developing-characters
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Storyboard: Back me up, backstory
Welcome back for another edition of Storyboard, where after a couple of weeks in which we laid down ground rules we're ready to start in on the fine details. So it only makes sense to start at a point filled with fine details and yet often searingly inconvenient: backstory. Because we all know how beneficial backstory can be, how it can add depth and meaning and rich interaction to even the most innocent and trivial incident. A quest about killing boars can dredge up memories of hunting with a lost father, making one of the most obnoxious holdovers in MMO quests into something interesting. And yet it's a double-edged sword. Because not only is backstory time-consuming to come up with, much of it requires either events that can't be supported in the game's engine or work on details that never come up during actual play. So we're left with something that's a huge benefit, but also such a huge inconvenience that the occasional benefit is outweighed by the massive amount of work required beforehand. How can you work character backstory and get the benefits without the negatives?
