Chalk this up in the Oddball Observations category, but I’ve noticed that more often than not (and regardless of system or genre), in most PC backgrounds parents are:
Is that just a quirk of my personal GMing history, or have you noticed this too? And if you have, why do you think this is? Do you specifically encourage your players to give you family histories?
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I have noticed this, and the next most common relationship missing is a SO/Spouse. I had made it a rule in several campaigns, including a Mutants & Masterminds game, that players had to have family defined. No one got to be the lone, single orphan.
For M&M, family was important, because in the superhero genre, family is always the target of a bad guy, either by accident (wrong place at the wrong time) or a the target of a vengeful villain.
The other game where having family was critical, was Vampire. Having family members who were living, after you became a vampire, was a huge liability in the eternal struggle, and a great source for material and drama. I had a character who was turned into a vampire against his will, and he had a family. He wound up divorcing his wife suddenly and trying to keep some relationship with his daughter. One of the other vampires found out about his daughter, and took her under his wing, making him very nervous.
For other games I try to push the characters into having some family relationships, because it makes for a more well rounded character. I often include a question about it in my campaign startup questions. Just before I kick off a campaign, I ask my players 20 questions about their characters and about their character’s impressions of the campaign world. That all becomes material for future adventures. So there is always a question about family in the list; to prod them into thinking about it.
I think having family relationships is an important part of a number of games, but it is an often overlooked detail.
In RPGs too often the family is turned into a liability, and not a resource. I’ve created PCs with detailed families only to have the GM use that info against me. A family member was always in harm’s way, but my PC would never receive any help from them.
Why is this? Well I think most game systems encourage that the PCs be loners without families. How many games actually have a system to generate a family for the PC with? How many offer advantages for a PC having a family?
Now if the games had an attribute like “Professional Contact/Family Member” where your PC could say that his or her sibling is a detective with the local police that would encourage PCs having a family. It could combine the advantages of having a family (a sibling is easier to get in touch with and is willing to bend the rules a bit more for the PC), with the disadvantages (the sibling will make similar requests, and the PC should be more concerned about the dangers the sibling faces on his or her behalf).
The advantage of playing an orphan is obvious, you don’t owe anyone anything and you only have to look out for yourself. Unless the system offers some form of incentive for having a family that matches that why would a player bother designing a family other than for the sake of roleplaying a highly fleshed out character?
DNAphil – You make some great points. I think I will create some rules for character family generation that offer both advantages and disadvantages for having a family in the game that I am designing.
Although I encourage my players to create detailed backgrounds, none have ever included any family or SO information. My primary system is GURPS, and no player has ever taken an Enemy, Dependent or other social advantage or disadvantage. They have taken just about any mental, physical or supernatural/superhuman permutation imaginable but no heirs, wanted criminals, nobles, rash young reporter sidekicks or even wealth or poverty. I have granted or inflicted such things in gameplay, but no player has voluntarily taken them. Oddly though, they use, expand upon and plot to foil such things with evident enjoyment once they have them.
I find that using a player’s family works great as a moral reference. People are just that much less likely to have their characters go on a rampage or do something morally ambiguous if their family keeps tabs on them. I like the tension and sense of responsibillity that this creates (especially important in a superhero game, as mentioned). What do their parents think of what they’re doing?
In this vein, I like having letters from home, family funerals (adding an inheritence makes people come–this is a great way to play out issues of black-sheep estrangement and childhood rivalry), having extended relatives throughout various cities, having the player characters need to hit their parents up for money when they hit rough times, etc.
it all goes to creating a rich feeling world that isn’t as much a video-game-like candyland of monsters to kill and stuff to grab.
This is an anomaly I’ve dealt with and noticed many times – loner/orphan PCs. It has started to actually annoy me. It happens with players who are crunchy and it even happens to players who write 44 page backgrounds for a 1st level PC. I have noticed this since I started RPGs in the early 80s.
When I GM games, I will ask the player – actually the NPC will ask the PC about their family in RP-time. I found this helps foster a less myopic view of the PC. I also found that this also fosters: “Oh, no m’lord… my family is all dead.” comment all too often.
