Want more Character Backstory Tips? Check out my Backstories 201 video. kzfaq.info/get/bejne/nKqld6erndavl58.html

The argument that 95 % of backstory integration is the players' responsibility is really good. The GM keeps track of: ... 500+ pages of rules. ... a dozen or so potential opponents. ... what has happened. ... what is happening. ... what happens later as a result. ... traps in the area and the ways to circumvent them. Player: "I can't believe he forgot about my sick sister..." Yea, he's only human, supposedly.

I played with a guy who had a super-experienced level 1 character. His story was he used to be a hero while younger, but then got caught up in his own fame, got used to decadence and simply grew older, fatter, and drunker until he was back to being an out-of-shape, out-of-training nothing working his way back up.

Thank you for taking about the level one "super hero" background

Space Whiskey is carefully aged in Space Casks in space.

The Star Bar did a great job of driving your point home

WILL DWEEBLES FIND OUT HIS REAL NAME? WILL SETH BE ABLE TO EDUCATE THE IGNORANT MASSES ON PROPER PLAYER ETIQUETTE? WILL MIKE FINALLY PUNCH AN OMACRON? TUNE IN NEXT TIME TO FIND OUT!

I'm a novelist who recently got into D&D. I think the fact that you're a writer is the reason I find your roleplaying advice really relatable. Thanks for this!

I kind of wish Seth was as prolific as some of the DM KZfaqrs because he’s the best in the game.

"how did your character get here" Well it all started about 50 years ago when 2 Jedi Knights headed to a planet called Naboo for trade negotiations over a blockade...

The best character I ever played had a backstory like this "I was a farmer but lost the farm due to a random kobold attack" (I joined a game I didn't expect to join so pretty much everything about my character was just thrown together) I played that guy for 8 years and had a blast. What I'm saying is that backstories are great and can really widen your experience as a player, But at the end of the day it really is how you play him/her that matters.

Currently working on a "water world" campaign and a player wants to make a desert nomad character. I had to go back and listen to you give that example three times before I believed what I heard.

Backstory should be an open door, not a hallway.

here's a little pro tip I have for those who want to up their writing choose a theme song for the character- not as in theme to play when character has a moment, but one to play as you write e.g "How To Save a Life" upgraded a character I once had from "Monster hunter from Yarnham-inspired town" to a tale about losing someone, overcoming that loss, and a search of purpose

When it comes to writing characters for a tabletop game, I think a really important part of backstories is to not fret over the specific details and that it's actually better if you don't write any more backstory than the DM asks of you.. Alot of times when people think about "writing a backstory", they think about diligently laying out every detail of a character's life complete with a cast of characters and setting to go with it. However, I have personally always felt that those specific details are better to fill in later. When you are making your character, the most important is to figure out "What *kind* of life did they have?" and "How does this lifestyle show in their personality". When writing a noble, who has escaped his troubled home life, instead of writing a thousand pages worth of political intrigue of every noble in the area, their vendettas with one another and the copious methods by which that character has been attempted to be murdered, kidnapped or compromised, brushing past that with a simple "Being a noble, there were many families among both the low-lives and the highborn that wanted me dead and the attempted poisoning of my food at parties or the need to look out for political assassins very quickly became the norm for me". From my experiences, the latter tends to work out better. It sets a simple baseline to figure out how my character acts and given the player's blessings, the DM can have an easier time weaving their that backstory or elements of it into his story and world. What's even better? It's never too late to go back and add some layers and details to the backstory after the fact. Some of the most pivotal and important moments of the backstory of one of the best characters I ever played weren't established until 3 to 4 sessions into the campaign. It worked, because instead of pulling my hair out trying to have the full picture complete by the first session and letting all the baggage of a backstory I threw together pretty much in a panic get in the way of writing his personality, I first had the character's most important part, how he acts, down, letting any developments and details come to me more naturally. That's not to say there shouldn't be any details about the backstory. After all, it's moments that make a person. Just that when writing a piece of backstory to a character, it is always good to evaluate how important that detail is to how the person acts. If it's just kinda there and it doesn't actually mean much to the character, it's better not in there, because that piece of fluff is now taking the space of a moment of detail that could be adding something substantial to his identity, just that you haven't quite figured it out.

