Family can mean so many combinations. Mix it up a little.
There sure are a lot of orphans in roleplaying games.
From the brooding warrior with no ties to hold her back to the super skilled agent with a family lost to tragedy, it’s very common to find a table full of characters that have no family ties. Sometimes you’re lucky if any of them have any connection at all to anyone outside of the scope of the game. It’s a trope that many players fall into and if you’re not careful, your game’s PCs could represent a vast wasteland of loneliness and isolation.
When I started thinking about writing this article, I considered the six PCs in my Eberron (Pathfinder) game. They each have a pretty rich history, but four of them are still orphans. The Gunslinger was an abandoned infant taken in by a Lyrandar family in Stormhome. The Oracle’s family was slaughtered in the Demon Wastes by cultists that sought to enslave his powers. The Fighter’s merchant parents were casualties of the Last War leaving her to grow up on the streets of Sharn. The Wizard does have a brother, but their parents were also killed during the Last War. The only two characters with any significant family still around are the Witch and the Cavalier. All of these backgrounds make sense for the characters and the world they’re playing in, but it’s still a significant number of orphans.
It really is an easy trope for players to latch onto when creating their characters, and I am certainly not innocent of doing this for my characters. My Jedi in our FFG Star Wars game was a young Padawan on her way to Coruscant when she barely escaped Order 66, forcing her to live as a street urchin. The loss of family or loved ones can be a good catalyst to explain why a character started adventuring or fighting whatever evil lies at the heart of the game being played. At the very least, it can help explain why a character would be willing to give up the creature comforts of home and go on an adventure. If you’ve got nothing you care about at home, or even no home, there’s nothing left to lose.
It’s a reasonable choice, but it skips the rich opportunities having a family can present for your character. While it can provide some simple motivations behind a character, there is a lot to be said for having someone or something to fight for. Rather than doing it because you’ve got nothing left to lose, you could be doing it to ensure the safety of a parent, a sibling, a lover, a child. Family doesn’t have to be limited to blood relations either. Many of us can name friends that might as well be family, people that we would do anything for. Consider creating the same for your character. Family is complicated and messy and can make the game world so much more real and interesting for your character.
Players
- When you start going down the well tread orphan route, take a moment and reconsider. It’s too easy a choice. Consider giving your character a big family with plenty of ties all over the place. Or maybe a small, intimate group of friends that they had to leave behind. How about a lover where things got a little complicated and you haven’t had a chance to say you’re sorry yet. Dig a little deeper for some connections and it will help ground your character in the reality of the game.
- Don’t feel you need to map out a full family tree at character creation. Family stuff probably won’t come up in the first session, but don’t shy away from those connections if the opportunity presents itself later. If the characters are heading into a town where your character has history, consider who they know there and mention it to the GM. Recently in the Eberron game, we learned the Gunslinger had a fling with the Witch’s kid sister before they knew each other. That made for some fun scenes all predicated on their ties to the world around them.
- Sure, it can suck to have loved ones in danger, but that’s what drives so many great characters. Katniss Everdeen sacrifices so much to try and protect her little sister. Peter Parker keeps his identity a secret to keep Aunt May safe. John McClane may be going through a rough patch with his wife, but he’ll still take on a bunch of terrorists to save her. Would any of these stories be quite so engaging if it weren’t for the relationships driving these characters? Probably not.
GMs
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Close as could be as children, now on opposite sides… Go!
Don’t let your players’ characters exist in a vacuum. Ask questions about their friends and family. They came from somewhere and didn’t raise themselves, so they have people in their lives somewhere. Find out who they care about, who they never want to see again, who they miss. Everyone they ever loved being dead is a pretty extreme place to be and shouldn’t be allowed lightly.
- USE the connections the players give you. Asking questions helps build the world, but if the ties they create never show up in the game, what’s the point? When it makes sense, weave the family and friends of your players’ characters into the game as NPCs. Bringing pieces of their background into play helps reward them for helping add to the world around the characters and they’re great ways to get the players invested in what’s happening in the game.
- Finally and very importantly, don’t be a dick. Never fridge their loved ones just for the sake of messing with the players. Absolutely make the lives of the characters and those around them dangerous and challenging, but doing horrible things just for the sake of getting a rise out of your players is a cheap move and takes away their agency. This is also one of the reasons why some old school players will shy away from creating ties for their character. I’ve heard players state, “I don’t want to give the GM that kind of leverage.” Well, that’s either a player who doesn’t quite get it yet or someone who had a bad experience with an awful GM.
How have your players handled creating family ties in your games? Or, if you’re a player, when have you had family used well? I’d love to hear your stories on how your games made use of extended relationships like these.
Note that “orphan” does not necessarily mean “no family ties”. After all, Peter Parker is an orphan.
There are lots of ways to leverage the instant pathos of being an orphan without it being a lone wolf. I have a paladin character who was left on the monastery steps in a basket as an infant. No, he doesn’t have family, per se, but is intimately connected to the monks who raised him. A street rat orphan could have fallen in with a crew that is tighter than blood, a la The Artful Dodger or Locke Lamora. There is a character in a series of movies I watch who was a foster kid, but refers to the other foster kids who came up through the system with him as “cousins” and is close to them all.
