The DM will let you play any race with any class with any background you want but on one condition

But I already play a human character with two loving parents...

I do this intentionally to see if the GM will take the bait...

I've never played a character who didn't have a healthy relationship with their parents.

Easy--parents are slime creatures with few distinguishing features, part of a massive slime brood. No ability to converse directly. Comms can be a telepathic ability mutation for the MC.

Also, nice trips.

>Edgy half-demon antihero
>Just following in his parents' footsteps: a Succubus and a dark lord BBEG
>Calls them weekly to get advice on slaugterraping innocents

You are like little babies.

I had a 700 year old elf with 60 wives, hundreds of siblings, and 50 children. He loved them all and had his parents living with his family.

>Can you do it, Veeky Forums?

I can do it easily, and have done so voluntarily many times before.

Here's the thing: I immediately turn around and ask the DM if the parents are going to wind up dead for an easy adventure hook or drama fodder.

I did this recently. The only sticking point was his mother wanted him to get married and have grandkids.

A paladin who comes from parents who also are also paladins.

Most characters I've made have living parents. They just tend to not have much reason to interact with them during a campaign. If a DM kills them to get a reaction out of me they'd probably just be disappointed, but I've never really had that issue in the first place

Hey are you one of my players? Because yeah in my recent game that is a rule (Well except both parents part as few races I have lack that bit), it is quite fun you know.

Do they have to be my real parents? I can't be a half angel prophesied to defeat the Demon King?

Nice idea you have there.
Be a shame if someone stole it.

Well, my favorite character I played had an amicable relationship with her mother, but her father was a tyrannical emperor who she detested, who was quite possibly behind the death of said character's mother.

Oh, and said character basically murdered her father.

And this basically all happened 100 years before the campaign she was originally in.

So yeah, wouldn't work out as she'd essentially be a different character.

Oh I forgot to add - I don't have that rule so I could kill the perients of the players off - actually I have them there in case they needed some help form the old badass lizard mother or the kobold engeneer who makes golems.

Both parents alive is quite common for me, but i don't remember parents of character ever being relevant.

I usually make my characters with somewhat strained relationship to their parents, because i feel that is fitting reason for character to be adventuring - new start somewhere else, after the relationships at home grew sour.

Yes. They are then are murdered in their sleep in the first session by another PC while I'm roleplaying my character at an Inn.

Touché!

My character got a nice job and moved out at the age of 18.

I'm the opposite. My character is a wizard that refuses to move out of the barn or get a job and is content with helping out around the farm. 32yo.

I will roleplay into obstinance, keeping the campaign based in the town for as many sessions as possible going as far as to retake and rebuild the town if necessary.

>Can you do it, Veeky Forums?
If my DM isn't an imagination starved troglodyte who can't invent conflict that isn't a cliche, sure.

K.
>Storm giant cleric prince
>can't inherit throne unless he does something his father deems suitable
>before his 26 other brothers and sisters
>gotta keep the parents happy to get the throne
>Gotta go slay some fucking giant monsters or some similarly grandiose tomfoolery

Living is fine, amicable is less so.

>parents were scientists, brought their kid into the hobby as well.
>one day, they found out how to travel across dimensions.
>tfw they forget lil' Albert to the other dimension on their first trip.

> Human Battle Rager Barbarian 5e
> Parents were very pious for the chosen god
> Sent him off to school to be a cleric
> Was pretty all right for a while, Head priest took a shine too him. Got some preferential treatment. Shit was going pretty all right.
>16 losses faith in templs for some reason
> Still on good terms with head priest, but leaves as he no longer believes in what the temple stands for.
>Leaves temple with a bunch of Anger in his heart related to the reason he left the temple.
>Found by Barbarian Warrior Lady, has pity on the pathetic little shit. Takes him in, raises him to be a proper man.
>Teaches him how to fight, proper.
>Boy who is now a man is ready to join a party for adventure.

There you go DM. I've given you not one but 2 sets of parents, and a vague reason for him to leave the temple that you can exploit.
COME AT ME!

So, Korean.

How many of them started fuc- uh... inbreeding?

One of my characters in shadowrun was a burned SK security guard whose parents were still working for the corporation.

Yes, but you have given me questions that aren't clear and will need to be mulled over with you.
What is the family structure of a tree man?
What is the family status of a hiveminded creature that through defect or deviation broke off?
Are you allowed to have dead parents if you are an octopus? How would an octopus have live parents?
What if you are of a species that has like 3,600 kids?

