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  1. - Top - End - #61
    Ettin in the Playground
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    Default Re: Curiosity: How many player characters have dead family?

    Anyways, there seems to be a tangent about what counts as an "adventurer", so let's go over a basic point:

    Not all PCs are, or are under any pressure to be, adventurers.

    I've played farmhands, soldiers, daughters of French nobles, superpowered hobos, policemen etc. who are just doing their jobs, it just happened their jobs happened to be interesting enough for a game.

    "Adventurer" is a pretty broad category anyway. And often just an euphenism for more unsavory jobs. Mercenaries, explorers, pirates, privateers, archeologists, tombrobbers, merchants, raiders and many many others can qualify.
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  2. - Top - End - #62
    Pixie in the Playground
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    Default Re: Curiosity: How many player characters have dead family?

    My current character has a dead brother; his death motivated his parents to take actions that changed my character's life course, but the death didn't really effect my character emotionally or as a person (beyond sadness at the time, of course). It was just the events the death instigated that mattered. One of my companions makes good use of his 'orphan' backstory in his personality, and our last member's family are all alive and healthy. I think that it doesn't really matter how cliche elements of your story are, as long as you use them well and create something interesting with them! ^_^
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    Arvid Lagh | Human (Illuskan) | 35 years old | 5’ 10’’ | Outlander | Life Domain Cleric of Chauntea | LN
    Veryn Killaethem | High Elf | 280 years old | 6' 3'' | Noble | Battle Master | CN
    Glendower Archvalla | Half-Elf | 50 years old | 5’ 7’’ | Criminal | War Domain Cleric of Corellon | NG
    Solilque | High Elf | 300 years old | 6’ 0’’ | Sage | Knowledge Domain Cleric of Labelas | CG
    Ghaunvyll | Drow | 90 years old | 5’ 0’’ | Urchin | Trickery Domain Cleric of Vhaeraun | NE

  3. - Top - End - #63
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    Lord Raziere's Avatar

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    Default Re: Curiosity: How many player characters have dead family?

    Quote Originally Posted by Max_Killjoy View Post
    So would you consider Amundsen, Peary, Shackleton, and their fellows to be disreputable hobos?

    What about the Polynesians who kept setting out across the waters of the vast Pacific in outrigger canoes, looking for another new island, for 1000s of years?
    Pointing out counter-examples is meaningless, there is always exceptions to everything.
    I'm also on discord as "raziere".


  4. - Top - End - #64
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    Default Re: Curiosity: How many player characters have dead family?

    Quote Originally Posted by Lord Raziere View Post
    Pointing out counter-examples is meaningless, there is always exceptions to everything.
    They're not exceptions.

    Those are only a handful of all the people going back into the earliest days of humanity who have ventured beyond the map and struggled with the unknown -- from our earliest ancestors who ended up populating the entire planet to the astronauts who walked on the moon -- and painting them all as somehow "less respectable, because (they're) crazy (people) who is just desperately trying to find something on the frontier," is really unfair and inaccurate.

    Venturing out into the unknown is what humans do. Settlers, explorers, inventors, and storyellers... they're tapping into something inherently human.

    It's a sad day indeed if we've become so domesticated as a culture and species that people who go on adventures are considered the leftover scum with no respectable place or role.
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  5. - Top - End - #65
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    Default Re: Curiosity: How many player characters have dead family?

    Quote Originally Posted by Max_Killjoy View Post
    They're not exceptions.

    Those are only a handful of all the people going back into the earliest days of humanity who have ventured beyond the map and struggled with the unknown -- from our earliest ancestors who ended up populating the entire planet to the astronauts who walked on the moon -- and painting them all as somehow "less respectable, because (they're) crazy (people) who is just desperately trying to find something on the frontier," is really unfair and inaccurate.

    Venturing out into the unknown is what humans do. Settlers, explorers, inventors, and storyellers... they're tapping into something inherently human.

    It's a sad day indeed if we've become so domesticated as a culture and species that people who go on adventures are considered the leftover scum with no respectable place or role.
    Oh sorry.

