5 backstory bad habits that drive your DM nuts 

Lots of folks sharing some incredible exceptions to these rules in the comments! The thing about "rules" is that if you understand WHY they exist, you can always break them. 🙌 Every single "bad habit" I described here COULD work, if you understand why it's a bad habit, and are clever about navigating that. You can be the last of the elves as long as your DM is on board for it. You can own a magic shop and have a husband and adventure for... I dunno, a different reason than the ones I suggested. You can slay a dragon before level 1, as long as there's an explanation for why they are NOT dragon-slaying-level-powerful AT level one. I truly hope that y'all know me well enough by now that you know I am NOT making these videos to shut you down or tell you that you're playing wrong. As always, my goal is to provide you with information that teaches you something, makes you think, and gives you ideas. You don't have to listen to me unless you find what I'm saying helpful, and want to listen to me! OKAY BYE 💕

Okay, but you've got to write an incredibly long backstory with insane feats in it, and have the character flaw "is a pathological liar" at least once

On the note of character investment, my wife was SO invested in her half-elf ranger that after she saved her estranged father from the underdark, she decided to retire the character so she could live with her Tiefling girlfriend and help her at her potion shop. She loved this ranger so much she was genuinely worried something bad would happen to her. So she asked if she could retire Emelgwen and roll up a new character. Emelgwen is still in the world and can be called upon by the party. She’s just not an adventurer any more.

With the whole “I ran a magic shop, but one day the place was robbed clean” would be an incredible setup for a game in which the player went to try to find said items to return them to the shop. Cause that way you can have random enemies throughout the campaign all equipped with pieces from the collection to maybe work to tie them all together to one source to find the initial thief

I'm glad I am not the only one that writes two different length backstories, one to give to the DM and one optional to read that I did so for me.

I love nothing more than a player who ties their character directly into the bones of the campaign setting. You want to be part of a major faction? Yes! You wanna be a cleric of an outlawed god? Interesting!! You want to be from the town where we are starting? You betcha! Sending all the Nat 20 luck to anyone who does this.

You can be creative with giving a low-level character an illustrious backstory. In curse of Strahd, my 3rd level ranger was a major player in an uprising, but since entering Strahd's domain had become a severe alcoholic. Hence, leveling up for her isn't improving herself in a novel way, it's working past her demons to take back full control of her life and regain the skill and drive she once had

As a DM, I love the final point about players caring about their characters and not punishing them for it. The problems with backstories, mechanics understanding, even gameplay styles can all be addressed and remedied so much easier if the players actually care. That is what means the most to me when I'm running a game for them

My immediate thought about the magic shop is that she ran it while her husband went adventuring for supplies, but now he’s injured- took an arrow to the knee- and can’t bring back magic plants, monster parts, and mystical paraphernalia anymore. So now it’s her turn, but all she has is his half legible self-written guide to ingredients, and so she must seek the help of other adventurers, etc. etc.

I'll admit my weakest part of roleplay is reacting to how the dice fall, as I can sometimes fall into the trap of 'I wish it had rolled this, imagine how cool/dramatic/allowing for character development it would have been', rather than fully understanding that it's all about how I in-character should respond to wins and losses. This is good great advice. Also? I want those shoes, here's hoping they bring them to Australia. PS: Five breaths, if you need it.

One of my favorite characters was the third child, out of four, of a clothier and merchant. Education was very important, so she had been attending schools most of her life. At the start of the campaign she had been corresponding with a research wizard as part of her graduate project and had not received a response to her last three letters.

I actually did have a character who had slain an adult green dragon in his backstory. The twist was that he was but one member of a huge hunting party that his tribe sent to do the deed; he was just the lucky sucker who happened to strike the final blow. The tribe gave him a deed-name for it and expected great things from him, while he suffered from impostor syndrome and overcompensated by projecting a tough-guy image to everyone he met. He actually did go on to really wreck (and get the last hit on) a green dragon late in the campaign. I don't think the DM planned it for story reasons, though. That was just a reasonable boss for that adventure, and my character happened to roll insanely well in the fight. He did have a policy on our later adventures of letting the player who dealt the final blow on the boss keep the mini, so I have a cool green dragon on my RPG shelf now!

Worth pointing out to people starting with higher-level campaigns, "make sure your character's backstory is appropriate to your level" goes both ways. A 6th-level Ancients Paladin is not likely to be a wet-behind-the-ears farm girl looking for her dog that got lost in the woods, nor is a 15th-level fighter likely to be "a lowly new recruit to the city guard"! Great advice, as per usual, Ginny!

My last backstory document was huge, there was a paragraph at the top that said "what you need to know" and then the rest of the document tilted "I got carried away, sorry." I'm glad I'm not alone.

I'm not going to lie, I'm a huge fan of somewhat comedic back stories. One of my favorite was from a few campaigns ago. A friend was a level 1 Halfling Druid whose story was that he and his family were farmers. Everyone is safe and mostly happy. His reason for traveling is to find his horse who had been "stolen," because she's been his best friend for years. What he doesn't realize is that his horse was never actually stolen. His younger sister had borrowed her, with their parent's knowledge, and the horse and his sister returned home 2 days after he had left in his search. He never bothered to ask his parents before he left, he was too embarrassed to tell them that his horse had been "stolen," instead he left a note saying he wanted to see the city and would be back before harvest. Thus began the adventure of Karl Willowbark and the search for his horse named Jenni.

