Getting the Most From Backstories: for the Players

So I recently got to play the one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-other game, only this time with two girls and one guy. The guy actually gave me a pretty cool, if brief, backstory. It lacked details like names, but definitely left the door open to some neat play.

And that, after all, is the point: encouraging neat play. You want to pack your game sessions with as much cool and excitement as possible. Your background is just another way to do that. But how?

Work with Your DM
Your DM probably has a few themes and ideas in mind for things they want to bring to the table. Ask them about those. See how they might be worked into your background. If you know ahead of time that the campaign is going to be about hunting down a secretive cult worshipping Tharizdun, it’s easy enough to say that cultists killed your family. But you can turn it up a notch to say the cultists are your family! If so, how did you escape? Did anyone else escape?

Feel free to use the Ten Ideas trick. It’s a pretty simple tool for coming up with great ideas. When you need an idea, force yourself to write down ten. The first two or three are clichés everyone would think of. You were probably really stretching through the last two or three, and those ideas, while potential the most creative, are probably too “out there” to be useful. The ideas in the middle are where you’re most likely to find gold.

Ask if there are any institutions that are important to the campaign. Perhaps there’s a temple, a secret society, or a race that figures importantly in your DM’s plans. Find ways to connect your PC to them. This way, not only do you have powerful motivations to get involved in the world, but the DM is going to turn to you to provide exposition and important details.

Don’t be afraid to go big here. My latest campaign takes place in a world ravaged by a war between wizards. The landscape still bears the scars and huge swaths are only habitable thanks to powerful elemental magic supplied by genies. Knowing this, one of my players made her character the daughter of a powerful djinni. We worked together to create a situation where there is a useful link but also insure that her character was independent enough to go out on her own and couldn’t always just fall back on Mom’s influence and power. In spite of that, her ties to the movers-and-shakers of this world have been incredibly useful to both the player and myself in deepening the world and propelling the game.

Work with the Other Players
One of the hardest parts of getting a game rolling is finding a reason for the (inevitably diverse) PCs to join together and stick together. You can not only improve group coherency but also piggy-back on the cool ideas of your friends by linking your characters together before play even starts.

The methods for doing this are countless: family, childhood friendships, old loves and rivalries. You’ve seen all the old tropes in movies and novels for years now. Mine ‘em for their best stuff.

But don’t fall in love with something until you’ve talked it over with the other person. This is all about working with others, and will require some give-and-take. If the two of you can’t settle on something, just drop it; better to play what you want than a character you only kinda like linked to others by bonds you find annoying.

Don’t Stop Working!
It doesn’t do you any good to build all this background if you let it lay fallow on your character sheet. Keep in mind that your DM has a lot of balls in the air between monsters and NPCs and a whole world to manage. If you wait for the DM to bring up your character’s background, it might not happen.

Which isn’t to say you should be pushy and force your character’s background into center stage. The best way to bring your background into play is to ask your DM open-ended questions about what’s currently going on in relation to that background. “Which side of that conflict was my family on?” or, “What sources did my mentor at the Collegia Arcanum use to acquire black lotus?” or, “How did people prevent necromancers from animating their dead back where my character is from?” These are good questions that can deepen the world-building. Understand if the DM can’t address those in the moment; some might best be addressed via email or over coffee between games. And don’t be surprised if the DM throws the question back on you: “I don’t know. What do you think?”

Look for opportunities to bring your background into the game, the same way you’d look for ways to use the special abilities of your class or race. Re-read your background regularly to keep the details fresh in your mind. Towards that end, don’t write thousands of words of background. Keep it short and focused on the details. Create a bullet-point version for use at the table. Be gentle; it’s a shared world, after all, and you don’t want to step on the toes of others. But by weaving your character’s background into the story, you’ll be strengthening everyone’s investment into your character and the world you’ve all created.

Don’t be a Passive-aggressive Jerk
This is not an excuse to create traps or subtly influence where the game goes. That sort of nonsense never works. If you want something from the game, be up-front about it with your DM and the other players. Don’t use your character’s background as a club to whack the other players and DM into doing what you want, either. It’s a tool to deepen the experience of play, not a handle for you to drive the game.

