Dear Player, It's Our Hero the GM. We should talk...
about your character's background story
So you pitched your character idea and background story to your GM. 5 minutes into session 0 and chill and the GM gives you this look:
You figure the GM just has a lot on their plate with the rest of the campaign, so you start telling the other players about the awesome character you made. Surely they will appreciate the effort you went through to write the novella of your character's life so far, but they interrupt right as you're getting the the interesting part of Act 1 for your character with a hearty:
All that effort to write such an epic/clever/funny/interesting backstory feels wasted. You aren't really that into the idea of playing if your character if you can't have that backstory that you came up with. To that I'd say grow thicker skin and realize that when people agree to play an RPG, they are not agreeing to help you stroke your ego and tell you that your character is such a wondrously create piece of fiction that they don't want to play the campaign and would prefer just to hear more about your character. So how do you fix it?
What is a character background? What makes a good one?
It might be easier to figure out what a character background isn't before deciding what it is or even should be. It isn't a masterpiece of storytelling that will enrich the game's fiction in profound ways. Your character background is not a chance for you to flex your creative muscles.
A character's background is meant to help you figure out how your character will act. Seeing where they came from will help you determine what makes the most sense for their plan to move their story forward. It's a player's clues as to how their character should act when they get confronted with "What do you do?"
A good background is one that leaves things undecided or at least with some vague areas that are meant to give you space to explore aspects of your character during the game. Finality isn't interesting for story telling. If you're creating a background for a character and decide their parents were killed when they were young, sure you've got an interesting event that will no doubt effect the way the character perceives the world, but there is no place to go from there. The parents are dead. That doesn't leave a lot of room for much else. Maybe a heavy handed motivation for revenge; which is pointless because in most RPGs the big evil baddy at the end doesn't need a lot of help to be hated.
Now if you leave that sort of thing open ended without saying what happened one way or the other, suddenly they could become the target of a villain, or expose a family secret, or fall victim to a cult, or just bug the character to come home and help with the harvest. These are all hooks that can be used to pull your character in different directions to explore those aspects of the character's life and of the game world all the players are part of.
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