaying (especially for less experienced players. As you say, a group of long-time players and DMs is going to be much better equipped to improvise). I almost wonder if it'd be less divisive if 'history' was used instead, as I admit 'backstory' does conjure the idea of lazy tropes, player demands and a whole armoury of Chekov's Guns. 'History' is simply 'what happened to this character before now' while 'backstory' does to some imply a necessity for it to serve the fiction and provide setup for future events.

 
   
Made in gb
Witch Hunter in the Shadows





 Da Boss wrote:
If you give me a 4 page backstory I'm probably going to give it back and ask for a shorter summary, unless you're a great writer. And anything with hidden prophecies and secret royalty is probably not going to be a goer in my campaign unless we discussed it beforehand. Part of this is me not wanting to set up unrealistic expectations for the players - I am probably not going to follow through on that stuff, so you may as well leave it out.
I tend to find the best backstories are the ones that make sense of your mechanical choices and drives - the former gives context to help visualise the character and the latter is something the DM can work with to invest the characters in the plot.

Beyond that DMs have to start dealing with how backstory might impact current story and also expectations of players who may want to go off the rails and chase after the things they had written (or worse implied) into their own past...
DM: "the missive of the assassins guild demands compensation in gold or blood..."
Player 1: "I say we run!"
Player 2: "I say we fight!"
Player 3: (shuffles background) "I contact Baron Ulzoras, who is secretly an agent of the guild and who owes my family for saving his son during the Baha’al wars"
DM: "god dammit Dave..."
   
Made in de
Battlefield Tourist






Nuremberg

I think part of the divide, as much as a divide exists, is between people who see RPGs as a story with a narrative structure or a game/simulation that you tell stories about afterwards. I think I fall pretty squarely into the later camp. That doesn't mean I don't like roleplaying, that's part of the simulation to me, but narrative tropes and beats and all that are unimportant to my enjoyment and sometimes detract from it. I don't run games with a "plot" really at all, so sticking one in from a player background would be really weird. (btw, if me saying I don't have a plot makes you assume that my game is all murder hobos and loot, it could be. Sometimes it is, depending on the group. But other times my players engage deeply with the world and the game might seem very much like any plot heavy game, the difference is none of it is planned out in advance, it's an attempt to simulate what would happen in the game world based on the NPCs goals and desires and the actions of the party.)

I didn't used to feel that way, for a long time I would have classed myself as a Storyteller type player. But my tastes have shifted in recent years to the other side of things for whatever reason.

   
Made in us
Shadowy Grot Kommittee Memba






One of the things we're dealing with in our friends campaign currently is a divide between different styles of backstory.

One player has the dnd campaign as her current hyperfixation - writing tons of random backstory for her character, playing her character in side campaigns with other online friends and little, like...dnd minigame stream events? I don't know honestly.

And the other player, basically just wants to play to goof around, has an extremely simple backstory in the vein of "has some family who lived alone in the wilderness after his father deserted from the royal army, but he left to seek some adventure and ended up in the group"

It hasn't really resulted in any kind of tension among the group, but it does make it difficult to make story elements about either of them, ironically enough. For the former player, it's tough to fit anything into the elaborate web of existing backstory, and for the latter it's hard to find anything to grab on to, and when the DM does set something up for them, they just leave that ball RIGHT on the old Tee and ignore it.

Honestly, it's probably best to just let it go and not worry about it. Player A is having a good time basically writing fanfiction that doesn't matter much in game - great, that's fine. There's no expectation that the DM actually read any of it, and it doesn't have much impact on what the group is doing in the present day, so it doesn't matter.

Personally, I think if you're playing a roleplaying game you'll have a hard time avoiding a situation where your players want to be playing distinctive characters in a jumbled misfit group.

That's kind of...the default narrative most RPGs are set up to capture.

"Got you, Yugi! Your Rubric Marines can't fall back because I have declared the tertiary kaptaris ka'tah stance two, after the secondary dacatarai ka'tah last turn!"

"So you think, Kaiba! I declared my Thousand Sons the cult of Duplicity, which means all my psykers have access to the Sorcerous Facade power! Furthermore I will spend 8 Cabal Points to invoke Cabbalistic Focus, causing the rubrics to appear behind your custodes! The Vengeance for the Wronged and Sorcerous Fullisade stratagems along with the Malefic Maelstrom infernal pact evoked earlier in the command phase allows me to double their firepower, letting me wound on 2s and 3s!"