I played in an Iron Kingdoms campaign for a while and built a PC that not only had a huge family… but his family (the de la Guerres) were so prolific, the GM and I created a table of % chance per city we walked into of any of my PCs brothers being around. Sometimes it was good, sometimes it was bad. One of the other players IRL girlfriend wanted to play so she decided to come in as one of my sisters – looking for me to straigten me out, plus “Papa” de la Guerre was sick and needed help. It was all fun, did not detract from the main plotline and was quite humorous at times.
It was a running joke in my group’s dnd games that all the parents in the remote villages would keep their children locked up until they reached adulthood for fear that the moment a adventurer to be wandedered out of town everyone would be killed off by monsters or such so that the future PC would have a dramatic background or a hated enemy for future rangers.
One game did start with the dm telling everyone to have characters who had a parent who was formally a adventurer.
Part of the campaign involved a demon that had been locked away by the parents and the sacrifice of one person of each bloodline was needed to free it.
It added a few good roleplaying moments for me since my character passed up upgrading to a magic sword twice, perfuring to wield his father’s mundane blade untill it was finally destroyed.
Weirdly, my 7th Sea game revolves ENTIRELY around the heroes’ families. Everyone took backgrounds and back-stories that involved a lost relative, missing/dead parent, true identity, or other aspect of unknown heritage.
So all the characters had parents mentioned in one way or another (except the hero who was old enough to BE a parent, and it turned out he was)… but they were all only children. No siblings, anywhere. Very strange.
In my current campaign, three of the PCs have ongoing family involvement. Of those three, one has regular contact with his father. The father typically offers advice or drops a name or two from his previous adventuring days. There are no plans to have him kidnapped, murdered, or made into an adventure seed. Although I have done this with PC family members previously, I try to avoid now.
Players who are interested and willing to write backgrounds for their characters are as likely to include family members and enjoy having them playing active roles in the campaign world.
in my current campaign, none of the PCs have any surviving family that they know of. of course, its eberron, and they’re all cyran veterans who were operating in brelish territory on the day of mourning, so…
past campaigns have included some family, the players have been pretty open to that. i try to go easy on them, since the PC bringing her strange new friends home to meet family is usually more stressful than an army of orcs. 🙂
The last game in which I was a player was a Torg campaign. The character was from Los Angeles, Los Angeles was destroyed, QED.
Back in college in a Greyhawk campaign, I played a cavalier who came in as an existing paladin PC’s brother, who the DM decided was the youngest brother and sort of the whipping boy of the family — the oldest NPC brother was a paladin in Furyondy fighting the big bad guys, the middle PC brother was also a paladin beyond reproach, and my cavalier was expected to take over the family’s fief and carry on the family line (with all the compromises those two goals entailed) but simultaneously expected to live up to his brothers’ reputations.
And then he ended up going on errand after errand to rescue his headstrong younger sister. Oh, and saddled with the youngest son of the Duke of Urnst as a squire. Sigh. It was infuriating, but made for a good campaign.
I play in the RPGA so I have a character who is married, has kids, and even grandkids. That way I have a background that won’t be used against me by killer GM’s.
If a player says in one of my games that his parents are siblings are dead then I create aunts, uncles, and cousins. Family is too useful as a plot element to let players wave it away. (If someone really wants to play someone who has nobody then that’s another issue, but if they just don’t want to bother then I don’t stand for it.)
Players quickly learned not to let me make their families (which I always offer to do), since invariably they’re always full of screw-balls. What can I say? I like to run a realistic campaign! 😀
I think that, to a large part, the loner stereotype comes from our inspirational sources:
– Conan. Lone wanderer. Parents dead. Later, wife imperiled.
– Aragorn. Lone wanderer. Parents dead. Prospective father-in-law doesn’t approve of him.
– Bilbo. Loner, estranged from the rest of his family.
– The dwarves. Generally exiled wanderers and orphans.
– Frodo. Introvert.
– Fafred. Lone wanderer who takes up with the Mouser. