Build Better Backstories, Part 1
Today, I want to talk about backstories. This is pretty much a pure RPG post, not a history post, so if you're only here for the history content, this is your warning.
Depending on your experience with backstories, you may have strong feelings. Some people love writing backstories as players, and some GMs enjoy reading them. Other players find them frustrating to write, and many GMs find them to be a distraction from the plot of a campaign, particularly when your player decides to write a whole backstory narrative that does not necessarily align with the tone or themes or power level of the campaign.
For my part, I love a good backstory, both as a player and as a GM. To me, the point of a backstory is to create hooks that the GM can use to instantly get engagement from a character. A good backstory NPC is someone that I can toss into a game and guarantee that the character will interact with and have opinions about. It takes some of the guesswork about "how will [player character] interact with [narrative moment]" out of the equation, which can be useful in guiding the narrative in a particular direction. It can give insight into a character's motivations, which can similarly help out a lot in figuring out which way the story is going to go in a way that is not railroading your players into only one option.
As a player, I like to give my GM these same pieces of information: what will I guarantee that my character will engage with? What moral compass guides my actions, so that you can guide me through the narrative better? Plus, it helps me as a player get a sense of the character so that I can spend less time at the start of the campaign stumbling through figuring out how to actually play my character (there's still some, but a good backstory helps a lot in making it faster and easier to get into character).
However, writing a good backstory can still be difficult, even if you know what you're doing! As a GM, I've had good backstories and terrible backstories from players. I've gotten backstories that I thought were good but ended up being completely useless to me because of the way that things worked out. As a player, I've written backstories that I thought were good and ended up not matching the campaign's tone. I've also written backstories where I got too carried away and ended up making the character basically unplayable without a major personality shift.
So what makes a backstory useful? How can you make a "good" backstory? For GMs, what advice can you give your players during a session zero or when you're pitching the campaign to them to help them develop good backstories?
Backstory Guidelines
A Backstory Should Set Things Up
One of the biggest challenges with writing backstories is that we never want to tell a completed narrative arc. A complete story, where the character has learned a key life lesson or accomplished a major goal, is great if you're writing fiction and so can feel like a natural instinct when drafting a backstory.
But giving your GM a complete story means that the campaign itself is an epilogue. If you've vanquished your mortal enemy in your backstory, that is an NPC that the GM no longer has access to as a mode of engaging your character.
Similarly, many players fall into writing the classic hero story where their loved ones are all dead, motivating them to go on a life of adventure and risk. Your rich parents' untimely death giving you the motivation and resources to go fight crime may be interesting--after all, it is the backstory of Batman--but it also means two things that shut down your GM. First, it means that you've likely already completed a major emotional arc. You've resolved it. This means your character doesn't have a ton of room to grow during the campaign. Batman is a fairly static character, emotionally, which is fine for the superhero comic genre, but less good if you're trying to build a single coherent narrative in a collaborative story. Second, it removes NPCs. Your parents are dead. That's no longer a knife that the GM can use effectively. Living parents that a PC has a good relationship with provide fodder for drama: they've been captured, threatened, or need a favor. They can tempt a PC to act contrary to their goals or moral code. Dead parents can't do any of that.
That's not to say you can never have a dead NPC, just that it is an easy and common narrative device to use that actually can make your backstory less effective for the genre of a TTRPG.
Setting up hooks well--whether they are locations or NPCs that you are guaranteeing to engage with--is one of the foundational goals of a good backstory. You are telling the GM how to ensure that you and your character are engaged. Backstory goal #1.
Connect Your Character to the Themes of the World
I've seen a lot of people online talk about characters that they'd love to run in a campaign one day, that they've already written up a character sheet for, and who they have a detailed backstory for. Don't do that. Please.
Good character backstories sit in the world around them. Beyond NPCs, your character might have places that are important to them, like a hometown that the GM can put under threat, spurring you to defend it with your life. A pre-written character might not be able to do that. Your character might have the best backstory ever written, have a strong supporting cast of living NPCs for the GM to choose from, be wonderfully open-ended... and be completely wrong for the campaign because it just does not fit the vibe.
Not to mention, good stories have things like theme baked into them. Some hack-and-slash, dungeon-delving, old-school style games might not focus on that as much, but a lot of modern story-focused campaigns do. For example, a major theme in my world common to my campaigns is about exploring individuality vs community, the merits of both, and the contrast between them. Is it better to have freedom in isolation, or to be restricted to a community that helps one another? A major conflict in my world, between religion and arcane magic, connects directly to that theme. And that's a theme that is baked into the worldbuilding of my game and the narrative arc of many of my campaigns. When you prewrite a character, you fundamentally do not connect it to the themes of the world/campaign.
For more about themes, I highly recommend this old AngryGM article that got me thinking more about the themes present in my world and games. I'll almost certainly write more about themes and worldbuilding in a future post.