Two of my current PCs already meet said conditions. One simply sends home money from time to time and writes letters. The other is a noble who regularly returns home before bickering with his father because they both make questionable and dangerous choices. Thus they each worry about one another He doesn't tell his mother about most of his antics as she's pure and innocent unlike his father. Also one of the other PCs is his twin sister, she gets along far better with their father because even though she dabbles in necromancy she doesn't pull the same insane stunts my character does, which is what led her to use necromancy. The moral of the story is that the only problem one of my characters has with his father is that he and his sister are making all of their father's old mistakes. So overall a fairly good relationship.

I embrace it. Let it all end.

Currently playing in a modern setting as an anorexic teenager. Is thinking they want to make me fat less than amicable?

>What is the family structure of a tree man?
A family tree

The thing about this premise is the only type of players that would break a campaign with a ridiculous class/race combo would be players that don't give a damn about their back story anyway. So yes I will go ahead and roll with my Ancient Gold Dragon Wizard and proceed to take over the entire setting for great justice.

Material Plane Alone

This backstory goes way beyond planes, user.
Lil Albert is straight up born in another setting entirely.

I'm playing a "mexican" mafia mobster in the medievil fantasy setting we are using right now and his parents are fine and he sends them money whenever he doesn't drink or whore it away, so yeah. Not a big problem.

>Elan Erudite//Psionic Artificer.

>Grew up sickly and frail, but had an amazing mind, and loved building new things.
>Parents were scouted out by an élan erudite's syndicate, and were told that I would be cured of my illness only if I used some of my potential to help them with their goals. Of course Ma said yes. But it was before They knew what that meant, or who they were giving me to.

>I came back different. Like...Really different, but they still worry about me. A little too much. Mom always calls me through a magic item I gave her with a whisper spell to ask me if I ate something.

>She knows damn well I don't need to.
>Work with the syndicate is good though. Everyone here is weird; But in the cool way. I fit in just fine.

Piracy is not theft. The original still exists and is usable.

I'm doing this right now. The only parents I'm not amicable with are those of my kidnapped not!Roman wife.

But what if I always end up playing a character with a totally normal home life?

what if they tell stories all the one about how awful and deprived their childhood was just be fuses they think it makes them sound more interesting

>killing/harming/kidnapping the parents for dramatic effect
They would have been alive and well if you hadn't specified it. Now they're both dead of old age.

Helicopter parents would make for an interesting campaign
>Parents follow your character throughout his adventures
>Passive-aggressively making suggestions about getting a real job, wanting grandkids, and meeting a nice girl
>Any kind of charisma check usually undermined by them butting in with their own opinions on the situation
>Parents keep your character well fed, force him to get 8 hours of sleep, bathe, and wear nice clothes under all the armor they make you put on before going outside
>Spend half of the time trying to save them from all manner of traps, monsters, and spells

deal, whats the worst he can do? kill them? who cares, make them evil? so am i, have them captured? see killed.

Skeleton wizard who started off human, but fucked up a spell and became a psudo-lich. Parents were horrified at first, but eventually got use to it. The skeleton was still their kid and he had the same personality and stuff as before.

The only bad part is that the father makes copious amounts of bone related puns.

>Write what you know, they say.
This
>Why do all your characters have strained relations to their parents?

>but fucked up a spell and became a psudo-lich.
Man, he made such a boner.

user no, that idea was to get me through the winter. My family with starve without it!

Are you referring to the conditioning experiments on a young boy by associating it to his phobia?

I know he ran away from the office but I never knew if he got home okay. It would be a good explanation for his disappearing.

Bonus points for the phobias

Or having gone through all that and find them at the end of each dungeon or fortress.

My character is a NEET that wasted all his time "mastering the sword" (he's still only level 1), but he needs to pull in some money to help his mom pay off some debts.

Highly suspicious, my dude. I try to negotiate him out of this and play a character where it expressly stipulates that they're dead AND haunt me as ghosts because of their animosity. I can pull it off, too- this bastard needs the game more than I do. Once he okays it, I'll never bring it up again because who cares.

...i wasn't aware of that.
Eh, we'll call him John Henry Junior instead.
I assure you, there were no intentional allusions to conditioning experiments.
I just had another user mention something about Material Plane Alone, noted how he was treating dimensions as planes where i treated dimensions as universes.

Shit, that could make for an interesting character, tho. Maybe for Unknown Armies or somesuch.
A young lab rat getting thrown across dimensions trying to get away from conditioning experiments connected to phobia.

It's pretty fucked up
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Albert_experiment

But I still liked the idea

Huh. As i said, i had no idea the name Lil Albert held such ramifications.
I just picked the first vaguely science-related name popping to my head.
Hence, Little Albert (Einstein).

I...guess i've always had a knack for backstories?

