Recently I've started a new campaign with some people from my old game and two new people, the reasons for which I won't be talking about today, mainly because I don’t want to talk now about them and secondly because I can't be bothered, that will be the subject of a future post.
But when we were having the session zero for this campaign, I got talking to one of my players Fred and he told me the backstory for this character he had in mind. This eldritch knight that doesn’t know he has magical abilities but uses them more out of instinct in times of desperation. He wanted his character to be constantly writing in a diary that he never look back in, and to be always praising his brother.
These are all the things that the others players knew, but after the session, over a pint of whatever we fancied at the local, the player and I got to talking some more. He explained to me that he wants the characters brother to have experimented on him due to the fact that he was the only one In his family who had any arcane ability at all, and hence the brother thought it must be something within the blood. He explained that he always wanted to think that the diary itself had information about what his brother had been doing to him but that because it was in previous sections of the diary that he couldn't read, that he had amnesia ,couldn’t remember these events and wanted the help of the other players to try and remember what happened to him and eventually go and seek justice for his brother.
Now, this is a great backstory, it’s a great story end of, but it does bring up and interesting topic of how much do you let your players preplan their character's story and how much as the Dungeon Master you dare to distort it. We want that player to have a surprise about finding out about his past and what’s going to happen in his future, but I also feel that we should completely change the expectations character that the player has built within their head.
Now as its stands I do have something planned for my player's character that he knows nothing about. While he may have come up with a lot or maybe speculated about a lot to himself, I have taken and changed a lot about his story, and I’ve made pages that his brother wrote that are in the front of the diary, that I’m hoping will change the expected outlook he was planning on having for his brother, I don’t know if he’ll still want to bring down fire and brimstone upon him that he had originally intended but I look forward to a lot of inner character struggles.
This is going to be a working project of mine and as soon things come to a head ill certainly be writing about it, however id like to know from you guys examples of when you’ve had this happen in your games, where you changed the expectations of your players character according to the backstory they had devised.
I'll be taking a week off from blogging because of the holidays but you guys should receive a new post on December 28th.
Thanks again for reading guys I hope you’ve enjoyed this discussion and until next time.
Bye !
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