Seems like panel 3 couldve been their character arc for the campaign

I feel your wife may have just been assassinated in the chaos Thievius, I don’t think that dragon would’ve used a sword

Your anger was misplaced, it was truly the goblin that took both your wife and you.

And this is why my next character is gonna be Steve the fisherman. Been spear fishing his whole life. That’s it. That’s his backstory. He carries a spear.

Hence the number one rule: cool stuff should be done in the game, not your backstory.

Ohhh, that’s a good one. I’m stealing that!

Nice day for fishin‘, ain‘t it?

Trait: overworked back When you stand for long periods or don’t think before folding to pick up stuff or sleep, you are disadvantaged for 10 minutes

I thought it was im the rule book that players should do so. If i have an epic backstory im playing and ancient old fart that has not battled in centuries and is not used to it anymore

The one solution is to end the back story bad ‘so anyway, he’s learning how to walk again after… That.’ or ‘crawled into a bottle afterwards, and you’ll have a hell of a time fishing her out. In the meantime, she can still manage a cantrip from time to time. Most days.’ Especially if you’re going for a ‘last job’ or ‘old gunslinger’ vibe.

Works really well if your early build is super specialized, and, like ‘they still remember how to do that part just on reflex’

And that’s the campaign where you start at level 12, lol

Or just start the campaign at a higher level.

That was obvious. Why would a dragon need a sword to kill a maiden?

And to explain why D&D characters miss half the time, you can just say he was unnecessarily ‘correcting’ for water refraction still.

I’ve become increasingly convinced that people don’t want to play low level characters. Level 1 characters are neophyte adventurers. Their backstory shouldn’t include significant a mounts of adventure, combat, or heroics, because it introduces a significant amount of ludo-narrative dissonance into the campaign.

Unless there’s a reason they’ve been de-leveled.

One of the most fun characters I’ve played was a broken-down elite super-science soldier who was so addled by basilisk memes and psychotronic warfare that he needed his intelligent gun to remind him where he was every ten minutes.

Yep. Feel like we just had some posts about this. People who write that kind of backstory should just write a book. It’s especially bad in games like D&D where you’re starting out as a level 1 nobody. Some games, even some games of D&D, start at higher power levels, so the story is at least mechanically plausible.

Yes. That’s one reason that the Fate system basically disallows characters ever being low level. Low level starts aren’t actually particularly fun, and they can prevent characters from having diverse epic shared backstory.

Hence the number one rule: cool stuff should be done in the game, not your backstory.

I prefer Fate, where the rules practically require having cool stuff in each character’s back story.

ensignwashout@startrek.website I don’t know, zero-to-hero is one of the best story tropes out there. Totally nullifying it seems kind of wild to me. But you have to know who you’re playing, and if you’re playing a highly skilled veteran with a rich history of great deeds, you need to understand that that is not a Level 1 character.