Listen to Your Characters
As a follow up to my previous post, "Let Your Campaign Talk to You" , I've been thinking about new ways to approach developing character backgrounds, and looking at various techniques from literature and television. Rather than what I suspect is the standard approach, that of drafting the background and incidental details all at once, and typically before even the first game session has taken place, what I'm now envisioning is a process where the character background grows organically over time. In this new approach, players should at the time of the first game session, know the basics, what's readily apparent from their character sheets, but details beyond that can be left somewhat vague and filled in over time. This could be something as minor as character details, or something as major as character motivations and goals. In the past I might have a character background that states that "Johnny" is the oldest of 5 siblings. But in this new appro...