Can we normalize orphan PCs? Coming up with one character is already hard enough, I shouldn't need to make up parents or guardians for them too
They come in two flavors anyways
>mommy/daddy issues
>heckin' wholesome family because "I'm not like the other adventurers, my familylife is stable"
Orphan adventurers, you say?
>riff raff
>street rat
>I don't buy that
>if only they'd look closer
>would they see a poor boy, no sir
Gotta eat to live,
Gotta steal to eat
Tell ya all about when I got the time?
NO!
>Coming up with one character is already hard enough
This is why people make fun of people who make orphan PCs. Because everyone knows you're trying for a low-effort character, which is hilarious because you think making a character is hard.
If ya all outta ideas, just use random chargen. It's not like you're in a soviet prison where the guards are pretending that the result of this multiple choice test is in any way related to the already signed, stamped and filed execution order.
Exactly why OP complaining that it'd be too hard to make up some parents/guardians is hilarious
Most of my characters are orphans or missing at least one parent, but I still go into detail about who those parents were in case the DM ever wants to use them.
Have they ever?
Family is pretty important, especially if we're talking a pseudo-medieval setting. That's why I like that Harnmaster includes rolling for your clan and relationship to other members of the clan. It just provides more hooks and in-built connections with NPCs, that players can leverage for help.
>My cousin is a pilot, he can bring us to this island on his boat. My father is an alderman in this town, maybe we'll get off lightly for this crime.
And so on. And you only need to include them in actual play as much as you'd like, I've never seen the idea of my character having parents as disruptive.
>Can we normalize orphan PCs?
I always make sure to orphanize the PCs.
heh...this is good DMing.
This 100%. Always kill your PCs family and love interests for added drama. It just makes the story that much better.
This true DMs?
The only reason you would ask /tg/ to "normalize" a certain way of playing TTRPGs is that you don't actually play games yourself and thus have no understanding of just how worthless what your asking is. It doesn't even seem like a bot wrote the OP so maybe this is just some nogames seething.
Here's a life hack you'll probably never get to try:
>Make an orphan PC and play the game
>They become more interesting over time as they experience more
>Appreciate the character for who they are, beyond the meaningless nogames generalizations that you invented and applied to all the hypothetical characters in your head
I have rarely if ever made parents for my characters and no one has ever cared.
Besides I'm much more a consequences of in game developments sort of player, not plotting up layers and layers of complex backstory and hope the GM bitestry to weave everyone and everything into my own backstory kind of player
But Aladdin isn't an orphan, he lives with his mother.
And he's Chinese.
Man, it's been decades since I've seen the Disney version so I can't equate it to Aladdin at all now.
In fairness his China-ness was just the original authors trying to put him in a far away land, but it’s not like he tried hard to make the setting in any way like China. I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess that the name “Badroulbadour” is vanishingly uncommon in China, for example.
Just sayin’. Disneys’s version is no less authentic than the Arabian original.
>no less authentic than the original.
Classic Disnoid logic. Everything was already bad, therefore Disney can do no wrong. Seen it thousands of times.
>Everything was already bad
I didn't say the original was bad, you pearl-clutching cunt. I said that the original felt no particular need to be authentically Chinese, so I don't see why Disney should be held to a different standard from its source material.
>But it's also not the 1001 nights Aladdin. At all.
If it helps Disney did do one that was considerably more faithful to the original a couple years earlier.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0136702/
>considerably more faithful to the original
And yet, still inferior to the scooby doo version
He's got a point though. They had Sultans, Princesses, Viziers. It was Chinese in name only to be exotic. Is the Disney version good? Yea. It's good. But it's also not the 1001 nights Aladdin. At all. I mean not even the bad early translations of Gallad, on who pretty much every translation was based on, and he changed it to fit his ideas, Burton, who did the exact same as Galland, not to mention the Calcutta translation, and so many more. Frankly a good translation didn't even exist until 2010 with Hussain Haddawy, but I'd recommend Yasmije Seale's 2021 translation myself.
The OG Aladin is french
It's a story likely made up by a Frenchman but the bulk of the characters are Chinese. I think only Jaffar isn't and he's a Moor.
Being a POC kid with a single mum is even worse, I heard.
Like proper orphans can at least be harvested for their organs without anybody raising a fuss.
Normalize? It's already normal, at least at my table. Hell, at least one adventure started with the destruction of the player's orphanage, leading to a bunch of teenagers being forced into adventuring to stay alive.
Oddly almost all my characters have had a combination of both of those…
I thought orphan was the classic rogue backstory.
Why are we pretending that isn't already normal? Almost every character I've made has been the odd one out because they still had living, non-estranged parents while everyone else had their village burnt down or they were kidnapped by pirates or what have you.
They are normalized. They're so normalized that making "he's an orphan" a part of a character's backstory that it's seen as generic. A character, especially a protagonist, being an orphan is almost as common as having two thumbs.
You're a fucking retard.
Orphan is most common PC background
bro Orphan PCs are the standard, and have been for decades
Bitch almost every player character my friends have ever made have been orphans or parentless robots or some shit. As someone who has DM'd for over a decade my experience is it is FAR more rare for someone to actually plan out an extended family for their characters than to just sprout out of the ground in a leather jerkin and a shortsword. One of the things I hear most frequently about people who play is that they don't make character because they're afraid the DM will target them in order to force the player to do something they don't want or as a cheap way to induce drama. Well in the last campaign I played I was unsurprisingly the only one among the group to give his character parents and lo and behold the instant we got to my hometown they were attacked, so hell maybe they were right.
Being an orphan has been the assumed default for adventurers for decades, nogames.
>Can we normalize orphan PCs?
In my circle of friends, everyone plays friendless orphan loners. I was considered unusual when I said I wanted to play a character with a family.
orphan PC's are usually a symptom of vindictive DM's
if it's virtually guaranteed that your family will be killed throughout the game, you stop having a family because that shit gets old fast
pretty much this, every single midwit thinks they're so inspired for pulling literal bottom of the barrel capeshit writing and sifting through PC backstories for characters they can kill off for forced drama. Unless I have total faith and a long history with a given GM (thankfully my current group has been together for 2+ years and are great) my default "testing the waters" go-to is playing a middle aged or older character whose parents have already passed away of natural causes and he's fine with that because he's a functioning adult. Orphans and "my parents are DEAD!" types often invite just as much drama and are too edgy for my tastes.
If I wanted angst and constant handwriting over the safety of my fictional parents I'd play vampire the masquerade where at least it's an intended aspect of the genre
or worse than killed off, you've got DM's who realize killing the PC's family is beyond overused but instead of taking the hint they get as "creative" as possible in their horrible fates
no fuck you, turning my sister into a demon who's in love with the BBEG is not good writing you jackass
It's not good writing, but it DOES trigger a pavlovian horny response in me
>normalize
Gay shit
I'd prefer normalizing adventurers in their 40s who's kids have already left the nest. Like give me a wizard who's in his 80s and has grandchildren walking around.
If something needs to be "normalized" it wasn't normal to begin with.