I'd like to add one more for the cliche part: Do not shy away from playing basic setups like for example the human warrior commonfolk or maybe even with a military background as soldier. I for one think since they are often seen as basic they have also the biggest opportunities to grow and even surprise the group. I can understand the desire to play exotic characters since RP should be a getaway, but playing a Githyanki necromancer or tiefling druid you are most likely allready some kind of unicorn and super special magic awesome, which kind of lessens the opportunity for growth a bit.

One thing I would add: Don't be afraid to collaborate with other players at your table on backstory. The party doesn't have to be total strangers at the start of the adventure, maybe they've crossed paths before: Friends, siblings, former lovers, rivals, parents, etc. can all make for very interesting party dynamics.

“We’ve all heard the horror stories.” Huh. What horror stories? Kidding. Anyway, your point about caring about player characters hit home with me. I’ll take it a step further and say it’s a mistake for DMs to not care about PCs. How can you build a world/story around people you don’t give a crap about?

One cool thing my DM did for my current campaign is, once we talked about the backstory, he sent everyone a 50 question document with things that he could help build our character and character arcs. It included simple things like thoughts on nobility, ever been arrested(and why), thoughts on magic, what’s your party role(Comic relief, mom, leader). But it also has harder questions like do you consider yourself hero, villain, or something else. Or if someone your character trusts/loves asks you to go against the party, who would you side with. Or what is your character’s ultimate goal. It was awesome because it helped further develop my character and gave him potential plot hooks/story beats that he could use to keep us engaged. It was really set the campaign off to a good start.

My sweat has dried up because according to your tips, I did my current/first D&D character backstory correctly. I gave a summarized version to the DM, had a catalyst/reason to be from where she was, then to adventure, and while I had an idea in mind to how her character arc would go, I played along with the dice and DM's plans to see what would be the ultimate shift in her. I just had a session where I shared her story to the rest of the party. I had a rule that she would try to keep it to herself for as long as she could because she is ashamed of what happened to her. But the session before, she died - she saved the paladin, now her adoptive father, from a lich Power Word Kill by switching places with him. We had a cleric with a diamond to save her after. Dying is a pretty big deal and it rocked my whole party. I was pretty scared to share her story after because I was worried I went too far. Thankfully, this video just validated that I'm doing alright. 😅

One time, my ENTIRE player group joined in a kind of prank on our DM who wanted us to make LEVEL ONE characters, wherein we were all these epic villains, planes hopping terrors that have felled kings and empires, with a loyal army of soldiers thousands strong... AND THEN, we thought we were so smart and untouchable that we went to Sigil and tried to *usurp the Lady of Pain*. She didn't take to kindly to this and proceeded to turn our loyal soldiers into so much fertilizer. In a last, DESPERATE bid to escape my wizard used a kinda janky teleport spell he was still working the kinks out of but would render them untraceable, having the whole party jump through... reverting our ages and capabilities back to level 1, thought we still largely possessed our memories but with that fog of timey wimey nonsense that kept our proficiency bonus at +2, even for stuff we knew otherwise.

One of my favorite backstories that I've ever made was a little gnome locksmith. Helpful in the community, earnest, and hart working. One day he met a beautiful tiefling thief from the thieves guild, looking to improve her craft back in the city. So they traded techniques. He taught her more about locks, and she taught him how to sneak around to stay safe. And as they bonded, he slowly fell in love. But insecure and unsure that he could win her heart, the little gnome got a wild idea. He would use the skills she taught him to steal a fortune from a cruel noble, delve into a dungeon to find rare treasures, or even make off with a portion of a dragon's hoard! Then he would return with the riches and use them to win her heart! A humble backstory with grand ambitions, and no tragedy in sight to spur on his transition into adventuring.

I had a ton of fun with a 3rd level character who'd slain dragons and was instrumental in defeating the Dark Lord. But he was an elf, and that was all 500 years ago. Since then he's been a teacher, a father, a grandfather, the keeper of a mystic shrine, ambassador to the Summer Court, a vintner, and, most recently, a beekeeper. The Dark Lord appears to be making a comeback, and not only has my character's old armor and weapons rusted away, but his skills are rather rusty as well. Still, he hasn't quite forgotten everything and he'll have some sage advice to dispense to this new crop of heroes as they take on the challenge of saving the world. Mechanically, he was a 3rd level College of Lore Bard. His good advice was mechanically his Bardic Inspiration, and since he'd done a bit of everything over the centuries, he had a wide array of skills scattered across centuries of interests. It was going to take some time to knock off the rust and return to his old fighting trim, but with the example of these young new heroes to inspire him, he was certain it wouldn't be long until he was once again the champion he had been in his 200s.

As a DM who really struggles with coming up with storylines and plot hooks, the 10 page backstories are a life saver! Details for me to use and steal, NPCs pre made, its Heaven 😂 Also, well said! Especially at the end with getting attatched to characters. My Human Druid that I play in my Curse of Strahd game has become a character very near and dear to my heart, along with the rest of our party. He died a few weeks ago, and after a very tense session he was eventually revived, but the other PCs reaction to his death and tearful relief at his revival just made my heart soar. It was a truely joyful couple of sessions because I knew that even if my character didn't come back, he had an impact on the story and the other characters, and thats just made me care about him all the more. At the same time, I am fully awake to the possibility that he could go down for good next time and not come back. Still, better to have loved and lost, then never to have loved at all.

