Ban backstories. These, above all, are an infringement of performative culture upon the game's rules. A backstory is a way of voting yourself a set of accomplishments, which then you think you're allowed to crow about, while everyone else is expected to buy in. The character who whole-hog embraces the backstory is one who can see no difference between an invented triumph and one that's earned. Both allow him or her to boast, both allow preening and the prancing that comes of self-importance, both permit a safety net of imagined competence that can be defended with words, making die rolls and real consequences inviolable. The monologue of the invented character is there to pull focus... which is precisely why such persons should never be allowed to play.
D&D is a game, not a performance. It is a series of events taking place in game, where the numbers bestowed — experience, wealth, status, toys — reflects an ongoing series of risks that brought concrete benefits. Nothing... no item, no association, no privilege, no satisfaction, no skill, no asset should manifest in a way that is self-assigned. The dice can assign these things, every player ought to have the ability to roll on a large table of chance, with winners or losers, but nobody is blessed merely because they wish it so. You start a game, you get the same number of pieces as everyone else. You join a game, your value is your ability to play. That's the only measure. D&D is NOT a game of "imagination." Like every other form of entertainment that exists, imagination plays a part, but it doesn't make you special. The only person your imagination serves is you, and it only counts when its in your head. The rest of the time, you must play the cards your dealt, you must play the character the dice dredged up, you must take the good and the bad along with everyone else. There's no special car for your originality and there's no seat for your imaginary friend. If your imaginary friends want to play, they'll need to roll their own dice.
It's rarely said, but the compulsion to backstory is vanity run amuck. Human activities have long suffered the admission of those who insist that they ought to be made the centre of things, for no other reason that they believe they are that. The "backstory" has empowered these people. It has given them a licence to be themselves — that is, execrable — while being able to point to official literature that justifies that claim. And we, who owe nothing to officials, who owe nothing to those who invented this nonsense, who never needed such nonsense in our games, are now expected to bend the knee simply because some fool put it in a book somewhere.
The functions that we place most highly where it comes to human collaboration and involvement are work, study, love, friendship, family and personal sacrifice for the greater good. None of these things recognise vanity as anything but an impediment. NONE of the organisations based upon these ideals rewards such vanity. Why D&D should go its own way, while branding itself as a special form of collaboration where the vain selfish assholes of the group are catered to, I can't begin to imagine. But here we are.
We're not even supposed to call it vain. We're supposed to reward it.
Yes, reward the loudest person at the table and make the game orbit them. Reward the prattling fool who insists on delivering a three-minute segment of their backstory every session. Reward the one that must remind us during every combat about the one who killed their father, who must be avenged. Reward the player that cries on cue, that won't act because it's "out of character," who steers the game because every event must be about their backstory. And with what should they be rewarded? Applause, of course, and our laughter, though we've heard the joke a dozen times. But if we can't laugh, then our tired groans will do, for those too prove that the player is the centre of the universe, again, compelling the emotional state of all others present, without relent.
Stopping this is easy. As DMs, the setting is ours. The characters were born into it. When Geoff says, "My father was murdered by assassins and I must avenge him..." then say, "Your father is a porter, he works at the Calf and Lamb inn and he drinks too much. He's an NPC, and I'm the DM." There, settled.
When Mary says, "I was born in a far off land, where I am known as the lost princess Sheia..." then say, "You were born in the back of a milk truck while they were trying to get your mother to the midwife; your mother still calls you 'Diddlebums.' You really hate it. But your mother is an NPC, and I'm the DM."
This is a clean, surgical way to handle it. By reasserting the world's reality, not by arguing, but by defining the setting, as the DM by the rules is directed to do. We don't debate their invented past; we overwrite them with something ordinary, grounded and specific. It’s reclamation. We’re reminding everyone that characters are born into the setting, not imported from some parallel stage. The moment we reclaim authorship of origin, vanity loses its foothold.
These interventions work because they're decisive and unambiguous. We don't make a story about why the player's backstories don't fit; we just demonstrate, in play, that the world already exists and doesn’t bend to a player’s imagination. "Your father is a porter," "You were born in a milk truck" — these aren’t punishments; they’re reintroductions to reality. These players need a little more reality. They need to remember they're playing with other people, not themselves. They need to be reminded: you exist here, in this shared space, according to the same rules as everyone else.
Handled this way, the table resets. The players learn that identity isn’t a gift they bring — it's something they accumulate with sessions, at the same time as their peers. Our job isn't to validate their self-mythology, but to give the world shape. Our world, not theirs. Let them run the game if they want to make up characters.
Then, once the premise is clear, and the players cease assuming their importance, they can start engaging with the game in front of them. With their ego on the hook above their shoes in the front hall, to be worn elsewhere. Whereupon the game returns to what it was always meant to be: a shared act of exploring, adventuring and overcoming, grounded in the present, where the effort is to help each other along, paying each kindness forward as they go.
When Mary says, "I was born in a far off land, where I am known as the lost princess Sheia..." then say, "You were born in the back of a milk truck while they were trying to get your mother to the midwife; your mother still calls you 'Diddlebums.' You really hate it. But your mother is an NPC, and I'm the DM."
This is a clean, surgical way to handle it. By reasserting the world's reality, not by arguing, but by defining the setting, as the DM by the rules is directed to do. We don't debate their invented past; we overwrite them with something ordinary, grounded and specific. It’s reclamation. We’re reminding everyone that characters are born into the setting, not imported from some parallel stage. The moment we reclaim authorship of origin, vanity loses its foothold.
These interventions work because they're decisive and unambiguous. We don't make a story about why the player's backstories don't fit; we just demonstrate, in play, that the world already exists and doesn’t bend to a player’s imagination. "Your father is a porter," "You were born in a milk truck" — these aren’t punishments; they’re reintroductions to reality. These players need a little more reality. They need to remember they're playing with other people, not themselves. They need to be reminded: you exist here, in this shared space, according to the same rules as everyone else.
Handled this way, the table resets. The players learn that identity isn’t a gift they bring — it's something they accumulate with sessions, at the same time as their peers. Our job isn't to validate their self-mythology, but to give the world shape. Our world, not theirs. Let them run the game if they want to make up characters.
Then, once the premise is clear, and the players cease assuming their importance, they can start engaging with the game in front of them. With their ego on the hook above their shoes in the front hall, to be worn elsewhere. Whereupon the game returns to what it was always meant to be: a shared act of exploring, adventuring and overcoming, grounded in the present, where the effort is to help each other along, paying each kindness forward as they go.
No comments:
Post a Comment