Helping the D&D Backstory, Better Story, More Fun.

Ever get tired of the same tragic backstory? Or maybe as a GM/DM you feel like your player characters are lacking story interaction capabilities? This post might be for you!

As a player this will:

• Assist in character playing.
• give depth to your campaign, and possibly give you more importance in the campaign.
• help diversify your character choices.

As a GM/DM this will:

• Help you entwine your players into the story.
• get a more diverse cast of characters in the party.
• make storywriting for (or manipulation of) player characters easier.

Now first thing to look at is backgrounds for the game you and your players are in. D&D5e has a large choice of character backgrounds and variants of those backgrounds to give more detail to your characters. This may be a 'of course' situation for some players who use this feature extensively, however some people just use the background for extra skills, and items, instead of allowing it to help create depth to their character. Your rogue may be a criminal in his background and it gives him skills in deception and stealth, tool proficiency in a gaming set and thieves tools, and give you some miscellaneous thief type equipment. If you dig deeper though you can make your rogue a trained assassin or a master blackmailer who is trying to pay off a large debt to someone, who always has a plan, but when they see something valuable their attention is drawn to the item, only being able to think about stealing it, or your rogue could have been a burglar who doesn't worry about the risks, who always forgets or ignores the plan but aims to become the greatest thief of all time. Both of these for the same class can make two completely different characters. Using this tool can also paint a good concept of how to play your character, with the Ideals they can give you an approach to who your character is personality wise, between his Alignment and what is important to them the most, are they a cunning rogue like Robin Hood? or someone like Corvo from Dishonored, trying to redeem themselves?

Another way to flush out your character is to look at their starting things, such as race and class. How do these things help in character development? Take for example a Tiefling Paladin, two polar opposites that can work very well together, with Tieflings +2 to Charisma and +1 to Intelligence in the base book it gives attributes to your spellcasting as a paladin, and also giving the paladin resistance to fire damage, extra spells, and infernal as a language can give them an edge when trying to spy on or studying about demons or devils their deity is wanting them to pursue. A variant of this can be determined by things such as warlock pacts, wizard schools, and for a ranger their location. Did your spellcasting come at the price of your soul, or a loved ones demise? Did your magical studies make you incapable of understanding basic human interaction? As a ranger, were you a hermit who went to the mountains and this is why you have a snow fox as your companion, or if you grew up in the underdark and caves giving you your peculiar spider or bat. Things to avoid however are things such as the 'Tragic backstory', granted people are less likely to just pick up and go adventuring if they just had a kid and their life is going perfectly well, but there seems to be an overabundance of people who go for the massacred family/village, edgy loner stereotype character that can instead of making the story go along smoothly can take the story off the rails too often, refusing to work with the group or deciding that they would rather go after the demon lord, or dragon god alone rather than work as a team with people. This I feel is one of the personalities that I could see breaking a group up by making the party feel like they have to go and bring the person back on a regular basis, but someone who has minor trust issues and hides away magical items now and again is definitely free game and can add some fun interaction between cursed items and sometimes trouble with the city.

A final way to better flush your character out is communication. This goes two ways and though it may sound cheesy, this is the most important part for GM and the player. As a GM you are not only in charge of the story, but also making sure your players are getting along and drama and disputes are outside of the table and nothing too serious breaks the game up into arguments, or derails the party so much that the nights activities are halted and what you're wanting to get done can't happen. If two players are having a dispute, try and mediate firsthand and make sure it is not a in real life argument. If its just people playing their characters there is obviously not a huge issue but if there is something bothering, or upsetting a player try and fix these issues. Second step as a GM, can also be followed by the players, is communicate to each other. Based on the story maybe your character doesn't feel important and you feel left out, or maybe your character isn't feeling as "cool" or "amazing" as you were wanting them to. See if your GM has options to help you get more involved with the story, provide them with a detailed, yet open ended, backstory or plotline for your character to see if they can work a side quest tailored to you. Talk to other players, and see if they believe it would be useful for you to take more healing spells or damage spells the next session, or if one of them can assist you in learning a skill or language to increase your INT score. Ask for outside activities for more gold, or minor stat upgrades. If a player seems like they aren't having fun with their character check in on them, sometimes this is a pre-five slump where its before any of the very interesting things for some classes. Maybe suggest the player multi-class to gain more weapon or armor proficiencies, or give them spellcasting based on Charisma or Wisdom instead of Intelligence, seeing as the Eldritch Knight, and Arcane Trickster both go off of Intelligence and maybe as a fighter your player made Intelligence their dump stat giving them no benefit to spellcasting.

So in summary, try and give yourself more things to work with using the tools given to you by the Player Handbook and other player resources provided by yourself or GM/DM. Look at your class and race and find angles to use those to your creative advantage, and for your DM to help you if you have questions or problems. Finally, always communicate because either with other players, or your GM to better your experience while playing any form of tabletop RPG. Remember you never know, unless you ask!

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