When playing a character who has close living relatives (parents, a spouse and/or children)...

When playing a character who has close living relatives (parents, a spouse and/or children), what's the convention within your group in terms of roleplay. Does the player roleplay his character's family, or do you leave it to the DM? Is the DM free to decide everything or is he expected to follow certain guidelines about these characters' personalities when roleplaying them?

> Does the player roleplay his character's family, or do you leave it to the DM?
Yes.
> Is the DM free to decide everything or is he expected to follow certain guidelines about these characters' personalities when roleplaying them?
Yes.

It depends on context and how much control the GM is comfortable exerting. Unfortunately there's not a simple answer.

I think it's fine for the dm to decide how they act, unless the player wanted them to be a specific way. It may be important to their character in that case.

As a DM I always look over profiles to see if a PC has family. If they do, I try to reward them just to drive the point to my players that they don't have to be afraid of their characters getting double crossed or punished by getting familiar with NPCs

>A random town messenger finds your character and gives them a letter. The letter is filled with cramped writing from your beloved family member as if they struggled to fit all they wanted on both sides of the page. It is filled with the chores and thoughts that have occupied their mind since you've been gone and by the sound of it, things are going really nice for them. Your character is filled with renewed confidence and motivation and you get a d4 to add to any attack/skill check you'd like

If the relative is in town, they'll show up and depending on their occupation or the current situation they'll help the PC out with a potion, another weapon, or some helpful info.

I asked my players to fill a personnality sheet for NPC they care about, so I can accurately portray them. If they leave anything blank, I'm gonna improvise something.

It works well for now, the players are quite happy that the caracters looks like what they pictured, and they're happy to see them come in play and have meaningful interactions.

One of my players, who also GM, told me to fill the exact same sheet for my NPC's in his game, and it works well too.

I had two characters, one very smug mage and a tsundere lancer. The main character was the mage and i RP him most of the time. But i RP both of the chars, except in conversations between then, in those situations the DM plays her because me talking to myself isn't the most fun thing and a player should't have full control of the scene

Post the sheet? I'm intrigued.

Do you have an example of the sheet?

The DM roleplays them, along the pre-defined lines of the character.
It's like any other NPC, just the DM may not have had full creative control of them.

It's in french.
For a quick summary, there is:

Aspirations, or motivations, dreams: What your NPC deeply want and care about, what drives him. It's useful as a GM to use the NPC in the plot.

Emotions: What is the most standard emotion for your NPC. Is he angry, upbeat, cynical, bland, all the time? And how fast does he switch from emotions to emotions, is he very emotive, or is he stone cold, etc.

General Personnality: The most importants personnality traits your NPC have. Things you WANT to be included. Is he optimist, dishonest, spontaneous, brave, and so on. You can include a sort of derivative personnality traits. Like, your NPC is complexed, but that makes him audacious, because he always want to prove himself.

Social Behavior: The way you character acts in social situations, like his humor type, does he like dirty joke, dark joke? His favorite subject of conversation. Does he like to gossip or to talk about magic all the time? And then the community he feels attached too. Is he proud to be a guard and recognize himself in fellow guardsmen, or does he doesn't care at all about the others and just do his job?

Religion: Does he has faith? If so, in what gods? Is he tolerant of others? Does he tell everyone about it, or keep it to himself? Does he try to convert other, or not at all?

Quirks: Does he talk loudly? Does he exaggerate a lot when he tell a story? Does he suck his thumb?

Hobbies and Passions: Does he like sewing, cooking, fighting, writing... And how much.

Vices and mental disorders: Does he have one? Maybe he's alcooholic, or bipolar, but he could also just be hypocrite, a bit depressed, or quick to anger.

There is a list of example for each category in my pdf, along with more specific explanations, but well, it's ten pages in french as I said.

