I'm building a background for my character (went with the basic Street Sam type using the concept of a Mercenary history), but my problem is I'm not too familiar with the ins and outs of Shadowrun's history, I'm working on it thought, just takes time to read through everything. Anyways, I was hoping somoene could give me some ideas to work with for now, until I learn enough to flesh it out in detail.
To start of with, he's a troll, and I've got nothing for his early years as a kid, but sometime in his teens he ran across a pit fighting match, and got hooked into that for a few years. After making a name for himself (just in his area) a mercenary company looking for more cannon fodder picked him out and offered him a job, gave him a cheap gun, and threw him in the front lines. From there he managed to survive long enough to equip himself far enough that should something go wrong (read, luck runs out) he could come out alive. Several years later and several augmentations letter, the small time merc company took a job out of it's league, most were killed, and those that weren't scattered. Which then leads up to now where he's on his own looking for work.
Full Version: Backgrounds...
To be honest with you, I think it's okay to skimp on the detail about irrelevant points in a character's background. The background is there to explain how the character wound up running the shadows, and give a rundown on that character's description, general personality, and motivations. So focus the detail on the parts that matter, and skim over the rest - you're not writing a novel. If his childhood was relatively uneventful, then something like "Jake grew up in a sheltered corporate enclave in Denver, before it was partitioned in the wake of Ghostwalker" or "Bob spent his childhood scrounging in the garbage heaps for food and running away from the gangs of older kids who roamed the Redmond Barrens." is plenty.
As far as ideas, Aztlan is a perrenial favorite as far as places where a mercenary character ran into bad luck, but any third world place would do. Or maybe they simply ran into an elite unit such as the Red Samurai, and were outgunned.
As far as ideas, Aztlan is a perrenial favorite as far as places where a mercenary character ran into bad luck, but any third world place would do. Or maybe they simply ran into an elite unit such as the Red Samurai, and were outgunned.
| QUOTE (Glyph) |
| To be honest with you, I think it's okay to skimp on the detail about irrelevant points in a character's background. The background is there to explain how the character wound up running the shadows, and give a rundown on that character's description, general personality, and motivations. So focus the detail on the parts that matter, and skim over the rest - you're not writing a novel. If his childhood was relatively uneventful, then something like "Jake grew up in a sheltered corporate enclave in Denver, before it was partitioned in the wake of Ghostwalker" or "Bob spent his childhood scrounging in the garbage heaps for food and running away from the gangs of older kids who roamed the Redmond Barrens." is plenty. As far as ideas, Aztlan is a perrenial favorite as far as places where a mercenary character ran into bad luck, but any third world place would do. Or maybe they simply ran into an elite unit such as the Red Samurai, and were outgunned. |
Oh, I know, I'm not making something deep and story-like. It's just we have to have a background that justifies our equipment.
How about "the small-time merc company was hired and 'fired' (so to speak) by a company participating in Desert Wars"? As I understand it, although most corporations field their own teams, they would also hire disposable cannon fodder. This would give the character a justified grudge against a certain corporation (always a fun thing to roleplay and a good reason for running the shadows).
Depending on the timeline, you could have the character participating in a number of key events, from NAN border skirmishes to resource rushing (need mercs to "quell the native resistance") to backup for a corporate hostile takeover gone bad.
I think important details for the purposes of character history are your character's relationship with his own race, metatype, and culture and your character's economic status before he became a shadowrunner. Did he grow up poor or rich or middle class? Is he used to the big city or a rural area? Is he an Amerind, Anglo, Black, or something else? How does he feel about that? Does he mostly hang out with other Trolls or does he hang out with other metas more frequently? Is he racist against any particular race or metatype? A lot of these can be fleshed out during play, of course, and you can justify them later, but it's a good idea in terms of roleplaying to figure out those aspects of identity, as they tend to have the most influence in initial reactions to other people.
Depending on the timeline, you could have the character participating in a number of key events, from NAN border skirmishes to resource rushing (need mercs to "quell the native resistance") to backup for a corporate hostile takeover gone bad.
I think important details for the purposes of character history are your character's relationship with his own race, metatype, and culture and your character's economic status before he became a shadowrunner. Did he grow up poor or rich or middle class? Is he used to the big city or a rural area? Is he an Amerind, Anglo, Black, or something else? How does he feel about that? Does he mostly hang out with other Trolls or does he hang out with other metas more frequently? Is he racist against any particular race or metatype? A lot of these can be fleshed out during play, of course, and you can justify them later, but it's a good idea in terms of roleplaying to figure out those aspects of identity, as they tend to have the most influence in initial reactions to other people.
