Character backstory: You were then, like you are now.

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Ted
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Character backstory: You were then, like you are now.

Post by Ted »

This is a principle that generally I try to put into practice when I'm writing NPCs, that I encourage other Narrators to use, and that I encourage in players.

In general, if you look at a character's past, it should probably be similar to how you play them right now. If there are differences, there should be big reasons for the change, and even then, there should be a thread of similarity.

This applies to PCs and NPCs alike.

If you're playing a character who's a backstabbing conman, looking into his past should probably turn up a long trail of bitter victims. Or, if he's good at covering his tracks, a long past of people who were suspicious of him but then dropped their accusations, or maybe a string of other people taking the fall for crimes around him. A character who walks in with the Status of "Reliable and Loyal" who immediately stages a coup and sells out all his friends will rapidly lose that Status, but also, just feels incongruous as a character.

Sometimes you can't predict everything about a character and how people will react to them when you start playing. You may be planning for your character to be suave and well-liked, but find out during play that he's more of a laughingstock. That can be upsetting if you're not ready for it! Resist the temptation to stockpile your characters with backstory full of universal successes if you're going to be taking risks. Resist the temptation to have your character always succeed in the past if you're not always going to succeed in the present.

You can also fake this after the fact. If your character seems to be behaving in ways you didn't expect when playing him, or garnering reactions you didn't expect, you can (within reason) retroactively add some times in the past when they've done that before too. Did you just kill someone brutally in the heat of combat when you thought you were playing a mellow pacifist? Maybe they've done that before, either as a Kindred or mortal. Did you just forgive someone you should have taken a grudge to, or vice versa? Add examples of similar things in the past. Write a lit about it, even!

The benefit of this is that it adds a huge creamy dollop of believability, that it makes it worthwhile to investigate and ask around about people, and that it makes characters feel more real. It's also more "fair" to other players. You may want everyone who investigates you to find out that you're perfect and flawless with a long string of successes, but does that make sense? If you can't keep it up in play, it might not make sense to have it happen in your past, or if it does, to have some reasons for it.

Playing a vengeful character? Add some wounded victims to your past, and some enemies who learned not to mess with you. Playing a trusting innocent? Give her a manipulative mentor, or folks who took pity on her. Playing a courageous hero? Add some grateful folks she rescued to your backstory.

It's not just about making flaws in your backstory - do it with the good and the bad! But try to make your past match your character and how you play them.

Some concrete examples of what I'm talking about, from my own PCs and NPCs:

- Curt Macabee. He's got a habit of boldly jumping into things, and occasionally really fixing things and doing the right thing, but just as often screwing up, and often needing to call to his powerful and dignified Sire for help. This happened over and over again in play. But even though it was frustrating when he was a PC sometimes, I was planning on that! His backstory is full of past times where he had some big scheme that backfired, or Malkavians playing pranks on him, and many times when his disappointed Sire had to bail him out, order him not to go through on an "ambitious" scheme, or just speak up for him. At the same time, his past also has plenty of times when he succeeded, and plenty of times when he learned a lesson well after a humiliating defeat.

- Bjarne Lax. This guy was a lot of fun to play. I wanted to play the dark side of an Artiste Toreador here: obsessive to art, oblivious to politics, thinking only of beauty, but capable of tremendous innovation. Nobody looked into his past until after he pulled his War-Ghoul-ballet-dancer stunt, but I had it all written out before: his tendency to innovate a new dance style every 20 years, his meticulous attention to detail and presentation, his habit of sometimes bringing in Kindred Disciplines, his lack of concern about politics, even his rivalry with a much more politically savvy prima ballerina. When people looked into it afterward, they found the seeds of it. (Though it wouldn't have been enough to see it coming and stop it, honestly.) He hadn't used Vicissitude before, because he only got that during the big Sabbat attack on Paris in 2010. That made him more unhinged and willing to make bizarre art -- but the seeds of that obsession were already present in his background long before.

When I see a NPC who has a sterling reputation suddenly burst into play making enemies, I see a flawed NPC concept. If there's a surprise change of character, there should be some dramatic reason for it -- and even then there should be things about the character from before that foreshadow the change. The same applies to PCs.

Think about this when you think about your backstory: You were then, like you are now.

