The Problem

I just wanted to rock up to the table and start the game, but the DM had other ideas. He wanted all of us to write a character back-story. Having three jobs at the time, I didn’t feel enamoured with my homework. The little story meant a hurdle to jump over to get to the actual game.

But let me back-up and take the hurdles from the start. The first hurdle is reading the campaign notes (otherwise the character’s background would make no sense), the second is writing the thing, and the third comes when the DM finally reads one story per player and attempts to minimally reconfigure the established world to allow for the backstory.

Players’ back-stories will not let DMs plan their campaign world. The DM might find a couple of ideas to riff off, but there’s no RPG-plot those short stories without a lot of work.

Some players had their stories enter the plot, but not mine, and this was a good thing. With five players, the DM had a monumental task ahead: to fit all of those ideas into an existing campaign, with limited time.

Very few people can write well, and I don’t mean this as an insult. It’s a rare talent. It demands training, but training does not guarantee ability, so the group produced what you’d imagine. A halfling who had lots of siblings. A rich elven princess. Standard stuff.

Well, mostly standard. The rich elf meant this character required loads more starting money than any other character. It made sense for the story, but from the point of view of the game, one player just received a whole bunch of free stuff.

The Solution

Each player in BIND starts with five Story Points, and spends them at any point to add some small deus ex machina from their history.

• Alice’s character is so weak that everyone expects her to die soon, so she spends two Story Points to say that a couple of allies join her, eager to help. She’ll have three characters this session!
• Shortly after, when the troop feel stumped about which direction they should go, Alice reveals her character’s ties to the local Paper Guild. This lets the character know all sorts of secrets about the least-dangerous routes.

After a spending her Story Points, Alice has established her character’s ‘backstory’ as a sociable and popular person.

• When the troop can’t understand what mischief the elves are plotting, Bob declares his character knows elvish. “He learned it in the library, from the section of Elvish Verse”.
• When Bob worries his character might not succeed in making the Elixir he needs, he spends another Story Point for a massive Bonus. “He learned this exact recipe from a book he stole from the great library, back in the day”.
• Soon after, the entire town struggles with a rift opening in its centre. Bob spends two Story Points to craft a friend from his days at the great library, specifying every facet, so he can purchase some magical ability.

Despite not reading a single paragraph about the setting, Bob’s background fits perfectly with Fenestra, because every element began as a response to Fenestra. Breaking up the character’s background into little boons, spread across a few sessions, means that nobody had to listen to a long, pointless, monologue; his notes were short and the results useful.

Character Pools

Once Alice’s character dies, she can pick one of the characters she introduced earlier to join the troupe. Internally, this helps narrative flow, as the troupe have already worked with this person, and Alice’s death provides a reason for them to appear. Externally, this also provides a kind of hidden character advancement for players; the first character has purely random stats, but once Alice introduces three allies from her background, the second character will be ’the best of three randomly rolled characters’.

I’ve not had a chance to see the Character Pools in play yet, so I can’t wait for the next chronicle.

Hoarding Potions

Just as people complete computer games with a hoard of healing potions, forever unspent and wasted, BIND players in previous chronicles would often hoard their Story Points. It’s hard to spend them, knowing they’ll never regenerate! This works fine for one ‘mysterious loner’ character, who can dramatically reveal their past only near the end of the chronicle, but when nobody spends their Story Points, it means the system failed.

My brute-force solution is to give players 5 Experience Points every time they spend a Story Point. This also helps taper off the Experience Points slowly, since Story Points will drip-feed an extra 25 Experience Points into the character just as fast as the player likes. Once the initial ‘growth-spurt’ ends, the character settles into the usual 2 to 6 Experience Points per session.