Players who railroad GMs

[Dammit Victor]

Aside from making sure that one player doesn't smother the others with unsolicited exposition or a flood of unnecessary details, what matter does it make to you whether they have the barebones or more?

Well, first: if I've informed a player of my rule against backstories, and they aren't "smothering the others with a flood of unnecessary details" then how would I even know they've violated my rules? How would any of the other players know? The best rules are the ones that still serve their purpose even when they're broken.

Second: the reason that I've banned extensive backstories in the first place is that they pull the players out of the actual game that they're playing with the other players at the table. The players/characters are interacting less with each other, less with each other's backgrounds and agendas, because they're trying to play the character in their head and the character in their backstory instead of playing the character at the table in the group with all of the other characters.

People think these backstories are some kind of prerequisite for immersive roleplaying, but in my experience they detract from it. The "barebones", as you call it, is enough to encourage the players to play with each other and not enough to encourage them not to.

 

[Kilted Rob]

If what you mean is the other players can make bids for connections between them, that would definitely work, but the character's owner should have veto power over any such.
I have gamed with a fair number of players who would walk away from a table where any other player has a say in their character's background ... JusSayin.
I can't think of any Life Paths that fit on a 3 x 5 index card. The background is to inform the player of what his connections to the world are, how he got to where he is at the start of active game play. on which the player bases his role-playing efforts. If that PC does something the other PCs don't understand because of background, they can ask and an explanation is ready.
Aside from making sure that one player doesn't smother the others with unsolicited exposition or a flood of unnecessary details, what matter does it make to you whether they have the barebones or more?

The life Events life path in Crypts & Things could easily fit on half or less of a 3x5 notecard. Short and evocative, they provide just enough framing details to give a player a little context to spark player creativity.

 

[TJS]

People think these backstories are some kind of prerequisite for immersive roleplaying, but in my experience they detract from it. The "barebones", as you call it, is enough to encourage the players to play with each other and not enough to encourage them not to.

Yes. In my experience the most common result of these kinds of detailed individual backstories is characters that cannot function together effectively as a group. Often this means the character with the detailed backstory gets shelved and a new character created because the player decides their character just wouldn't do whatever thing it is the group wants it do next.

Where this gets dysfunctional, and I think this is the sort of situation the video has in mind, is in the sort of situations where PCs need individual motivations to participate in group activities. I've seen groups where players wanted individual hooks to their own character's "story" to proceed to each new stage of the campaign. So if the game needs to go to Hammertown, then the PC who is looking for his father needs to be given a clue that his father visited Hammertown, the Dwarf that is questing for the lost axe of the Dwarf king needs a hook as well etc. This is the road to GM burnout.

(It's also doesn't really have any place for much player agency in the game, it's basically personalised but linear. If the party isn't really a group, but a collection of individuals who don't have a solid reason to make collective decisions then you can't really have a sandbox, or much in the way of open decisions.)

What I see the video is touching on, may be a response to a lack of player agency in some cases, but it's the wrong response, and it's a respinse that makes the situation worse overall because it basically tries to end run around the game, by putting pressure on the GM role. "Here is my character - this is what I want his story to be - please make it happen". Really you can see the difference. There's backgrounds that are clearly intended to just give the GM something to work with and there's backgrounds that practically demand certain events need to follow from them. Basically I see the issue as less about Players demanding agency, but more about them giving even more responsibility and work to the GM. Now the GM doesn't just have to run the world but needs to make sure everyone gets their individual character beats too.

That's why I said this video is unlikely to resonate much here. It's not really a problem you're likely to have with established groups. It's more of an issue that is likely to occur if you're running a game at a game store or over the internet with a group of people who don't know each other previously.

 

[A Fiery Flying Roll]

I haven't played a lot of lifepath systems, but I like the concept. They generate just about the exact amount of backstory I'm willing to tolerate, and if they're played out at the table, they're actually a part of play. I'd really like to see a multiplayer life path system in which the players share some control over each other's backstories.

It's not quite life path, but new edition of Paranoia has that to an extent. Obviously, being Paranoia it's set up to encourage them to hate each other.

