A few days ago, my good friend Stupid Ranger posted on inspiration about playing the game and writing about it in the blog. In that post I added a comment about an interesting experience I had with my friend Math. I’m reposting an expanded version of the comment here… not very original I agree, but I’d like to keep a version open for discussion over here.
Some time between this game and that one, Math dropped in on Gtalk and mentioned that while he enjoyed his PC’s crunch immensely, he found that his character was quite an empty shell story wise (an extremely deadly empty shell of stats mind you).
So we started brainstorming about our game world’s history. Since Math’s been playing with me for more than 20 years, he is basically one of the world’s architects especially with the elves.
I mentioned the recent destructions of the Elven Homelands. Our game world was the theater of a huge alignment-based war in the last campaign, and the new one starts in the year following the end of the last one. All the Something-Neutral alignments allied themselves and won the war. Elves, being Chaotic Good were part of the Beaten and had had most of their homeland forests burned by the Yugoloth (Neutral Evil Fiends) that are my current campaign’s bad guys.
I then discussed about how the apparent apathy of humans toward the Elven plight had created frustration and even anger in the otherwise good-natured elves.
Math then proposed to play his character as a militant & religious elf that got fed up with humanity’s lethargy and unwillingness to accept the continuing threats of the Yugoloths. His character is willing to kick some serious butt (politically and physically) to protect his vulnerable race…
He since then added to his character by making him very impatient, a trait that’s almost unheard of in elves… In fact I’d be willing to say that he’s probably going to gain a reputation as being rather unstable and dangerous in the eyes of the race he strives so hard to save.
All this through back and forth between DM and player on a chat program. It even got to a point where Math started answering my Gtalk comment in character! So I gave him 10% of leveling up XPs for his RPing efforts… even out of game.
So building a character’s backstory or key motivation does not have to be a chore nor does it have to be a written assignment… it can take the form of two people shooting the breeze and doing some good old brainstorming.
This setting sounds fascinating, i would love to get into the game enough to create a setting like this or Arr-Kelaan or any of the customized ones i’ve seen.
Maybe in a few years when i have more time.
Character backstory is one of my favorite parts, unfortunately my primary DM doesn’t really take any of that stuff into account (This is the “All NPC’s have my personality” guy).
The only thing written down on our game world is a Map, a few pages of very badly written Dot-Matrix stuff sitting in my gaming Archive box and our collective memories.
So it was created, not by me writing a gazillion pages but by the players, with each game adding a bit more to it.
It’s not a consistent history, much like a long running comic book. Stuff get’s Ret-conned pretty often… 🙂
You know Seth, even if your Lisa Kudrowesque DM can’t imagine a world, nothing prevents the players from gently hijacking it and create simple, elevator pitch-like backstories and personalities…
Math created a personality, which accounts for a lot but we still don’t know where he comes from, what he did during the War… that’s fodder for another day….
Much like a Lost or a Pretender
episode…
Cheers
(This is the “All NPC’s have my personality” guy)
Ah, the Innumerable Andrew.