#help with a one shot on a character's backstory

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

night sierra
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i'm looking for maybe some advice or directions to other resources? i'm trying to write some one-shots for the backstories of each of my player's characters but i am struggling a bit on one of them. he's a (i'm so sorry) male drow ranger who escaped the underdark because he wanted to be good (the player had no idea who Drizzt was, but has since started reading books about him). i want the session to feel a bit different from Drizzt's story but I am struggling with alternatives.

we are already pretty settled into the actual campaign, the one shots are just during a little downtime while we can't all show up in person for a couple months, so it's kind of hard to tell him to change his character's story. I'm fairly new to writing campaigns so I wasn't sure if there were any useful resources out there to help me with this. any tips are appreciated. thank you!

copper vault
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It's a oneshot. Is the life history of the characters really A: important

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And B: will it come up at all

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Oneshots are ultra structured by their nature of being 4 hours long and having like, 4 scenes max before they're over

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Any fat you can trim should be trimmed

amber totem
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It probably seems counter-intuitive, but you could basically take any little packaged one-shot and just run it.

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I think you’re maybe getting yourself stuck on the idea that the scenario needs to be super tailored to the character, but it doesn’t. It just needs to be a scenario they could have believable been in.

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What’s special about a characters past is that they’re in it, not that it’s “about” them.