 

[Fenris-77]

You need cool evocative ideas for a good backstory not a lot of actual, you know, story. Those cool ideas interface with the game at the table to produce additional depth and (sometimes) immersion, while the same is not true of actual story IMO, as mentioned upstream.

 

[ffilz]

I can't think of any Life Paths that fit on a 3 x 5 index card.

Classic Traveller life path would definitely fit on an index card. With a little abbreviation I think even Burning Wheel chargen could be fit on an index card.

 

[TJS]

There's also systems where your background is threaded right into your characters abilities like 13th Age or Barbarians of Lemuria.

 

[ffilz]

What I have seen as a challenge with long back stories is the player is really trying to have the story of their character all locked up ahead of time rather than come out in play. In truth railroading from the player’s seat...

 

[Ravenswing]

Second: the reason that I've banned extensive backstories in the first place is that they pull the players out of the actual game that they're playing with the other players at the table. The players/characters are interacting less with each other, less with each other's backgrounds and agendas, because they're trying to play the character in their head and the character in their backstory instead of playing the character at the table in the group with all of the other characters.

Stipulating so, so what? My job as a GM isn't to get people to play the way I think they ought to play, but to have fun at my table. With the proviso that it's a cooperative genre, and that there's a point beyond which freelancing isn't possible, what a backstory does is to give the player more tools for roleplay. It is not only not my job to compel each player to deal only with the stimuli presented by the other players, no one has ever adequately explained why I'd want to do so.

Beyond that, you're talking something that's unenforceable. I'm not a mindreader. I have no idea what's going on in any of my players' heads (except in so far that the one I've known for the *least* amount of time is 18 years). As long as my players are paying attention to the action instead of their electronics, well ... that's seemingly a tough enough thing for the 21st century GM to ask, from everything I see and hear. I decline to worry about Goodthink and Goodspeak.

And finally, you raise the oft-raised premise that it's an essential virtue that RP take place at the table, and ONLY at the table, and ONLY from the moment of the first die roll on forward. Fair enough. Can you tell me WHY that's essential? If, say, a player wants to get in an hour's hack session for pure RP purposes with me, what's wrong with that? How does that detract from the other players' enjoyment?

Ultimately, my longstanding belief is that the hatred of backstories comes from fear. Fear that the player's somehow "better" than the GM, fear that he or she will demand more, fear that the player will somehow "take over," fear of anything not fitting into the paradigm. Because sure: there are drama queens out there who expect the world to conform to the backstory. I can even remember one player who was. That's ONE player, out of 176, over 43 years. And I dealt with that the same as I've dealt with other uncooperative players over the years. It would never occur to me to avoid backstories forever because ONE player tried -- and only *tried* -- to abuse them, the same way it would never occur to me to disallow mages (or aristocrats, or rogues, or ...) because a couple players went off the reservation.

 

[Dammit Victor]

Like you, I only have one real horror story about prima donna players and their precious backstories. I wouldn't have stopped playing that way over one bad experience. (Though it really, really sucked.) I stopped allowing backstories because of the dozens of times I watched players refusing to engage with each other because they were trying to live out their novella.

If you don't understand why lack of player engagement is a game problem that needs to be addressed...

I'm a writer, and I have a lot of writer friends and I support their hobbies-- careers, in some cases-- but I would ask them not to attempt to play the protagonistis of their current works-in-progress for the same reason. If we're all sitting around the table working on our solo projects, that can be fun, but that's a writer's group, not a roleplaying game. Five or six people can have a lot of fun sitting around a big table playing mobile games on their phones, but you don't hear nearly as much entitlement from people when you suggest banning phones.

If you're not there to play the game with the other people playing the game, what are you there for?

 

[ffilz]

I’m trying to think if I’ve had any long backstories that weren’t problematic...

Let’s see, recent Traveller PbP player with long backstory.... problematic and killed the campaign...

Arcana Unearthed player with long backstory that totally contradicted my thoughts for what was behind some of the stuff in the setting and didn’t want to change it to fit my setting...

I have always seen long backstories as attempts to guarantee the PC’s relevance and negate what might happen in play.

