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?
Me, personally, I have slowly started to shift towards "bones-only" storytelling for my campaign settings – I build a loose plot, some NPCs tied to it, locations and a few bigger encounters. Beyond that, I want my players to not feel railroaded to encourage them to think creatively in each session, as it helps me as a GM enjoy the session more when players aren't always looking to me to tell them what they should do next. I also usually stockpile a bunch of pre-baked generic encounters, NPCs, shops and such so that I can keep up with their story and choices.
That is also my preffered style of play.
For many, many years we used "adventures" which were either written by some author or prepared by a GM. This was often fun, but also frustrating. The plots were often not flexible enough to work out in all cases, as a GM it might be frustrating if players just skip big parts of the story and in the end it was never so much about the story, but more about fights, rules, stats and so on.
These days you have super cool systems like Blades in the Dark, which do away with planning and encourage you to just play to find out. I much prefer this spontaneous exploration of rough story arcs that are very flexible and often player driven.
Personally, I run a Burning Wheel game which was 100% created by the group and in each session is driven by what the players want to do. My preparation time is roughly 1 hour before each session and the rest happens at the table.