An exemple of a filled sheet, loosely translated:

Carlos, the fine cook
Aspiration: Making the best ratatouille in the world, becoming rich
Emotions: Joyful, with no big swing
General Personnality : Optimistic, Dishonest (shameless) Spontaneous, Outgoing (gossip)
Social Behavior: Tell funny stories involving himself, mainly made up. Like to gossip a lot. Very proud to be a cook, and will like someone just because he's one also.
Religion: Not faithful, but will pray "just in case"
Quirks: Talk loudly, exaggerate a lot, use his hands when he talk
Hobbies and Passions: Cooking
Vices and Mental disorders: Shameless liar, will do anything for money.

>It's in french.
>Carlos, the fine cook
Aspiration: Making the best ratatouille in the world, becoming rich

+1

>having a family

rookie mistake OP

The player and DM work together to figure out the details of the family as the players know them.

Post it anyway!

Awww, that's cute.

>Actually making a family for your characters
That's just a tragedy waiting to happen. Might as well kill them off Hercules style in your backstory just to cut out the middleman.

fpbp

Post the fucking sheet.

French or not.

>every GM ever fridges character NPCs.
maybe you should stop playing with shit GMs?

Generally the GM does it. I (or my players when I'm GMing) generally shoot an email over with a name, description, and maybe a few character traits or short history. Kind of like the little "NPC" cards you use to remember what NPCs are like. The GM does the rest.

It's worked out pretty well so far. I think it's best not to give too much info for this kind of thing; the more wiggle room the GM has the easier it is for him to work them into the campaign, and it can be fun to learn a surprise about someone close to your character ("You joined the militia after I left?!"). Assuming the GM and players are actually friends and not trying to fuck with each-other for no reason, that is.

A couple of times someone with a familiar or a mechanically-important combat companion will play both, for ease of play more than anything else. Pretty much everyone else is the GM.

The GM can't kill your character's family if they're already dead.
>maybe you should stop playing with shit GMs?
Newsflash kiddo, most GM's nowadays are shit until proven otherwise.

>Giving characters any background at all other than their trade/job
What for? It won't improve your roleplaying, it won't make the campaign more interesting and if you are playing with random GM you barely know, chances are it is going to be fucked up for some retarded plot hook.

Not worth it at all

Recently my character and another pc went to my home town and met a girl from my backstory. I really wish I'd written up a cheat sheet on her... Personality, looks, her backstory, interaction with my character/opinion of him etc.

I didn't, and let's just say it was a bit of a disaster. Luckily she's not super important, so it's mostly just funny how insane she acted. But I know the other players would be pretty annoyed if their beloved family members started acting like crazy whores. We'll see how that goes....

>A character doesn't need to be more than a class/race combo

>Knowing what kind of family background your character comes from won't improve your roleplaying
>Having fleshed-out characters with connections to the world won't make the campaign more interesting

Dang.

So we visited the hometown, right, and my character was apprenticed to a wizard. Grew up in a tower. So I'm picturing a sort of 'bigger on the inside' deal with artefacts, art, and a massive library. Fucking karazhan, right? It's not really described but then the next day we go to 'moderately wealthy but really just a gentleman not a huge deal' pc's family's house and while we're there I check out his dad's library. Dm said it was 'almost as big as your master's' but.. What .

Even the other pc was like um we're not super rich and the dm just said ya books are a status symbol. Like.. Y-ya.. But ..

When your GM doesn't care, it doesn't matter. And on average, your GM won't care, unless it will be useful to fuck you up.

I've looooong ago lost any interest for roleplaying in actual tabletops, thanks a bunch. Especially with uncooperative GM/party/both. I've got vallheru for roleplaying and I'm fine with it.

Besides, it still doesn't matter. Character backstory can be entirely kept "under the table" for all tha matters and you don't need to bring it anytime, because you keep it for yourself in the first place. And since you keep it for yourself, for everyone that isn't you/asks you about it it doesn't exist, so... yeah.

Also, if you are playing the game with races and/or classes, why the fuck you talk about roleplaying? Everyone knows D&D is for killing things, not making drama class.

Every GM I know of, including me, is thrilled to include personal hooks for PCs in their campaign.

