When you’re around the table, the action and narrative can take you anywhere. You can delve into deep dungeons, stroll the streets of a metropolis, or gamble away your coin at a tavern, but almost all of the activities at the table are done with other players. Having a character with a compatible backstory will help your character fit into the scene and narrative when it isn’t about them directly. This compatibility can help all players – including yourself – feel more fulfilled and comfortable during a session.
Let’s take a look at why we should want a compatible backstory and a few easy tricks for creating one for your character!
What are Compatible backstories?
Dungeons and Dragons can be a game of immersion where smooth transitions and believable events keep us engaged in the narrative and action. If all goes well, having other characters in the scene should enhance the experience.
Your character’s backstory shapes how your character will react to situations and events. As we create our backstories — even ones that seemingly have no impact on the narrative, there are a few things we should keep in mind.
Characters build relationships in much the same way that people do. Similar interests and aspirations will keep the party together and interested in each other’s goals. For instance, if two characters are siblings and dislike each other or have different goals, there is still a certain believability to why they could travel together – it could be that sibling bond or the fact that they have share childhood memories.
If two characters don’t have a familial bond there still needs to be a believable reason why they take moments to interact and travel together. The reason can be as deep or as surface level, as you want, anywhere from fate-bound warriors to drinking buddies looking for another tavern. No matter what bonds keep your party together, they will give reason and grounds for character development.
To be clear, in-game conflict and tension have a place in Dungeons and Dragons and make for a compelling narrative. There will most likely be arguments and disagreements within a party – motives, and quests will pull in different directions for multiple reasons. In this way, having a compatible backstory is less about making sure everyone agrees and works well together but more about working well with the game itself.
This is what a compatible backstory is, not one that is less than your vision or compromised somewhere, rather it is a sign of willingness that you want to be a part of the story.
Keep it Simple
When creating a backstory, it can be easy to create a vast web of events and details you want about your character. This is natural. You’re excited about your new character and all the possibilities a fantasy world has to offer, but keep in mind that simple is better.
Keeping a backstory simple is as much about ease of understanding as it is about believability. Characters with complicated backstories often have a tangle of events and confusing plot holes that serve less as defining moments for the character and instead seem like an attempt to make a character stand out.
I talk about this in the backstory section of the post It’s Okay To Be Cliché While Playing Dungeons And Dragons. (If you find yourself worried about whether your ideas are cliche, then take a read) The short of it is, a backstory is there to inform your character’s actions and motives, not see how many hooks you can cram into one character.
While creating a backstory, if you’re not sure how to tell if a point or event is significant, just ask if it informs your character’s views, motivations, or morals. If the answer is yes, then include it, because it must be important! If the answer is no, think about why you want to include it, and rinse and repeat the process.
Okay, so our backstories should be filled with significant information only, mostly because insignificant details can lead to confusion. The same goes for the number of details in a backstory. Overburdening a backstory, even with significant details, can keep it from being easily understood or remembered.
Keeping your backstories simple has another positive effect – it adds flexibility. If there is one thing I have learned from DMing and worldbuilding, it is always easier to add more details later than have to take away something foundational.
Ultimately it is up to you to decide what is important enough to include in your backstory. If you think a detail has weight and will be used to inform your character’s motives and actions, then add it in. But if you’re worried that you won’t have enough in your backstory by not adding it, just remember, just because something is simple does not mean it is insignificant.
Avoid Extremes
After keeping it simple the next thing we can do to craft a compatible backstory is to avoid extremes. Often, characters with extreme worldviews are incompatible with other characters. This might not always be the case but often a character’s extreme ideology or motive will cause tension without value.
For example, if a character views all tieflings as devils that must be destroyed, make sure you think about what happens if the rest of the players are playing tieflings. Sure, it could provide an interesting growth arc for our character as they accept that tieflings are more than what they were taught they were, but it could also see the group at odds and make it pretty difficult to find a convincing reason for the party to travel together.
A situation that brings four tieflings and a tiefling hating character together as an adventuring unit has a long uphill battle before it is productive in-game. Along the way, there will be unnecessary conflict and could end up hurting the dynamic of the group both in and out of the game.
