Character Histories and the Campaign

You can play an entire Dungeons & Dragons campaign and enjoy yourself thoroughly without giving a thought as to your character’s past history. Likewise, you can find creating a detailed history enhances your enjoyment. Which one works is affected by the preferences of you and your group.

It is well worth discussing how you wish to approach character backstories at the beginning of the campaign. Some DMs look to their players to come with backgrounds that help shape the stories to come. But that is not true of all DMs. (Nor should it be).

Some DMs will have trouble incorporating your ten-page backstory. There is a school of DMing where the DM is the primary creator, and the players explore the world that the DM has created. Yes, the players’ actions will shape it, but the elements of the world are all created by the DMs.

Meanwhile, there are more collaborative approaches where the DM adjudicates the world but is more comfortable including player-created material – even material that is created on the fly.

It is worth noting that even though the DM is happy with this, the players might not be!

Some players are much happier reacting and experiencing the DM’s world rather than creating new material. I have often seen that when players are given an opportunity to create, they shy away from it.

People enjoy different aspects of the game. (If you are playing a computer game, your choices are limited by what the programmers thought of. And yet, millions of people enjoy those games). And forcing players to do something they are not good at can be very counterproductive. One of my good friends absolutely hates improvising. And if we force him to improvise, he will not have a good time. It is fine to desire games where everyone is creatively adding to the shared world but be aware that that is not what everyone likes.

When this collaboration happens can also change. It is quite possible to do most of the collaborative world-building in “Session 0” (or at least before the campaign begins). The players and DM brainstorm elements of what is to come. But after that, the world is the DM’s to populate from that baseline.

My own style as a player is to come up with a simple background for a character, and then add details to it – with the DM’s approval – as the campaign continues. Especially if these details would provoke good role-playing opportunities. It is tremendously easy to design an elaborate history that never comes up because the campaign goes in an unexpected direction.

But with all of this, be mindful of the other players. If your inventions are shutting other players out, they will be detrimental to the campaign as a whole. For each backstory element you include, it helps significantly if at least one other character uses it. This also helps the DM. Remember, D&D is a group game. If the party is dealing with a story based on an element from ONE character’s background, it doesn’t engage everyone as much as if it’s based on an element from EVERYONE’s background.

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