Creating a great D&D backstory doesn’t have to be hard. Here’s five easy tips that will help you to write a great backstory for your character, one that is actually useful during your campaign for both you and the Dungeon Master.
Wargamer’s guides to the different DnD classes and DnD races and species are full of useful information that could inspire your next character. However, creating a great backstory isn’t a matter of filling out pages and pages of lore – you’re making a tool for both yourself and for the GM that is tailored to the campaign and party your character will be part of.
Ask the DM the right questions
A backstory is only good if it is useful – if it helps you to roleplay, gets your character involved in the adventure, and gives your DM ways to pull you into the story more meaningfully. But every DM runs their games differently, with a different balance of elements. Knowing what to expect is a big help.
- What’s the tone for the story and adventure? Heroic, goofy, grimdark, Saturday morning cartoon, horror…?
- What kind of backstory details would be useful for the DM?
- Are there any key canon elements of the setting you need to know about when devising your character?
Perhaps the most fundamental question is – what kind of backstory will be useful? For example:
- Some DMs want to incorporate player characters into the main plot of the adventure – they’ll have specific ideas about what your backstory needs to contain;
- Others prefer to facilitate personal B-plots for the characters, and may only have very loose guidelines for characters that will and won’t fit;
- DMs running hexcrawl, location-based, or otherwise open-ended campaigns prefer to cultivate the story through play – the less you write for your backstory, the more scope you have to improv and join in.
Write for referencing
Although it’s called a ‘backstory’, I don’t recommend writing it as an actual story. A character’s backstory is a reference tool for you and the DM, so make it easy to reference!
Bullet points, mind maps, or question-and-answer pairs are good ways to communicate information in a condensed fashion. If you’re a stationery goblin, this is the excuse you’ve been waiting for to use every colored pen in your hoard.
Know what’s important.
A person’s life is an ocean of experiences and influences that, together, subtly form their way of being in the world, and inform the choices they make. When you summarize that life for a backstory, you focus on the most important elements, the pivotal events, significant personal connections, and key commitments that have the biggest impact.
There’s no hard and fast rule on what makes something significant – it’s going to depend on the campaign your character is part of. But you should know how every backstory elements (be it a person, an event, an institution, etc.) shaped how your character behaves and sees the world, and what their priorities are.
An event doesn’t have to be huge or dramatic to be important. The Paladin might have chosen to take their oath because of a storybook they read as a child. That’s still a pivotal moment that suggests all sorts of interesting things about this character: maybe they have a childlike innocence – perhaps they’re utterly single-minded in all things – maybe they regret fixing their path so early in life – maybe that storybook was more than it seemed…
Details should be motivating.
If nothing else, a backstory should explain why your character is willing to embark on a perilous adventure. This isn’t just a question of what the character likes or wants, it’s the fire under their ass that stops them from living an ordinary life. Classic motivations include:
- Emotions – love, hatred, jealousy, pride, wrath…
- Bonds – your duty as a noble, your code of honor as a Paladin, a legal obligation, a supernatural contract, friendship, rivalry…
- Debts – you owe a your life to a Harper, you owe a crime boss money, you owe a favor to a Red Wizard, you seek revenge…
- Mysteries – magical secrets, religious rites, the cure to a sickness, the means to free your brother from his curse…
- Internal struggles – the need to prove yourself, self-doubt, an unresolved crisis about who you are…
A motivation should be a reason for your character to make bad decisions, put themselves in harm’s way, and – if nothing else – willingly descend into a dank dungeons full of traps and monsters.
Keep plenty of blank space
Your character’s back story exists to help you create a consistent character, and which the DM can connect to the story – and it doesn’t need to exist except to do that. Leaving blank spaces and unanswered questions lets you respond to the story of the campaign as it develops.
Suppose your character is motivated by revenge for the death of their parents. Until you actually say how they died, there doesn’t need to be an answer to what killed them. When the party finds the tracks of a hydra, maybe that’s when you decide that your village was destroyed by a great monster, setting you on the path to become a Ranger. Or if it becomes apparent that the local nobles you’re taking quests from are an enjoyably hateable bunch, you could reveal that your parents were killed by someone in the court, and you’re only working for them to get close enough to settle the score.
If you want to workshop your next character’s backstory with your fellow nerds, why not join the Wargamer Discord community?
Source: Wargamer
