Improvised Background Stories and Forced Interactions

Every so often I get an idea of how to stimulate more role-playing in my games. Usually the implementation of these ideas reaches it's conclusion with my players offering threats to my general health and fertility should I ever try to use that particular idea again. (For instance, one of my favorites was when the players were about to meet the dwarven king, I had them all pass their character sheets around the table to the left and made them role-play whatever character they got. It was a ton of fun... for me at least.) This time, however, my idea actually went over really well.

I find that game mastering is a lot more fun when players actually have decent background stories for their characters. The players have more material to go off of when role-playing and I can tie elements from their background stories into the general plot of the game. However, if I just ask the players to write background stories, usually half the group never gets around to it. Furthermore, the quality of background stories varies greatly. One of my previous attempts to improve this was providing prompts for the players to fill out. What is your characters job, what is his or her family like, etc. Overall, I would consider that idea to be a success, though it required quite a bit of nagging on my part and I still had to write a background story more or less in it's entirety for one heavily writer's blocked player.

The particular game for which I came up with the idea this post is actually about was only intended to last 2-3 sessions, so I didn't want to be that demanding of the players. What I decided to do instead was to provide the players with prompts to answer during the first session, and have them improvise answers in front of the group. Since I wanted there to be some reason why this motley group was adventuring together, I decided to force interactions between players responses to the prompts. For instance, I asked one player what was the worst thing that had happened to him during his training at the Royal Magic Academy. His answer was that he had once accidentally summoned an enormous hydra that nearly killed him. The next player in line was playing a somewhat out of control alchemist, so I asked him how he was actually to blame for the accidental hydra summoning. Apparently, as a joke, he switched out some of the ingredients ahead of time and got a bit more than he bargained for. Then I went back to the first player and asked him how this had led to them becoming friends.


I'm not shying away from placing players in awkward positions with these prompts. This is probably part of the reason why it has worked so well. Force someone to improvise themselves out of an awkward enough situation and good chance you'll hit comedy gold. Admittedly, I'm blessed with a group that universally has a good sense of humor and doesn't take themselves too seriously.

Obviously, I reserved the right as game master to veto any responses that won't work for this campaign.

I used this technique again in the same game when I decided to extend it beyond the first 2-3 sessions. As the players approached a city, the “Port of Gold,” in which they hoped to sell a galley ship they'd come into possession of and which I planned to have them spend the next several sessions in, I informed them that their characters had all passed through this city before or at least had some familiarity with it. I then prompted them with questions like:

“You were brought here as a small child, soon after your parents 'donated' you to the priesthood of Abadar. What happened during that trip?” 

as well as:

“Describe someone you are looking forward to seeing when you reach the city?” 

and, best of all:

“The last time you were in this city you killed somebody. Who was it and why do you feels safe coming back now?”

I should note that I generally knew what sort of characters my players were thinking of playing for this campaign. As such, I was able to come up with custom questions for each character. This raises a question of fairness. Some of the questions I ask tend to be boons while other questions tend to be obstacles to overcome. For instance, as a prompt, being asked to “describe someone in this town that owes you 100 gold pieces” is going to be much better than being asked to “describe someone in this town you owe 100 gold pieces.” I suppose the fair thing to do would be to come up with a list of generic questions and determine which character get's which question by die roll. However, I feel that I got better results with my not entirely fair custom prompts.

General Digression on Fairness:
I believe there can be such a thing as too much fairness in pen and paper role-play games. If you are too unfair, of course you're players are going to get fed up and leave. However, the same thing can happen if you are consistently too fair all the time, since you run the risk of having an uninteresting campaign. Players are suppose to play with the goal of having their characters get ahead in the world and most players want to win some glory for themselves within the party. If you insist on everything being strictly fair and balanced all the time, players with ideas on how to accomplish the above will get frustrated and not enjoy the game as much. The better approach is to let those players get ahead for a few sessions, within reason. Then hit them with a load of bad luck and give the other players some new toys to play with off their wish-lists. Don't just rebalanced things, completely flip the scales over. The players who got ahead the first time will eventually climb their way back up, and then after giving them a few sessions to enjoy themselves, you can do it again.

Part of the job of the game master is to maintain a certain level of chaos. Just be careful not to be an asshole about it. Well, not too much of an asshole, anyway.