Often, when I'm writing a backstory as I player, I start conceptualizing my character by reading the pitch for the campaign and the world and asking the GM questions. Then, I pick a theme or mystery or other worldbuilding topic related to the campaign and try to build a character that meaningfully engages with that theme.
For example, in a friend's campaign that I played in during college, there had been a major event that the entire world forgot about due to magic interference. Rediscovering this mystery would be a core arc in the campaign, I was told, and the theme of the fallibility of memory was an important part of the world/campaign lore. In real life, I have a pretty terrible memory, which is why I write everything down, but I've also found that I can and will remember song lyrics far better than something just spoken. So, I built myself a bard who, through song, was remembering faint inklings of the event which had been lost to memory, and who was trying desperately to hold onto memories that would be dragged out of his mind by writing them into catchy songs. It was a really fun and interesting character that engaged with the campaign premise, even if mechanically, he was a pretty standard and mundane D&D bard.
And GMs, make sure you have thematic conflict in your world. Not only does it make your campaign richer, but by being open and transparent about those thematic conflicts, you provide an on-ramp for your players to engage more meaningfully with the campaign that you want to run.
By building a backstory that engages with these themes, you're also signaling to the GM that you want to explore those themes in the campaign. It hits backstory goal #1: tell the GM how to engage you & your character, sometimes even in more meaningful ways than by dropping in a backstory-relevant NPC. Bonus points if you can create relevant NPCs that also engage with the themes, really solidifying to the GM a way to get engagement.
Think About Interaction
TTRPGs are social games. The vast bulk of the roleplaying that you'll be doing--the moments where you are making decisions--are in interactions. These might be with NPCs or with other party members, but they are all interactions. You might make slightly more choices in combat technically (the brave knight who is willing to risk taking extra hits to defend the party), but your character and their unique personality often most shines through in social interactions.
And that personality in interactions is one of the hardest things to nail down before play, at least for me. It can take a few sessions of play to settle into a rhythm. It takes playing through a few moral conflicts to figure out what this character's response to moral challenges would be. However, a solid backstory is a place to explore some of those interaction styles and at least try to shorten the time frame to be able to play the character "well" and consistently.
So, as part of your backstory, think about moral compass! Put your character in a scenario in their backstory where their fundamental morality is tested and shown.
For example, in a (different) campaign that I played in college, a Star Trek RPG, I played a character that I genuinely ended up despising. He was meant to be an inversion of the "brave and daring" style of leadership often seen in Star Trek captains. He was a veteran of a battle where he had seen his family killed, and so he ran from the battle. He ran from other responsibilities as well, and he took a new commission for an exploration mission as a way to continue running–completely abandoning the family that he had left. This desire to run from difficult situations would become a critical part of how I played him during the campaign; if the going got tough, my captain got going. In some ways, this made him a good leader–a cautious one, who would be willing to make a strategic retreat rather than throwing lives away. On the other hand, it also made him an awful coward. When the GM confronted my character with the family he had left behind during a shore leave session, he panicked and tried to launch the ship early to avoid the emotional confrontation. It made the character thoroughly unlikeable, but exploring that moment of initial "running away" in his backstory gave me a foundational way that he approached scenarios for the campaign, which allowed me to be consistent in how I would handle his morality during it from session 1.
My last piece of general advice, however, on this front: know your limits. If you cannot bring yourself to lie and cheat people in the campaign, you probably shouldn't be playing a mafia don. If you aren't willing to go against the group's interests at times, don't play a lone wolf archetype. If "killing a technical ally who is very corrupt" just isn't something you as a player are ok doing, playing the vigilante killer who sees the world in black-and-white is probably not going to work. Even with a solid backstory, if that moral compass you explore in the backstory isn't something you're willing to engage with in the campaign, you're going to end up with a bit of an inconsistent mess as your character. Your characters should not be clones of you and your morality, but you need to do some self-reflection to make sure that your cool character concept is something that you are actually willing to engage with morally.
This hits backstory goal #2: giving insight into your character's motivations, which allows the GM to do better, more informed prep because they can better anticipate your reactions to the aforesaid hooks that they've been provided. This is part of why it is important to create a character that you can play consistently on the same morality/personality--if you're wildly deviating from session to session about whether you are a ruthlessly ambitious person or a merciful, friendly one, the GM is not going to be able to plan for the path ahead well.
Conclusion
I was going to jump into talking about some specific tools and resources that you can try out in your games, as both GM and player, to help you put this advice into practice. But then I realized that I'm already pushing 2500 words, and to avoid this article being well over 3000, I think that might be better saved for a Part 2. I've had some that are right around 3000 (like the History & Myth post in the Bones series), but I do try to keep them from hitting that length too often, and I have more to say about specific resources you can try out.
So, stay tuned for Part 2, coming next week! We'll pick up this conversation then with two specific products that you can use to actually accomplish these more meaningful and successful backstories, both as a GM and as a player. Be sure to subscribe to the blog to make sure that you do not miss a post! Getting it delivered to your inbox is way more guaranteed that you'll see it than just following me on social media.
Thanks as always for your support and for reading!