    But we're kind of out of places to explore and haven't yet gotten the space travel part down. Right now, we're kind of stuck. I'd love to go exploring into space ala Star Trek or whatever, but I just don't see that happening within my lifetime. in a global society full of laws with no place left to expand, an adventurer who goes around killing random things and stealing things looks exactly like a crazy outcast.
    I'm also on discord as "raziere".


  6. - Top - End - #66
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    Default Re: Curiosity: How many player characters have dead family?

    Quote Originally Posted by Max_Killjoy View Post
    It's a sad day indeed if we've become so domesticated as a culture and species that people who go on adventures are considered the leftover scum with no respectable place or role.
    The term "adventurer" as a term of art in RPGs is not the same term as applied to explorers in general. The standard RPG party is a very small group, completely self funded, lacking direct institutional support, and generally in the business of violence. All four of these criteria are notably missing from a great deal of what's being presented as counter examples.
    I would really like to see a game made by Obryn, Kurald Galain, and Knaight from these forums.

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  7. - Top - End - #67
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    Default Re: Curiosity: How many player characters have dead family?

    Quote Originally Posted by Knaight View Post
    The term "adventurer" as a term of art in RPGs is not the same term as applied to explorers in general. The standard RPG party is a very small group, completely self funded, lacking direct institutional support, and generally in the business of violence. All four of these criteria are notably missing from a great deal of what's being presented as counter examples.
    On second thought I agree with this. Again: an adventurer is not an astronaut, a government or company funded colony, a soldier or an explorer. even Columbus was funded by the spanish crown, and Leif Erikson who discovered America five centuries before him was actually on a religious mission to convert Greenland and was a hirdman under King Olaf Tryggvason. through technically he following word of a merchant and rescued guys who got shipwrecked in america so, he was technically the fourth guy.

    So yeah, all backed by institutions, probably have more than five guys. Well Columbus was pretty much in the business of violence but he had like a hundred men just killing and enslaving people for the slave trade, but even his men was only a vector for the epidemic that truly killed off most of the natives, he probably he probably commanded more people to be killed than did it himself, because his men would kill and enslave people, then he would send the slaves across the ocean and more would die on transfer. So even when completely evil, Columbus didn't personally kill everything himself, he wasn't doing this alone, he was a government backed first wave of a centuries long effort to invade and colonize the americas.

    adventurers or murderhobos, are five people who just randomly find each other, just so happen to all be good at combat, decide to work together out of the blue because why not, and go wherever the hell they want, killing whatever they feel like, without even bothering with slaves or prisoners. They just go "Is this organism in the way of loot? Y/N" and kill if it is. which sadly makes Columbus look nuanced in comparison, because he had a conception of sparing peoples lives so that they may serve him as slaves forever, as well as taking tribute, but then again I've never heard of murderhobo PC's torturing or raping anybody, so score two for the murderhobos there? can't say that for Columbus's men.
    I'm also on discord as "raziere".


  8. - Top - End - #68
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    Default Re: Curiosity: How many player characters have dead family?

    Quote Originally Posted by Knaight View Post
    The term "adventurer" as a term of art in RPGs is not the same term as applied to explorers in general. The standard RPG party is a very small group, completely self funded, lacking direct institutional support, and generally in the business of violence. All four of these criteria are notably missing from a great deal of what's being presented as counter examples.
    And I was responding to descriptions of "adventurers" that would include explorers, settlers, early archaeologists, astronauts, and even the earliest humans spreading across the world... and (those descriptions) also asserted that "adventurers" were awful scummy jerk scumbags... because of the qualities they share with those settlers, explorers, etc.


    Quote Originally Posted by Lord Raziere View Post
    adventurers or murderhobos, are five people who just randomly find each other, just so happen to all be good at combat, decide to work together out of the blue because why not, and go wherever the hell they want, killing whatever they feel like, without even bothering with slaves or prisoners. They just go "Is this organism in the way of loot? Y/N" and kill if it is. which sadly makes Columbus look nuanced in comparison, because he had a conception of sparing peoples lives so that they may serve him as slaves forever, as well as taking tribute, but then again I've never heard of murderhobo PC's torturing or raping anybody, so score two for the murderhobos there? can't say that for Columbus's men.
    No.