I think the key is that any backstory (or goal) explains why you are now an adventurer. It shouldn't explain what adventures you will go on! Play a "lone wolf" if you like, but only if you always want to come up with the reason to adventure with your fellow players' characters. Have some goal you want to reach if you like, but hold it lightly enough that you will always find a way that the adventure the DM prepared will somehow seem to you a way to reach that goal.

We had random event tables when I entered the hobby. A friend of mine rolled and got 'your family was killed by orcs' three times in row. That was all the backstory a fighter fresh out of service in the imperial army needed.

"Having a rigid plan" is actually a flaw baked into some RPG systems, like 7th Sea and Burning Wheel. Both of those feel like less role playing games than inspiration methods for writing a story, and part of it is how mapped out your character feels just from the character creation.

Pretty sure Ginny Di has the best ads on RU-vid!

Yeah, as a DM, I agree with pretty much everything in this video. I do, however, have a character backstory floating around in my head that features a character slaying a dragon at level 1…. So the character was an ordinary peasant girl living in an ordinary village. However, rumor had it that a dragon had made its lair in the cave a few miles from town. The dragon hadn’t been seen for centuries, so most believed that the rumors were just that-rumors made up to scare the children. One day, my character’s friends dared her to go inside the rumored dragon cave. When she went inside, however, she found that there really was a dragon there, but the dragon was very sick and had been slowly dying for the last few centuries. The dragon, seeing her, begged her to put it out of its misery. When she obliged, a rush of the dragon’s power coursed through her body, and she found herself suddenly capable of magic no one else in the village could do. This was her origin as a Draconic Bloodline sorcerer.

The one thing I would add to the flexibility of a background is to make sure it is not so finalized that other players cannot influence it in some way. For instance, say your shopkeep was an artificer, then maybe one of the items stolen was a holy sword you were forging for the party's paladin, leading you to request their aid. Or maybe the halfling bard was one of your childhood friends and offers to show you the shortcuts they have learned about.

I did the character that owned a shop and it worked out great. The character was a dragonmarked character in Eberron, but he didn't actually have the mark. That disapointed his father, and the character wanted nothing more than to win his fathers effection. As a result, the character would constantly leave his wife and daughter behind in search of greater adventures in hopes of earninig his fathers admiration. The character was eventually eaten by a Dire Shark.

One of my favorite questions to ask when it comes to writing a story (for a D&D character or otherwise) is simply, "Why?" With everything, every new idea, every character trait, every event, ask yourself, "Why?" Digging into the motivation and the reasoning behind everything I write helps to fully develop the story and the character and to recognize when certain things simply don't fit or make sense. Everything happens for a reason, and it's crucial to understand those reasons in order to understand your story and your characters.

Another great video full of practical tips! I also love you calling out the mean spiritedness in those fantasizing about your grief of possibly losing something you care about. Like a tangy puree of Brené Brown and Brennan Lee Mulligan

i always write at LEAST 6000 words of backstory for my character but i always always always start with bullet points. not only is it helpful to write the thing but it's helpful for the dm and future me who doesn't want to search a billion paragraphs to remember what my fathers name was

Funny story about one of my characters. He spent most of the campaign with his only backstory being "He's been framed for the arson of his shop and the murder of a witness and was sent to the undead kingdom to be used as food stock. He escaped and was fighting to survive." It was minimal because he was a temporary character where I was getting a feel for if I wanted to join the campaign long term. I joined but the backstory never moved beyond that because my character was pardoned then hired as the bodyguard for some of the party and no one dug into his history. Recently due to changes in team dynamics he could no longer be a bodyguard but still had reason to adventure with the party. It was at this point I started fleshing out his character then got the dastardly idea of giving him a tragic backstory fitting for the rogue that he wasn't, and the DM approved. There's a sweet irony that the calm bedrock of the party holds a past that runs contrary to his sunny disposition

I'm a big fan of light-touch backstory, with details filled in if and as needed. It's not for everyone, but especially for new and young players has the advantage that it's fairly easy on the attention span. My daughter (who is 10) just created her first full D&D character who wasn't 'I want to be this character from this picture.' (Not saying that's the worst method, but she never engaged much with them, while currently she's having a tonne of fun creating her new character's parents in Hero Forge and trying to decide if the one exotic but mechanically harmless pet I've allowed her should be a tressym or a displacer kitten.) We did a session 0 where characters were created through discovery, and she decided she wanted to be a pashak (off-brand tabaxi) who was size small with the noble background, who lies a lot and had been arrested for petty theft (we started out in a prison cell.) Her backstory is that her parents are the first son of a minor house, who brought property to the match, and the 12th in line to a major house who brought the status, thus she has enough to enjoy the side benefits of nobility, without really being a somebody yet (and if a 10 year old is okay playing a character who isn't individually important yet, I'm pretty sure anyone can.) Her parents also belong to the coastal pashak lineage who are based off the leonin, so they're both strapping tigerfolk while she's the gnome-sized foundling they adopted when it turned out they couldn't have their own children.