In this situation, I’d recommend pulling back from the extreme viewpoint on tieflings and settling for a dislike or distrust of tieflings. We can still have a growth arc, but the whole situation is less abrasive.
Granted, this is a pretty subjective point, and in the context of a backstory, the word extreme can vary widely from character to character. A character’s extreme worldview can be justifiable for one character and not for another. Some extremes are workable, it just depends on what they affect in-game.
For instance, my character Valis is a druid who has absolute conviction in her druid circle’s way of life that leaves her strongly rooted (ha!) in her traditions and nature magic. Valis also abhors human cities that are built overtop the land, so much so that she won’t enter them.
Valis is going to have a hard time fitting into a narrative that is set primarily in cities, true, but the friction created by Valis’ extreme viewpoint is with a pure game entity and not other players.
That’s often where I draw the line, if the extreme ideology will cause conflict with other players, change the ideology to be a bit more flexible.
As with keeping it simple, we don’t want to remove tension or conflict as an option, we just want to keep in mind the ramifications of our backstory on other players. Think of extreme views in backstories as closing off avenues for roleplay and development – something we should try to avoid.
Leave Room
Perhaps the most important thing you can do to create a compatible backstory is to leave room and not define everything. It might be cliche but leaving room in your backstory allows you to focus on the story as it unfolds during a session and less on how to relate things to only your character.
Feel free to leave an NPC nameless, a reason for a scar vague, or even the fate of those loved ones back home open. You avoid over-defining things and overburdening your backstory while at the same time leaving paths open for improv and inspiration. As a bonus, it also overlaps with keeping things simple (or simpler).
Leaving room to invent minor events could help shape an emotional moment or add context by adding a lot of compatibility to your backstory. Looking for opportunities while playing to fill those gaps in a meaningful way keeps you engaged with the game. That said, you don’t need to leave room everywhere – if something in the backstory is important, detail it as deeply as you need to.
The main caution here is that we don’t want to be in the business of retconning everything or molding our backstory to fit any situation. We want to avoid filling in the gaps in our backstory just because the current narrative could account for them.
Because of this, applying this inventive route should be done with a light touch. You should always keep in mind what the new addition will do to your character’s motive and morals. Your character, and by extension, their backstory still needs to be cohesive and the path from past to present still needs to make sense.
Include your Dungeon Master
This is a sibling point to leaving room in your backstory. That room you leave is the perfect way to loop your DM into and let them integrate these gaps into the larger narrative and gameplay.
Tell your DM the hooks or ideas you may have that surround the gaps left in your character’s backstory. Your DM can build on these hooks in several different ways, from friendly to hostile NPCs, a trip to a location from a character’s backstory, or even just giving the character the spotlight on something they know a lot about.
As a DM it is a lot easier to connect the dots when we have some wiggle room to spin a creative chain of events. These DM-created hooks are a perfect tool for characters to form bonds and to get the table roleplaying. It is a wonderful feeling when the DM can sit back and watch the party chat about their backstory in a meaningful way for twenty or thirty minutes.
Final Thoughts
If we are making backstories that means at some point we will be sharing them! And if we’re making compatible backstories, it makes them all that much easier to share.
Creating a compatible backstory is about having an organic character. Letting your backstory be revealed during events and narrative beats that have weight. Being able to discuss the day’s events over the campfire during night watch – to open up about why you responded in the way that you did.
Your backstory shouldn’t be planned such that you have to reveal it. It should be the thing that informs your actions and shows itself when deepening bonds with your traveling companions.
Your character’s backstory is their convictions and motives. The more rigid and absolute we create them, the more rigid and absolute our characters will be. Extreme and complicated characters can work well within the game but often only in the way they were designed to.
Letting your character grow and evolve into something you didn’t plan for is in the essence of roleplaying and Dungeons and Dragons.
Letting others tell the story with you and leave room for your imagination will ensure new and fresh ideas can find their way into the character. Avoiding extremes and keeping things simple are preventative ways to ensure your new ideas will make sense and allow characters to relate to one another.
As always, try things out. It might not always work out as you planned, but you can’t be creative without it.
