Origin Stories: The Heroes
Of course The Heroes met in a tavern. Original they are not. It should likewise come as no surprise that Wizard went in for the Session One exposition dump. As you may have gathered from Wizard Quiz, The Heroes’ resident arcanist is a big believer in in-depth backstory. It’s not hard to understand why.
When you first sit down with a band of brand new PCs, it can be tough to get a read on the personalities gathered around the table. When it comes to that all-important first impression, you’ve only got the general-purpose “you may describe your character” to go on. I don’t know about you, but I have a hard time connecting with, “You see a human in his mid-thirties. He’s got brown eyes, a lean physique, and wears a travel-stained cloak.” Maybe it’s a personal hangup, but I always feel a certain pressure to make sure my fellow players instantly “get” my character. I’ve only encountered this anxiety in one other medium.
A million years ago, back when I was taking improv courses in college, my troop ran a game that featured playing cards. Everyone took a card, tucked it into a headband, and then began to mix and chat as if at a cocktail party. You weren’t allowed to look at your own card, but everyone else could see at a glance whether you were an ace or a deuce. The shtick was that you were a big shot if you had a high-value card, dropping all the way down to “social pariah” near the bottom of the deck.
“You!” said I to the Four of Clubs. “Servant girl! Pop back to the kitchens and bring round another tray of shrimp.”
“Excuse me?” she said, eyeing me up and down like I was the scum of the earth. “I don’t work here.”
“Oh of course, Ma’am! My apologies.”
I continued that game assuming I was the lowest of the low. I did my best bowing and scraping to my many betters, and was startled to learn at the end that I’d been the King of Hearts the whole time. I guess my classmate didn’t like being called “servant girl.”
That’s the kind of misunderstanding I worry about at the table. If I’m a tricksy rogue, I want the other PCs to show a little instinctual distrust. If I’m a barbarian with a heart of gold, I want my buddies to treat me like a likable oaf rather than a violent savage. Sure, the other players might decide to react against type for their own in-character reasons, but I want that to be a well-informed decision rather than one based off of a misapprehension.
If you’re a talented actor, and if you rely on broad stereotype rather than subtlety, much of this problem goes away. Nail a Danny DeVito as-used-car-salesman impression and people instantly know what to make of you. If you’re a less demonstrative type however, say the ever-popular brooding in the back of the bar PC, then it’s a lot harder to convey your personality. This is something I term “the rich inner life problem,” and it shows up every time your character’s complex identity is invisible to the rest of the table. You’ve got this fascinating character in your head, but no one else gets to experience it because you don’t have the chance to show it off. That’s why I love White Wolf style preludes in my games.
It doesn’t take much. Just ten to fifteen minutes apiece in Session One, allowing each PC to show a little bit of their personality. Everyone gets a brief solo session, playing out important moments in their backstory in front of the other players. This allows the rest of the table to see one another’s characters in action, and to imagine what kinds of relationships their PCs might form.
Discussing characters in Session Zero helps of course, but that’s far less experiential than a prelude. Same deal with a Wizard-style exposition dump. You can observe with those techniques, but you can’t grok. That’s why I think watching other characters strut their stuff in a prelude is the best way to get everyone on the same page. You’re free to set your own tone in a solo prelude, and party cohesion is just a short step from there.
That’s my go-to Session One strategy anyway. What about the rest of you guys? Have you ever tried to run a prelude? How did it go? Let’s hear about all your favorite methods for introducing characters and forging a party dynamic down in the comments!
ADD SOME NSFW TO YOUR FANTASY! If you’ve ever been curious about that Handbook of Erotic Fantasy banner down at the bottom of the page, then you should check out the “Quest Giver” reward level over on The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. Twice a month you’ll get to see what the Handbook cast get up to when the lights go out. Adults only, 18+ years of age, etc. etc.
I made a friend at a Meetup last year that created a hex based roleplaying system some forty years ago and has been running it with the people in his life for all these decades. Everything is in allowable flux, like how we decided just today that you couldn’t put a Returning rune on a pilum or you’d just get a bent missile weapon back that wasn’t even doing its job of making the other guy’s shield unusable.