Not this video coming out right as I'm working on a new PC and me drawing blanks on the backstory. Thanks for sharing Ginny. ❤

I have to say, I believe that that was your *BEST* sponsorship video to date! I think the most intricate backstory I ever did was for my Waterdivian Nobel bard, with her catalyst being that after excelling at all sorts of musical instruments and storytelling, she wanted to go out and find new stories to tell, including her own. No, she wasn't already a famous bard in Waterdeep, but she did dream of being one one day. (I'm used to writing concise backstories. The superhero MMO I once played only had exactly 1,024 characters in the biography section. Yes, there was one time I had to build two more characters just so I could finish the backstory for all three of them, but that was the exception.)

i love those lists of "don't"s for backstories, because i find that right on the edge can be some interesting or fun ideas. best thief in the cities' thieves guild? said city is actually a village with about 10 inhabitants, the character might even be the only member of the thieves guild. slain a red dragon? something they manage to claim convincingly perhaps, or everyone knows they're full of it. or they confused a kobold for a dragon. or they imagined it alltogether. maybe the memory was put into their head for some reason. a great and bespoke hero? actually, everyone is just making fun of them and they don't realize it. that's really mean, come to think of it. massively wealthy, perhaps a powerful noble? there's some potential for kahoots with the DM here; the character is like this, but very early into the campaign, they end up in a place where all of that is worthless. or this has happened before the campaign, for a little turning point. perhaps they come from a different plane or sphere, maybe by accident or exile. turns out they're the last of their kind or royal bloodline? a lie, placed in their head by the BBEG. or a false belief. maybe they're the only child of an extremely minor noble house and think themselves far more important than they are. the classic super tragic backstory, all friends and family dead? they made it up. admittedly, some of those work better than others and there seems to be a bit of a through-line of the character thinking themself greater than they are.

I'm a newer player. My DM has me just make a basic framework of a character to game with, and told me to take my time fleshing the character out. I'm really glad he said that, because I missed a lot of the common traps you list! And now that you've made me aware of some other Important Things, I'm going to continue writing my charactercs full story slowly, and with the overarching story of our adventure in mind, specifically - leaving ways it *might* be able to tie in to our party's story. You're a treasure, Ginny! 😘

I've never really had a DM that took character background into consideration. From what I've seen all the best characters I've played have initially been intended as quick throw-away characters that had overcome that fate of being quickly cast aside. Their adventure becomes their background. Slap together a 3rd son of a poor farmer whose parents tossed them out when they were old enough, it's pretty easy to see why they'd go seek a life of adventure and there's no tedious questions about how to incorporate the character into a party.

The worldbuilding one is really important to me as a DM! I actually gave the players direction as the prior campaign was ending to not go too far into character building until we were ready to do it together, and I sat down with a bunch of questions and we hammered out a backstory to make sure the characters really *lived* in the world.

My catalyst for my current character is that her goddess Istus has not been seen in a long while, and 2 weeks and 5 days ago she was brought to her garden in a dream, and gay panicked so hard that they woke up in a sweat, immediately thought "the tapestries dont do her justice at all" (cause collective errors during restoring art over a couple hundred years happened,) sketched as much as they could remember and started preparing, they have been on the road a total of 5 days and was introduced to the party by falling out of a bush by their campsite and spitting out a leaf, their class is a paladin, but i dont think they have reached that point yet, so they introduced themselves as a painter... wearing full armour... i love her

I actually tend to write out three versions of my characters backstory 😊 1. Short version to hand my gm 2. Longer version with more details about the backstory and 3. A journal/diary written by my character that describes what happened but from their personal pov. Its a really nice way for me to really get to know my character.

9:20 I'm playing a character like this now (their family died a year back, very sad), and the way my DM and I kept it from becoming stale was, "what if the family isn't dead?" Now my Amazon worker monk/druid has gone from mourning his family to searching for his faenapped father, finding a way to give his ghost sister a body again, and.....well, the mother stuff hasn't been revealed yet, but basically she's a gold dragon that was stuck in human form on Earth for the past thirty or forty years.

Another wonderful video, great stuff! One thing I would add as a DM, because it keeps happening to me and drives me to want to quit, is a player playing a character who, due to their backstory of being betrayed or abandoned, trusts NO ONE, including their fellow adventurers. How is a DM supposed to work with that, and why should the other players have to deal with it?

I agree so hard on all of these, but especially your last point about not being ashamed or embarrassed to adore the characters you create. When we design a character that’s fun to play we put a bit of our heart and soul into it. As you play the game and learn more about that character it’s very natural to grow attached. You’re creating and guiding a person in a world that you can touch and bend in a way that we can’t do to our real lives. And when done well I’ve seen those characters not just create amazing stories but help the people playing them to realize things about themselves. It’s a wonderful and powerful process. I’ve personally worked through depressions by playing and cannot recommend enough the amazing feeling that putting your heart into a character brings.