    This is conflating a particular approach to gaming and/or a certain type of player, with a general sort of character. Not all adventurer PCs are "murderhobos", and not all "murderhobos" are adventurers. Some players see the game as "just a game, so nothing I do matters or has consequences", so they do whatever seems funny, or convenient, or whatever... or they think the game is their venue to act out on things they can't do in real life (*shudder*). And they have GMs who let them get away with this and never impose the natural consequences that would arise from the PCs' behavior -- the world is in effect the PCs' toilet. This happens in games of any setting and with PCs of all types (on paper), and isn't in any way restricted to or caused by the characters being "adventurers".

    I've been in plenty of fantasy-setting campaigns where the PCs were a wandering group of independent "freelancers" looking for combat, loot, tavern crawls and tavern brawls, the blank parts of the map, and general excitement... who were usually brought together by circumstances at the start... who often didn't have a lot of social ties relevant to the game... and they went out adventuring on adventures looking for adventure. They were adventurers.

    And yet those same PCs had morals, ethics, codes of honor, etc... and did a lot of their killing in genuine defense of people who couldn't defend themselves against the threats at hand... and risked their lives for things other than loot... and got their loot without murdering random people (funny-looking, green-skinned, or otherwise)... and on the rare occasion when a PC acted like a "murderhobo", there were consequences, often imposed by the other PCs in-game.

    I've got no problem with calling actual murderhobs "murderhobos". But I'm going to say FOUL every time someone tries to assert that "murderhobo" = "adventurer" = "people without strong social ties who go out seeking things in the blank parts of the map and are ready for violence if it comes" and tar all those with the same broad brush.



    I'm not going to walk into the political/historical minefield of sorting fact, fiction, and revisionism out on the subject of Columbus.
    Last edited by Max_Killjoy; 2017-09-24 at 05:28 PM.
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  9. - Top - End - #69
    Troll in the Playground
     
    Flumph

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    Default Re: Curiosity: How many player characters have dead family?

    I think that "Adventurers are all scummy reviled murder-hobos because that's what I've defined 'adventurer' as meaning in RPGs" is circular reasoning.

    Especially when a lot of the reasons given apply less in D&D than they do IRL:
    * There are plenty of new places to explore, in many settings.
    * Magic and superhuman survival skills means that a small group acting without significant logistic support can go much farther and have a much greater chance of survival than they would IRL (and even IRL, people have done it).
    * When the state of nations is much less stable, hordes of monsters arise periodically, and various types of deadly creatures can show up even inside a fortified city, going around armed and having a history of fights is not such an unusual or socially aberrant thing.

    If you want to play a scummy reviled murder-hobo - sure, have fun. But saying that all adventurers are or should be that is just as cliché as "all adventurers are shiny knights and heroes of destiny".
    Last edited by icefractal; 2017-09-24 at 01:36 PM.

  10. - Top - End - #70
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    Daemon

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    Default Re: Curiosity: How many player characters have dead family?

    Oddly enough, I've never actually meet a murder hobo in any game I've been in or DM'd, and I run pretty stock "you're adventurers, go adventure" games.
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  11. - Top - End - #71
    Ogre in the Playground
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    Default Re: Curiosity: How many player characters have dead family?

    I have always developed pretty involved backstories for my characters, with complex family relations and very rarely are the closest ones dead without good reason. My DM also loves it and frequently makes use of it.

    My current characters' family is actually two families, divided and united, of nobles. They were married and both families had a child each, but eventually the husband of one cheated with the wife of the other, she got pregnant with twins, and both spouses demanded divorce. Eventually those spouses got in contact with each other and while filing the divorce papers got closer and eventually ended up marrying each other, also taking custody of all the children and inherenting the noble titles for themselves only, while the others were disgraced from nobility. Then they had a child together whom became the inheritor of the noble title, causing all the other children to lose their status and grow resentful as they grew older.