I never *expect* GMs to incorperate backstorys, (unless the said they would,) but I do enjoy placing tidbit in my backstory, that the GM *can* use, if they so chouse to. If left unspecified by the GM I try to give an 1 - 3 page backstory story, with a TLDR bulletpoint version at the end.

Thanks Seth! I appreciate you giving my hometown of Sum’ware’er’anuther a shout out!

Quality as usual. Thanks again for the great content. Can't wait to incorporate what i learned

A good backstory is so important! It makes the character interesting and new even months after he/she was introduced.

Well i did go on the adventure to fight the dragon and save the princess of Soanso where we fought goblins, evil wizards and navigated the labyinth maze of alter doom but i left out the detail where i was just the bag boy for the knight and his party of badasses...so technically i did. - Level 1 adventurer with cool backstory.

Taliesin Jaffe commented that a backstory should be written from the point of view of the character. There will be things the character didn't know, didn't see, or was simply mistaken. When writing the backstory for Percy, the character saw his sister take an arrow but didn't see the results. He left it to Matt to decide whether the sister died or captured and recovered or escaped badly injured.

I LOVE that advice on players bring up their background themselves. And you hit the nail on the head regarding working in character backgrounds. Sometimes a challenge in background is clearly level inappropriate or distracting/inappropriate from your introductory plot. I don't know about other GMs, but I am definitely an enthusiasm whore. What ever makes you enthusiastic about my game is likely what I am going write story for. If you turn in a background and then never mention it again except to chastise me for not bringing it up, that doesn't exactly inspire me.

Thank you for another intelligent and well presented video on an issue that too often attracts shrieks and clickbait, you stand as a pillar of calm in this sea of chaos. The illustrative example is excellent - too often folk seem to forget that they are active participants in the game, and are responsible for bringing their characters to life.

Party member: “Hey dude where are you from?” Me, the distrustful rogue: “Oh me? I’m from the land of Somewhereoranother.”

i misheard "goblins in the paths that are attacking merchant caravans" as "goblins from the past" that's an interesting campaign idea. time travelling goblin villains.

I love being able to pick out the AD&D-2E Monster Manual, Player's Handbook, and Dungeon Master's Guide instantly on the shelf behind you, and also seeing how feathered and frayed the cover is on the Player's Handbook.... a familiar sight, and evidence of how much time you've spent helping other players make characters, as a GM. Good on you, sir.

I used to write pretty rich backstories for my characters, and then i took an arrow to the knee...

I see you touching up on the players knowing each others' backstories, and boy, did I cheer when you mentioned it. There was a time in my gaming community when backstories were kept secret, because knowing them was *gasp* metagaming. Yeah, I suppose it is, but so what? One very important thing about RPGs is that players absolutely do love talking about it - about the campaign, about the adventure, about the characters. Not everything comes up during play, but discussing motivations and stories OOC is one of the joys for me.

Reading background material for a Norse campaign I noticed that Norse sagas generally begin several generations before the protagonist, so I started the backstory with the tale of why my grandfather left the dwarfen realm for Midgard. Dwarfs in the sagas are usually smiths so it occurred to me that I might be able to narrate a masterwork dwarfen waraxe into my equipment, so I included a scene where my father handed me my great-grandfather's axe: "my father replaced the head, I replaced the handle: it is the very axe your great-grandfather made."

Seth, I've watched many of your excellent videos. I've been GM'ing RPGs for 43 years. This is one of my favorite topics. I try to choose players who share three things above all else. (1) Let's have fun. (2) Honor the contract. (3) Be invested in the process. I believe you have tackled all of these in your videos. Great job.

Awesome video Seth!!! AND I especially like that you brought up "Being PRO-active" as a Player about your PC's backstory! I mean, honestly, if a Player only writes the thing and then forgets all about it... how important is it supposed to be to anyone else? ...right? ;o)

What a perfectly timed video. I find that the more open ended or freeform an adventure is the more important it is that a player knows their character's motivations and personality.

I love the running Omacron joke so much.

Just 350 more subscribers to 36K! Let's get Seth to 100K so we can have a full-length movie starring Seth and only Seth!

