Hey all, Ian here

Because just one blog series isn’t enough, we’re getting a second one going, which I’m calling “GM Tip Tuesdays”. Here, we’ll talk about strategies for dealing with player backstories. In particular, talking about an approach we used for How Not to End the World, which worked particularly well in my opinion.

I’ll be basing this post in particular off of a post I created for r/DMAacadamy, but expect future posts to contain original content. Since I wrote it toward an audience that didn’t know about How Not to End the World, I have some episode 1 spoilers in the original post, which I’ve hidden behind a button here.

(Also, before launching into the rest of the post - please note that the title is mostly tongue in cheek)

One of the things I've noticed over the years is that backstories tend to have a lot of details fleshing out a character, but games always seem to flounder their first couple sessions - regardless of whose running them or who's playing or how interesting the characters are. Sure, the games will *eventually* become interesting more often than not, but the first few sessions are always a really awkward cludge of forcing players to be together through obviously-artificial, thin justifications as everyone kinda figures each-other out and why they care.

What's so weird is that, in that structure, everything interesting and compelling about a PC is somewhere else by design. Two of the most important things in a story and for a character are Relationships and History (for our purposes here, anyway). Without relationships, a character has no reason to do anything for anyone, has no ties to a plot, and has nothing to ground them. Without history, a character's relationship feels flat and bland. Who would you rather hear about: John the adventurer's quest to slay the Wolf harassing some town he's passing through for a sack of gold? Or John the bookish School Teacher who gets consumed by rage when he finds out a Wolf slaughtered his former student, Suzie?

So that begs the question: "How should we write our backstories instead?" I'd argue that this form of backstory writing comes from a desire to avoid treading on the plot's toes, or because the players don't want to assume anything about the DM's sacred world, or because players feel like they need to put their characters in a position where they're untethered to the world and ready to adventure. So, in order to combat that:

Characters Should Have Relationships Where the Plot Starts

This is pretty straight forward. Your characters should generally know *someone* in the starting plot area - preferably a group of people. This doesn't mean they need to be tied down, but this gives characters a reason to care about where they're at and the people who live there, and it gives you a way to connect them to whatever's going on in a broader sense.

Now, you might ask: "Why would the characters leave the starting area if they tie themselves down?" - but this has a pretty simple answer: Players are not beholden to their characters. What's more interesting: A Dad with a loving wife and a family of five seeing a world ending horror, shrugging, and asking around for a mercenary to go take care of it? Or that same Dad with that same loving family bravely, yet with great hesitance, answering the call to adventure, all while trying to make the best of a bad situation? As an improv instructor of mine once explained: "You might have a character, scared of heights, getting ready to jump out of a plane. And they won't want to jump out of that plane, but that's not the point - it's your job to make them do it anyway - because that's the most interesting thing that can happen next" - and the same mentality should apply to your players

Characters Should Have History With the Plot

The whole point of Backstory is establishing a character's History, but sometimes it's easy to forget that "having a history" isn't a means to an end. Instead, the history can help inform the character and their ties to the plot. Now, this doesn't have to be as straightforward as "The player's parents were brutally murdered by The Big Bad" (although there's absolutely nothing wrong with going full cliche - they exist for a reason) but if your character has a figure in their lives that's constantly causing problems, and then it turns out that nuisance is one of the Big Bad's henchmen? Awesome. Or maybe the character once slept with a nobleman/noblewoman who's now trying to incite the civil war around which the plot revolves. Or maybe the Big Bad is a character's former mentee, but now the student has turned rotten and the character needs to make a heart wrenching decision to fight their former student, even as they privately, desperately try to convince the Big Bad to end their evil ways.

This requires coordination up front, and you should ideally be proactively working with your players as they're making their characters' backstories, but you can get some really cool interactions if you can weave a character’s history into the game, and adds a whole extra layer of texture and meaning to what would otherwise be bland, disconnected encounters.

Characters Should Have a History with Each Other

One of the worst parts of starting a new game, or introducing a new character, is that they pretty much start from ground zero. The best character interactions I've seen come from those characters having deep, shared history to draw on to inform their conversation and actions - "Two unacquainted mercenaries fighting side by side" isn't as interesting as "estranged brother and sister coming together and putting aside their differences to fight side by side".

I think FATE does this really well - before the game even begins, you pass around character sheets and write down interactions your character had with the character whose sheet you're holding, then the original player determines character traits based on that interaction. But - you don't need to do anything so formal: I've had players decide out of game that they have a long, shared history - and then they just acted like it in game, and it immediately added a bunch of depth and realism to the interaction that there wouldn't have otherwise been.

This one requires a little more trust, and your players possessing the ability to relinquish some control over their character, but it really makes in-game interactions sing if done well. In particular, players need the confidence to proactively say things about their interactions with others that basically becomes fact as soon as it's said: "You never were there for me", "Look, you've always been a pain in my ass, but we need to set that aside for now", "I've always looked up to you - you always gave off this air of perfection when we were in school together - but now you need to trust me!". But in longer-running groups, and with a lot of out-of-game discussion, you can generally make this work pretty well, and it really adds a splash of jet fuel to slow game starts.

Character Backstory Should Not Be Fixed

The most interesting developments I've gotten to run have all come from stuff from players' backstories that just were not written before hand. I've given characters relationships with hitherto unmentioned figures, and had entire arcs revolve around major life events that only came into being a year into the game.

This isn't to say you should just completely upend character backstories unilaterally - some of my worst game experiences came from the GM twisting my backstory into something I didn't want it to be! - but if you work with your players and try to hammer out what (if anything) is missing from their backstory, and how you can tie an upcoming event, location, or person into their history, it's a really easy, slick way to lend weight to an event and shine the spotlight on a character who might be sitting in the metaphorical shade just a bit too much during game-time

In Conclusion

The way I've been phrasing all this to myself is that, instead of writing a "Backstory", players should be writing a "Nowstory" - they should take all the interesting stuff in their backstory that sets them off on their adventure, cut that out, and then have that bit be the stuff that happens in game. Likewise I've found that, when I manage to inject this stuff into an ongoing plot, it adds jet fuel to the RP, and helps players feel more engaged with the game and what's going on - both from their character's perspective, and their own.

Anyway, I hope you found the read interesting ! Click the “like” button below so we know to write more! Also, be sure to leave your thoughts in the comment section below - anything you like doing with your players backstories? Any backstories you or one of your players wrote that really sticks out to you? Let us know!

Finally, don’t forget to check out our YouTube channel, where you can see this advice put into action in our “How Not to End the World” series