"you think it is you who has gotten me, yugi, but it is I who have gotten you! I declare the ever-vigilant stratagem to attack your rubrics with my custodes' ranged weapons, which with the new codex are now DAMAGE 2!!"

"...which leads you straight into my trap, Kaiba, you see I now declare the stratagem Implacable Automata, reducing all damage from your attacks by 1 and triggering my All is Dust special rule!"  
   
Made in de
Battlefield Tourist






Nuremberg

Again, that's the idea that an RPG is set up to capture a narrative. That is certainly one valid and fun way to play but there are others.

But you are right, people can write their fan fiction and enjoy it. The rub comes only if they get disappointed that it's not included in the campaign or hassle you for that. I'd rather have the latter player at my table because, honestly, they are less work for me. But if the former keeps all the involved backstory as just some interesting flavour or motivation in game without expecting me to read all of it or involve it, then absolutely go ahead.

I think the game is better, and more fun is had, when there is a unifying purpose behind the group. I don't care what it is really, the players can totally decide that themselves. They can be out for treasure or to fight evil or for any number of other motivations. But it's important to have some sort of reason to work together, because I don't tend to run "save the world" style games so there is no plot to push you together.

   
Made in us
Battlefield Tourist




MN (Currently in WY)

Often times, the back story is enough of a hook to let me start "Adventure 1" in the middle of the action like a chase, a fight, needing to escape, arrows/bullets flying everywhere, making a tense exchange, etc.

I also love when a player thinks something is linked to their backstory, even if it isn't. I even like it better when it isn't and the player then invests so much heavier into what is going on.

Support Blood and Spectacles Publishing:
https://www.patreon.com/Bloodandspectaclespublishing 
   
Made in us
Shadowy Grot Kommittee Memba






 Da Boss wrote:
Again, that's the idea that an RPG is set up to capture a narrative. That is certainly one valid and fun way to play but there are others.

But you are right, people can write their fan fiction and enjoy it. The rub comes only if they get disappointed that it's not included in the campaign or hassle you for that. I'd rather have the latter player at my table because, honestly, they are less work for me. But if the former keeps all the involved backstory as just some interesting flavour or motivation in game without expecting me to read all of it or involve it, then absolutely go ahead.

I think the game is better, and more fun is had, when there is a unifying purpose behind the group. I don't care what it is really, the players can totally decide that themselves. They can be out for treasure or to fight evil or for any number of other motivations. But it's important to have some sort of reason to work together, because I don't tend to run "save the world" style games so there is no plot to push you together.


Well yes, obviously there should be some kind of driving force behind why the group stays together, and it's better if it is semi driven by the players desires rather than the plot. In our campaign, initially the DM was massively overwhelmed by the sheer number of canonical playable races in DnD and the players coincidentally only rolled up humans, elves, and half-elves that they decided to start the world out with only humans and elves in it. As multiple players got interested in the charm of the non-human races, the focus of the story began to naturally shift towards finding where and why those different races were hiding out and stopping them from behind enslaved or eradicated.

Initially we had the setup of all being hired on for an exploratory expedition, and we all had to figure out why our character had accepted that job and what position they held within the expedition, with obvious limitations like "you can't declare yourself the leader."

RPGs don't have to be intended to capture a pre-planned narrative in order for people to want to play distinctive characters, though. There's a reason that it's extremely extremely common for RPGs to be set up to allow people to act out "Ensemble Cast" settings like the fellowship section of Lord of the Rings, the death star rescue section of Star Wars, heist movies, crime solving detective teams, superhero teams and the like, and it's extremely uncommon for RPGs to cast players as similar in background and purpose like a unit of standard soldiers (and if they do it's often the sillier types of RPGs like Paranoia)

"A bunch of drastically distinct characters working together for a common goal" is what an RPG is at its core, whether you're using it as a system of rules to totally improvise and see what happen or whether you're approaching it as a way to tell a story set up more in advance.



As an aside, a fun exercise for anyone who likes running RPGs when looking at an arc is the approach in one of my favorite casual RPG systems called Monster of the Week. The way that system has the GM set up the storyline is to plan out one arc at a time, and start by determining "what would happen in the storyline if the players sat around and did literally nothing." If that set of events is uninteresting - you need to up the stakes. If the players are faffing around - well, you've got a plan for how things escalate sitting right there.

"Got you, Yugi! Your Rubric Marines can't fall back because I have declared the tertiary kaptaris ka'tah stance two, after the secondary dacatarai ka'tah last turn!"