But when you create a character in this, you basically only get to choose the most very basic stats for him or her. Beyond that, you roll dice at like a chapter of charts for randomization, and for the stuff that isn’t already charted, you roll 2d6 to gauge how the character that you’re unearthing feels about it.
And it’s an unearthing. Other systems generally have you build a character, race, class, feats or skills or quirks or talents, then you add flesh. Here, you are essentially occupying a citizen who already lives in the world, you just jump in through his already existent life and learn what he’s about, and from there you decide how to go about doing things. It’s basically a Session Zero build into character creation, and happens as a natural thing for everyone who creates a dude.
Short example, I start tossing dice, I don’t choose name, ethnicity, alignment, nothin’. It turns out I was born in the ‘Eastern Mountains’ where celtic type clansmen live, and I show up as Sullivan Culann, a Chaotic Evil javelin chucker (the reason we were discussing pila in the first place today) who loves his family, wants to make sure his 3 sisters go to college and is okay with his only brother being a cartographer instead of a warrior like him, and will cut his own throat before he puts a bug into his mouth ever again. Stitching all of these things together, even as nonsensical as it threatened to be, let me meet Sullivan the Dented so much more deeply than my most longstanding characters who I kicked off with ideas like “I think it’d be fun to try Grey Guard.”
I’ve just started playing Mordheim again for the first time in years. Rolling random advances has been an amazing way to hint at a story, building it piece by piece rather than telling it by intimation.
I’d always heard that Traveller was amazing for this. Yet another reason to try those funky sci-fi shenanigans.
Of course, all of this is contingent on the idea that you’re down to play whatever. If you get your jollies by expressing creativity in a writerly way then I could imagine getting irked by this system.
“What do you mean I can’t make my own character? I have to do what the charts tell me? This is bupkis!”
Mordheim was always amazing. If you haven’t found the Steam version, I can recommend it. Definite 8.9/10.
Now it’s time for more gushing about this system, so you can skip over the rest of this post until you’re bored sometime. 😀
The charts and the gods of dice have a strange interaction in the game I was describing (I took to calling it the Big Fish System as a salute to the incredible breadth of experience of its creator). They rarely produce a dissatisfying result, but commonly suggest options that are equally cool when you think about it. I brought a friend into the game and his dude fell in love with axes. Said friend hadn’t given two seconds’ thought to axes, but now he chucks ’em right along with Sullivan, who is thrilled to have a Throwing Buddy.
The stats that you -do- choose (by investing points) are Strength (directly reflecting hit points, damage, and carry weight), Dexterity (which you have to roll under on 3 dice to hit anything and gets modified by various actions like multiple strikes or aimed shots), and your Talents (the various weapon proficiencies, and secondary boosts like Monster Knowledge so you know where to aim for a brain on a giant slug, or Running to give you extra movement hexes in a combat round). With everything else randomized, you develop your character goals and personality. Sullivan got 18 (max) Con and
a Huge frame, but 33/100 looks, 9/100 courtesy, ‘Lazy’ level energy, and we extrapolated from these that he cares about function way over form, and doesn’t care enough about anyone beyond his direct circle of friends to bother with ‘looking nice’.
Then he died, and got cloned and his soul was claimed by Mars Ultor, so now he’s part of that temple. Two changes occurred to his sheet…his dex went down by 1, and his Courtesy changed to -96-. Dex is Dex, but the shift in interpersonal values stirs up the pot entirely as far as ‘what makes Sullivan Sullivan’ and it’s enormously fun to discover.
My takeaway is that when I don’t start with a predetermined goal, I get a hundred paths to take and all of them are ‘Forward.’
Chicken entrails, cloud gazing, and Rorschach blots. There’s nothing I love better than finding meaning out of random bits of information. In other words:
https://xkcd.com/904/
I’m stealing from Lucky Luke here, but I imagine the tavernkeeper taking down the huge mirror behind the bar and scurrying it to safety before Fighter can finish saying ‘fighter’…
As for Session Zero or other preludes, I’m afraid I’ve not much experience there; my face to face games tend to start slow but without anything I’d call character introduction or acclimatisation.
Immediately after this comic, Fighter did indeed begin busing up the tavern. It was his first confirmed kill.
My group often uses preludes and session 0’s, but not for character exposition, but to ensure that each PC is invested in the world setting and their own character. For character exposition and teambuilding, we instead answer 1-3 questions about our character’s flaws, back story, fears, aspirations, families, etc., in 2-5 sentences each. We then go around the table one by one letting players give their responses to the chosen questions. Since this is done at the beginning of each session, the character exposition is spread out, instead of waisting a massive amount of time as players recant their character’s autobiography.
Do you find that you’re able to remember everyone’s answers? For me, it’s easier to associate what a character does in-game with personality than to pick it out from a questionnaire.
I’m going to run Starfinder soon-ish, and I actually expect to do a ‘session 0’ that covers the reason each character knows the NPC central to the story – it’s something I like about Starfinder APs, each character is given a potential way they knew a central character to the story based on their background choices, which prevents a lot of ‘Why am I here?’ moments out of edgier, more ‘back of the tavern in a dark corner’ character archetypes. Because we can answer, ‘You’re here because you owe a life now get in the damn robot.’
I myself have never had the opportunity to be in a game that involved a true session 0. My games all just began, sometimes in media res. In a tavern, at a starship dock, in an underground aquifer (That was a weird game of Marvel Superheroes, and the first and only DM I’ve ever had who flipped the table and ragequit mid-story, on TWO campaigns – he also ragequit the Star Wars game he was running that I was also in, after railroading my high-charisma Han Solo into combat by repeatedly having the GM NPC attack after my guy had talked a situation down,) already in control of a small city as its de facto leader – all my games have simply begun with little personal attention paid to anyone unless they took a trait that made them a big name/bigshot in the area, then they would get lingered on a bit.
Are you talking about background traits? I’m having a hard time remembering what the “character connections” section looked like in Dead Suns.
Does a Prelude not get a bit on the meta-game side though?
Or is it just to show how a character should be treated, after first impressions are put aside?
I love the idea, but the other characters in the plot would hardly be able to know these back stories right off the bat.
When do the preludes become relevant in the game itself?
Or is it just purely for backstory?
My favorite preludes are the ones that hint rather than explicate an entire backstory. They show one or two key scenes rather than someone’s life story, and leave viewers with more questions than answers.
“Wait… who was the guy with the cigar? Why did you burn down his shop?”
That sort of thing. You provide a glimpse of the character while still allowing most of its personality to be discovered through play.
Ah ok
I like that
You know, I like to think we live in a world where every game is perfect and all the players are amazing at roleplaying and the pacing or presentation is never off… but I guess that mindset is causing more harm than good?
At least for my own characters, I don’t like “explaining” them to my party for the most part. Because if I have to explain them, I feel like I’ve kinda failed as a roleplayer. And yes, sometimes people will try and fill in the gaps on their own and make assumptions about aspects of your character instead of waiting for you to show them, but that’s more of their mistake.
In fact, that’s one of my biggest pet peeves in roleplaying – people not making an effort to interact with my character and then making stuff up. Or even worse, judging my roleplay choices as if they know my character better than me – as if I’m playing them “wrong”.
Now, if you’re meeting in a tavern for the first time on session 1, then it’s natural that you won’t know each other. Your Barbarian can challenge the Fighter to an arm-wrestling match, thinking he’s probably a worthy opponent. Then he’ll get scoffed at and find out the Fighter is actually a noble archer who dumped Strength and does not partake in peasants’ artless contests of brawn. Then that eloquence will be met with a blank stare, showing him that the Barbarian dumped Intelligence and probably cannot understand words with more than 2 syllables. But then maybe he’ll explain it nicely and simply, as he has manners, and the Barbarian will instead challenge him to a game of darts, as he has decent Dexterity and all he really wants is a buddy to play with, not to show-off his maxed-out Strength.
If it’s a low-roleplay game, of course, you likely won’t be doing banter or other bonding activities… in which case, sure, an introduction would be practical. But otherwise, I really like the idea of allowing the camaraderie or other party dynamic to develop naturally.
Sometimes you’ve gotta shoehorn the roleplaying a little, as far as I’ve seen. A little ‘show to tell’ if the other people are playing with a sheet full of stats when you’re trying to play a character.
I’ve helped one or two people warm to the idea of dealing in more roleplaying than the bare minimum for diplomacy checks by demonstrating how much fun I was getting out of my little extra descriptions for everything. Fun, it seems, is a gateway drug to more fun.
I think of “explaining character” as making up for he lack of contextual info. That barbarian would never challenge a skinny nobleman to an arm wrestling match, but we lack the at-a-glance visual information to help him realize that. That’s why I like the prelude as a solution. It’s a non-exposition dump way to grok another person’s character, getting to know them a bit before you have to interact with them. It can give some of the context you would naturally have in an IRL meeting without ramming it die your throat.
Some time ago mt group framed a campaign with the talk of two of the evil guys prior to the final attack on their fortress. The two guys where talking in the throne room prior to the heroes to crush the door and get them. We open the campaign with them saying something like “Hey, can you really believe we are here trapped for that backwater band of meddling teens?”. After some levels another one in which they say: “When we get that report of our operations getting dismantled you say ‘don’t worry’. What will you tell me now? Eh?” The DM used that moments to make a recap and some foreshadowing of what will come. Prior to the party storming the castle they get another one and another one prior to kick the door and discover only one of the two evil guys dead, impaled to the walls and killed. Then came the revelation that this was not the end of the campaign and that the party has to get the other one guy. They catch him in the real good ending, but the true real good ending is that the bad guy survives. Why i told this? Well first of all i like stories, second to illustrate that in my group we really like to play with the narrative and the times. Some people play rpg in a strictly linear time, so they don’t need to go back and de-advance their character stats, or altering the continuity. We like to play with it. More than once we have started a campaign in the end and then we told the story that leads there. Of course this is a dangerous approach you need to leave enough things in the dark so you don’t set the fate in stone, that said is interesting that one of the first things you show the group is that in the end there will be more or less people in the party that in the begin. And because of this many time we have in fact run a prelude by the time we reach the middle of a campaign. Like that time the party have killed the bad guy only to discover that that guy was the good if misguided guy of the campaign and could have been their main allay. The opportunity of taking the great accomplishment of the party and turning it into a “Nice job breaking it, hero” moment with a plot twist is too much for our DM or for me to not take it.
I’ve only rarely used this technique. It’s cinematic rather than ludic, and so it theoretically risks harming suspension of disbelief. In practice though, I think it’s super effective.
We don’t use it every campaign, just when it’s dramatic or our DM whant to screw with the plot 🙂
I assume this comic takes place before wizard’s “character developments”
Assumption confirmed! This is a throwback to the days when the party first met after all. It completes the “Origin Stories” trilogy:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/origin-stories-team-bounty-hunter
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/origin-stories-the-anti-party
My characters rarely have a full backstory planned out. They have a skeleton of a backstory at creation, and more facets reveal themselves over time.
^ solid strat right there
There are some characters I guess people got more- I had an experience once playing an “ironic” Drizzt clone who disliked other Drow but for personal reasons and was actually still pretty evil, but the group just saw it as a regular evil Drow and never probed deeper, so that whole thing was a flop. It was also kinda dorkish/hipsterish and not in a good way; these days I chalk it up as a learning experience for meta-roleplaying.
Anyhow, for my current game I’m taking pretty much the exact opposite tact to both Wizard and Fighter up there: my Druid has a heckuva backstory for his recent life-changing decision(s), but doesn’t trust anyone enough to open up to them about it. So all the party gets are veiled references to some SERIOUSLY anti-theologic leanings that last session literally had one player asking “What did the gods ever do to you?!?!?”. And of course, if my response to any questions is ever NOT a cryptic half-answer, then I feel like I’ve betrayed my druidic archetype.
And I. Am. LOVING it.
So you sidestep the “the rich inner life problem” with frequent cryptic hints? I could get behind that. Just make sure they’re heavy-handed enough to attract notice! Like you found out with the early Drizzt-clone, there’s nothing worse than having an interesting character hook that never comes into play.