In the latest DnD campaign I am part of, my character idea was last-minute, spur of the moment stuff. Like... day before we played. So I used Xanathar's Guide to Everything's roll-chart for background, just to help myself out, and made choices depending on what I thought made sense when there was a roll I thought was too... narrow-scope. Character ended up with the motivation of adventure because he was in search of a mysteriously-missing lover. My DM liked it, as well as the random roll that somewhere out in the world, my character has a Paladin buddy that for some reason is a wanted man. Of course, I'm not saying "just use that book for DnD backstories". Just that in that case, for a relatively last minute choice, it worked. To think, I was originally going to try out a Kenku Bard whom used the jeers thrown at his performances for Vicious Mockery. But I went with a classic Elven Ranger and he's already a beloved character for me.

What is this ongoing beef with the Omichron system? I feel like there's a "war story" we're missing there. :)

13:25 thank you so much for this. This completely shifted the way i do backstories. My characters now feel a lot more "alive" and i'm having a lot more fun

I’m an Australian and I approve this analogy

Personally one of the funnest things I've done was for a campaign I took each character and did a one on one session of there backstory in order to explain why theyed come to the main town . it made the characters feel more personal as they went back years one was a childhood memory another a festival and the last one was right before they set off for adventure leaving home (she was from the main city so she was coming home in campaign)

What did the Omacrons do to that guy? That is the real question.

Two things here. 1st i want to thank you Seth, you always do excelent job and i believe that you are one of the few people on internet that even though i might dissagree some times i find that you know what you are talking about and you make excelent points, honestly i believe you helped me become a better GM and player. 2nd about this video, i completly agree. Once i made a campaign that the main villlain did horible things to the PC's backstory, he killed a PC'S a wife and children making him turn into a fanatic inquisitor searching for who did this to his family and take revenge or he stole an ''artifact'' that was entrasted to a PC by an angel and because the PC was an evil man searching redemption now lost his chance to redeem himself, and it was a total sandbox campaign where 4 complete strangers ''happened'' to meet and figured out that the person they all look for is the same man. And it went bad, because i tried to give to my players what they wanted and not what the campaign needed, and soon i run out of "revelations" and it simply became boring and that was the my fault not the players. So to conclude i believe you are 100% right when you say how the responsibility should be handled, i tried the opposite and it failed. Thank you again for the great work

Best video yet. The contrasting example skits were amazing and so illuminating.

I can't thank you enough Seth, your videos are really helping me improve.

"I have a hard time remembering what I ate yesterday..." I felt that deeply.

Always enjoy seeing and hearing your insight and own experiences~ Great vid, thanks for uploading my dude!

Excellent video Seth. What I appreciate most about your videos are the examples. They are easy to follow and easy to understand and make the point you are trying to convey. Please keep up the good work.

Easily one of the most consice videos on back stories I've watched. Good job as usual. I loved the examples of players working their own backstories. Thank you for your efforts!

Beautifully explained. I’m hyped up on playing and incorporating these and hours of other information you’ve shared. Big thank you

Dude you are awesome! I like how your addressing both GM and players here! You're doing a great job. Please continue to do fantastic thing like you have been.

thanks a lot for the video. one can certainly feel your years of training as a DM, switching POV so easily, navigating through what you want to express

Great work man. My favorite RPG channel on KZfaq.

Your videos are the perfect blend of information and entertainment, and as someone who is interested in DnD but hasn’t played a game all of your videos still find a way to engage me and help understand the game/view it from angles I haven’t considered.

Thanks for another nugget to request my players to view. This will definitely help them understand player mechanics.

Definitely sharing this with my players. Great video as always!

The usual ironic character backstory that crops up now and then is where the backstory is so deep, so rich, and so full of adventure and experience, that it fly's in the face of a level one whatever belonging to it. "So, Dandakr the Daring, that sounds great for your older, long retired uncle. Now, wanna explain how you fought in three wars; mastered six different martial arts; became the hero of three villages and a kingdom; all the while maintaining that 01 experience rating?"

This is the second video I've watched on your channel. (The first was 10 tips for better combat) Making this one more video than I needed to convince me to subscribe. I've been gaming since 1980 (Mostly 2e AD&D) and your knowledge, experience and presentation are stellar. Excellent videos. Thank you sir, well done. Looking forward to watching more.

THANK YOU for this one especially Seth. Well said.

This is great advice! I’ll be sure to apply your lessons while enjoying time as a PC as well as including as much background provided by my players while I am the DM. Thanks for posting great examples from both perspectives

My players were very backstory happy, and that was at my encouragement. I usually got a page or two per player, and some of the best subplots came from player backstory. When we did Only war, I pointed out that we were expecting a high character turnover, so encouraged them to pool their efforts on making a regiment. I got a full regimental history, customs, command structure, and the commander's rivalry with an inquisitor

Excellent video, great ideas for newish players/GMs.