"So you think, Kaiba! I declared my Thousand Sons the cult of Duplicity, which means all my psykers have access to the Sorcerous Facade power! Furthermore I will spend 8 Cabal Points to invoke Cabbalistic Focus, causing the rubrics to appear behind your custodes! The Vengeance for the Wronged and Sorcerous Fullisade stratagems along with the Malefic Maelstrom infernal pact evoked earlier in the command phase allows me to double their firepower, letting me wound on 2s and 3s!"

"you think it is you who has gotten me, yugi, but it is I who have gotten you! I declare the ever-vigilant stratagem to attack your rubrics with my custodes' ranged weapons, which with the new codex are now DAMAGE 2!!"

"...which leads you straight into my trap, Kaiba, you see I now declare the stratagem Implacable Automata, reducing all damage from your attacks by 1 and triggering my All is Dust special rule!"  
   
Made in de
Battlefield Tourist






Nuremberg

Hmm, I'll agree that a group of disparate characters working together is how most games end up, but I think this is not actually a good thing or desirable in particular. And I don't think it's really what an RPG is at it's core either, but that might be a pointless debate.

I would say the similar purpose of finding treasure and becoming more powerful is the real motivating factor behind a lot of groups, and I think that is a fine motivating purpose. I've done soldiers or mercenary companies before, siblings and noble families, watchmen or just a Delver's Guild. All of those games were (in my opinion) more satisfying, more fondly remembered by the players than any of the games that were just a bunch of random people coming together.

It very much might be down to my style of game though. In the LOTR or Star Wars, the party is united against a singular, villainous threat. I often don't put something like that in my game directly, or at least, I don't force my players to be in opposition to them. So if there is no unifying threat, there needs to be some other reason to unify.

I'm not saying this to disparage other traditions by the way.

   
Made in us
Been Around the Block




 Da Boss wrote:
Hmm, I'll agree that a group of disparate characters working together is how most games end up, but I think this is not actually a good thing or desirable in particular. And I don't think it's really what an RPG is at it's core either, but that might be a pointless debate.


Characters that stay together because the players stay together to play do not feel engaging. There must be a reason for the party to work together and to be sustainable due to who the characters are. Most systems gloss over this. I have seen it addressed directly in the rule book though

The Ashen Stars setting is designed to address the recurring problems of space opera roleplaying.

Classic space opera setting are hard to translate to roleplaying because they usually organize their ensemble casts along military or quasi-military lines. Chains of command make for clear fictional storytelling, but disrupt the joint decision-making that is the hallmark of an RPG session. Ashen Stars removes this issue by making its protagonists freelance law enforcers who organize themselves cooperatively.


 Da Boss wrote:

I would say the similar purpose of finding treasure and becoming more powerful is the real motivating factor behind a lot of groups, and I think that is a fine motivating purpose. I've done soldiers or mercenary companies before, siblings and noble families, watchmen or just a Delver's Guild. All of those games were (in my opinion) more satisfying, more fondly remembered by the players than any of the games that were just a bunch of random people coming together.


Characters need motivation to keep adventuring instead of playing it safe. Again, I have seen a system address this.

Players sometimes forget that actions that would be foolhardy based on their real-world experience are merely calculated risks in the context of a space opera setting and the action-adventure genre conceits that go with it. Reminding them of this essential context are Drives, motivating factors that propel each Laser into the storyline, hazards be damned. Drives prevent players from making boring, cowardly choices for their characters. They don’t require foolish or suicidal recklessness, just the same degree of courage and initiative you’d expect from a heroic protagonist.

When playing roleplaying games, we sometimes tend to overprotect our characters, who we identify with more directly than we do the lead characters of books or TV shows. This habit can bring the story to a halt as the PCs hunker down and avoid trouble when they ought to be leaping into it with gritted teeth or confident swagger. Even when the GM is able to work around this tendency, it feels discordantly out of step with the sorts of stories that inspire the game. Drives remind us to break this habit. Most of the time, a GM who realizes you’ve slipped into over-cautious mode and are holding up the progress of the story can spur you to action simply by reminding you of the drive. She might explain to you why your drive would spur you to action. Better yet, she could prompt you to explain it.

   
Made in us
Terrifying Doombull




Hiseadmose wrote:
 Da Boss wrote:
Hmm, I'll agree that a group of disparate characters working together is how most games end up, but I think this is not actually a good thing or desirable in particular. And I don't think it's really what an RPG is at it's core either, but that might be a pointless debate.


