NovemberDarling's page

My players also used invisibility and stealth to bypass most of their problems at the keep! They even got the drop on Lucian and intimidated him into surrendering to them (they acquired his keepsake and the player rolled a natural 20 on his already super high Intimidate), since for roleplay reasons they didn't want to kill him. My players and I were all extremely surprised at how smoothly the keep adventure went - one of my players is a veteran DM and he said he's never had a mission go that well.

I feel like having Lucian as such an underwhelming opponent worked in the end though, because my PCs started feeling really good about themselves and getting overconfident. They were making plans to strike Barzillai directly when they got the masquerade invitations, and that didn't go quite as well for them haha. If it works for the way your PCs have been playing maybe try to play up how strong they are, how much the people of Kintargo love them, how far they've come as a rebellion, etc. before dropping the Ruby Masquerade on them.

I have a lot more experience with this on the player side than the GM side, but I think a detailed backstory can be one of the most valuable things in a game. My current character Adah is probably the best example I have of this. When I created her, I decided that she was the youngest child in a large family and had complicated relationships with several of her siblings. This explained why she had initially learned to fight and why she tended to feel like she was useless or unimportant, as well as why she had struck out on her own at the start of the campaign. The GM totally ran with this - two of her brothers have ended up as important villains, and the sister she's closest to has become a recurring NPC. I think developing her family and her feelings towards them was what really helped me elevate Adah from my initial concept of "lovesick fighter" to a character with interesting perspectives and reactions to the events of the campaign.

On the GM side of things, the only time I've really utilized player backstory was in a game set in the Dragon Age universe. The main villain of the second phase of the campaign was an escapee from the Circle of Magi, while one of our PCs was from the same Circle. I left it up to her to decide how she knew the villain and what their interactions had been like, and let that influence his encounters with the party. It was pretty interesting for the short time it lasted before I moved away :)