I love to write fleshed-out backstories that have specific details left deliberately vague so that the DM can expand them into plot hooks if they so desire. My current character was originally envisioned as a noble daughter, who happens to be an Aasimar, that was abandoned by her guide partway through an adventure he told her to go on. I wrote some basic family drama and told the DM that the family’s rank was up to him and that I’d fill the rest in once I knew what the family title was, expecting it to be “count” or “duke” at the highest. Next thing I know I’m the heir to the throne of one of the major kingdoms on the continent, giving me direct control over a substantial amount of the world building. I’m surprised that he was willing to trust a player he’d never met before with that much power. Maybe he was just looking to outsource. Now I have a basic family history going back five generations, several branch families that work in conjunction to run the country, traditional dress wear with cultural oddities, a failed coup that happened before my character was born with lingering loose ends and also the ankylosaur is the family’s guardian animal because that’s awesome. Due to certain plot developments, I was forced to kill my uncle and take the throne from him meaning that my character is now officially a head of state, which is something that would terrify me if I were the DM. We now have a running joke where my character, who is the queen of the country with the highest mineral wealth (DM’s decision, not mine), is consistently the poorest member of the party.

The statement about cliché characters is really important to me. My first character was an elf archer with flowy blonde hair. Sound familiar? It was fun, though! That's what matters most in the end.

I’m currently playing a cleric in the curse of Strad game. I went in with a fairly minimal backstory and I’ve been surprised at the things I’m learning about her week on week for example a few sessions ago I discovered that she’s actually a bit of an alcoholic not in their original backstory. Recently I’ve discovered that her and her husband have an open relationship also not in the original backstory. I definitely agree that the more room you leave to play with your backstory and the more room you let the DM have the more fun it can be discovering your character.

I always think of Bilbo Baggins. A humble gardener minding his own business until a Wizard and an army of Dwarves showed up at his apartment and told him of their epic quest. His catalyst was just FOMO mixed with empathy. His speech about how much he loves his home and how he will do everything he can to help the dwarves get their home back!

One of my favorite characters was created with the initial intent to undercut the other players and steal artifacts that they were searching for (like Indiana Jones style adventure), but the other characters were so inclusive and wholesome that he went from planning on backstabbing them to becoming close friends and faking his death so he could avoid his boss and continue adventuring with his new buddies.

I usually keep my backstories simple. How I learned the skills I have at the start of the game, how I got to the place the game is starting, and why I'm going out on an adventure. I like to keep it under two paragraphs. One of my DM's likes to work with the players on their backstory. My other DM never uses anything from our backstories and I'm not sure he even reads them.

Bless the players who keep a succinct point form back story that's easy to reference.

I feel like the last point is the biggest take away from the video: Loving your characters is wonderful. Love them. Protect them. Advocate for them. And mourn them if they fall. The whole part of the fantasy is to make that connection with the imagination. To feel the rush of the story and the characters. But it's also important to try and share that and understand the other PCs when they do as well.

Okay so, that last rule about "not getting too attached" to your character...I really needed that. I recently had a character (whom I LOVED) die quite tragically in game, and I was feeling pretty upset and silly that my pretend barbie was gone. Thank you for saying that it's perfectly okay (and encouraged!) to be invested in your characters; they are a little part of you! THANK YOU!

Overly attached is something I see as unwilling to roll with the die. Not accepting that their character perished, or that a story beat didn't go as they wanted to just failing a skill check.

With the long backstory one of my favourite things to engage with (as a GM) is the idea of "This is what my character thinks happened". It's a wonderful way to write backstory and learn your character, while still giving the GM a lot of room to play with. For example, although I usually honor most of it, for one of my players I had a spark of inspiration that caused me to end up rewriting the majority of their backstory. The observations they wrote down still make sense, but the conclusions are out of whack - which makes for really interesting RP moments where both the character and player are genuinely surprised and confused when breadcrumbs of new information present themselves.

My favorite D&D character ever had an absolutely insane backstory: he was so angry about the state of the world he had been born into (a post-apocalyptic homebrew setting, but still fantasy - the apocalypse had been magical in nature) that after the senseless death of the best person he had ever met, he decided to find a way to force the gods to fix it. He hated the gods and lived with absolute disregard for his own survival - he knew his plan was probably pointless, but he figured if he just threw himself at the world hard enough, there was a small chance of success. And if he failed, hey, at least he didn't have to live in that terrible world any more. He finished the campaign as a Horizon Walker 19/Arcana Cleric 1, one of the world's preeminent experts on planar geography, a minor lord in his home kingdom, and a loving husband and father. To say things did not go according to his plan OR my plan would be a serious understatement.

I've been a DM for a few years and there's a list of questions I like to get from my players. I ask that each question is answered in around a few sentences: - Who are you? -Where did you come from? Describe a bit of what its like there. - Who are some people who have connections to? They can be freinds, families, rivals, confidants, etc. They just have to be important. -Describe a bit about their personalites and what they look like. And why do you have a connection to them? -What is the reason that you are risking your life on this journey in the first place? -is your character willing to cooperate with others on this journey? If no, then they need to change that. If you have any setting or campaign specific questions, ask them as well. This can be a plot hook that all of the characters share.

I usually ask for 2 sentences from a player besides their race and class: one sentence to describe their character's appearance, and one to summarize their background. nothing more, nothing less. The rest of their background usually unfolds naturally throughout the adventure/campaign

Really good advice and as always communication is key!