Masaru could use him for his little "righteous" battle with the Japanacorps in the Phillipines. That would give him a background that fits in well with the pit fighting angle as well.
Ahh Backgrounds. I've been on both sides of the argument on whether to have a "detailed" background or not. As I have gotten older and have put many miles under my GM belt I've decided that I don't really care how much background a character has. As a player, I develope my character's personality before I develope a backstory. If you have a great group you game with, you can develope a backstory as you play. As Shadowrunners, your not going to ask each other "hey chummer, where'd you score the Wired Reflexes?" My buddy made a comment about how most of the backgrounds end up sounding the same when there is a lot of resources at character creation. Don't get me wrong, a complete dearth of background is bad as well, but all I need from a player is 3 or 4 lines describing why they have chosen to run the Shadows as opposed to being Mercs, Corp, Gangers, etc. It may be cold to say, but in the end, all the background in the world isn't going to make your character memorable if your roleplaying skills consist of chucking dice and looking up info in the books to twink out your character. 
I see my job as a game master differently than you seem to. Part of what we like from our gaming experience is the telling of the story, we prefer to think of our games as very "cinematic"-that is the frame work could easily fit the mold of a script, or a play.
Back ground is very important to me for a number of reasons-one it helps write the script, but two, and more importantly in my boo, itmeans the player has invested in the character. That means they might be less likely tomass produce lame ass sychophant one trick ass ponies that they could care less about killing one session. (Even we have bad luck with players at times. You take what you can get at times...)
For some games this isn't a big deal, but most of what we do we like to think of as serious gaming. (As serious as we get anyways.)
I see my job as a game master less adversarial, and more like a Director. While I am gawd on the set, my job is to help get the story told.
Back ground is very important to me for a number of reasons-one it helps write the script, but two, and more importantly in my boo, itmeans the player has invested in the character. That means they might be less likely tomass produce lame ass sychophant one trick ass ponies that they could care less about killing one session. (Even we have bad luck with players at times. You take what you can get at times...)
For some games this isn't a big deal, but most of what we do we like to think of as serious gaming. (As serious as we get anyways.)
I see my job as a game master less adversarial, and more like a Director. While I am gawd on the set, my job is to help get the story told.
In my opinion, the biggest advantage (for a GM) of a good background is the plot hooks that can be used in the game.
| QUOTE (Fortune) |
| In my opinion, the biggest advantage (for a GM) of a good background is the plot hooks that can be used in the game. |
That's all well and good if you've got the time for it. I'll throw out my situation, and hopefully that will better clarify where I'm coming from. I've got six players. We play on average 4-6 hours a week. If I decide to use a bit of player background as a plot hook, what then becomes the incentive the rest of the group wanting to take the bait other than "well it's the script the GM wrote" No offence there to ye scripting GM's. I like those types of games too. I GM with the Sand Box model in mind. We're even going to the stable method of characters. (I've come to loath the typical Mr Johnson needs some runners, wow look who he gets the same group again! Or Let's form a group, Why? Group Karma!) I know it ain't all that bad but when you role play it out it's like slapping pretty dresses on an ugly Troll. I give my players a lot of freedom in what they want to do. I myself feel constrained if I start writing down too much back story or scenes that I think the players will enjoy, because then I feel I have to force them down that path or hold their hands to get them to the next scene. In the end, it's all about having fun. If we had fun that night I know I did my job as a GM and they did theirs as a Player. Some players love making developed, written backgrounds to their characters. I say Go ahead!. Some, like me, prefer to develope the background "on the fly". Some just want to show up and shoot stuff. I welcome them too. In the end, if I want to add a plot hook to a player's back story, I just do it. As long as it doesn't rake the player over the coals they generally will go along with it.
Sorry bout the long rant, but I didn't want to be labeled as an Adversarial GM....
I'm a much, much worse
The last group I was in was all character hooks. I don't think we ever took a job that was a "real" shadowrun. I'll explain.
Started out a contact of a player asked us to find someone, we even got paid like 1000 a piece. That was almost as close as we came to a standard shadowrun. It turned out the person responsible for the missing people was tied into a characters contacts. So we got drug in a little deeper. Then we did some investigating on our own, partly to aid the "procurement" face to keep on her good side, and partly because we were making way more money from looting our adversaries.
I think we actually got paid for another job, but it was also a case of them holding a hostage to persuade us to do it.
I loved the campaign, because of the twists. We would get manipulated by our enemies to do things to help them. And a couple times people we were really ticked off at turned out to be dupes like us.
