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Especially for new players, it’s often difficult to integrate their character into the world in a way that feels natural. Here you’ll get some tips to better incorporate your pen & paper characters (or those of your players) into roleplaying through their backstory.
Generally, it makes sense when creating your character’s backstory to ensure you establish goals and reasons for joining an adventuring party. The lone thief with the “Batman backstory” is indeed a cool concept for a book or movie, but often causes problems in pen & paper groups, where solo acts usually also mean boredom for the other players.
Prior Knowledge of the World
It’s significantly easier to create an interesting character that fits into a world when you actually know the world. It can be very helpful to ask your Dungeon Master for some information about the setting and perhaps also about the campaign. A Session Zero is also great for this, where all questions can be clarified and players can also coordinate with each other in terms of roleplaying. Often funny constellations can emerge that carry the roleplaying of the entire campaign.
In our current Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden 🛒 campaign, the players decided to play three dwarves and one human. The dwarves are all from Clan Stoneeye, while the human tries to be an important medic. The whole thing often reminds us a bit of The Hobbit when the dwarves talk about their clan, drink a lot, or make fun of things that humans do.
An example from our campaign
Here it’s also often interesting when individual players receive information about the world that the group is otherwise initially unaware of. Perhaps a character already knows where a certain item can be found or knows some people who will become important later.
Details of Your Backstory
It’s important to have some details in your backstory that allow you to reference your past. However, you shouldn’t get too detailed, as such information often either doesn’t come up at all or gets ignored. Personally, I find it essential that your character has a simple goal. Everything else can come later and revolve around that goal.
Goal-setting for a character shouldn’t just be “wants to experience adventures,” but should contain some kind of measurable goal that can be achieved or missed. This can involve simple things like money for a sick family member or revenge against an old enemy. Above all, it’s about giving your character motivation outside of the story. This allows you to much better lead conversations yourself in roleplaying situations and also give impulses for roleplay to other players. Here’s here a somewhat more detailed post on this topic.
Organizations and Groups as Motivation
Many characters have as part of their backstory that they belong to a group or perhaps are also being sought by one. Classes with religious connections like clerics often have an organization like the church of a specific god as a central part of their story. Here it’s important to have this relationship at least basically in mind and perhaps note it in a few bullet points when creating the character. Questions that can help are: Who is the god? How well regarded is the church in society? Is the character convinced by the religion? What does the church demand?
Often it’s also helpful to be sought or pursued by a group to motivate your character. Perhaps you owe money to the wrong people or have tangled with an organization you should rather stay away from. Now they’re looking for you. This immediately gives you a reason to join an adventuring party (whether for money or protection) and also a very clear goal.
Individual People in a Backstory
As already mentioned, it can also be helpful to have connections to people in the world. You should definitely coordinate with the DM to properly integrate these NPCs into the setting. You can also have a few names of characters from your personal history ready, but here I would be very careful with the elaboration. It’s easy to get lost in the exact connections and relationships to various family members, which usually never become relevant. This can also be frustrating for players, as they invest a lot of time in this backstory and this can’t be appreciated if it doesn’t come up. So if this isn’t meant to be the central motivation of your character, then I would only minimally develop it.
Once you’ve developed your characters, you can create them on D&D Beyond and with Beyond20 automatically roll digital dice directly on Roll20 or in other VTTs. Here you’ll find more on this topic.
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