 

[Ravenswing]

Like you, I only have one real horror story about prima donna players and their precious backstories. I wouldn't have stopped playing that way over one bad experience. (Though it really, really sucked.) I stopped allowing backstories because of the dozens of times I watched players refusing to engage with each other because they were trying to live out their novella.

If you don't understand why lack of player engagement is a game problem that needs to be addressed...

I'm a writer, and I have a lot of writer friends and I support their hobbies-- careers, in some cases-- but I would ask them not to attempt to play the protagonistis of their current works-in-progress for the same reason. If we're all sitting around the table working on our solo projects, that can be fun, but that's a writer's group, not a roleplaying game. Five or six people can have a lot of fun sitting around a big table playing mobile games on their phones, but you don't hear nearly as much entitlement from people when you suggest banning phones.

If you're not there to play the game with the other people playing the game, what are you there for?

Um. DOZENS of times? You've really seen DOZENS of players refuse to engage because they demanded to play out their backstories instead?

To be perfectly honest, if you're not trying to bullshit us with absurd hyperbole, damn, dude ... you need a different gaming circle.

But I will call you out on the absurd hyperbole of your last sentence. There is nothing about a backstory that precludes playing with other players, at the table. My own players routinely have backstories. I've seen other GMs routinely use backstories. I've played in some of their campaigns, and submitted backstories to them. That one instance in 43 years really is the one time I've seen the notion abused, at my table or anyone else's, and if we banned other elements from gaming with ten times the incidence of abuse that people do with backstories, we wouldn't have character classes, playable races, magic, combat or scenarios.

I will accept the possibility that your own gaming circles are riddled with drama queens and prima donnas, clutching their scripts with white-knuckled grips, and acting like a Hoffman or a Streisand towards anything or anyone daring to dent their preconceptions. I don't swallow that the syndrome's endemic in the gaming world, nor that the term "backstory" imposes an obligation upon a GM or a gaming group to follow someone's script to the letter, nor that the existence of backstories are synonymous with an unwillingness to engage with other players.

(Hell, I'm playing in a MMORPG, right now, with a hundred-plus players. Every character has to submit a backstory of at least 250 words, as a precondition of graduating to full play. Somehow we still manage to RP, and with one another, even.)

As a GM, I love backstories. They provide plothooks, they provide motivations, they make it easier to introduce NPCs, they're good for getting past the awkward "Why in the heck do these people want to adventure together?" They aid me in helping the players create their characters - certainly even the one-line "I'm an ex-gladiator who bought his freedom" and "The king ordered the murder of my parents" suggest skill sets, advantages and disadvantages obvious to many of you. What possible reason would I have to forego such an excellent play aid? I'm a grown-ass adult, well able to put down munchkinry, well able to put a red X through any elements of a backstory that don't conform to my setting.

 

[xanther]

I've fairly simple rules,
(1) As a group you need to find some reason(s) why all the PCs are together...as I don't run PvP games.

(2) Backstory is fine but it can't give you any more resources (connections and political power are resources...actually hard wired into my rules) than the starting character build gives you...either now or in the future...of course you could play your PC to fulfill some destiny, but there is no plot protection.

(3) Backstory can't rewrite the setting, which includes redefining the society you are from; you can certainly have any and all character traits that are completely antithetical to the "norm" of your society, and perhaps that is why you are adventuring.

(4) You do get to choose your reputation: from exiled and potentially hunted to a well supported operative...but with benefits comes responsibilities, fail to fulfill them and you can fall from grace fairly quickly.

 

[Ravenswing]

(nods to Xanther) Yep. Doing backstories right requires that the GM stands ready with a red pen to X out anything that doesn't fit. Bonus: the player's learned more about your style and your setting.

 

[ffilz]

(nods to Xanther) Yep. Doing backstories right requires that the GM stands ready with a red pen to X out anything that doesn't fit. Bonus: the player's learned more about your style and your setting.

That would work if the players who wrote up long backstories were amendable to the red pen...

Thankfully for me, with my current focus on old school games MOST people (with the exception a Traveller player whose insistence on playing his backstory as opposed to the content of the region of space I had defined killed the campaign) don't even write a sentence or two of backstory which is just fine by me.

