Playing the Backstory

In a role-playing game, a character’s emotional connection to the world is often limited to an academic understanding of their backstory. A more natural, more immersive result can be reached by playing through the characters’ upbringing.

Benefits to playing out the backstory

Characters are the result of their past, rather than having a past selected to result in the character
Experiencing playing through a setting and with backstory NPCs results in greater investment; when the village, kingdom, or world are threatened, this matters
Players grow and develop in response to individual choices, leading them to developing characters beyond their standard choices
Player Characters have stronger and more complicated emotional webs, leading to more interesting interactions.

How it works

In short, you begin the game long before the players’ adventuring careers begin. Depending on the story you’re going to tell, you might begin with childhood, college, or sometime after. Whatever it takes to frame the process of the characters becoming who they are.

Collectively you play out the process of becoming those characters, whatever the starting point for your game is. Allow this to determine what their starting traits are, based on the choices they make, and how they react to what life throws at them.

Implementation tips

You want to play this on a high-speed setting, years passing in little play time. What works for me is a series of played-out vignettes followed by months or years of time summarized by a few questions. The choices they make should matter, and have definite effects upon their development. Skip the boring stuff, zoom in on the life altering definitive events.

You might play this out at the table as a first session, or do it via email before the game as an extended form of character creation.

I find that a set-up that brings the party together works best. It’s far more entertaining to allow the players to react to one-anothers’ events in character, and it forges real true bonds between them.

Either let the players determine their starting situations, or roll for them randomly. Likewise, the events you play out can be determined randomly at first, and in response to their earlier choices.

Examples of use

Characters from the same small medieval village learn about the setting and each other as they grow from children to adulthood and leave to find their destiny as adventurers. (Fantasy)

College Freshmen deal with the stress of a new environment while trying to build a future and getting to know each other, dealing with the dramas of young adulthood, until they all get superpowers. (Superhero)

Friends grow up on the same culvert from junior high to adulthood, blissfully unaware of what lurks in the shadows around them, engaging in mundane conflicts and drama, until the vampire moves in next door. (Modern Horror)

A family of five are lucky enough to have a fallout shelter when the bombs drop, and must cope with learning to survive in the aftermath. This lasts until their parents die, and they must step out into the world and look for other survivors. (Post apocalyptic)

Questions? You are invited to either leave a comment below, or ask directly through the comment form.

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