By: Joe Gaylord (LabLazarus)
This is the second of a pair of articles I have written with diametrically opposite opinions. This presents the opposite opinion from what I said last week. I’m writing both because it’s a topic I’m deeply conflicted about, and one where both sides have solid arguments. The topic is character backgrounds. Specifically, how much should you write about your character before starting a TTRPG campaign and why. This month, I’ll present the minimalist view, my opinion that you should come to the table with just enough backstory to play the game.
The minimalist view hinges on two key notions. First, a roleplaying game is, at its core, a game; characters should be kept mechanically tight, and shouldn’t inflict a lot of extra work on players or GMs. Second, TTRPGs are telling a story, and if you arrive at the table with your character’s most interesting stories already written, you’re losing out.
Meet Krag
Before diving into the discussion of how tighter character backgrounds make a difference in a game, I want to illustrate what I mean by the idea of a “tight” background. Often in TTRPGs, there is a tendency to overwrite characters with pages of backstory. This is natural since we’re expected to not only play, but to embody characters we find exciting or compelling. As an example, let’s consider Krag:
Krag is a barbarian from The Great Northern Forest, a member of the Elk Clan. He was a trapper, used to long forays into the wilderness, with a knowledge of many animal species and an interest in fine and exotic pelts. He hunted the woolly mammoth as part of his coming of age, and saw his brother die from a fomorian’s curse in the deep forest. Over campfires, he traded many stories with other outlanders and became steeped in his people’s oral tradition. He knows the epics of the seafarers and snowwalkers by heart. When he speaks, he often dives into fables and allegories to make his point instead of stating it directly. He also riddles his speech and action with small superstitions and rituals, meant to ward off evil spirits. He inherently distrusts magic, especially wizards, and will accept their aid only in the direst need. As a man of 52, when he already had children and even a granddaughter of his own, a neighboring tribe, the Snow Leopard Clan, laid claim to Krag’s region. They demanded great taxes on his people and drove Krag and his family from the land. He fought a guerrilla battle against the Snow Leopards for a year before they took his granddaughter hostage to force his surrender. The family resettled in a nearby city, Krag’s wife took a job as a noble family’s maid, and his children took other menial jobs in the city as well. Krag decided to seek his fortune as an adventurer, hoping to earn 1000 gold pieces to ransom his granddaughter and enough skill at arms to later drive out the Leopard Clan and reclaim his home. The language of his people is recorded only in complex knotwork, not in traditional writing. He sends these knots as messages and purses of gold back to his family whenever he can. He hopes one day to return home as a hero, ransom his granddaughter, and teach her the ways of the deep north.
There’s a lot of good information here, and this isn’t a bad character. However, a more minimalist version specifically for D&D 5.5e might look like:
Krag, Human Barbarian
Lawful Good (Or Green-Red if you’re using color alignment, which you should)
Str 15, Dex 12, Con 14, Int 8, Wis 14, Cha 12
Krag is towering and hearty, with charming and insightful stories always at hand. He can be artless and naive at times, but is methodical, dedicated, and honest.
Guide background. Origin Feats: Skilled, Magic Initiate, Druid (Produce Flame, Message, Snare)
Skills and Tools: Leatherworker’s Tools, Performance, Religion, Survival, Thieves Tools
Languages: Common, Giant, Sylvan
Krag was a trapper in the Northern Forests, learning to set snares and cure hides. He studied the ways of nature, the myths and stories of his people, and the magic of the deep forest.
He was driven from his home by a rival clan, and he seeks the wealth and power to seek justice and retake his homeland. He carries a lock of his granddaughter’s hair in an amulet as a lucky charm and reminder of his quest.
This is essentially the same character, but stripped of most fluff. Almost everything here is mechanically grounded. His description is based on his alignment and ability scores. His story is based on his background, skills, and feats. The only non-mechanical piece is his motivation, which is reduced to a single sentence. This gives a number of big benefits, for the players, for your game, and for the story you are telling together.
Ease of Use
A minimalist background offers a much simpler experience for the players and GM while playing the game. It turns the background from a homework assignment into something that is dedicated to supporting the table in playing the game.
