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The World of Georic 1989-Present

Monday, August 3, 2020

#RPGaDay2020: Day 3 - Threading the Campaign

Day 3 of #RPGaDay2020 gives up "Thread" as the prompt... and an excuse to finally use this meme that's been hiding in my drafts for months:


Since the beginning of RPGs, the character backstory could range from "I was born in a village and learned to fight, I might drink too much," to overwhelming pages of inane background even the most detail-oriented biographer wouldn't use in a book.  Picking the choices pieces of story out of those backgrounds and threading them seamlessly into the story, that's part of the art of gamemastering.

Let's be honest, there's something of an old school trope of sitting down at the table and finding your players are a paldain, two thief-assassins, the soulless wizard, and a group of guys playing fighters who begin to roll initiative before you finish describing a room.... of orphaned babies. In that instance, unless they show zero interest in getting out of the tavern they met up as, I wouldn't even bother looking at character backstories (if they provided one to you) until they survived session three.

This is talking about getting to find a natural connectivity within a "modern" group.  Low hanging fruit is used to give the party the impetus they might not normally have to start, but it's those subtle interactions that wait for the biggest payoff.

The obvious one was a simple review of character backstories back in college, such as:

*Same Town
*Both raised by single mothers
*Both raised by single mothers working in brothels

This is a no-brainer, unless you've already pulled that on your group previously, but tying that into the blatantly obvious half-brothers plot didn't bear fruit in my college campaign until episode #42!.  Why?   I had plenty of plot twists built into the campaign, dropping this on them early would be yet another zany turn of events that might diminish those two characters developing into brothers-in-arms naturally... or hated rivals.  In fact, after evrything they endured together and how they did it, it made sense that they were related.

It also allowed this storyline to play out without a full gimmicky feel, and opened up other storylines, a new hideouts, and that existential question for PCs, 'If Dad left us a large manor, can we clean it out or are we required to hire adventurers, like everyone else."

And let's not even talk about the true pleasure of threading the backstories of the "orphaned, raised by wolves/suicidal ninjas/villagers all killed by the plague/mudslide/inadvertent fireball."  While it keeps the option of family members in help/in peril, it is an utterly blank canvas to fill in the details, at will, of what transpired many moons ago.  Let's skip Chosen One or Child or a Demon and stick with more mundane things.  Pulling heartstrings usually has no effect on these players/characters, so a more direct/adversarial tone must be used.  It still may not affect the focus the plot, but it will give the other characters a realization of  "Why do we let enigmatic dudes like that join our group.  They're nothing but trouble"

We don't need to weave every little similarity into the campaign.  Two people that like to knit do not need to be part of some international wool cartel, and the impedning wool embargo can effect them differently.  Making everything look like an conspiracy board for some local tin-foil aficionado will make the players regret putting any work into their characters. 

Recently, I've been addressing the threading a different way.  Following the old adage of "the players will do more damage to themselves than anything the GM could ever dream of," I've kept things far simpler to begin the campaign.

"Six characters from the same village," is enough to tie most groups together.  "Intergalactic Exotic Animal Traders" keeps the unit cohesive and allows the player to work the character backstory into the group connections. 

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