The Unwritten Past: Advocating A New Approach to RPG Character Development

Is your RPG character’s backstory necessary? Is the famed exercise of creating a background really useful?

The creation of a role-playing game character involves choices based on the mechanics of the game — determining attributes, skills, special abilities. Then comes the fateful moment of the character’s “background”. What is the character’s story? Who are their parents? Their friends? The highlights of their life?

Most players are not writers or screenwriters, which makes this exercise difficult or even downright painful. Hello clichés (the orphan-slave), calls to grand destiny (I am actually the secret son of the king), and inconsistencies with the universe established by the game master (how can I not play a Dark Elf in Dragonlance?).

Knowing that you are going to focus all your energy during the games on action (exploration, combat, etc.), your story has little chance of being relevant, so we can ask the killer question: is this background creation exercise really useful?

I’m going to be direct: most of the time, no. In fact, we don’t really care what your character did before the adventure. What happened before stepping into the dungeon belongs in the past. What’s the point of describing your family tree in detail if you never meet a member of your family? What’s the point of the time spent imagining a villain you’ll never cross swords with?