    And this is just the default state of the family, without adding in the backstory of the family butler, the noble who tries to marry into the family for his own perverse desires, or the youngest being sent away to a far-away kingdom to study magic at her uncles place.

    And I play one of the older siblings here, adventuring to recover a lost heirloom and to evade said pervert.

  12. - Top - End - #72
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    Default Re: Curiosity: How many player characters have dead family?

    I've honestly never played with the dead family trope as a starting backstory except a handful of times. I usually go with strained relationships over severed ones. My newest character is actually the exception.

    Half drow from the underdark whose father was given to her as a personal slave, but was very kond to her behind closed doors. She caused his death by accusing him of damaging an artifact that she was actually responsible for destroying. He was killed by her mother and she has a few half sisters that were killed in the event that lead to her leaving the Underdark. I had a specific reason for each one.

    1)The father was to show just how awful and ruthless her homeland was and give an example of the terrible things she did for survival. Which kick starts the redemption theme her character revolves around.

    2) The sisters aren't there for tragedy, but rather to give a reason why she can't just slither back home and even for members of her house to accuse and becomer her enemies in the future.

    The point I'm trying to make is it can be a good ot device if used fpr specific themes or reasons. However it can also lead tp unecessary brooding. Just ask yourself why your family has to be dead and if you have a solid reason don't be afraid to go with the cliche.

    Because literally everything is a cliche at this point and hardly anything is 100% original.

  13. - Top - End - #73
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    SwashbucklerGuy

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    Default Re: Curiosity: How many player characters have dead family?

    There're two main reasons orphan PCs are so common:

    - It's an easy way to justify your character not just settling down and having a job in his city. If you don't have to worry about taking care of your young daughter or aging father, you're free to explore the world!
    - It safeguards the player against the old "the villain kidnapped your family! Follow to railroad to save them!" trick so many GMs like to pull. It gets old fast. I had a GM who was particularly bad about this, despite otherwise being a great GM... So after the second time it happened to me, all my characters for his games were orphans with no family or childhood friends.
    Last edited by Lemmy; 2017-09-28 at 10:19 AM.
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  14. - Top - End - #74
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    Default Re: Curiosity: How many player characters have dead family?

    Hmm, some of my recent PCs:

    1) Biological mother, disposition unknown, but probably still out there, as she was too good a plot hook for the DM to throw away. Biological father, most likely killed and eaten by biological mother. (She was a changeling. Her mother was a green hag. This is SOP.) Adoptive parents, alive and well, and she helped them out in their shop when she was home.

    2) Anthropomorphic personification of the concept of adhesion. No family, per se.

    3) Parents killed when their limo was bombed, character survived only because of intervention by loa. This event was the trigger for her Awakening as a mambo of the loa of Death. Potential other family unknown; the character was too young when she was orphaned to know how to find them, and she was presumed dead in the explosion.

    4) Literally raised by wolves. As a young wood elf, she'd outlived several generations of her pack, including all those who had taken her in when she ran away from home, before the start of the campaign. Didn't know or care where her biological parents were. They were elves, and elves are jerks. She identified as a wolf (and spent as much time as possible wildshaped).

    5) Family - parents and a younger brother - alive and well, though never on-screen.

    6) Due to space-time shenanigans, had two sets of her parents, an identical twin sister twenty years older than her, and a biological daughter she never had who was about her age. She avoided ever actually meeting her alternate-universe twin or her husband because it would have been too weird, but did visit her alt-parents, and helped out her alt-daughter a few times.

    7) Parents might have been some kind of butterfly or something. Shadowrun pixie, and old enough that he would have been first generation after the Awakening. He was on the run and couldn't return to his homeland in any case.

    8) A half-orc, with all the unfortunate implications thereof. His father was an orc raider - dead or alive, no one knew or cared - and his human mother died when he was too young to remember. His family was the orc clan that adopted him. Though "adopted" is a little strong. "Let him follow them around and didn't kill him," would be more accurate.