 

[Ravenswing]

Someone not amenable to the red pen gets no choice, at my table. I'm the one who knows my setting best. I don't mind players seeking to flesh out what I haven't created, but I get a veto, and they don't. Beyond that, someone pitching a fit on me in character creation wouldn't be someone I'd keep around anyway.

Which leads to one of my shibboleths: the ability to say "Nice try, but no" is one of the most essential tools in a GM's arsenal. Any GM either unwilling or unable to do so is hamstrung from Day One. I admit to considerable contempt for the premise -- which extends far beyond gaming, of course -- that it is far better to impose blanket bans and zero-tolerance than to ever face the horror of making a judgment call. In a position where one has to make judgment calls anyway all the damn time, for hours on end?

Nope. I don't eliminate combat in my games just because there are twinkies out there who love to argue rules. I don't hand out pre-genned characters to everyone just because there are minimaxers out there thirsting to abuse the system. I don't delete certain races or certain character classes just because there are idjits who turn them into treacly parodies. I don't roll all the dice myself just because I've run into dice cheaters. And I see no reason to eliminate backstories just because some players want to push them further than an individual GM might want to handle.

 

[TristramEvans]

Huh, this is not a problem I've ever encountered. Players want to write a big backstory, I'm like "great".

It tells me the sort of stuff they want the game to be about, and it gives me plenty of fodder for twisting the knife

 

[ffilz]

Someone not amenable to the red pen gets no choice, at my table. I'm the one who knows my setting best. I don't mind players seeking to flesh out what I haven't created, but I get a veto, and they don't. Beyond that, someone pitching a fit on me in character creation wouldn't be someone I'd keep around anyway.

Which leads to one of my shibboleths: the ability to say "Nice try, but no" is one of the most essential tools in a GM's arsenal. Any GM either unwilling or unable to do so is hamstrung from Day One. I admit to considerable contempt for the premise -- which extends far beyond gaming, of course -- that it is far better to impose blanket bans and zero-tolerance than to ever face the horror of making a judgment call. In a position where one has to make judgment calls anyway all the damn time, for hours on end?

Nope. I don't eliminate combat in my games just because there are twinkies out there who love to argue rules. I don't hand out pre-genned characters to everyone just because there are minimaxers out there thirsting to abuse the system. I don't delete certain races or certain character classes just because there are idjits who turn them into treacly parodies. I don't roll all the dice myself just because I've run into dice cheaters. And I see no reason to eliminate backstories just because some players want to push them further than an individual GM might want to handle.

I screwed up in the Traveller campaign. Well, actually, partly the player pulled a fast one. They came in with back story, but said they were happy to play in the region I set up and their back story didn't have to factor in much. Then after a year or more of play by post play, suddenly they wanted to play into their back story big time, and ignored anything I said about what I was prepared to run or prep up. And quickly it became clear the solution was to shut the campaign down. Since then, the player and his buddies have tried getting other GMs to run a campaign for their PCs... Oh, and the set of players that was hooked into this, they would write multiple posts per day about their interpersonal interactions, drowning out the interaction with the GM input and making it very hard for me to find the "what are you doing next" and sometimes they'd even ignore my "what do you do next" to expound on their PCs romances... (they also did this in another campaign). I think what they really wanted was a back drop for their cooperatively written romance novel... And actually, the back story really wasn't that many pages. It just didn't engage one bit with the setting I had presented. And they expanded on it as we played to tie in more PCs, yet still not really tie into the setting I had presented.

The Arcana Unearthed player with the problem back story I think presented it in the middle of the campaign, but that campaign was also nearing a natural ending point as I had to back down a bit for doing house hunting and then packing and moving. Other players were also drifting. My next campaign, using the newer Arcana Evolved edition ran much better with players who were just down for 3.x character builds and dungeon of the week. And no rambling back stories...

When players ask about backstories, I suggest they write a few sentences that will help them visualize their character, but realize I may or may not include anything from the backstory. I "play to find out" so having something pre-written just doesn't fit well with my play style. I don't find most of the hooks players drop as useful, and have been more likely in pulling on one to discover it wasn't something the player wanted to explore in play.