Characters that stay together because the players stay together to play do not feel engaging. There must be a reason for the party to work together and to be sustainable due to who the characters are. Most systems gloss over this. I have seen it addressed directly in the rule book though

The Ashen Stars setting is designed to address the recurring problems of space opera roleplaying.

Classic space opera setting are hard to translate to roleplaying because they usually organize their ensemble casts along military or quasi-military lines. Chains of command make for clear fictional storytelling, but disrupt the joint decision-making that is the hallmark of an RPG session. Ashen Stars removes this issue by making its protagonists freelance law enforcers who organize themselves cooperatively.


That's... the opposite. A chain of command would actually give a narrative reason, but they've taken it out because it doesn't work for RPGs. 'Organize themselves cooperatively' is literally just 'the characters stay together so the players can play the game'



 Da Boss wrote:

I would say the similar purpose of finding treasure and becoming more powerful is the real motivating factor behind a lot of groups, and I think that is a fine motivating purpose. I've done soldiers or mercenary companies before, siblings and noble families, watchmen or just a Delver's Guild. All of those games were (in my opinion) more satisfying, more fondly remembered by the players than any of the games that were just a bunch of random people coming together.


Characters need motivation to keep adventuring instead of playing it safe. Again, I have seen a system address this.

Players sometimes forget that actions that would be foolhardy based on their real-world experience are merely calculated risks in the context of a space opera setting and the action-adventure genre conceits that go with it. Reminding them of this essential context are Drives, motivating factors that propel each Laser into the storyline, hazards be damned. Drives prevent players from making boring, cowardly choices for their characters. They don’t require foolish or suicidal recklessness, just the same degree of courage and initiative you’d expect from a heroic protagonist.

When playing roleplaying games, we sometimes tend to overprotect our characters, who we identify with more directly than we do the lead characters of books or TV shows. This habit can bring the story to a halt as the PCs hunker down and avoid trouble when they ought to be leaping into it with gritted teeth or confident swagger. Even when the GM is able to work around this tendency, it feels discordantly out of step with the sorts of stories that inspire the game. Drives remind us to break this habit. Most of the time, a GM who realizes you’ve slipped into over-cautious mode and are holding up the progress of the story can spur you to action simply by reminding you of the drive. She might explain to you why your drive would spur you to action. Better yet, she could prompt you to explain it.


That actually sounds awful. The GM has a mechanic that can force you to act against your best interests, and flagellate you into action. Even 'better,' the GM can force you to do a self-flagellation scene where _you_ have to explain to the group why you have to do it. That sounds in line with some of my worst RPG experiences- the Storyteller for a Mage game demanding I give an on the spot presentation about how my character's magic works, and 'I have correspondence 3 and use runes to symbolically connect locations' was an unacceptable answer.

I'm not even sure why its needed, to be honest. Most of my RPG sessions have involved a desperate hope that the party will be sensible instead of charging ahead doing something stupid.
Especially anything involving government officials and heads of state, where players simply assume that their characters can just wander in, be insulting and arrogant and are entitled to get away with it.

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I like the idea of the lore/world building reflecting game reality. Thus, if you cannot have a chain of command in the player party there ought to be an in game acknowledgment and and alternative provide for in to feel "natural" or at least not forced. "This is how adventure's crew ships" instead of "since one of you cannot hold authority over the rest, we'll have to fudge something" The former is more satisfying for me.

Your Mage experience sounds awful. I am well aware that the Mage rule "require" explaining how the effect works within the characters own reality bending paradigm. I feel the storyteller should have worked with the player(s) to develop this earlier, assuming you were not cheesing the rules, given you a pass when you struggle and later help develop the this for you, or made the suggestion/explant it on your behalf. Collocating teleport? You draw circle and a some rune coordinates to create a portal, like a stargate.

GMs using the rules against player is rarely a good thing, after all, any tool can be abused. If the players are cheesing the rules the GM can explain that such does not fit the world and remind players of the RAW consequences if they intend to beat the story story to death with the rulebook.

Forcing or encouraging the PCs to act against self preservation? Depended on the game for me. When one is conducting an investigation, one cannot conduct it executively while laying low, especially when there is a timer. PCs may need help being heroic to face the danger and carry on. The parties I am in get stuck in "thing happened, this is the situation, what do you do?" - "I don't know. What am I supposed to do?" Go out end explore so the plot can find you.