    9) Father was unknown, one of a list of several candidates, none of whom were around anyway. Mother was killed in a demon attack during play in our previous campaign, for which he blamed our previous PCs. This led to some friction when it turned out that one of the other members of the adventuring group he hooked up with was the squire of the knight in the previous group. I spent much the campaign trying to get the squire to challenge me to a duel so that I could set the terms, and beat him to death with my bare hands without the paladin being able to say anything about it.

    There were some others in there that I never fleshed out enough to know what their family status was.

    So, a few living families, a lot of dead or absent ones. Almost all of them had complicated family histories. The one that came closest to being the angst-filled edgy loner was that last, which I did largely to make a point to the DM about his handling of some things in the previous campaign.

    (In the encounter in the previous campaign where my character's mother died, the DM had been very insistent - through his DMPC - that we had to protect the town's high councilman, and because we were focused on the DM-imposed escort mission, protecting some dude whose only distinction was that the DM had given him a name and title, a whole lot of "unimportant" people whom we could have saved died. So my next character was the orphaned child of one of the people who got killed because the DM cared less about his NPCs than I did.)


    Out of curiosity, this is the full backstory, as written on my character sheet, for #3 up there. I'm wondering if you'd reject this character as "too cliché" because her parents are dead.
    Spoiler: Mary Quite Contrary
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    Mary remembers very little of her past: Just vague images of a big house in a hot, steamy, slow-paced city, some faceless figures that must have been her parents, or perhaps nannies, and the excitement of getting to fly on a big airplane. Then there was a new, brightly-lit city with towering buildings, and riding with her parents in a long car through streets streaming with people and cars, even the sky above buzzing with drones, and then everything ended in fire.

    Mary's first clear memory is of a strange man in an old-fashioned suit and hat picking his way with his cane through the twisted remains of the limousine, through flames that reflected from the one intact round lens of his sunglasses, but touched neither him nor her, to Mary's side. He took her hand, drew her out of the inferno, and led her away. None of the bystanders, innocent or otherwise, beginning to pick themselves up after the blast that destroyed the limousine in which Mary and her parents had been riding seemed to take any notice of the odd pair strolling unharmed away from the burning wreck.

    After a short walk, they came to a cemetery, and the strange man led Mary onto its grounds. They walked some way among the tombstones, and then the man stopped, turned Mary towards him, and dropped her hand.

    "Close your eyes, mon cherie, and don't open them until I say so," the man said.

    Mary obediently closed her eyes. After a few seconds, she felt the cool touch of metal on her face as a pair of glasses were put on her. She expected the man to tell her she could open her eyes now, but he didn't. She waited, and waited, and he continued to be silent. Finally, she couldn't bear it any longer, and carefully cracked open one eye to squint through her eyelashes. Finding that she was looking through the dark lens of a pair of sunglasses, she opened her eye all the way, but saw no one. She opened her other eye, also behind dark glass, and looked all around, but the strange man was gone. Thinking perhaps he was playing hide-and-seek, she began to search for him, looking behind gravestones, under bushes, up trees. Though the day was overcast, with a light mist falling, she didn't even think about taking off the sunglasses as she searched. Finally, she gave up her search and plopped down on a sarcophagus.

    Then his voice, from nowhere, said, "Now," and the right lens of her sunglasses shattered. As the smoked glass fell away, her other eyes opened, and she saw the world as she had never seen it before, glowing with the riotous light of life and the calm shadows of death, and she herself was the brightest beacon in sight, though she could feel the strange man's presence, vaster and stronger than her own, as if he were standing always just behind her, though never there when she looked.

    That was two years ago. She was six years old.

    Since then, Mary has been living on the streets of Seattle, using her developing powers and the guidance of her new friend, Ghede, and other spirits - loa, as she learned to call them - to make her way, and fend off those who mistakenly believed a small girl, alone on the street, to be easy prey.

