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Storyboard: Dark past of infinite darkness
There's no reason in the world that the idea of a dark past needed to become a cliché. I mean, it has; there's no denying that. Do a shot every time you find a character with a dark past and you'll have alcohol poisoning inside of half an hour. (Do two for every character whose past is dark and mysterious and you can just call an ambulance before you start.) But it's one of those things that's been cast into the realm of the cliché before its time -- it's a legitimate element to constructing a character that's become overused. Of course, it's been sent to the horrid land of the cliché by people using it poorly and overzealously. You can still make an interesting and nuanced character with a dark past, but you have to do so with a gentle hand. You need just enough dark past that it's interesting but not so much dark past that it gets obnoxious or silly.
Storyboard: All about the lore train, like it or not
In tabletop roleplaying, through all of the various supplements for a given game, there are usually overarching plots, which players could either interact with or ignore. This is the metaplot -- not the plot that necessarily concerns your game, but the plot that the designers are keeping an active hand in. Of course, if you wind up running smack-dab into the middle of the metaplot, your tabletop game has a distinct advantage over an MMO. If, for instance, the game has a story arc that involved a city's being destroyed within the metaplot, you can just ignore the metaplot or delay it slightly. Your story rules, and the metaplot just fills, in background information. This is not the case in MMOs. The game's lore is not a distant force; it's an oncoming freight train, and if you haven't gotten hit with it yet, you will. I touched on it briefly when I first talked about the strange relationship that roleplaying has to lore, but between patches and expansions, lately I know I've been feeling the pinch of the world changing around me. (Well, around my characters, at least.) So how do you adapt when a game's overarching plot derails a character arc or a group-wide story?