My characters usually have a moderate to large degree of backstory, but I hate the “You must tell me your entire life story!” gimmick for a session 0. In the comic, Fighter actually comes off as the more realistic of the two. For the elaborate backstories, I expect events in story to be what triggers small revelations at a time.
In a recent game, my character had a 5000 word backstory written up, and even that was more skimming than detail. However, personality-wise, she could barely tell the truth to save her life. Her massive backstory was barely referenced in game (though it felt more an issue with never being given an opportunity to explore it), but the fact that she would never tell anyone the truth about it came back to bite the entire group hard when assassins from her home country showed up to take her back by any means necessary.
And that was fine. I never got to really provide exposition on her backstory, but the failure to do so had its own merit. It was her personality and the way she interacted with others that mattered. Trying to “force” everyone to know everything about her would have ruined the character.
Shocking as it may seem, Fighter isn’t always the asshole. Wizard is invested in his RP. That doesn’t mean you’d want to sit at the same table as him.
I’ve gotten to where I hand out a series of questions in our planning session. Your character isn’t considered complete until i have the answers, and they are things like backstory details, desires, motivations, fears, that kind of character building thing. Then, I plan stuff around the information I get after Session one. A character fears spiders? That’s going into the game. A character desires to become king, I’ll see what I can do. It has increased player engagement a good bit, as players see something and suddenly their eyes get big and they realize that this scene was effectively custom written for them.
One of the most fun I’ve had with it, was recently in my Changeling game. I have a guy playing a changeling forced to basically be Jack the Ripper versus his Gentry’s Holmes. He’s been really dedicated to the concept that the Gentry gave him (or maybe he always had…) an itch to kill. So I recently looked at him after one of the games and said “you know, it’s been a while since you got to do it right. I wonder what that one Spring Contract that reveals your deepest desire would say about you right now?” The resulting panic and following “Oh, wait, maybe that’s why Spring Court doesn’t want me at parties.” Was classic.
I love seeing players enjoying their characters.
Sounds like you’ve been successful with the strategy. If your players are happy, then you’re doing it right. A word of warning though. Like we talked about back in Wizard Quiz…
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/wizard-quiz
…some players resent being assigned “homework.” This can come up if you find yourself GMing for a new group. I therefore submit that it’s better to provide an incentive for this sort of thing, making it optional rather than mandatory.
When my friends and I play D&D, it’s very narrative heavy. But it’s for that reason that I like it when the session jumps right into the story, and the character’s big backstory plans are reserved for “loyalty missions” down the road. And a big part of that is because I’m a firm believer of leaving wiggle room in the character design.
It often takes time for the greater story to emerge, and you might lock yourself out of ties to bigger story threads and narrative themes because you already overinvested yourself into your character design, complete with a deeply research psychological profile and drawing up their family tree for the past three generations.
Besides, sometimes it’s more fun to roll with the dice, so to say. I like letting successes and failures decide some things about my character — their mood, their interests and fears — rather than chalking all the dice rolls up to luck.
Solid advice right there. Discovering a character rather than inventing them can be oddly freeing.
Hmmm…. what are the rules of succession in the elven kingdom that Wizard is coming from? I am guessing it is agnatic seniority, since the uncle is sitting on the throne, instead of the prince.
But now that the prince has turned into a princess, his claims to the throne would be null and void, wouldn’t they?
There may be a future storyline in this. Time will tell!
Hello, I am an elven prince. Which means absolutely nothing, because there are thousands other princes. I am 874th in line of succession, so unless mass assassination in the court happens, I’m not seeing a crown any time soon. And my children are going to wait even longer, as my older brothers also going to have children that have a right to the throne before mine. My youngest nephew talks about staging a revolution that would change our rite of succession to election based on personal virtues. The nerve of young people! How dares he disrespect our sacred rites, freaking commie.
I’ve got a new group of characters that have a shared backstory. Their village was controlled by a cult. They channeled various spirits into a man before having him have relations with several women. The children were to be sacrificed when they got older, but they escaped and have been living in the wild ever since. They trust no one but each other.