    Mary was unaware, at the time, of the search for her and for her parents' killers, that concluded that she must have died with her parents when their limo was destroyed, with the force of the explosion explaining why her remains were never found. She is aware, in retrospect, that there must have been an investigation, and that there may still be people interested in her survival and current whereabouts, but, from what she remembers of before Death led her by hand away from her old life, she sees little reason to not simply let them continue to assume that she died in the explosion.

    Mary has a SIN, issued at birth, but it was marked "deceased" when the investigation into the explosion was closed, and her new life is not linked to it in any way. She has no ID, and her economic interactions are strictly black market, bartering or simply scrounging and stealing.

    Over time, she has built herself a niche in her community, trading on her magical powers, her spiritual connections, and her charisma. She provides magical healing and health care, painless death, handling of magical threats, and a conduit to the loa in exchange for more mundane goods and services.

    (Mary has, incidentally, been described by multiple people as the best part of that entire campaign.)
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  15. - Top - End - #75
    Barbarian in the Playground
     
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    Default Re: Curiosity: How many player characters have dead family?

    Hehehehe, "Da Brudda-Cousin Clan". Heard about these guys, although they're not nearly as incestuous as their name implies. All of them are Half-Orc brothers who go adventuring for treasure for their dearest mother. And don't you dare call her any names just because one of them is a Half-Orc Half-Stone Giant, and the next is a Half-Orc Half-Dragon, and the next is a Half-Orc Half-Particularly Dexterous Gnome etc... I know that this thread is more serious but they were some goofy, fun, off the wall kinda characters with a strong focus on family dynamics.
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  16. - Top - End - #76
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    Default Re: Curiosity: How many player characters have dead family?

    My backstory for my first character wasn't a death, but an exile. He was ousted from his home city for dumb reasons and now has decided to make the best of it, deciding to do some good, and to write a book about his experiences before returning home and stabbing his exilers in their throats..

  17. - Top - End - #77
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    Default Re: Curiosity: How many player characters have dead family?

    I often overlook parentage when creating a character, i always get nervous that the GM will feel like im forcing things into their game.

    Of the two characters im playing currently, ones parents abandoned him as an infant for reasons, though hes since run into his brother.

    The others parents are quite dead, burned at the stake for being a teifling and a "devil lover" after a local politician worked the common folk into a riot. This was mostly to explain why hes so short tempered, irreverent and fiercely protective of those hes close to.

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    Default Re: Curiosity: How many player characters have dead family?

    Common tropes become common for a reason. Dead family is a pretty good motivation for otherwise sedentary or peaceful people to leave home, especially if the family died due to foul play and the perpetrator has eluded justice. This also gives the GM an easy hook for that player, by having the killer be related in some way to the BBEG (or be the BBEG themselves.)
    Quote Originally Posted by The Giant View Post
    But really, the important lesson here is this: Rather than making assumptions that don't fit with the text and then complaining about the text being wrong, why not just choose different assumptions that DO fit with the text?
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  19. - Top - End - #79
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    Default Re: Curiosity: How many player characters have dead family?

    So, I think most of my characters' families are alive.

    At least, of recent-ish ones:
    Spoiler: Characters
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    One was a bastard child, whose mother and father were both very much alive out there, and signed on to the party's vessel to make some cash for herself since she wasn't due for any inheritance and wasn't all that useful for diplomatic marriages.

    One was a dhampir, so half her family was technically already dead by the time she was born. By the time the campaign occurred, they were elsewhere, unliving together happily ever after. She had also dealt with the pesky half-mortal part too.

    One was a operative for a foreign government. Supposedly, her family was dead, but supposedly she was also a lot of cliched hero things. Their actual state wasn't ever discussed, but it was assumed they were still alive leading normal lives back home.

    One was a soldier who was almost destitute after WWI and emigrating to the US with had little money he had to his name. Presumably at least one family member if not several was dead, given that, you know, WWI had just been a thing.

    One was a insane psionic escaped from a monastery on an island who had found a tome of eldritch lore and run off with it. She wasn't at the monastery by choice, being a psionic and all and not well indoctrinated in their teachings, so I assume her parents were probably out there somewhere.

