| Apupunchau |
So I like to try a lot of different fun creative exercises. On a few of the pathfinder boards I play a little game where I give out a randomly rolled race, class, alignment, and patron deity and ask folks to write a background. I do another game where I do a harrow reading and ask people to write a character based on the harrow spread they get. I also do a fun creative challenge on my blog every week.
On Mondays I post a randomly rolled character, race, stats and simplistic background snippets using paizo’s random background generator. I ask everyone to look at the information and try and cobble the disparate bits and I Friday’s I post what I came up with. I do this because I think getting the creative juices flowing is integral to good gaming, and I like to see how different people can come up with different characters from the same stats.
Last week someone on reddit asked me about what my process was for coming up with these backgrounds. So today I present to you a more in-depth look at how a piece together these backgrounds I do every week.
How would you write a background for random bits of information? How do you piece together a background for a character in general? How much of what you write is dependent on mechanics you choose, and how much mechanics you choose is dependent on what you write?