How about you? Do you add events in your past that match how you play your character now? Do you include events to justify shifts of character? Do you even think this kind of consistency is necessary?
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Re: Character backstory: You were then, like you are now.

Post by Melissa »

I personally tend to go more free-form with my characters. I have a concept, enough backstory to answer the basic questions (who are you? what do you do?), and an idea of their personality and mannerisms, and then I jump into game and make the rest up as I go.

Yes, this is why it took me like two months to send in a backstory officially. I am sorry. :D

But, it gives me a lot of freedom to play off of other characters, add in details, find points of common ground. As time goes on, those improvisations are set in stone in lits and backstory updates. Melissa wasn't originally a painter, but Sibihah saw me drawing using my OOG skills and asked me to do a painting of Lennet. So, I quickly threw in that Melissa painted, bought up her crafts, and now it's a major part of the character.

Now? She's a lot more firmly set in stone as a character, but the other PCs can still influence her, just in different ways.

So that's my process! It requires a lot of quick thinking and makes for a rough first month or two. But, it makes for a backstory that very much matches how they play in the game.

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Re: Character backstory: You were then, like you are now.

Post by Ted »

Melissa wrote:So that's my process! It requires a lot of quick thinking and makes for a rough first month or two. But, it makes for a backstory that very much matches how they play in the game.
That's a great process! And it totally does make for a character with a past that matches their present.
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Re: Character backstory: You were then, like you are now.

Post by MikeLG »

My process is to build a skeleton for staff and other players to work from, followed by me putting the meat on in play.

Example, this is directly from Mike's backstory about the masquerade incident that led to the kindred taking notice of him:
During one visit, witnessed a kindred feeding on a nearby vagrant. Police not notified. Information not disseminated.

For more details, see file Sheriff investigation of the evening of December 3, 1924.

Arrested for murder of one Judy Pivard as a precautionary measure.
That's it. The rest of the details of the evening were added in play/lits. Also, why is it so sterile of a backstory? Because it was written in the form of a Ventrue file on him. It was bland by design and allowed me a ton of leeway in how to modify him, since there's what's reported and how things are.

I like having a ton of ambiguity in my backstories because I've only ever had one character that played the same way as I expected him to play. Mike's backstory, amusingly, is actually fairly boring, which I think adds to why he is how he is. He's spent decades under his sire's shadow in his sire's city. He's free of that now, so he's acting out and coming out of his shell. Hell, the ex that Mike was pining over for like 90 years and has been a core tenant of Mike's character? The final sentence in the above quote was the full extent of her appearance in the backstory.

As time moves on, the character solidifies. Hell, Mike didn't technically have a childe in game until a few months ago, but I managed to work things in so it wasn't that major of a retcon. Cooking wasn't part of Mike's backstory, and now the ability to cook is actually one of Mike's greatest passions. But the skeleton of the backstory is there for me to work on, because in the past, I did full on backstories for a character and when they came into play, I felt more constrained by them than anything else.

The downside of Mike is his relative youth and connection largely to New York/Chicago, which prevents his being tied in with other people more often than not. But you can't have everything.

Still, whenever people write backstories, I like to encourage a skeleton, as well as a few defining moments established for a character, and to have the rest be up for play later. That way, you know how you'll play your character, but you have a ton of wiggle room as to the why, and gives you space to have them grow on their own.

Most of my amendments to backstory will start with a throwaway statement that I then turn into a lit. I once made a flippant remark in game about how it sucks to get blown up by a car bomb or having your neck slit, and both those ended up as lits. Treat the backstory as an outline to follow, but not constrain you.

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Re: Character backstory: You were then, like you are now.

Post by Ted »

There's another character here that comes to mind for me that I want to call out, thinking about this topic and how it applies to characters that DO dramatically change:

Morgan Sharett! I think Megan did a great job of creating a character who had a dramatic change in her backstory, but with reason, and kept things in common with her throughout the changes. Morgan had a violent backstory, then, in her past, but repented it and became devoted to nonviolence. But you can still see things in common with the character's past and how she was in play: her martyrdom and her protective ferocity remained even after she swore off the violence. The change was dramatic, but it happened in response to events in her life, and even after the change, a lot remained the same.
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Re: Character backstory: You were then, like you are now.

