The first character background I was said was akin to a Mary Sue fan fic, the player had made himself a hero by the age of fifteen…so what else was there to do?

Having said that, I have found I am rather hesitant in giving my players characters a particularly good or bad background simply because of the bad associations that can come with it.

It is nice though when you learn that the Baron that your group may have to meet is actually your character’s uncle, the brother of your mother who ran away from the Baron’s court to get married to your father. I look forward to all the awkwardness this will envolve if we get to meet him, and likely we will, knowing the DM.

David: Thanks! I hope that they bite on your hook and smoothly integrate right in with their companions.

I particularly appreciated your suggestion about preludes. I have a couple of new folks joining my campaign this season, and they’re also new to the system, and tabletop rpg’s in general. It was great to run a little session for them a couple weeks before the main campaign started up again: we got to review the rules of the system, get to know their characters (both personally and mechanically) and I gave them a good hook for meeting the other characters and moving the whole party into the season of adventuring.

Plus, I got to play while most of my group was still out of town for the summer!

The prelude that I was working on was going to be done over MSN as I can’t get the guys together for a while but they want to get something started. If it works out I’ll have the players sworn to secrecy on who they are playing, hopefully, and have the chat windows open for each and run the game as individual preludes. Once they work out who they have to go see from their list of contacts and friends they’ll eventually move over to a joint chat window. It might not work but hopefully the group dynamic will end up with an actual leader coming from roleplay rather than from character classes as it usually ends up with this particular group of players.

Leurnid: Disadvantages can do a lot to steer the campaign. Hunted was a good way to make sure your favored enemy would show up in Champions…

They length i get ranges from a couple of pages to a quick summary, but i really like that background page Rafe put up. about the basics, and they must have that for me.

On a few occasions, the psychosis, neurosis, and quirks I would pile up on my character would become such a compelling component in our gaming sessions, that the GM would incorporate some of the elements into the plot lines- proving (to my character at least) that it is only paranoia if you are wrong.

After hashing things out, they then write up a more formal background before the second session. It’s usually between one and three paragraphs long. I usually ask that it be kept to a single sheet of paper. Players print off one copy for themselves, and one for me.

I flesh histories out further with flashback sessions (thanks for the link, by the way).

This method has two advantages: The players tend to choose a reasonably balanced party (as opposed to all showing up with a paladin, say), and they often develop backgrounds that work together, even if I don’t specifically ask that they’ve all met each other.

Dasis: Sounds like fun. How long an adventure did they usually submit? Did they ever submit “and we stumbled on the cave of a dead red dragon and now have 1.3 million gold pieces” type stories?

Truthfully, I would like the players to get more into doing this themselves, but it does solve some problems listed above.

No meeting in the tavern leading to tavern brawl.

Bryan: Q&A before and during the game are good ways to encourage reflection on characters or prompt specific details. (I’ll say more about that soon…) A brief history sketch and some back and forth to deepen the characters made for great characters. I am looking forward to the sequel.

I think it really helps answer the eternal question of “so why is this character with the party, anyway?” Well, the misanthropic droid is with us because he was on my pirate ship and we both got kicked off at the same time, and now I’m the closest thing he has to a cover. The suspiciously honorable bounty hunter is with us because this planet was his port of call, and since I don’t know anything about what’s going on here, I’m sticking with him since he has bigger guns.

Different character goals or alignments can often be a problem, but I think having the characters know each other to start can mitigate the issue fairly effectively. Why is the paladin sticking around with the bloodthirsty barbarian and the wizard with questionable morals? Because they were childhood friends, and you don’t abandon a friend that close just because you’re not entirely positive he needed to fireball those hobgoblins. After all, he’s your friend; he must have had a good reason. If you can’t trust your friends, who can you trust? Best to stick with them. Even if that rogue your wizard friend claims to have gone to school with is a rather shifty-looking fellow..

With that in mind, my preferred method of character generation is usually, “Show up with some idea in mind of who your character is and where they came from, then talk with everyone else to see if you can make your backgrounds work together.” There’s usually a tacit agreement that anyone can add background details to the relationship once the game has begun. “This is just like the time you screwed up your featherfall spell and ended up bringing cloud giants down on us!” “Yeah, well I’m not the one who got caught in bed with the Viscount’s eldest daughter!” “You’re just jealous. Ow! Hey, healing over here, someone?”

I like to know about the characters immediate family. I like to know about their aspirations or goals. I like to know what they fear or what they desire the most. I like to know if they have any enemies. I like to know what they have been doing in the recent past (prior to game time).

I also like to have that background give me at least 3 or 4 NPC ideas to incorporate into the campaign. Good backgrounds provide the GM with some tools to use, yet leave much of the PC’s character open to development as the campaign progresses. Three or Four paragraphs are usually sufficient. A few sentences don’t provide much and not many GMs want to read a 50 page short story either.

The methodology varies but I usually try to get the PC to answer around ten common questions. I also have the players discuss their backgrounds together (even via e-mail) so that they can establish connections (if any) or common events in their past. I offer suggestions and tweaking until the player and I are satisfied with their back-story. I think this approach worked well in my most recent Star Wars series.

I think part of the success is being able to sell the players on the idea that the game will be much more interesting if you do the pre-game effort. While it was a pretty easy sell in my group, my responsibility as a GM was to use the tools that they created in order to enhance the gaming experience. Apparently it was pretty successful as everyone wants to see the sequel.