Very good points! I found an amusing way to incorporate the 'My 5th level character killed a huge monster' into the my backstory in a way that the GM absolutely loved. I was playing a Fire-domain cleric named Blaze (this was in the 3.5 days). In his backstory, he had three powerful nemeses: An efreet, an evil mage, and a specter--far more powerful than any 5th level character should ever be encountering. In the backstory, he finally had an epic showdown with his three enemies on another plane of existence as they battled over the MacGuffin. While my character got some good hits in (killing the efreet and wounding the mage), the specter landed several blows on Blaze, draining his levels. Eventually, Blaze was so weakened that he had to flee the fight, leaving the MacGuffin with his nemeses. So I was playing a 5th level cleric, that USED to be 15th level, drained all the way back to 5th level. And was NOT happy about having to level up again in order to challenge his foes! I was rather proud of that backstory, and my DM thought it was amazing. It wouldn't work now, as permanent level drain is gone--and good riddance to it! But I quite liked that PC! P.S. The three enemies were named Llaberif, G'nimoc, and Enilio. Spelled backwards, that reads 'Fireball coming online'. Man, that was fun! This was back in, I'd say, 2002-3 or so.

I had a player one time who did something fun with the "badass backstory for a Level 1 character" trope. She took the "folk hero" background and explained that her character, a bard, had spun a grand tale of having killed an Orc warlord based on having killed him by accident while drunk

One small addition: Make characters that WANT TO ADVENTURE.

"If you're level one, you haven't already slain a dragon." But, hear me out, what if you did but it was entirely by accident and now you're fleeing the consequences?

I was friends with my DM for years before we started playing D&D, and we're all really good at building our party before we start a new campaign. The DM will tell us what setting he wants to run, then we each say what class of character we want to play, and he'll say "All right, here are some suggestions based on the world and the story," then we pick our races and names and sub-classes, and he gives us more suggestions for our starting powers and kits.

My players once got so attached to one player's cleric character, that they made him a saint after he died. They petitioned the church and everything. Every time a moral problem came up they asked themselves what that character would have done (he died at level 6 and we played that round for three more years to level 17). There were actual tears at his in game funeral. It was glorious. And they were only able to connect to the character in this deep way because the player really gave thought to the character and their development. For me, roleplaying is all about the emotions and sharing those with the other players. And that cannot happen when people are not invested in their characters.

You couldn't be more right about not caring if your character is cliche. I love playing human "sword and board" fighters. Sorry for having fun wrong, haters!

Can we acknowledge the fact that ginny did a tiefling cosplay for just a few seconds of sponsorship? Like, she didn't have to, all the cosplays could have been human (which is still a lot of work). This woman puts too much work in her videos

My simplest character starting place was having my newbie wizard be from an isolationist island kingdom in the existing campaign setting. He left to find adventures because he was bored there. He would often get excited about a presented danger and say “it could be fun!” When he was more seasoned he would still wryly bring back that phrase to annoy his best friend during planning sessions.

My little brother started a campaign a few months ago with an entirely original world and pantheon, and one of the best things about it was the fact that he let us (the players) create our hometowns and even the main gods of the world from scratch! It's been so much fun seeing what he's done with all of our contributions, and everyone rushes to take notes when we hear something about the gods or the hometowns that he expanded from the foundations we made

My satyr bard backstory is she was in the feywild (born) and her older brother was holding the back of her shirt and was doing the teasing bit, he let go she started running and a portal opened up took her and she appered in her offical home where she was raised by an older human woman in an orphanage/foster home deal where she then grew up. She met and fell in love with a mysterious high elf? On the day of our first session it will be her birthday of which shes late too, she currently works at an Inn/Tavern and plays music when its slow. My DM and i came up with a lot on the fly, but im so exicted to play her! ❤ shes also dedicated to the lliira goddess of joy as a little bonus and she has a small pet snake named leviathan!

There is nothing wrong with cliche's. Every story you love is filled with ideas taken from elsewhere and woven into a new tale.

“...I invite you to ignore them.” Exactly! Don’t look to others for approval and enjoy life more as a result.

Dm of 22 years gonna weigh in. #1: Player doesnt need a catayst if the DM isnt trash. It just means that a Catalyst has to happen, handin that to the DM at least for me is fun to figure out what horrible tragedy is going to befall them to push them over the Edge. Many great stories like Wheel of Time, start of in whats called the "Ordinary Life" stage of Heroe's Journey. This is a great place to start for session, getting the players into the SLice of Life mode, before dropping a plot hook.

I really love when players care about their characters and also get to articulate that with the campaign story! When we're able to find a way to merge their backstories with the context of the campaign and a motivation for their characters to join, there's so much room for new twists and important events to happen that all stories and adventures end up being close to their origins, making it all purposeful and meaningful.