Great Video and Tips, Thanks

This is going to be useful in crafting a Cyberpunk Red character. I never played tabletop RPGs so your channel is really helpful and interesting.

This is great! Thank you for making this!

Way more useful to me than the “just don’t do x” videos. Thanks!

Excellent video that I will definitely recommend to my players in new campaigns going forward.

Nice omicron call back to Five GM Secrets.

Great breakdown of the hows and whys! Thanks!

interesting and very helpful! really makes me see how the narrative in roleplaying really is a group effort. everyone needs to put something in, but everyone needs their space to work the threads

I am totally making my new players watch this before they write their backstories for my new campaign!!! I LOVE Your videos like this!!

Love your channel. Always super informative, about to run a campaign and just started having 1 on 1 sessions with my PC's to create their characters.

I just tend to lean heavily on Noodle Incidents greatly. Makes things much easier to weave in... if we never have to speak of that day... that horrible horrible day.

I love this video. I always tend to go back to it as inspiration when doing my own games as DM or a player

I always love your videos, keep up the great work!

My gnome wizard is a prince, he refuses to loot corpses and graves. Also, he treats prisoners well because, he feels obligated to treat prisoners with respect due to his upbringing. Yes, this also makes him a bit baffeld by certain things, for example he is not used to having to think about money so its quiet easy to swindle him by saying "Oh, this is the standard price."

I just use Backstory to justify any mechanical choices I made crafting my PCs. Especially when I join late in the campaign or they start higher than LV1.

Thank you for your video on how to arrange backstory, and who uses backstory the most. It's good to remember that kinda thing.

Just wanna say thanks, as I was working on a character backstory and this video helped me rework it. I'd like to also add that if you get the time, maybe also have a summarized version of your backstory for your DM and yourself. Especially for people who can write pages of backstory, a quick paragraph or two for you and your DM can help you both remember characters, motivations, and other character essentials that don't require skimming over several pages.

Thanks for the Aussie touch. Love your videos and sending some Australian high-fives, mate.

Seth, thank you so much for this in-depth look at how players are responsible for providing the game master and assist!

Great work, as always! The best advice I ever got on backstories is that they should be jumping off points for your character's adventurous nature, so you shouldn't have already beat your nemesis on your backstory, nor should you have already saved freaking cities from evil. Leave that to the upcoming adventure, that's what it's there for!

The timing of this one couldn't be better, I've got a few friends in to D&D with the starter set adventure to bolster my party's ranks and this video will help a bunch with their characters.

With a previous group, I had my character keep a journal. I would summarize the nights adventuring from my point of view, and it gave me a chance to insert my views and motives and drop hints on my backstory. I would post it to our groups FB page after our session. I think my DM and the rest of the group enjoyed reading it, and the DM would often incorporate bits into the upcoming story. It was really cool.

I was in a long term campaign back in the 90's and I created a background for my character. Basic premise was he a fighter who was exiled from his original country. Then I went to college and only could play in the holidays. The DM then created a mini side adventure with my character and one other character to go and resolve the exile. It was supposed to only last about a year. But ended up being a major ongoing campaign which lasted about 4/5 years and really expanded the campaign world.

One of the things I like to do when creating a backstory for my characters is leave some unanswered questions about the character that s/he has about him/herself and let the GM's imagination fill in the blanks. For example, my current character has amnesia. Her memory starts about a year ago and the first thing she remembered was waking up in an old basement lab. A man in a labcoat was there and told her that she needs to get away as fast as possible. He knows someone in Boston who can give her work. Was the man legitimately trying to help her? If so why? Does he know about her past? Is he responsible for her loss of memory? Is he playing her and she's a pawn in his or someone else's game? Is someone looking for her? She has no idea. Let the GM go to town to decide HOW she lost her memory (intentional? voluntary? accident/injury?). She had just enough info to explain why she was in Boston and why she was at that place at that time and The GM is free to use the open ended backstory--or not--as he pleases.

I love your vids! glad to see you talk to players too :D

I agree with players taking charge, my group does exactly this! When I was gming I found it incredibly useful as it inspired me a lot to make side plots for them all. It also gave me a much better feel for their expectations as well.

