Core Rules deep dive: Background

Fourth post with an insight on the VI·VIII·X core rules: this time I will focus on the background. Let me have a foreword before. 

I am not sure if my experience in traditional RPGs is a common case or not but I always found myself (as well as any other player in the party I had) to build up a character from the stats. This means that I never though beforehand to who was the character; first it used to come how this was and afterwards I started building his history. This is regardless of the GM: that way was accepted by almost all the GMs I met in my life. The odd part of this thought is that the background used to be created according to the needs... I mean: if my character's parents were not an useful detail in the campaign (doesn't matter the reason), then my character had a huge "?" on this piece of info... I could have been the son of either the ruler of that land or of a slave and this was not necessary and known. Then, when I ran into a situation where I needed this info, it popped up. 

Ok, maybe I am not that sophisticated player and I am the only on Earth who had this "problem", but I felt this detail important and somehow tried to route the player into what should be his background from the beginning. The background is a detail necessary to create the character as part of the skills he knows are coming from it.

Rule-wise this means that a character is asked to define his social class as well as his place of origin so that these details can be used to have skills consistent with his background. The rationale is rather clear: when a player starts a character up, the knowledge the character has at the beginning is coming from these two relevant aspects of his background. The rule enables the player to define the background in detail from these ones and create a sound story of his character from the beginning. In the core rules there is not info on the setting, therefore I left the indications to a "generic" setting so that any GM who is using a different setting can apply them in his world. In the upcoming setting, I will duly develop in detail the information on social classes and place of origin.

Under the view of the KUP model, I can observe that even if this is not a straight KUP detail (i.e. there are not unknown information to the players), this aspect strengthen the KUP model anyway. This simply because it binds the players to follow a story, to keep the respect of details that are already on the table and cannot be defined "on the fly" whenever it is necessary (and, useless to say, they are defined in a way that perfectly fits with the required situation a character is having). In a nutshell, this way helps to look after consistency and respect of an important (but often not too much considered) aspect of a RPG.

One last note on background: this approach is something I "borrowed" from an excellent RPG, it is one of the few aspects not invented by me simply because it was so well structured that I took this approach and adapted (i.e. not copied!) to my game. The RPG is "Tiers Age", it is by  J.P. “Usher” Jaworski (2000): it is a RPG set in the Tolkien's Middle Earth and it is simply one of the best games I played. My kudos to the author, my honesty requires me to give the link to this wonderful game: Tiers Age

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