Like our only lead to a guy I think was the "evil mastermind" who was in jail after getting cut loose. We arranged to get him released, and at first the tone was lets pump him for information, then pump him full of lead. It dawned on me that this guy probably saw us as his liberator and best buddy, and after a question or two, I subvocaled this to everyone. Wound up gaining a contact because the guy was just trying to make a living and was probably no where near as big a dupe as we.
Be that as it may, if you GM where you have a bunch of selfish, mercenary, criminal characters whose sole reason for being together is to commit crimes, and you offer a job, they do it, and go on to the next one while trying to screw each other over and maximize their own gains, yes it is hard to work in hooks. Or the hooks become liabilities for the other character to exploit.
Started out a contact of a player asked us to find someone, we even got paid like 1000
a piece. That was almost as close as we came to a standard shadowrun. It turned out the person responsible for the missing people was tied into a characters contacts. So we got drug in a little deeper. Then we did some investigating on our own, partly to aid the "procurement" face to keep on her good side, and partly because we were making way more money from looting our adversaries.I think we actually got paid for another job, but it was also a case of them holding a hostage to persuade us to do it.
I loved the campaign, because of the twists. We would get manipulated by our enemies to do things to help them. And a couple times people we were really ticked off at turned out to be dupes like us.
Like our only lead to a guy I think was the "evil mastermind" who was in jail after getting cut loose. We arranged to get him released, and at first the tone was lets pump him for information, then pump him full of lead. It dawned on me that this guy probably saw us as his liberator and best buddy, and after a question or two, I subvocaled this to everyone. Wound up gaining a contact because the guy was just trying to make a living and was probably no where near as big a dupe as we.
Be that as it may, if you GM where you have a bunch of selfish, mercenary, criminal characters whose sole reason for being together is to commit crimes, and you offer a job, they do it, and go on to the next one while trying to screw each other over and maximize their own gains, yes it is hard to work in hooks. Or the hooks become liabilities for the other character to exploit.
Well, I think the best PC concept would be, "I want to play an invincible PC with no hooks for the GM to exploit. If I can't play this character, I'm not having fun."
| QUOTE (toturi) |
| I want to play an invincible PC with no hooks for the GM to exploit. If I can't play this character, I'm not having fun. |
How delightfully lame.
Methinks that was toturi's point. 
TeOdio: I did not necessarily mean that every character had to have a novel detailing his life prior to starting the game. All that is needed is a reason for the character to be running the shadows, a run down on how they acquired their goodies, how they met their contacts, and a brief outline of their major life experiences. This can be done in a couple of paragraphs, or alternately just by answering the 20 Questions.
TeOdio: I did not necessarily mean that every character had to have a novel detailing his life prior to starting the game. All that is needed is a reason for the character to be running the shadows, a run down on how they acquired their goodies, how they met their contacts, and a brief outline of their major life experiences. This can be done in a couple of paragraphs, or alternately just by answering the 20 Questions.
Good use of a background hook shouldn't present a problem with getting the whole group invovled, or take much time to arrange. For example, in the background of one of my characters, during the Seattle blackout he played highway vigilante, hunting gangers (in brief, he had a thing against all gangers, and got himself messily near killed). He told his team mates that he got thrown in a holding pen by LS when he accidently strayed into a high security neighborhood while trying to get back to his family.
So you want to do something with gangers that week, you now have a good hook for getting them invovled. If they track down the character and try and jump him when the others are around, well that gets them invovled too. Also, depending on the game, there could be serious consequences if the other characters found out that he not only lied to them, but had done so to conceal the fact that he'd embarked on a murder spree.
So you want to do something with gangers that week, you now have a good hook for getting them invovled. If they track down the character and try and jump him when the others are around, well that gets them invovled too. Also, depending on the game, there could be serious consequences if the other characters found out that he not only lied to them, but had done so to conceal the fact that he'd embarked on a murder spree.
I like a moderate amount of background. One of my players is a writer and his backgrounds are a bit long. Its great for him, sometimes intense for me. The layers of intricacy are enough to give me a headache (j/k)... but seriously, its fine when someone just has a brief synopsis of where they've been, who they know, and what they've done.