Interactive backgrounds that tie the PCs together and to their setting is advanced-level play. It’s not the sort of thing to undertake unless you’re comfortable with your game and you have a good rapport with your DM and the other players. That said, it can also be used to build that rapport, but if that’s your aim, don’t ask it to do any more heavy-lifting until you’ve got buy-in from those players and DM.

Schrödinger's Personality

I ran across this list of 11 ways to be a better roleplayer. I think the list gets weaker the further along you go, as it delves deeper and deeper into “don’t be a dick” territory (important, yes, but not nearly as useful to those of us who, as a general rule, don’t play with people lacking in basic manners). However, the beginning of the list, and most especially the first two points, are solid gold.

I especially like point the second, Realise that your character does not exist outside of the things you have said:

You can write as many pages of backstory as you like, mate, but they don’t factor in one bit to the game unless you show them happening. Are you a shrewd businessman? Cool. Do some business, shrewdly, in front of everyone else. Are you a hot jazz saxophonist? Play the saxophone. Are you a wild elf struggling through social interactions with civilised people? Struggle through those interactions! Don’t go off and sit in a tree, you prick!

And this ties directly into what you can actually pull off at the table. No, I’m not talking about allowing only people with exceptional social skills to play high charisma characters. The issue is more fundamental than that.

To whit, it’s rather frustrating, as a DM who’s built adventures around a character background full of derring-do and wild escapades, to discover that said character is actually played with all the caution and timidity of a mysophobic in a kindergarten classroom.

Granted, sometimes life, and the game, conspire against you. You meant to play a more colorful character, but traveling with the happy-go-lucky pixie rogue has you playing the straight man. Sometimes that’s just the best way to do things, and you have more fun playing with the other players than your original, conceived-in-a-vacuum idea would have been. No worries there; just adjust and roll with it.

Even better, however, is when you and your fellow players can actually build these interacting personalities together. This is one of the reasons many old schoolers prefer to begin with minimal background; what’s needed can be invented on the fly that way, after you’ve had a chance to see the character in action, interacting with the rest of the party and the campaign world.

And that leads me to imagine a group character generation system in which stats and skills are created via interacting tropes that are developed through the first adventure of play. That is, you begin with the bare-bones skeleton of a character (perhaps even one suffering from amnesia) and, as you create relationships for your PC with the other PCs, you flesh out skills, bonuses, and quirks accordingly. I’ll bet you could come up with dozens of templates just by browsing through tvtropes.org.

Charmed, I'm Sure

Charm is a fun but dangerous spell to use. I know a lot of folks who just avoid it because it can create drama around the table, and there are some groups I won't use it with except in very limited, contained circumstances. But if you can get around the silliness, man, is it a game-changer.

If you're playing a “classic” version of D&D, the rules for the spell probably contain a line along the lines of “[a]ny commands given will usually be obeyed, except that orders against its nature (alignment and habits) may be resisted.” That's a direct quote from the Moldvay Basic book, with emphasis added by me. This, ladies and gents, is how we differentiated between two fighters way back when. Whether you played your warrior as a paragon of virtue, who upheld a code of honor while defending the defenseless, or as an amoral brigand who'd gut his own granny for a shaved copper, it made a difference in the game. Commanding the honorable knight to stab his friends in the back is likely to force another saving throw, and won't be obeyed, where the greedy mercenary will do it without hesitation. Both situations can create all sorts of fun around the table, but of a very different sort.

There are some folks who just can't enjoy this sort of thing. Either they can't separate player from character (and, honestly, in this case, it might be best if you just ask them to leave the game, as they will be a constant source of friction), or they're too uptight about issues of control. I used to be one of these people, and learning to relax and roll with it was hard, but I think I got better. Any time you “de-protagonize” or remove more than the usual amount of choice from the PCs, you're treading on thin ice. You need to be cautious with this sort of thing. If the players trust you, and enjoy your game, most will be willing to roll with this sort of thing and that allows you to really push some in-character buttons.

You've all seen the episode in your favorite serial-esque TV show where the characters are pushed out of their comfort zones and forced to behave out of character by some external force. On “Chuck” it's truth serum, and on Star Trek, it's flying too close to an unstable star that makes everyone on the ship behave like they're drunk. This is where the charm spell really shines. Maybe it allows a character to indulge in a part of their personality they've been denying or suppressing. Maybe it's the push to take them through a mental block, a choice they've been avoiding, or a truth they've been denying.

