Backgrounded

Like I mentioned in the last post, I’m not keen on backstory as a differentiator of characters.

In the new school of 32-bit gameplay, players as storytelling vectors can find themselves sinking a hefty investment prior to the beginning of play through elaborately backstoried characters, complete with whole-cloth manifest destiny, leading themselves to logically entrench against the idea of said character losing face, power, life or limb; essentially immunizing themselves against the lose conditions so dear to sustain the game’s tension at the table, undermining its outright viability as a game from the ground floor.

So, let us not do that.

Character generation is important as part of setting the tone for the whole game that follows. I’ve already voiced the opinion that players should, to a degree, be surprised by what character they’re getting to play. The olden days, you very much played the character your rolls gave you, complete with minimum attribute totals for unlocking certain classes. Not to advocate such extremes, there ought to be a middle ground between wish-fulfillment and what you actually get.

I’m going to use a dry husk of a word here, one that’s been devalued harder than the zimbabwean dollar by the internet culture: awesome. You should never start out awesome. Awesomeness is an aspiration, what you set out to become. New school gaming cut out the middleman and traded the destination for the journey, granting nothing but the ashen flavour of that which was not fought for and therefore has no value. This follows as corollary of respecting the level structure that’s been in place since the game’s inception: you’re allowed no exercises in futurology, your character starts out as barely-exceptional at best and is only as good as his present resourcefulness will allow, with no guarantee of ever getting better should the player’s input and fortunes not be up to snuff.

Once the player is forced to come to grips with what fate has given him, rather than his meticulously chosen and already accomplished ideation, he will feel challenged. This feeling of challenge will form the bonds of a relationship that will have the player exhibit greater creativity in order to have his character jump hurdles, even if (or, rather, especially if) the character’s somehow impaired.

Thus this brings us back to character backstory.

Backstory reads to me as a shorthand for telling and not showing, i.e. the sworn mortal enemy of organic character development.

The principle that I wish to stress is that you can’t hope for characters to be created fully formed (or for players to care about characters with a tailor-made prior history). It must all come about through shared experiences during the running.

I do have known some players who esteemed their imaginary figments to a fierce extent, no matter how derivative their origin and design, others who never seemed to connect to their avatar, lending it as much substance as a videogame representation. I’m not concerned with either of these oddities.

What concerns a durable campaign are players who etch characters without paying service to the two important drivers of character behaviour: endless ambition and an unreasonable gregariousness, the two things that ensure cohesion within a group, no matter how outlandish, dangerous and at-cross-purposes their set bearings happen to be.

"I'm sorry, fellow party member, my backstory/alignment dictates that I simply must do this!"

As long as you respect the conditions set above, it doesn’t really matter where you come from, who or what you are, for all that a functional campaign requires is that you stick by each other and have a neverending drive for conquest and acquisition with a minimum of in-fighting. These are the only two things of substance and neither come about through backstory. All the factoids that might have some bearing on the game’s play (geographical origin, languages spoken, any special skills or feats)  should be summed up in a single line of background, tidily and without any bells or whistles.

For all of the rest, backstory is just a venue for frontloading verbose answers to questions that haven’t been asked and to constrict organic character development as well as providing an entry barrier to new players and new characters alike – for once this or that character dies, it is of course expected that his replacement should have a proper backstory too, isn’t that right?