Backstories

I have been thinking about backstory in D&D lately. There were some remarks made regarding the Princes of the Apocalypse game I am playing in, and they set me to thinking. How important should backstory be in playing D&D? Well! I have thoughts!

1. The purpose of backstory is to shape how you act in the story. It explains the character's reactions, why they do what they do. That is how it works in fiction, where it shows why this character is the way they are; it works the same way in games, except there it guides the player in deciding how the character is going to act in the story. You don't need a lot for this - an outline, a few details. It's also something that is really only significant for the player - as much as you need to know to play the character. Maybe it comes up in the story, maybe it doesn't. Maybe your backstory is mainly to explain why you don't talk about your past. The short version is, backstory is a tool, for writer or player, to help shape the character, but it is always secondary to what the character does in the story itself.

2. Should backstories come up in the story? One of the remarks to set this post off was that a villain from a character's past was more interesting than a random monster. This is, in context, a very strange comment, since we are currently 9th level in an ongoing adventure, and we haven't had to deal with anything random since about 3rd level (a year and a half ago, more or less), but we'll pass that. The more general comment I have is that if the backstory is coming up in the story, then it is the story. Now: that can be a very good thing to build into the story - though it is mainly going to work if you have a session zero, and everyone participates. If you can build characters that have a pre-existing stake in the story, or the DM takes elements of the backgrounds of the characters and works them into the texture of the story - you have something, and probably something better than just dropping characters into the adventure. But that beginning stage is important. It avoids the dangers - the idea, say, that a villain from THIS character's backstory is part of the story, but not anyone else's; or maybe worse, that you spend all your time going around the table fighting the next character's childhood nemesis. Again - you can work this into the story if you do a session zero, if the whole group is in on the idea that one character's backstory matters, and so on - but it doesn't work so well in a more generic situation. It has to come up in the story, to work at all.

3. Along with session zeroes to work on complimentary backstories, I think backstory can enter a story easier in a home brew campaign than a published adventure. If the DM is making it up as they go - a series of situations, that aren't preset - backstory is a very good source of ideas for what can come next. Though even there - you would want to start working on this as soon as you can, so have a session zero, or at least push players to make characters that fit within the world of the story, so their backgrounds come up naturally. You still have the problem of why one character's backstory matters more than another, though there can be a lot of answers to that. And finally - if you work this way, you can make it so the backstory is, in fact, part of the story. I did some of this in my desert campaign - one character is a monk, who was a folk hero, who overthrew some kind of tyrant, and later, his monastery was destroyed, maybe in vengeance. That has come back - the party's enemies turn out to be working with another refugee from the monastery, and the two of them blame each other for destroying the place. But that means - the background element is in the story; it comes in from a different angle, so everyone has a stake in it; it is associated with other character's stories. And maybe most of all - in practice, interesting as this idea was as a way to move the story ahead - it was trumped by events in the story itself: the cleric was petrified! That is immediate, compelling and affects everyone in the party, and reminds us all - the story itself becomes what matters, in a decent campaign.

4. The fact is, unless you do the session zero, or some equivalent of to get the characters to fit the story - you don't need to worry too much about backstory. Backstories don't have to come up in the story that often, except as details about the characters, their motivations and so on. You probably should NOT use too many PC backstory elements, unless you have buy in from all the players, or set it up from the start. NPCs are different, though. I wrote about this way back when we were just starting with 5th Edition: how to use NPCs to drive the plot. I would still stand by most of that - PC backstories should be relatively open; they should not be determining the course of the plot - their actions in the story should determine how this story goes. If you need villains tied to the story, if you need to steer the story in a direction, you should use NPCs when you can - they can be focused on something outside the story (as it is occurring); they can have much more specific, narrow goals and motivations, that steer PCs toward the story the DM wants to tell. All that is true, now as much as then. I did this in the desert campaign, too - the party is working alongside a drow cleric, an archeologist type - and he is the one who brings in the plot twists I need, more than the PC's. If the PC's stories come up in the story - great; if not - I can still use elements from the NPC's background to steer the story around, if I have to. That's how I brought in the rival monk - tied him to the NPC's enemies, went from there.

5. All of this, I think, has become amuch bigger part of 5th Edition than it ever was before. It has become maybe - I don't want to say too important, but - it can be treated as being too important. There's a weird tendency in the modern game to make characters into bundles of background - they start up with the sense that they have lived these long full lives, full of adventures and traumas and Significant Events, that have somehow deposited them as first level clerics in this particular story, and that - all that background - continues to be the most important thing in these people's lives. That is very strange in a long, ongoing campaign, like this one. We have been playing it for a year and a half - we are 9th level - we are playing Princes of the Apocalypse, with its plot of literally saving the world from these elemental monstrosities - how can you still have people thinking that something that happened to them as children might be more interesting and important than this? This game has a massive amount of lore and history in it - the PCs have done all kinds of things, had all kinds of wild experiences, we have fought demons and devils, talked to liches and dragons, characters have come and gone and made weird deals with weird entities, in the game - how is anything outside the game supposed to be more interesting than what has happened in the game? People like to talk about immersion in a game, and lack of it - but this is one fo the most egregious lacks of immersion I can think of: to refuse to see the story you are IN. Especially something as epic as this one.

Now - all that changes when you are talking about first level characters (though even there, the backstory should not be more important than the story; but you might make your backstory be part of the story.) A session zero should work that way - to integrate those backgrounds, to make the story and backstories fit together. These characters setting out to Save the World should have some connection, some kind of connection to the world they are in - all that is absolutely the truth. But even there, at first level, you have not done much, and shouldn't try to make up too much in your past. And whatever happened in the past should quickly be eclipsed by what is happening in the present. Whatever your reasons for being there, once the story starts, that is going to put it in the background. The villains you encounter in this story are going to be more interesting than the villains from your past; you are very likely to experience things far more exciting, traumatic, horrifying, whatever than anything you could have survived as a non-PC. And not being able to see this, to think that something outside this world-changing story you are in is more important than it is - is a very strange thing to do.