Integrating Player Backgrounds

First off, a heartfelt apology to my readers for not posting anything in the last few days. Life has been kicking my butt between home, work and school over the past few days, but I'm back now! Today we'll talk about a topic that has been on my mind for a week or two now: player backgrounds. Not all DMs use them, some require them, and I recommend them. If you're using a homebrew setting, it gets the players to learn about the setting by having them build their character into it. It also helps the DM come up with ideas and populate areas he never had (remember all that blank space we left on the map? Yeah, here's where it comes in handy), which is a very handy technique for world-building (called collaberative design, but we'll get to that another time). For now, I'll discuss how I use backgrounds in my campaign.



Right now I have 6 players, and each has a different type of background. I'll show you what I mean by this.

Player A and Player B have backgrounds that don't really occur in/around the main staging area of the campaign, so its harder to implement their backgrounds into the foreground of the campaign. Player B also has a super-complex background, making it hard for me to follow and understand.

Player C and Player D havesimple backgrounds, but again, they take place far outside the staging ground of the campaign. They're also very fluff-light, making most of their character built around their progression forward rather than a background.

Player E has a nice short background, but the key is that it's very tied to the story of the campaign. He is more or less the "face" of the group and its leader, and a lot of the stuff in the campaign deals with him. This is a coincidence, mostly, but it also helps that him and I worked together to make his background something that would be relevant.

Player F has a pretty simple background, but this real boon is that its not tied to a place; it's about people, and the character's ties to entities. Essentially, he made a bargain with some devils for power, so I can do whatever the heck I want to screw with him.

So the trick to all this is to create a way to tie all the backgrounds at least partially into the campaign's main story arc. This can be tough since you have to build ties between the characters that is both not obvious to the players, but also makes sense. I think a good way to do this is by adding a common villain. Player E has an rival whom he defeated, but that rival works for a dragon (several players like slaying dragons as the dragnos destroyed their homes), and that dragon is allied with devils (the ones player F made bargains with), and one of the villains from Player B's background is actually a devil that's been slowly building a cult within his village, leading to his exile.

So you can see I've had to come up with ways to tie the players together beyond their own partnerships. So for DMs, I offer this advice for having players come up with backgrounds:

• Talk with your players about their background. Don't let them do whatever they want, but don't force them to do what they don't want. Give them advice and tips on ways to make their background relevant to the game.
• Limit the scope the players'  background can use. If you tell the players they all grew up in the same large city, you'll have an easier time tying the backgrounds together as plots can be tied together neatly.
• Tell the players that they've all ended up in the same situation, but for different reasons (You're all in jail, why? You've all been forced into the military, why?), and make them come up with those reasons.

In the end, backgrounds can help you build up plots that you had never thought about before. Remember when I wrote about nested plots, and said to have blank spots where more plots can be added? Backgrounds are a great way to fill those voids, as players tend to make choices you can't predict and plan for.

But that's it for now, hopefully this helped some of you guys. Until next time, happy gaming!