As a player, charm and other mental/emotional manipulations are your chance to go Dark Phoenix/Dark Willow on the game. Yeah, sure, maybe Mister Goody-Two-Shoes can use his moral fortitude to resist the charm. But maybe he chooses not to. Or maybe, when you scratch the surface, that air of reserve and restraint is the armour that keeps the beast within contained. Maybe its his turn to keep the treasure for himself, or to spend it carousing and having fun. Maybe its his turn to torture and murder the bad guys, to look the other way when expedience wins over virtue, or to kick Christian in his cojones, throw Roxane over his shoulder, and ride off to some romantic hide-away with her.

What about after? Certainly, there are the consequences for things done, for confidences broken and expectations confounded. But what about the character? Maybe the satyr taught her that self denial isn't all it's cracked up to be. Maybe spending some time on the dark side has only renewed his fervor for justice and honor. Maybe a bit of time under a charm is exactly what you need to renew your interest in your character, or to justify within the game changes you've been itching to make for a while now.

UPDATE: More cool ideas and comments spawned by the charm spell from the Lost Papers of Tsojcanth:

Charming an NPC allows PCs to peek “behind the scenes” and learn tidbits about your setting without going out of character. This is a meta-tool that can be used either to showoff your effort, highlight or foreshadow something important that you want to make sure players notice (possibly because they didn’t get it the fist time around) or to provide closure for some events players have been puzzling about.

Be sure to read the whole thing.
(Updated 3/25/10)

Image credits: John William Waterhouse and Clodion.

Neo-classical Tactics: Alpha Strike

There have been some very cool posts lately about using extremely dangerous and overpowered monsters in neo-classical and modern gaming lately. I'd like to sound a cautionary note. First, understand that I agree with just about everything I've read about these sorts of encounters and how cool they can be. However, before you include them in your game, you have to keep in mind just how dangerous, and anti-climactic, they can be.

The alpha strike is a tried-and-true tactic from the earliest days of D&D. The name is stolen from Star Trek wargaming. In the game Starfleet Battles, a player launches an alpha strike by maneuvering into the optimal range (usually point-blank) and then cutting loose with every weapon on the ship. It perfectly recreates those moments in TV and movies where the ships crawl towards each other, and one is blasting, blasting, blasting while the camera shakes with every hit and someone is calling out in tones of escalating concern the worsening condition of the shields, the soundtrack rises to a tense pitch, and the captain yells, “FIRE!”

In D&D and similar games, the alpha strike usually doesn't involve that slow buildup. The PCs immediately unleash their most devastating attacks upon a single target. This makes sense, if you think about it, because a critter with only 1 hit point left is almost always as dangerous on it's turn to attack as a critter that still has all of its hit points. Focusing on one target at a time is usually the most efficient way to remove the monsters' offensive power.

Even in cases where the monsters do get weaker, players are encouraged to launch an alpha strike. The damage from most breath weapons in early versions of D&D is usually equal to that monster's current hit points. The quicker you whittle those away, the more likely you are to survive the blast. This is why, when you put together an encounter of a bunch of goblins and a hellhound, the players will likely ignore the goblins as much as possible until the hellhound is dead.

This can be annoying for the DM, because it's the reverse of a good cinematic fight. Instead of the danger ramping up as the players wade through the minions, you get a brief moment of tension, followed by a drawn-out mopping up phase. (You might be tempted to save your villain by declaring that he survives or even shrugs off this attack. But now the players are looking at a foe who hasn't been noticeably weakened and they've likely burned resources in their alpha strike that they can't get back without resting up. The players will probably retreat in this case, in order to come up with a better, more certain one-shot kill.)

Here's something else to keep in mind about alpha strikes: magic-users use 4-sided dice to roll their hit points, and usually 6-sided dice to roll damage. Your typical 6th level magic user has 15 hit points and her average fireball or lightning bolt will do 21 points of damage (10 if you roll your save). Magic-users are both scary and fragile. They usually end up on the receiving end of an alpha strike, because if you don't do unto them first, they will almost certainly do unto you.

(This also means that wizard duels in D&D-land are not drawn out battles of wits, or back-and-forth exchanges of spells. They look more like the gunslinger showdowns of the Wild West, where the fastest draw, er, I mean, incantation, usually wins.)

