Playing through the past
Ginny Di has a wonderful video full of advice for players to make the Storyteller’s job easier. One of those bits of advice was to consider having players play non-plot vital NPCs from their own backstory. That’s a fascinating idea — the Storyteller usually has to play everyone in the game world except for the PCs. That can be a lot of work. Letting the players step in gives the Storyteller a bit of a break, but it also gives them a chance to dabble in some other characters. It can be fun and novel.
Ginny suggested letting the players play some of their characters’ family members or friends. Let’s say that Nadiyyah al Yasir, our party’s artificer, returns home to see her family. Instead of our Storyteller playing all her household members, Ginny suggests that maybe Erica — Nadiyyah’s player — play these people with whom she is familiar.
But I’m not sure that we want Erica to RP the entire al Yasir family — she’s going to be glad to be home and eager to interact with all of them. That’s a lot of talking to herself. So perhaps the other players could be her mother, her father, her old teacher, and so on. It could make for a great family reunion!
That’s just a slight spin on Ginny’s advice, though, and not really what this post is about. Talking about it reminded Erica and I that we’ve done something similar before, and that might be worth sharing.
Some years ago, I ran a game campaign in which I kept everyone’s backstory a little vague. Everyone worked on a concept and we developed a few important people or events from their lives, but I kept it vague because I had another idea — flashbacks.
Each session, one of the characters had a flashback to their own backstory. For each flashback scene, I created NPCs that were involved with the character and made some short, bare-minimum character sheets for them, then handed them out to the other players. I gave everyone some notes on who their NPC was and their goal in the flashback scene, then we played it out.
Everyone playing NPCs in the flashback got to try out some different characters, either people that I thought they would enjoy playing, or an NPC that was completely out-of-type so that they could dabble outside their comfort zone. And the player in the middle of their own flashback got to play through their history with a full cast instead of just me trying to do five different voices for them and talking to myself half the time.
Next session, a different PC would get a flashback. As a bonus, we were able to develop everyone’s backstory as we went. Everybody knew that they would get a turn to learn about their own character and with each flashback, they developed their character, adding details and layers. It was a weird thing, simultaneously developing them backwards in their history and propelling their character arcs forward.
It was really memorable and neat, but not something that suits every game. I don’t want to overuse that tactic, but there are some variations that might be fun.
Say the player characters discover a buried temple and venture inside. They navigate the collapsing tunnels and fight the monsters that have made this place their den. Finally, they find an ancient record of a forgotten war.
Now it’s exposition time!
But instead of me reading them the long story that the party is translating, what if I ran the scene as a historical flashback? The historical figures from the forgotten war become NPCs for everyone at my table and they play through the final confrontation.
Each player would get some notes and a character sheet, and the opportunity to play a different kind of character — perhaps one vastly more powerful, too. They plan the final assault on the ancient villain, lead the charge, and fight that climactic battle.
It doesn’t even matter if they live or die. The history of the forgotten war largely remains the same; the important people and the timing, but now the players have a hand in deciding who dealt the killing blow. Who sacrificed themselves in the final battle. Who betrayed the leadership and almost cost them victory. Whatever happens. The point is, the players learn all of the same exposition that I could have just read to them, but they get to shape it. And I bet they’re going to remember it far better than any long story I read to them!
It would work for dream sequences, too, and you can get even more strange in dreams. Events might get crazy and you don’t have to stick to normal physics or the flow of time.
Alternately, players might take the place of NPCs, not in dreams or flashbacks or ancient history, but just far away in the game world. What if the next big plot point is that Evil Kingdom A is going to launch an attack on Kingdom B, starting a war. The party will hear about it as messengers send word that the border garrison has fallen, but why not also let them play the soldiers stationed there? With new NPCs, the players stand at their posts and are there when Kingdom A attacks. They fight valiantly and then fall at last, or maybe sacrifice themselves to buy time for one of them to flee with a warning Kingdom B.
In game, the PCs may still “first” hear about the war when town criers or news sources begin announcing the battle and declaration of war, but it can be more visceral if the players were there.
Like my flashback adventure, it’s not a trick to use in every game. But if there’s a lot of “off-camera” events to set up the plot, if there is deep history in your plot, or if you want to use dreams or flashbacks, playing through it can be a lot of fun and something novel that your players will remember for a long time to come.