| QUOTE (Fortune) |
| TeOdio: I did not necessarily mean that every character had to have a novel detailing his life prior to starting the game. All that is needed is a reason for the character to be running the shadows, a run down on how they acquired their goodies, how they met their contacts, and a brief outline of their major life experiences. This can be done in a couple of paragraphs, or alternately just by answering the 20 Questions. |
Back in the day I used to MAKE my players answer the 20 questions. I agree that it's not a bad thing for backgrounds, especially for folks new to the game or setting. I've just been roleplaying for so damn long as a player I find it too much like a real job to bust out with a background. I mean, does it truly match what the GM has set their setting up for? Does any of it pertain to what we are doing? I mean, in Shadowrun, how many have your players created a background before making the character. Most make the character, then create the background after. I was a guy who believed that in a game like Shadowrun or in White Wolf, where you have so much latitude in creating a character, you should give some thought to making a concept first, than the character. I've ran for a lot of different players in my day, and most of the time their character concepts are pretty limited (like I'm really good with Guns, cause I'm an ex hit man, or I'm a **** shaman so I can get more dice to summon **** spirits.) I know there are some really great roleplayers out there that can be a bit more creative than that, I've gamed with a bunch. I also have gamed with the others as well. I've just gotten to the point as a GM that giving them the 20 question exam isn't going to help a mediocre roleplayer "get in Character" any more than not having them do it. Half the time they couldn't even remember what they answered. As for myself when I game, the last time I came up with a bad assed background for a character I still came up with better stuff while playing the game. Now I see them as a crutch that I don't need, and extra work for those that never develope them in the end. If you've got a game group that wants to give you a great concept before making a character (Hell, I used to make the Player make the character with my guidance to make sure they didn't deviate too much from the concept...younger, too much time on my hands), God Speed to you sir. I just don't think it should be forced upon them like I used to do. We as GM's can be like George Lucas and write the back story after the main one has started.
Me: Yes, you are the bastard son of me Damian Knight, join me and we can invest and diversify as Father and Son!
Player: NOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!
Anyway, that's a silly example, but hopefully you see what I'm getting at.
| QUOTE (TeOdio) |
| I mean, does it truly match what the GM has set their setting up for? Does any of it pertain to what we are doing? |
I suppose that depends on the GM. I write stories that alternate from random runs to runs involving elements out of different runner's backgrounds. I like a decent background for that exact reason.
I guess it's a non-issue for me. I do individual chargen with each of my players, going over anything and everything that I think would be relevant. If I want something fleshed out, that happens in the individual session. I find that in this manner, I can explain how my world works for those players that have never gamed with me, and can come up with fairly decent, consistent, but not necessarily all encompassing backgrounds. I might (and usually do) use this session as an opportunity to go over exactly how the rules work in relation to combat (or decking, or rigging, or whatever). As an added bonus, it gives me as the GM total insight into the little ins-and-outs of each character, so I am not surprised in-game by some obscure bit of fluff written in the corner of the character sheet.
As I said earlier though, a fully novelized background is not necessary in order to play the game. It is quite feasible for the player to have a lot more info in his head about the character than is written down. As a GM though, I find it very useful to know at least some things about each character in my games.
As I said earlier though, a fully novelized background is not necessary in order to play the game. It is quite feasible for the player to have a lot more info in his head about the character than is written down. As a GM though, I find it very useful to know at least some things about each character in my games.
Backgrounds...what a melting pot subject. Personally i like giving my characters plenty of background to them, it lets me use parts of the game world that otherwise may not see much light of day. As for my players, i`m lucky enough that two of them have been gaming for years and can come up with some wonderful backstories that you could run a campaign off and the third player preferes to copme up with something with me that is simple and to the point and yet gives a good feel for his char.
When it comes to shadowrun (as my group are still relatively new to the game, they`ve been playing it on and off for little over a year and are only just now getting into the abience of it all), the only real question i ask of my players is the infamous. Why do you run the shadows?. Thats all i really need from them to begin with and vice versa. Its surprising how much of a story that sole question throws up.
Now further into the campaign (about 20 sessions or so now) I`ve asked for other details of chars lives. Which have been provided in varying levels of detail and are now being used for personal points in the over-arching campaign story. These all happen alongside the Shadowruns and other things the players get involved with.
My personal view? the backstory of a character is always important. When that backstory gets written/detailed is less so.
When it comes to shadowrun (as my group are still relatively new to the game, they`ve been playing it on and off for little over a year and are only just now getting into the abience of it all), the only real question i ask of my players is the infamous. Why do you run the shadows?. Thats all i really need from them to begin with and vice versa. Its surprising how much of a story that sole question throws up.
Now further into the campaign (about 20 sessions or so now) I`ve asked for other details of chars lives. Which have been provided in varying levels of detail and are now being used for personal points in the over-arching campaign story. These all happen alongside the Shadowruns and other things the players get involved with.
My personal view? the backstory of a character is always important. When that backstory gets written/detailed is less so.
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