Alternatively, if the PCs are reckless, their inner voice or the force or something, should tell them "this is a bad idea." When the party fails to head the warning, consequences happen and cinematic game over or party wipe and restart. Make a new party, and this one may take notice that the last party is decorating the palisade having insulted the local ruler. To me, this is analogues to, we are playing on continent X, my character gets on a ship to continent Y. That may be a story for another game, but said character has left the scope of the current one an I ma y make a new one if I choose to continue playing.
   
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I get really mixed feelings on back story. A lot of it has to do with how humble/collaborative the player is, vs.how much they are servicing their ego at the expense of the world I've set up and the player experience.

Sometimes backstory discussions feel a lot like young roll players starting out who say "I go to the top of the hill, and I look around, and I see a snow storm coming"... and as a DM I say "No, It's still summer in this land, tell me what you want to do and I'll tell you the result." If they want to talk about and collaborate the evolution of their back story, including the natural responses of the world as I've written it as they flesh it out, cool. If they want to dictate what the world did in their back story, particular in relation to major details, I get less sympathetic.

It's kind of random. I was willing to work a 5th edition dragon-born into a 2nd edition world with no dragon-born just because they were totaly open to how they got there. I was also fine with the guy who wanted to play an elf paladin in 2nd edition (everyone's used to 5th), until he brought out this long story about who he was in the elf lands, his rank of command in their military, his intrigue with the royal court... before I had a chance to tell him that's nothing like what was going on in the elf lands. We worked it out, but it all comes down to their respect for fitting into the world and the effort the author puts into it and their experience, vs. asking the world (and the DM) to revolve around them.



   
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 RegularGuy wrote:
I get really mixed feelings on back story. A lot of it has to do with how humble/collaborative the player is, vs.how much they are servicing their ego at the expense of the world I've set up and the player experience.

Sometimes backstory discussions feel a lot like young roll players starting out who say "I go to the top of the hill, and I look around, and I see a snow storm coming"... and as a DM I say "No, It's still summer in this land, tell me what you want to do and I'll tell you the result." If they want to talk about and collaborate the evolution of their back story, including the natural responses of the world as I've written it as they flesh it out, cool. If they want to dictate what the world did in their back story, particular in relation to major details, I get less sympathetic.

It's kind of random. I was willing to work a 5th edition dragon-born into a 2nd edition world with no dragon-born just because they were totaly open to how they got there. I was also fine with the guy who wanted to play an elf paladin in 2nd edition (everyone's used to 5th), until he brought out this long story about who he was in the elf lands, his rank of command in their military, his intrigue with the royal court... before I had a chance to tell him that's nothing like what was going on in the elf lands. We worked it out, but it all comes down to their respect for fitting into the world and the effort the author puts into it and their experience, vs. asking the world (and the DM) to revolve around them.





I would always rather someone comes to my table with backstory that either requires me to tell them 'no' to some details or alter some details of my world to fit the character, than someone show up with nothing but a character sheet and stat allocations. Every time. Always.

Obviously my preference if I got to pick every time would be 100% players who do their homework about the world we want to play in and make up characters that would be interesting in and cleanly slot in to the world, but a character that's a bit odd and incongruous is always better than a character who's just dull and flat and nothing.

Personally, I generally leave backstory purposefully vague and open, and shape them as the story goes on to fit the direction we're going in. I will never play an orphan whose family and friends are dead and the only people he knows and cares about in the entire world is the party. All my characters have living family, living parents, exes, previous jobs, all kept vague so that if there's some element of the story the GM needs to have buy-in for I can slot my character into that.

Generally that leads to fun situations like one of my current characters, who I started as a recent academy graduate in entymology who then got infused with druidic nature magic (I wanted to play a bug-themed druid as my core character concept) and his backstory evolved into him being raised as a pirate and he was so utterly terrible at it that his family sent him into academia under an assumed name to keep him from further damaging the family's reputation.

"Got you, Yugi! Your Rubric Marines can't fall back because I have declared the tertiary kaptaris ka'tah stance two, after the secondary dacatarai ka'tah last turn!"

"So you think, Kaiba! I declared my Thousand Sons the cult of Duplicity, which means all my psykers have access to the Sorcerous Facade power! Furthermore I will spend 8 Cabal Points to invoke Cabbalistic Focus, causing the rubrics to appear behind your custodes! The Vengeance for the Wronged and Sorcerous Fullisade stratagems along with the Malefic Maelstrom infernal pact evoked earlier in the command phase allows me to double their firepower, letting me wound on 2s and 3s!"

