I havent really played a tragic back story character in dnd ever Sardukar (barbarian) was a first son of the tribal champion who became a the tribal champion mother still alive during the whole campaign Vorel (bladesinger) an only son and gifted wizardly genus woth no social skills of foppish and vapid noble parentes who are still alive Nickolas Nightroad (gunslinger) adoped at a young age by a family of 7 dwarf brothers spent many hours in game with his adoped family
I am a GM 97% of the time. As a Player I make this mistake very often. I like your point „you can have your tragic backstorie, but let it happen on screen“. That’s a realy good advice. I will try to do this the next time I am a player 😅
Personally I think skip the backstory and play the character. Let the early levels be the backstory. The Game master only needs 4 or 5 questions answered by a player to start with. Good topic.
Interesting that you mention the Heroes Journey, first I am not sure if Batman really qualifies as that type of story, but my main point would be that the tragedy is not there in most of such stories. Luke is a thus an exception, since that removes the key part of the journey being taken voluntarily. Bilbo and later Frodo are much better examples, and neither of them have a tragic backstory to motivate them. And I guess that is where I can close the circle, because I completely agree with you that tragic backstories are often badly done and not really necessary.
Yeah, there were probably better examples out there. More than the hero's journey, now that I'm thinking about it, it's characters following the lost prince model, who also happen to follow a hero's journey, like Harry Potter
Two words: Vox. Machina. All the characters in that campaign had tragic backstories and they were great and interesting characters. So no, I don't think your points are correct.
Scanlan doesn't have a tragic backstory and is one of the best characters in the group. Keyleth, Grog and Pyke's backstories are also minimally tragic. The only character who does have a tragic backstory AND ends up being awesome because of it is Percy... and even that's because his backstory came back to bite him in the ass during the campaign, which also goes along what I was saying. But bear in mind, I'm not defending that tragedy should never be attempted, or that tragic characters are inherently bad. I'm just pointing out that in my experience, a lot of players (mainly new ones) rely too much on tragedy, and those characters would be more interesting without it more often than not.
@@TheFirstArcadianDnDAh. Well, keep in mind I'm only familiar with the show, I wasn't old enough to have already seen the tabletop campaign so I'm not entirely familiar with everything about the characters.