On the flip side, I’ve seen dozens of characters who weren’t orphans, but whose family were not even noted in the character history. A soldier whose history simply begins with boot camp. A wizard who doesn’t even go as far back as noting school friends/rivals. The issue is less about having a rich family, per se, and more about having a rich set of NPCs that the GM can leverage to bring your character into the story.
This is very true about oprhans, but I do think it tends to be a slightly over-used trope for character backgrounds.
I also absolutely agree with you that too many characters don’t have any history of note, even if they don’t explicitly proclaim themself to be without family. It doesn’t need to be set up at character creation, but players shouldn’t shy away from it when the opportunity presents itself.
I did intend for ‘family’ to be a fairly loose term, though that probably didn’t come off clear enough.
My recently-ended campaign had two characters with family in the background. One player wanted to tie into the nobility, another a knightly clan (4 others left family blanks). I was able to alter already-written NPCs to fit family roles, so that the players could have a desire to rescue one NPC, and search for another. The noble links meant that I could introduce lots of powerful NPCs (“You met this guy at your cousin’s wedding” “You were fostered at the palace together, but she was older and looked down on you”) and provide help from afar (“Father’s willing to bankroll your new settlement”).
It was a player that wrote up “Mom went missing in this wilderness when I was small” that I could use to dribble area information and history through found notebooks. Mom was eventually found alive, just before the final battle.
I promise that I didn’t fridge any family, but I will cop to providing more story goodies to the characters of the players who tried to engage with families. That includes the one who, as a noble, sought out a marriage to expand the family’s power & influence.
On the flip side of this, before our newest campaign started, I resolved to link my new character to one or more of my old ones: this is the son of my PC from a long campaign in the ’90s and great-grandson of one of my favorites from the ’80s. I have yet to see what our GM may do with this.
That sounds like an awesome campaign. It’s not that orphans with missing family can’t be done well by both the players and GMs, just that it’s such a common background. It sounds like you used the family ties to really good effect.
I found out a couple years after the fact that someone made a character that was the daughter of my character and another PC from a previous game. I was bummed I never got to play in the sequel campaign, but it made me oddly proud that our romcom bickering inspired another player to follow the relationship to the inevitable conclusion.
As a player and GM, I have mixed feelings about this. As a player I have created both detailed backgrounds for my PCs and quickly glossed over ones. And… honestly, more often than not, those backgrounds have had very little effect on actual gameplay other than how they inform my view of the character.
So for instance, I have a bunch of family named for my current PBeM character — father, five brothers, a sister, a sister-in-law. (Also for her world some historical research, alternate history crafting, etc, etc. A great deal of thought went into her background.) In two years of play, those NPCs have never appeared, and were only referenced by me when I sent them a letter a year ago. Now I imagine these NPCs will have a direct bearing on the game if it lasts long enough — but I can also easily imagine them quite reasonably never showing up in the next decade of play.
And in a very different instance, my entire background for a character can be described as: 1) The phrase “Celtic Voodoo”. 2) Became a navy sailor. 3) Notoriously unlucky yet still a successful naval career. 4) In love with his ship’s doctor, a felinoid female Stephen Maturin rip-off. In actual play, the ship’s doctor was ignored by the GM and then ignored by me, as after a couple of sessions it occurred to me it was much more interesting to have him romantically interested in other PCs. I don’t believe I ever once regretted the fact his family background was a complete blank.
And as a GM, I think both GMs behaviors were perfectly reasonable. If you’re writing a complicated background for your character that slots into an out-of-the-way part of the game universe, you have to understand that you’re mainly writing that for you, not for the GM. As a GM, I’m very happy to get that sort of information, and I’ll use it if I can fit it in, but odds are good it will not be a focal point of the game, and it might never come up.
Now, good hooks for a PC are GREAT. But most of the time, I think, you need to be consciously creating hooks, rather than just creating background and hoping it can be treated as a hook. So in a third character of mine, the big interesting detail of his background is that when he was a young teen, in weird mystical circumstances an incredibly beautiful woman showed up, told him he was too young but she would be waiting, and blew him a kiss before disappearing. He has been obsessed with her ever since.
And in 5-6 game sessions since then, all I’ve learned is her name. It’s a gigantic plot hook whose meaning I do not know that I gave to the GM, and I’m still waiting for him to reel it in. (I do give him regular reminders.) I think that’s an interesting way to do things — but I don’t yet know if it will actually lead to interesting game experiences.
I actually took advantage of this trope in an urban fantasy campaign. I deliberately didn’t ask the players about family background, and only one volunteered any. Before long, they all (except that one guy) learned that their current identities only went back a few years. Further investigation brought to light that they were nigh-immortal Nephilim/Lazarus Long types. (I had warned them in the setup of the campaign that there would be something of this nature in the story.) So none of them had any family because they had outlived them one or more centuries ago!
Since then, my players have tended to find some family to tie into.