Another awesome and very informative video

As a DM, I can tell with certainty that the part about it being 95% the players responsibility is spot on, as a DM we are juggling so much to keep the game interesting, with NPC's, plot hooks, location descriptions, plans for possible fights and intrigues that it's extremely easy to forget little details about a player's backstory. We aren't perfect, and it's easy for players to forget that they aren't the only ones at the table, and while their backstory might be "epic" or "crucial to their character", which could possibly be true! Hell I've had plenty of amazing player backstories presented to me over the years that I was 100% on board with, even offering advice or additional details to really flesh it out... But when it comes to playing the game proper, all those little details get washed away by all the other stuff that's going on, we're not slighting your character on purpose, so it's up to you as the player to remind us of them when appropriate! That being said, when planning a session as a DM, see if you can incorporate a players backstory into the details, like a bounty hunter showing up at the end of a harrowing chase scene as a surprise, or one of the henchmen of the villain being the mind controllled sister of the player who he's been looking for the entire time since the campaign started. Not only is it a great moment, it also shows your players that you actually care about their characters, and that you pay attention to the little details. That's where the remaining 5% comes in!

This video came at a perfect time, and I am excited to take in all the advice when we get the ball rolling on this.

What I do before I start a campaign, I have the players give me a hometown, a kingdom name and so forth. Then I just add it to my campaign. I love this method because the players are giving me information to add to the campaign that I can use. This also allows them some influence in the design of the campaign.

When I wrote my Kobold Warlock's backstory, I mainly wrote an origin story. I didn't specify a particular place of origin or any specific events at specific locations, I just mainly wrote about the character's upbringing, why she entered a pact with an Archfey, and that she willingly decided to become an adventurer. That way it's easy to work her into pretty much any campaign setting that doesn't explicitly ban monstrous adventurers.

I asked my players in a recnet game to keep their back stories as a few dot points. We have 3 players. When one cant make it, we do flash back one shots with home brewed super low level characters and fill in the blanks of one of the pc's. It helps me set up the law of our own world by visiting places the main story hasn't gone and allows me to bring in interesting npc's too. The players love it because we take turns developing one characters back story at a time, while the other player gets to try something different. I recomend it!

This is such a solid backstory explanation video, thank you Seth! I have a game where the players want more backstory involvement but they wait for me as the GM to force their backstories to come to life. Also, I tried to explain to them that fallible characters are cooler and more realistic than their backstory being “oh I was a king and then I got exiled. At level 1. Lol.”

Sirius Mann, Monk 4 (Way of the Drunken Master) Backstory: An unserious man walked out of his home and stubbed his toe. An unserious man fell into a deep melancholy, and became, A Depressed Man. A Depressed Man found an ancient monastery, and trained relentlessly to forget, the shame and embarrassment of, stubbing his toe. A disciplined man told a Depressed Man that he needed discipline, and focus, if he ever hoped to become, a serious man. In that moment, a depressed man, chose to become, a serious man. A Serious Man, has since, always been a, serious man. A serious man has wandered the world, seeking to become, a heroic man. When a serious man, has become, a heroic man, a heroic man will return to his village, where a heroic man, will have the will and strength to endure, the shame and embarrassment of, stubbing his toe.

Regarding having a decorated or experienced low level adventurer, me and my groups are fans of saying that the war vet/old assassin is typically retired for several years and is out of practice. Great content as always Seth.

Great stuff!👍

I think that last line was great. I need to start focusing on the good things about my character rather than trying to keep up with the min/maxxing going on at the table. I feel like I have a great character story going, and the GM is keen to play into it. I may die at the next turn or be ineffective in battles because I’m so weak (just a basic ranger class), but that can actually be a fun RP opportunity.

6:07 I resonate with that picture on a spiritual level

The Montoya example was brilliant!

1. Always be a chosen one, with a prophesy. Have the character make a big deal out of it, to the point if it being something they almost exclusively talk about. 2. BE EDGY! Always take annoyance with your allies, such as by going “Tch” or “feh” when they say something, even if it’s smart and/or correct. Be arrogant, and always be dark and brooding. 3. Stab first, ask questions later. 4. Always be ready to take the least popular option. You need to make sure that every group decision is not unanimous. This is important if your team agrees to only act if everyone agrees. Never budge and be stubborn until you get your way.