Then maybe you should get off your ass and GM, instead of complaining on a sub-saharan dirt pictogram antropology board.

t. ForeverGM

I'm interesting in GM'ing

Tips?

As a player, I like it when the GM remembers that my character is more than a set of stats and actually uses what I put on my sheet, including NPCs my character cares about, even if it's a simple nod.

As a GM and especially when thinking about the story, I can't really work if no character in a group has loved ones, known family, trusty friends or something along the lines, because sometimes I need to have a friendly NPC to give them information they can trust. I also do whatever I can to give them NPCs they can like, because it actually up the stakes even if I don't directly threaten said NPCs.

>Pick a system you like, any system.
>Then grab the first premade adventure you can find for it, pick out the bits that you find interesting and throw the rest out.
>Run a few one-shots to get use to running the game and using funny voices.
>Don't be afraid to alter monster stats or make them wear funny hats (refluff them as other things) to spice things up.
>Always remember to set expectations during character creation, otherwise you'll end up with fix different people expected fix different things from the game (including yourself).
>Hex crawls are pretty front-loaded when it comes to prep time, but once you have the area the character could be reasonable expected to explore and your random ecounter tables set up it lightens the during-play load aside from occasionally tweaking of the encounter tables and making the occasional thing up from time to time.
>Always try to let the dice lay, but fudging a number here or there can be fine if it makes sense. Circumstance bonuses are a thing, after all.
>take ques from your players. Some times players will fixate on the most random of things, so don't be afraid to make that random thing turn out to be important. But don't do it everytime, or else they'll get rediculous.

Depends on the DM. I've had pretty fun banter between my character and his family played by the DM during a flashback to WWII poland. In another game with another DM, my wizard tried to issue some basic commands to his familiar. DM said my familiar thinks I'm evil and won't obey. I point out that not only are they literally soulbound, and that their relationship is detailed pretty clearly in the backstory I submitted, but that this is also against the game rules, and there is no room for interpretation. DM just keeps repeating himself. So I walk out on that group and eventually join a new game by recommendation. The new DM has never even heard of my previous one. Same thing happens. That's how I promised myself I would never be a player again.

>Your going to suck at first. Don't be afraid to take critisism and learn to get better. Your players will be more invested with the game if they know you're invested in it.
>Sometimes you're going to need to put your foot down. Don't be afraid to call out That Guys and kick them out if they make a fuss about it.
>Don't GMPC. Just don't, even if you've only got one or two players. Even if you try your best to not play favorites, your group will assume that you are.
>Make the groups actions have an effect on the world. If your group takes pains to do something to change the state of things, and it makes no noticable difference, they aren't going to try anymore after the second or third time.
>Steal insperation from everything, but put enough of a spin on it to make it your own.
>Don't feel beholden to tropes and cliches. Just because bog standard D&D dwarves are short drunk scottsmen doesn't mean they have to be in your game. But also don't go overboard, or else your players will end up lost.

There might be more, but I'm blanking on them at the moment.

This.

Don't fall for Veeky Forums lies.

Talk to your players before the game starts. Get a handle on what they want to play and what you want to run story wise. If you and your players can be more inline with what you want to play, you can be more prepared for sessions. Some GMs are great at going noteless, but a new GM being able to use some prepared notes helps a lot. I'm not advocating railroading, but having a few monster stats pulled aside can help a lot in keeping the game running.

Stealing this. It's excellent.

...

Some of them played by players, some by GM. Depends on how well player can split his attention for multiple characters.

Thanks lads. I've kind of wanted to write some adventure shorts but realized i enjoy the world building far more and my prose are a little flat. Somebody suggested on here trying to GM instead and see how that goes

It depends on a lot of factors. I'm the kind of guy who prefers to control the PC's family, but I've played with people who prefer to let the GM handle things there. In general, if things like that come into play, I say ask the players.

I prefer to keep things like that vague. Just enough established for the character's backstory to flesh out and influence their decisions. It not so much where you start tripping all over it.