    One had barely skirted failing out of magic university, and was dispatched on a diplomatic mission. The family was very much alive.

    One was a Space Wolves Rune Priest, and had most definitely outlived his not-Space Marine parents' natural lifespans, by a factor of at least two. His Battle Brothers were still very much alive, though.


    At the very least, I haven't had families being dead as a plot point.


    Families are rarely brought up in parties I GM for.
    In the Grim Darkness of the Far Future, a good 99% of the time you were either abducted by the Astra Telepathica, property of the Imperial Guard upon birth, a war orphan in the Schola Progenium, donated to a Sororitas convent, transferred to a different ship, assigned to a different department, etc. People rarely end up in service to the Inquisition with happy, caring families, and even if they do, they almost certainly are sectors distant and out of contact.
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  20. - Top - End - #80
    Ettin in the Playground
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    Default Re: Curiosity: How many player characters have dead family?

    Does it count if I told my players their characters couldn't have any living family? Because I did that.
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  21. - Top - End - #81
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    Default Re: Curiosity: How many player characters have dead family?

    Hmm, let's see. Last time I GMed a campaign, the PCs definitely had living relatives (and I used that to my advantage). The time before that, it was Marvel's Days of Future Past. A deadly environment. And still, one of the PCs had a sister who appeared alive and relatively well.
    My own characters... often lost, never orphaned.
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  22. - Top - End - #82
    Bugbear in the Playground
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    Default Re: Curiosity: How many player characters have dead family?

    Quote Originally Posted by 90sMusic View Post
    It is so ridiculously predictable and kind of mind blowing honestly that even after all these years of playing D&D, anywhere from 1/3rd to 1/2 of player backstories I read involve their family being dead.

    Sometimes they are murdered, sometimes they just died from natural causes, whatever. But Regardless of the reason, players love their families to be dead.

    Just curious how often you run into this EXTREMELY tired trope and when choosing players for a game, do you ever pass over any that use the same tired cliches like "Dead family" as the catalyst for their adventuring career beginning?
    You say family, I say DM hostages.
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  23. - Top - End - #83
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    Default Re: Curiosity: How many player characters have dead family?

    Quote Originally Posted by Mystral View Post
    You say family, I say DM hostages.
    Which is a large part of what inspires so many players to avoid having any family, friends, etc.
    It is one thing to suspend your disbelief. It is another thing entirely to hang it by the neck until dead.

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  24. - Top - End - #84
    Troll in the Playground
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    Default Re: Curiosity: How many player characters have dead family?

    Of my more memorable characters.

    40k Inquisitor was a psyker, so he would have been taken away as a young child. Never came up in the game nor did I give it much thought.

    40k Ork was an ambulatory fighting fungus, so he had no family to speak of.

    AFMBE guy had well off parents back home, but he was stuck in Italy while they were in the UK during a zombie apocalypse. He didn't like his old man much anyway for pushing him into a career he didn't like. In game time was passing slowly anyway so I doubt meeting them would have ever happened.

    WoD vampire's parents were dead, mostly to get around the issues of him being a vampire and how that works with family. Missed his family but was mostly focused on the here and now and the future.

    40k Mutant had no family I'd bothered to think about. Didn't seem important.

    Current Lizardfolk PC has lots of family, little attachment to any of them. Views them broadly the same way as a real lizard would other than not considering them as food.

    Backup PC ideas I've got for if the lizardfolk croaks are pretty much all parentless/familyless, either due to longevity issues from being longer lived/undead or because they're the sort of person to sever all ties and flip their family the bird as they walk into the horizon.
    Sanity is nice to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.

  25. - Top - End - #85
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    NecromancerGuy

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    Default Re: Curiosity: How many player characters have dead family?

    I have had a DM invent a relative for my Character, just to push the party to rescue said relative from danger.
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  26. - Top - End - #86
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    Default Re: Curiosity: How many player characters have dead family?