Post by Vivian »

A thing that I've noticed in my life: people change.

It's not sudden. Over the course of a decade or two? A person could start out one way, and be almost unrecognizable to themselves by the end of it.

It doesn't necessarily have a huge cause, either. It could be a thousand little pressures and incentives, none of them noteworthy alone, adding up to a catalyst. Sometimes the big events don't even break a person's stride, but the steady progress of everyday life will do it.

I think of this, and then I multiply it by a hundred for vampires. When someone is struggling to remain human, they might fixate on little snippets of humanity around them and turn them into big things. They might start somewhere and go through fifteen iterations of themselves and by the end of it be a completely new person - either by accident, or by intent.

On another tangent, people are in part shaped by their environment. That person who was named Reliable and Loyal might have just never had their backstabbing buttons pushed until they got to the South Bay. That person who was never a laughingstock before might just not mesh well with the locals.

That all said, I'm all for reasons behind what a character is and does, even if the character themselves doesn't necessarily know what those reasons are.

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Re: Character backstory: You were then, like you are now.

Post by Ted »

Great point, Justin!

I agree that people change. But I think characters who make a 180 between backstory and playtime feel jarring and unrealistic, rather than the changes that people tend to have. Characters theoretically don't know that they just moved from backstory to gametime, but it's really common to see a disconnect between them.

(Okay, some do: a character who wakes from a coma would see a pretty sharp divide, but there you've got an explanation.)

More than that, I think that even changes people make often get foreshadowed in their earlier behavior. Things they always thought about but never saw the opportunity. Hints of personality that remain.

A character who's likely to take backstabbing opportunities probably has had those buttons pushed before, even in little ways. That's why security companies bother with background checks: because they're really good predictors of future behavior. You look at most big-time criminals, and they have a record of similar but smaller crimes building up to it. You look at the diary of someone who's had a big life-changing revelation (if they keep a diary), and you'll see little hints of the same revelation from years before.

People do drift and change. But parts of them stay the same too. And bringing that out makes for a more believable character.

There's a common habit that people in Alcoholic Anonymous talk about called "playing geography." It means moving to a new place and abandoning your past life to start over, but then finding that, even after everything has changed, the alcoholic is still the same. Until something *happens* to commit a person to change, they will tend to stay the same, even in a wildly new setting.

(Naturally, I'm not saying anyone here is an alcoholic, or intending to belittle anyone's recovery. I'm bringing it up because it's a term people use for that way a person's character and habits will stay the same even under new circumstances, unless something happens to transform the person.)

It's true, though, that like you say, over time people just tend to change too: people often mellow out when they're older, get less angry when they're less mistreated, and so on.

But I think characters are more believable and interesting when their past resembles their present, or when there's a reason why it doesn't.
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Re: Character backstory: You were then, like you are now.

Post by Capet »

-Julien is very much not who he was when he was embraced.
Change is a pivotal theme of his backstory. His wife wanted to stay in the 1700's and he didn't (and her Malk derangement didn't help).

- The world just reset: so there's all kinds of reasons for characters who went through that to change.

-If it's you as a writer realizing there are some things that fit more naturally for the character... well, there certainly are some aspects that are fine to change after playing them for a bit. Some things are really hard to change.

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Re: Character backstory: You were then, like you are now.

Post by Aldona Piast »

There's a common habit that people in Alcoholic Anonymous talk about called "playing geography." It means moving to a new place and abandoning your past life to start over, but then finding that, even after everything has changed, the alcoholic is still the same. Until something *happens* to commit a person to change, they will tend to stay the same, even in a wildly new setting.
On the other hand, there is the common literary tool of the sea voyage - the hero going away from the main site of story in some way and by doing so gains a perspective or enlightenment that changes their whole outlook and thus behavior - like Hamlet's trip to England.

I admit, when making or playing characters I use this effect a lot - probably because my own trips to Europe have had rather similar and drastic effects on me.

Most of my characters have stories that explain how it is that they have changed - how they got from who it was they started as to who it is they start play as. Because it's my belief that no one can be embraced and not have that drastic event change them significantly.

This may be because I enjoy playing the effects of change in a static creature. I don't think that it makes it any less believable of a character to do so.

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