Keep this in mind when using magic-users in your adventures. The first time the players see how effective sleep is as a spell, it's going to make an impression on them. They absolutely do not want to go out to a coup de grace like those goblins in their first adventure. If they see a spell-slinger, they are going to pile on the hurt. This is why the guy in the pointy hat dies first, and usually with extreme prejudice.

Often, the best way to protect your magic-users, either as a player or a DM, is to make sure they don't look like magic-users. Obviously, once they start slinging spells, the jig is up, but by making the magic-users look innocuous, they might actually survive long enough to get off that first spell. Generally, the first and best magical protection that isn't armour goes the magic-users as well. They also usually carry at least one healing potion, since any hit they take is likely to be catastrophic. It's also common to give the magic-user a bodyguard of some sort, just in case somebody rushes in and tries to stick something sharp and pointy into his or her face.

Photo credits: Focal Intent, Benimoto, and seanmcgrath.

Old School Tactics: Counting the Cost

Oddysey, ever our canary in the mineshaft, lost a PC to a giant bat in Godless Paladin's intriguing “Mayan/Aztec/Ghost Conquistador dungeon”. Apparently, GP just wanted to break up the monotony of lots of goblins and other such critters, which is always a good thing. Unfortunately, he had no idea just how nasty an 8 HD critter could be. Not until after it had chewed poor Biffy's face off.

This is not an unusual problem for DMs running “old school” games. In 3rd edition D&D, WotC added the challenge rating system to help codify just how nasty a critter was. I judge the results to be mixed, especially at higher levels, but it was a good attempt.

Older versions of D&D don't even have that. DMs are left to “eyeball” the situation as best they can, and the only way to get a good feel for that sort of thing is experience. Things are even worse at 1st level; when most PCs have 1d6 hit points and weapons typically do 1d6 damage, every successful attack has the potential to turn into a devastating alpha strike.

So what's a new DM to do? Here are a few rules-of-thumb you can use to judge the danger of your encounters in an old school game:

• Watch the HD: You can generally judge the toughness of a monster by its hit dice. The more hit dice a critter has, the more hit points it's likely to have, and the better chance it will have to succeed on attack rolls. As a general rule-of-thumb, a group of enemies whose total hit dice is equal to the number of total levels in the PCs and their allies is a strong challenge up until the PCs reach 5th level. (At 5th level, all sorts of wacky things happen, primarily because the PCs gain access to 3rd level spells.)
  
  
• Beware the Power of Iteration: A single foe is not as dangerous as a mob. This is due to attack rolls being made on a single d20. Since the probability of any single number coming up is flat, including a 20, rolling more attack dice has a huge effect on combat. This is magnified if you use any sort of “critical hit” rules.
  
  
• Save or DIE: There are lots of save-or-die powers in old school monster lists. Most spiders and snakes with venom force a life-or-death saving throw with every successful attack. However, these are not nearly as dangerous as those that force multiple characters to save. For instance, the tarantella's poison might seem a safer choice since it doesn't cause immediate death, but rather a spastic dance. However, anyone who sees someone doing this dance must then save vs. Spells or they'll start dancing, too. A single successful bite can potentially wipe out the entire party!
  

So, with all this in mind, what can the DM do to provide a little breathing room for both the dungeon and the players without having to worry constantly about building “killer” adventures? One trick I use are “get out of jail free” options. Things like my shields shall be splintered rule allow PCs to ignore one hit, giving them a bit more surviveability. Notice that there's a price for this, however. Squirming over these sorts of choices is part of the fun of old school gaming. The heroes in my Labyrinth Lord game recently found a potion that will restore all hit points, neutralize nearly any poison, and undo effects like paralyzation and blindness. Unfortunately, it also switches your sex if you drink it.

If you're a player, remember that the same iterative power that works for the monsters can work for you as well. Hirelings and henchmen can go a long way towards evening the odds. Don't underestimate the usefulness of clerics, either. Having a few extra hit points in your back pocket, that can be rushed to any member in the party as needed, is a powerful equalizer.

Finally, remember that there are however many of you, and only one DM. Your combined cleverness can almost always trump any idea the DM has come up with. Yeah, clever planning didn't work for Biffy, but lateral thinking is a potent force multiplier that literally has no limit in the sorts of problems it can overcome.

Photo credits: cheesy42.