The most straightforward aspect of this is cutting down on preparation time for everyone involved. You, as a player, don’t need to write a long block of text including a lot of events and background characters. Your comrades don’t need to remember or interact with a complex story with details that don’t bear on the game at the table. Your GM doesn’t need to remember your long story and a range of details from it. This is especially important, keeping in mind that there will be a half-dozen other stories for them to remember.
Relatedly, you can be more confident that everything you’ve put down on paper will matter. Having three, five, or ten times as many words in a backstory means that either your GM will be working hard to wedge all of those details into a campaign and that each element is that much less likely to have any relevance to the story being told. Worse, each additional piece adds to the risk that something isn’t a good narrative, or thematic fit for the world or the table. It could even create problems or tension in the game, such as Krag not trusting wizards.
Once the game is underway, more minimal backgrounds can be a memory aid as well. A character whose motivation comes down to a short sentence and whose other traits are bound to mechanics on their sheet is easy to recall quickly. From a roleplay point of view, you don’t need to do a lot of interpretation or guesswork when deciding how to act or react; everything you need is summarized in a few sentences, and it’s easier to keep in mind. Mechanically, it’s easier as well. Because the backstory is easier to remember and ties in with the character’s abilities, there are fewer extraneous details. This means you’re less likely to forget features while you’re playing, and your GM is less likely to do so, as well.
Each word added to a backstory is one more thing to remember, include, and use in a meaningful way. All of that can lead to a substantial mental load for everyone at the table, especially when long backstories are multiplied by four, six, or more players.
Pivot Points
In addition to making the game less stressful to run, a simpler backstory can provide a lot of space for improvisation and adaptation. A minimal backstory includes substantial “whitespace” that can be filled in during the game. That can serve as key narrative real estate for a player or GM.
As a player, the whitespace of your character lets you improvise more fluidly. You don’t need to decide on and remember enormous amounts of lore ahead of time. Instead, you can give family members, hometowns, and other details as appropriate during the progress of the game. In terms of improvising your character’s actions and reactions, not only do you have fewer elements to remember, as mentioned before, you also have fewer constraints and chances for contradictions.
In addition, this whitespace lets you fill in a number of gaps and include details as needed. If Krag, without any clear training, happens to roll a 20 on a medicine check, it can be challenging to explain. Likewise, when a town guard looks at Krag and shouts, “You again!” the GM can ask how you know one another. In both cases, a more complex background would require more thought to fit in and might actually conflict with what happens at the table. A minimal story gives you more latitude to add details as you go.
The GM can use this, too. They can work with you so that hooks are meaningful without needing to adapt them to a fixed backstory. If the GM knows that Krag’s granddaughter matters to him, the GM can work with that more easily than needing to remember her name, age, and what she is meant to be doing. Simple, flexible ideas are far easier to adapt and fit into the story of the game than more complex, locked-in ones.
We Are the Story That Matters
In writing, you often get asked, “Why are you telling this story?” It’s important that, when building a narrative, you are telling the more interesting and exciting part of a story you can, and one that only you can tell.
A backstory full of adventures and heroics can sometimes beg exactly that question. If your character has survived wars, slain dragons, and saved kingdoms before you even sat down at the table, how can raiding a goblin camp or slaying a pack of rabid wolves present the most compelling story you can tell? Characters with grand heroic backstories can make the adventure at the table feel trivial and make the game less fun.
Moreover, the most important story isn’t supposed to be yours; it’s supposed to be ours. Characters with big backstories can drift quickly toward main character syndrome, where their past heroics feel like they justify an unfair spotlight in what should be an ensemble game.
In both cases, a minimal backstory presents less distraction. Your character can be a hero, but part of the game is watching them become the hero they are destined to be, not to see them emerge as a fully formed hero.
Conclusion
Longer, more complex backstories represent substantial cognitive load on you and your table and can limit your ability to improvise and play the game. They can also create problems where your character’s previous adventures are more interesting than what you are doing at the table, and distract from the collaborative nature of the game. However, there are groups that like more complete, maximalist backstories because they do have their benefits.
You can read about those here.
About the Author
Joseph Gaylord has been playing TTRPGs and TCGs for 25 years, with almost 50 titles to his name on DMsGuild as an author, co-author, or contributor. He is on most social media as LabLazarus.
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