"you think it is you who has gotten me, yugi, but it is I who have gotten you! I declare the ever-vigilant stratagem to attack your rubrics with my custodes' ranged weapons, which with the new codex are now DAMAGE 2!!"

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As we are vaccinated, our group is getting together tonight to start The Curse of Strahd (sp).

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 Easy E wrote:
As we are vaccinated, our group is getting together tonight to start The Curse of Strahd (sp).


It's nice to hear things are creeping back towards normality!

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 Easy E wrote:
As we are vaccinated, our group is getting together tonight to start The Curse of Strahd (sp).

Is that the Jason Voorhees in space version?
   
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 Kroem wrote:
 Easy E wrote:
As we are vaccinated, our group is getting together tonight to start The Curse of Strahd (sp).

Is that the Jason Voorhees in space version?


We completely monkey-wrenched the first combat encounter by NOT fighting. It forced our DM to scrambled a bit to key key ideas in. Overall, I think they were surprised that we were playing actual characters and not our usual archetypes, as they put in triggers that normally would have spurred us into combat.

Good times.

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Leicester, UK

Hello everyone, i'm thinking about getting back into d&d - ive downloaded the free core rules and had a look and am now ready to actually buy a couple of rulebooks.

My question is: 5th ed seems to have been around for a while - is it likely to be around for a while longer? or should I wait since I probably won't get to play for a while?

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 PaddyMick wrote:
Hello everyone, i'm thinking about getting back into d&d - ive downloaded the free core rules and had a look and am now ready to actually buy a couple of rulebooks.

My question is: 5th ed seems to have been around for a while - is it likely to be around for a while longer? or should I wait since I probably won't get to play for a while?


I asked the same question last year and got very conflicting answers basically in two camps. The first was that the variety of options in the recent Tasha's book resembles the more freeform/option types of books that appear in the last years of an edition combined with the fact that the edition has been around for almost 7 years (not including the two years of the playtest "next" period) is more than 3, 3.5, and 4th lasted. The second is that the game is still growing despite the number of years and is more popular than ever so they'd be foolish to stop that momentum prematurely. In the end, there is no definitive answer unless one of the people posting here are verifiably a c-level executive or creative at WOTC. If you buy into it, you're doing so with open eyes that it may be replaced sooner rather than later but you'll likely have a year's worth of notice (whether in a lack of products or an actual playtest for the 6th edition).

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Leicester, UK

cheers warboss
I reckon I might procrastrinate for a while then , maybe look what else I can get free or borrow

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Northumberland

I think there's still a wee while to go before a new edition. As Warboss says, they're on a boom right now, it would be a bit of a flamingo up to suddenly muck it up by introducing new stuff. I'd say another couple years plus before a new edition.

If you're thinking of starting up again I'd say jump right in, now is the perfect opportunity.

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Honestly theres no real reason to wait on a new edition for D&D anyway.

You litterally just get the rulebooks and play whichever edition you and your friends like the most.


Theres a lot more support for the current edition (fifth) but 3.5 is still great and I hear 4 has alot going for it as well.

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Leicester, UK

I take your point Eihnlazer, and I would be fine with house ruled 2nd ed, but I'm thinking finding people to play with may be easier if I am up on the newest stuff. I plan to start as a player and if it goes well hopefully DM.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2021/04/18 18:32:14


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MN (Currently in WY)

3 sessions into Curse of Strahd and I am enjoying it. The Horror/Psychological aspects of it are very enjoyable and a change of pace for my normally combat focused fellow players.

I get the feeling none of them have played, Legend of the 5 Rings, Call of Cthulhu, Shadowrun, or Top Secret before. In those games, (at least in my experience) fighting often led to death so it was best avoided.

I can see that they are stretching themselves both as players and as characters. Kudos to our GM too who is doing a great job playing out some of the morally ambiguous aspects of the game very well.

Like I said, this campaign is a very different approach to what these particular players are used to, so I am liking it a lot more than our usual dungeon crawl/quest scenarios.

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USA

Curse of Strahd is maybe my second favorite of the 5e premade campaigns, and my favorite is Yawning Portal which isn't really a campaign book so...

Strahd really manages to capture gothic horror in a way that I think a lot of games struggle to do. It's hard to make rolling dice to solve problems terrifying, so that it manages in DnD is pretty impressive imo.

   
 
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