My group just finished a 6-year, 16-level DD5E campaign consisting of Adventurers League content strung together. It was a lot of fun of course, or we wouldn't have kept at it for 6 years, right?
Character backstory was 100% irrelevant throughout the campaign. I think few if any of my fellow players imagined their characters as having eventful backstories. We had only one adventure shaped by party dynamics, where we quested for a scroll to Resurrect our cleric after a bit of bad luck with death saves. Apparently the only friends our characters ever had were each other, and the small handful of recurring quest-giver patron NPCs in the AL modules.
As players in our late career years with other outside hobbies and interests, sure, we can't all commit to every campaign session or sink unlimited time into story collab. But I feel like it could have been so much more immersive and special with just the slightest bit of story tailoring to the PCs, not just steering us to dungeon after dungeon to solve a few puzzles between set-piece battles. I feel like it must be possible to run a campaign where backstory and character evolution still matter within a necessarily flexible attendance policy.
By contrast, another friend ran 8 or 10 sessions of the "Tomb of Annihilation" book, with a lot of thought toward weaving characters into the setting using backstory and personality details solicited from each player. Such a different experience, and I was a little heartbroken when the campaign fizzled due to scheduling impasses.
How would you describe the importance of backstory and player-driven story direction in your group? What are your top tips/tricks to make D&D characters feel less like interchangeable plug-and-play potatoes rolling through a disjointed series of episodes?
I have traditionally, with the player's permission (important and key step!), tie their backstory into the plot by really just asking a bunch of questions.
Ok so you were at magic school but got expelled, why is that? Did you have friends or rivals at this magic school? Etc.
This works for them because they tend to flesh out their character more as they describe what they've been through. It works for me because it gives me people/places/things I can tie into my own half-written campaign. They may not have the details nailed out and this is good because you can fill in the blanks with pieces from the campaign that you have.
I usually do this as a little one-on-one while they're doing character creation.
Now if you have a good player dynamic and you want to get fancy with it, you can tie their backstories together by incorporating details from other players backstories. Not something adversarial like one player having murdered another's parents, but something that builds player context and allows them to flesh out their own characters naturally during the story.