Personally, at least from my group, a fine reason for someone upending a peaceful life (shop owner for example) I hit my midlife crisis/I got bored and decided to go out and try my hand at adventuring to see if that aleves my boredom. Or one that I used that I like "My mom and dad sent me off to find rare seeds to increase the stock of our flower shop 😊"

Another point, if your dm's likes the idea of reading that, you can totally write 10 pages of story about your character going to the flower dance with their sweetheart and afterward during the night fighting a rabid animal to protect your little sibling and vowing to try and protect every little sibling of the world from danger. As a DM I'd love to read that. Long story doesn't always means unrealistic story, and it's still only the start of your voyage ^_^

I always create an image of my new characters. Usually I search the internet, but I have had friends draw a character for me. I always look at it just before the campaign session starts to help me get into character. I also share it with the DM and other players to see who they’re interacting with.😊

honestly i kinda already had most of this internalised for a while. for example, one of my favourite races is the plasmoid, but since they don't tend to fit outside of spelljammer campaigns. i usually reflavour them as a typical slime, or a water elemental. in one campaign there was a specific plothook where the planet had this system where when you die, your soul travels to the planet's center, and escapes back out from select locations, breathing life into the first thing it can. with a homebrew companion that was a pet rock who had been given life from this method. so i had worked with the game master to suggest that maybe that plasmoid was at one time an inanimate puddle given sentience this way, and who joined the party as she believed them to be responsible for her creation. alternatively if the campaign hasn't got much lore surrounding it, or it has extensive lore on the material plane that would forbid a plasmoid from being from there, maybe the plasmoid was a water elemental, sent to the material plane from the plane of water for whatever reason. whenever i've done fey druids (changelings, fairies, etc) i suggested that maybe as a rite of passage, they've been sent to learn about the material plane, and joining an adventuring group is how they can help keep themselves safe while doing so

You do a great job as an instructor, storyteller, and cosplayer. I appreciate the advice you give.

I've gotten into the habit of making my backstory an actual narrative story, inclusive of dialogue. I don't make it exhaustive in length, but I do try to weave in some of the personality of the character so the DM knows what to expect. I also always, always am sure that there are lots of open questions, plot hooks, and narrative conclusions in the history which even I don't know the answer to just so the DM can weave in his or her own narrative and make my character's backstory partially their own. It's almost always super fun to learn things about my character's past that I myself didn't even know. And I've ended up with some really unexpected outcomes.

The one with the magic shop can also be salvaged by having some very wealthy and powerful customer ask for a rare magic item that the store owners don't have, offering a massive reward that would set them for life. Maybe the magic item is the macguffin. Maybe the customer is secretly the BBEG!

Two of my favorite characters I've ever played have pretty lengthy, "tragic" backstories that were pretty much entirely unknown to the rest of the players until fairly late in the campaigns. It kinda feels like the best of both worlds since it gives DMs more breathing room to slowly dip their toes into the backstory and it doesn't take time away from other players character development. Both characters effectively resulted in moral dilemmas for the other players once the backstories were known, so it also built in an out if we collectively don't want to deal with pages of lore that I cooked up. One character was a fun-loving, degenerate alcoholic bard/warlock with exceptional charisma and was loved by every other character and player, until his real identity was revealed to be that of a sociopath who killed most of his family to secure a fortune in inheritance but had to go on the lamb when 1 sibling survived. He uses alcohol to escape who he really is and what he really feels, like faking it til he makes it at the cost of his health. The reveal really changed how everyone felt about him and eventually led to him becoming less of an alcoholic and more of a moral relativist that will do heinous things to get the job done if the moral thing is harder. The other character was a massive, friendly lizardfolk barbarian with the mind of a child and a really fancy mace. He was slow mentally but started to get smarter over time. Eventually the party noticed and started to try to figure out how he was getting smarter. They discovered that his fancy mace was inhabited by a lawful evil entity that was slowly replacing my character's mind with its own in an attempt to regain physical form. The moral dilemma came from the fact that before my character had the mace he was essentially braindead after being lobotomized. The simple-minded mountain of a lizardfolk that they really wanted to save would be reduced to a drooling husk without the mace, but would eventually be replaced entirely by a megalomaniac celestial being intent on being a dictator. One could not exist without the other, but there was a clock on their friend's soul. The party decided to destroy the mace and leave my character with a healer with the unrealistic hope that his damaged brain could be fixed. The discovery of the true nature of the mace and decision on what to do about it took place over 2 sessions, so it didn't derail the campaign or steal the spotlight from other characters.

As someone who worried so much over having my character having a very dramatic reason for being an adventurer, fitting in with my DM's world and having a reason for starting at level *2* despite their background... It's nice to see that I wasn't being paranoid. He's a druid barbarian and I love him.

I had a player who made a backstory in which he was the greatest hero on the continent, had slain dragons and vampire lords (this was 3e, where a Vampire Lord is a very specific, very high level thing), all solo and somehow at level 5. I told him that this could be his legend, but that it didn't mean these things were *true*. He agreed, and over the course of the game it was revealed that 99% of the stories about him were being misattributed to him because of Fey shenanigans, and were actually the stories of other adventurers and heroes.

As a major companion to this kind of thing, if you want players to go with a world you're making as a DM, don't put things into parts of the setting beforehand that they know if you don't want them to use it. I had a DM blow a fuse because I decided to use the mentions of an ancient war using automatons combined with one of the starting villages claims to fame being having dug up and partially restored an ancient war machine along with other war era relics that were being sold off to collectors to get the idea of a relatively vaguely menacing warforged that had been involved in that war and gotten damaged and buried until a local farmer dug him up when he put in a new cellar and managed to get him working well enough to do some farm work... It was actually stuff in the setting description that he gave out to players that I used for it,

Those are really good points! The third one especially is something I need to consider with playing my old combat medic. He has gone on a an adventure to find a cure for a plague that killed his wife and essentially cut out the whole city from kingdom. I should be prepared that maybe the city will be destroyed or the plague will be cured by some other measure. But my character can still go and find the guy who did it or discover some other plot. Thanks, you helped me a lot!