    Quote Originally Posted by Amphetryon View Post
    I have had a DM invent a relative for my Character, just to push the party to rescue said relative from danger.
    I've done this, but only in the context of characters that the players made explicitly part of significant noble houses in games centered on intrigue from said significant noble houses (and rescuing them from danger was only one of many options, point was them being in danger was bad for the family in the palace intrigues). Somehow I suspect that the DM in question doesn't have that excuse.
    I would really like to see a game made by Obryn, Kurald Galain, and Knaight from these forums.

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  27. - Top - End - #87
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    ElfRogueGirl

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    Default Re: Curiosity: How many player characters have dead family?

    All of my characters tend to be unmarried, but have living parents and siblings. I like the happy-go-lucky, adventuring because it's fun or the right thing to do type of character. I did have one character who was technically orphaned as a baby, but she was adopted by druids shortly thereafter and considered the druids to be her family. I also have another character with three living parents; she was the product of a one night stand between an adventurer and a town guard, and her father, who raised her, married her stepmother when she was five.
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  28. - Top - End - #88
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    Default Re: Curiosity: How many player characters have dead family?

    I have a character with a dead family, it was part of the plot. In the few weeks before the game began, my character's nobleman husband provoked two other nations by having some plot item (that was unknown to my character), so they join forces, descend on their island and killed him, then executed his sons/heirs, then I spent much of the early game trying to track down her missing 8 year old daughter. The DM didnt railroad me into this, I chose to do so. Then throughout the game she's had another daughter and adopted a kitsune boy that was the same age as her dead sons, both of whom are pretty cool NPCs now.

    I have another character that I admit I was pretty lazy with the backstory, the one in my avatar in fact. She's kind of an odd halfbreed so I made her parents unknown and she was raised in a coven-run orphanage because I didnt want to make up some convoluted story about how two people of races that dont share any common ground had a child together then that child ended up as part of the coven that their races are not supposed to like. Instead the DM took my lazy background and spun it into some amazingly intricate plot involving reincarnation, ancient evils, some long dead races, oh and her parents are alive out there somewhere it sounds like and I have the opportunity to find them.

    I do have another character who's father is dead, but I guess that wasnt a choice I made because the DM killed him in the very first session.

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  29. - Top - End - #89
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    Default Re: Curiosity: How many player characters have dead family?

    Being one of those GM's that has never run a "Your sister has been kidnapped and your father was killed by the BBEG!" plot, I have nonetheless dealt with a never-ending parade of orphans. I have requested that my table PLEASE do not ever do this unless they have a very good reason to. Since making the request, I deal with far fewer orphans, and a lot more cool moments where a player's attachment to a place or objective because of their own perception of family ties makes the game better.

    Turns out, mostly it was because they felt that a person with a happy family isn't the type of person who generally goes adventuring. It was an easy way to give motivation to seek your fortune. But my players are creative and they have found other ways.
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  30. - Top - End - #90
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    Default Re: Curiosity: How many player characters have dead family?

    Quote Originally Posted by pwykersotz View Post
    Being one of those GM's that has never run a "Your sister has been kidnapped and your father was killed by the BBEG!" plot, I have nonetheless dealt with a never-ending parade of orphans. I have requested that my table PLEASE do not ever do this unless they have a very good reason to. Since making the request, I deal with far fewer orphans, and a lot more cool moments where a player's attachment to a place or objective because of their own perception of family ties makes the game better.

    Turns out, mostly it was because they felt that a person with a happy family isn't the type of person who generally goes adventuring. It was an easy way to give motivation to seek your fortune. But my players are creative and they have found other ways.
    I really don't know how that idea that only people with no family and no home and no hope go "adventuring" gained so much traction in RPG discussions and "character theory".

    Human history is full of people who had parents and siblings and spouses and children, who none-the-less went out into the unknown reaches of the world to make their fortune or just their living. Explorers, settlers, nomads, trappers, etc.
    It is one thing to suspend your disbelief. It is another thing entirely to hang it by the neck until dead.

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