Do they have to be my PC's biological parents? If, say, I wanted my PC to have been raised by wolves (or a bear, or a yeti, or various rodents), could having a good relationship with their adoptive animal-parents cancel out the edge of losing their insert-race-here-parents?

>DM demands we do this one game
>We start cracking jokes about how he's getting the Orphaneers revved up to murder them all first session
>he gets pissed and insists that's not what'll happen this time
>we don't buy it, make our characters orphans because we know what's coming
>He gets angry and demands for 2 weeks straight that we play characters with living families
>He swears he totally won't have them all mass-slaughtered first session this time
>We finally agree just to get him to shut the fuck up
>Literally no one in surprised when that's exactly what happens first session
>He still insists he was "Le Rusemaster" because he thinks he genuinely tricked us
>Instead of us already knowing what's happening and just waiting for the inevitable
>He's still genuinely confused as to why no one wants to play in his games anymore.

I'd try, but probably fuck it up. I don't really have a good model for that kind of thing.

Sometimes I visit my mother in my father's cave. Parents as weird when you are a tentacle monster but I love them nevertheless

Fine by me.
desu I'd probably end up playing as a human anyway

I did this already, a Goblin alchemist who had 2 parents in a deeply committed relationship, but my mom wanted me to become a doctor.

It's your fault, not for doing that, but for not saying before the first session
>If you kill off our parents' characters in the next five sessions, you pay each of us $20.

this is what most of my characters are like.
I hate orphan stories.
Im a family guy myself i dont wanna inflect the pain of losing your family to my characters.

>.8 children per wife
So infertile or something?

Haleens my sister for this one, guys.

What if the party itself is a family of wandering adventurers?

you know those catgirls which are just humans with cat ears, that but a guy, and 1 foot tall, also he's a theif, sort of, how will ya fuck this character up?

Elves are often like that.

Full circle, he was the victim of science and attempted to master it.

>"I vvill mess with time! I vvill..."

I think it's arbitrary either way to say that a PC's parents have to either be dead or alive. There's lots of factors at play. What if they want to play an older character? Depending on their age and the time period that the setting is based on, it could be within reason that one of them died of natural causes.

What if I want to play a priest/cleric whose clergy, in-setting, are usually made up of devotees given to the church as babies? You could easily substitute a relationship with their high priest or the head of their orphanage if you want a father or mother figure.

What if someone wants to play a wizard in a setting similar to Dragon Age or Warhammer, where people with arcane talent are taken from their families and will likely never see them again? You can't exactly have an amicable relationship with a non-factor. If you do, it'd contribute to the angst and edginess that you seem to be trying hard to prevent.

Hell, what if you play someone that was raised by their older siblings because their parents were never around? You could have all the beats of a tragic backstory with them, then the parents could occasionally be around and actually be friendly to their kids when they show up.

I'm not a native English speaker - but I would happily take it as a though experiment how much unspoken contempt and cold bitterness can one hide beneath the "amicable" of the relationship.

Are we mainly worried about the idea that the DM will murder them?
Or is there actual comfortableness with the idea of parents being active npcs in a game world?

Hmm. Could work.

I like you

Does being adopted count without the tragedy? My merc occasionally sees his real dad but sees him more as a neighbor than a parent like he does his adopted ones. He sent them money here and there.

Druid loves his parents but they are overbearing hippie cultists. The group met the whole 'family'(cult and his horde of siblings, aunts, uncles and cousins) to test our patience as the DM based a lot of his family on our RL family members and family events we have all dragged each other into over the years to share the suffering.

Okay, as long as I'm absolved from the blowback when my character doesn't want to stray far from where they live without good reason or other complications that will arise from it.

20% of the "wives" were traps.

Define "amicable."

My sorcerer understands why his mom left and isn't mad at her at all. His dad totally neglected to tell her about his draconic ancestory and he came out throwing fucking fire everywhere, it wouldn't really have been safe for her to stay. But he's never met her. Does that count?

I also have a fighter who disagrees with his parents political views (they want everybody to live in harmony in the woods, he thinks nature sucks) but is otherwise fine with them. Does that count?

Eaay done.
Only reason my last PC didn't get on with his family is I let the DM make them, and he tried to give me a shitty family as a joke.
Even then, his little sister was a big deal for him.

Are a skeleton's parents the necromancers who raised him or his original parents?

Risen from the dead makes you come over a bit snowflakey edge-lord can he not just be masturbating in a far distant land somewhere, maybe on crusade?

>got a nice job and moved out at 18

only believable in the realm of fantasy tabletop gaming, these days.

What else would a skeleton due if it's brought back to life by the forces of nature and the spirits of the wild?

He wasn't a paladin until he was brought back, before he was just some priest or some shit.