>Think of a backstory for a character I really want to play
>Keep them in my back pocket for years until the right campaign comes a long
>Never get a chance to play them
>Decide to start drafting a short story out of their background
>mfw their adventure will never truly begin until I actually get a chance to play them
>mfw years of building them up in my head will make it all the more disappointing if the game falls apart before their arc is complete
I am literally the novelgay that DM's dread. I'm half tempted to ask my group to make characters for a hypothetical adventure and just use it as a jumping off point for the extended cast. Any other anons ever get this feel? Share it if you have.
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Play solo where your homosexualry can't affect other people.
Campaigns that start with high level characters can have complex backstories. If you're starting at a normal level your life has been boring up to this point and unremarkable. Nothing worth writing down. Had you done anything real it would have given you experience and thus excluded you from playing low level. So just write your fricking book, the whole thing, and start the character at level 12 or something.
diagetic experience points gets ridiculous, PCs are just magic and special always. otherwise the average slaughterhouse killing floor labourer would be a level 20 character after his second week on the job.
There's tonnes of old ex-adventurers who's sedentary life for years puts them back down to level 1, but in the rules you can't lose XP. that's because the worldbuilding and the rules are separate entities that don't interact perfectly.
The animals at the slaughter house did not threaten the life of the employee and so offer no experience. You do not get experience for killing things you get experience for overcoming challenges. If there's no risk you do not get exp.
I don't remember that being in the rules.
"the rules"
It's because butcher isn't a class, so they have no new abilities to gain as they level up.
It literally is in AD&D. If they forgot to include it in the WOTC DMGs, that's unfortunate, but it's still implied by the fact that you can get experience for overcoming noncombat challenges.
Complex back story=/=high level character. It is entirely possible to have a level 1 male human fight that's a run away farm boy, and have the village they come from and the reason they left be meticulously thought out.
A meticulously thought out home village is not a complex backstory. Guess what, village farm life is boring. Your life has been boring up to this point. That's my point. You have not had experiences and not gained experience.
You lack the imagination to think up the small town dramas that could unfold in a remote farming community.
How much drama a hometown has is entirely irrelevant to the complexity of your characters backstory. You're talking about world building, I'm talking about backstory. These are entirely different things.
The two become intertwined if they impact your character's past. Having an angry storm god's flood destroy a town's crop is world building. Having your character's family lose their modest fortune to a bad harvest, spurring them to set out on their own is backstory. The two don't take place in a vacuum.
>Inb4 the DM should do all of the world building
*Taps the "talk to your DM like an adult" sign*
Nobody actually thinks the DM should do all of the world building. You fell for trolls if you thought people did.
Small minded Black person
Just run your own game and feature them as an only moderately important NPC.
>t. never-game problems
No, I just play games or run games or write a novel.