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?
modernangel@sh.itjust.works They shape 100% of the storyline. The campaign is the story of their activities in the world.
They don't shape the world, though, unless they do things to intervene in the current world lines of the people and institutions in it. At the start of the campaign, I scaffold the major political players in the world,and sketch out what their goals are, and how they're trying to achieve them. I estimate how long it takes them to get to places of import for those goals, and track that in a calendar. I leave hooks for the players to pick up and engage with those things from time to time, but if they're not interested, those entities just continue on unimpeded.
Meanwhile, everywhere they go, I dig into books of tables to come up with some NPCs with problems that need to be solved, side quests that can be activated, and locations that can be explored. They're just names on a page until the players pick up the hook, but if they do, then the party does things to encounter and activate new political players who end up on the board. I then do the same thing after the fact, and add them to the calendar.
Their story is 100% theirs. The opportunities to shape the world's story are there. There's no "storyline" for me to bend around their gravity.