#RPGaDay2025 - 10 Origin


 

#RPGaDay2025 - 10 Origin

How do we take this? The last post was about inspiration, and for me that’s a type of origin. So let’s look at it a different way, let’s consider “origin” stories. Over the years I’ve had many attitudes to origin stories for TTRPG characters. I’ve had times when I’ve loved them because they show a richness of character and an opportunity to preload a methodology for portraying the character effectively. I shifted away from that idea because I’d seen too many players use the opportunity for a good origin story to basically play out everything they wanted from their character in a “Mary Sue” format, and then when the characters actually started interacting with the other characters, or with the systems of play in the game, there was always a disconnect between the heroic adventures that came before and the slapstick comedy if errors that came from wildly erratic systems. I similarly loved “lifepath” character generation systems that worked to integrate the individual into the communities around them…  they restrained the character in certain ways that set a character up for the adventures they might have later. Similarly, I found that those game systems promoting communal character development worked to enhance the origins of the group, so that the characters didn’t have to meet in a tavern, or some other clichéd start to a campaign.

Ironically, many of my own campaigns begin in media res. We’re introduced to blank slates as they’re performing some kind of task together, we know enough about them to get them going. However, since we haven’t pre-loaded the characters with lore and background, we can focus on the parts of them that are relevant to the stories being told, and can fill in the origin details as we go.

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