Playing in a campaign that the worlds water supply is tainted, so that is the Arc that drives everyone to work together, But working with the DM we came up with an event that Tabaxi(such as my Bard) called "The Wandering", when they reach 18 leave their clan to go check out the world and generally try to return before , or by the time they are 25. Being from a small village they know very little about the world, but seeing the world, along with running into allies and trying to save the world, along with helping them with some of their personal quest, drives us all.

I think an important note to your last point is that having a character you are invested in die can be a huge boon to the story and isn't always a bad thing. My brother-in-law's character, Calderax, had been invested in for 2 years. He sacrificed himself to ensure his party could escape a fight they were not prepared for and could not win. The gut punch of his last speech literally left us all in tears and I worked it into a huge part of the lore of my world that has carried into every campaign we have played since then. The fact that a character could die is often what makes the risks they take and the bonds they build worthwhile.

In the campaign I’m currently running, one of my warlocks wrote into his backstory that after making the bargain with his patron, the patron wiped his memory of it. He left the terms of that bargain up to me. Another player wrote into their backstory that he’d stolen a magical item, but he didn’t know what it does (he still doesn’t). If you have a narrative-minded GM, these are absolute GIFTS to them.

For my current character, I wrote 15 pages of backstory, but edited it down to 2 pages for the sake of our GM. Lost a lot of the details in the process, but that just means I’ll get to be surprised along the way. First surprise - my warlock’s Archfey patron, who I pictured (and originally wrote) as an elderly woman is now a somewhat younger (at least based on appearance) man with a salt-and-pepper buzz cut. This is going to be nothing like what I originally envisioned, but I like it! Edited to add: Now, I need a pair of Chucks.

Ginny. You are fabulous and I LOVE that you’re so passionate about your characters. Your example has encouraged me to continue to create characters with meaning and to play *as* them rather than just piloting a token around a battle map. Thanks so much and don’t let the haters get you down.

I made prophecy once for one of my character that I was being cheered and adored by a large crowd (typical main character syndrome). My merciful gm had me when a pie eating contest and steel the crown from one of the rude townsfolk. Prophecy fulfilled.

Enjoyed this video! It reflects a lot of my opinions on character backstories as a DM, particularly the mistake of avoiding cliches. I ran Mines of Phandelver (a starter campaign) for a few of my friends, and I told them they had to use the pre-generated characters - five characters, all cliche. They grumbled at first, since no character was not already taken, given our rotating-cast model, and there would often be two players with the same character sheet. But this meant they had to distinguish themselves through backstory and personality, best shown by the three dwarven clerics: one is a rational leader, one is a bubbly baker, and one is a lovable dimwit. Working within a cliche meant the players had to consider who their character was not just as an adventurer, but as a person. I also appreciate that you mentioned flexibility in a lot of these recommendations - I've had times where a player will come up to me with two thousand words of backstory for a character that goes completely against the setting, and I've had to tell so many people "no, you can't play that" that I now have a rule to not build your character until I state what classes and races are available. (Also, only sponsorship segment I've watched twice through.)

I think a back story that can fit in a handful of bullet points of the key elements-that you could tell someone in 30 seconds to a minute of conversation and they know who your character is-is a good amount of backstory. Who you are, where you're from, what you are, why you are, how'd you get here. I was in a game where a GM tried to use a player's multi-chapter backstory in the game and the thanks they got was, "no that wasn't what happened on page 9" during a scene where we were meeting with people from their origin.

It will always come back to communicating expectations with the DM. If there's a prepped setting already, talk to your DM about what resources you can use to build your character rather than going and reading the source book immediately because you don't know what they want you to know. I always struggled as a DM with the specific expectations from backstories, given loads of details, and then getting told that I didn't play something the way they expected. I'd have talks with the player before the campaign started to get an idea of what they would like and what they'd prefer to avoid in "arcs" shown at the table, but with such specific expectations that weren't expressed to me, I still felt I was letting my players down constantly. Always have an idea of what you want, and whatever is ESSENTIAL make sure your DM knows, and anything else, be prepared for it to come out a different way than you intended. Leave room for growth, and care about your PC! Being too invested is better than not being invested at all, but enjoy your PC as a moving piece in the world, too. Never make your DM feel bad for a combat going wrong and killing your character, allow your care for your PC to either craft a new one or use the death to influence the growth of the character. Cliche is great. I loved the comment on that because PLAY WHAT YOU WANT. Completely rip off a character from media of you like, just don't expect to be playing Star Wars exactly when you made Luke Skywalker. The campaign will have cliches too. Don't put pressure on yourself to avoid it because you might resent your other players for not avoiding it. Also cliche doesn't mean you lack depth. I've been a bit burnt out of DnD and this was just a fantastic comfort to watch.

This is why I love it when a DM gives a primer for their campaign. Just enough to wet the whistles of the players to give them ideas and how to incorporate themselves into the world they're designing. One of my biggest flaws is totally forgetting details of my own backstory and then the DM bringing it up and I just completely bypass it.

As a GM, seeing my friends care about their characters, be excited to play them, craft stuff for them in their free time is the reason I keep GMing. Your Game Master is lucky to have you at their table!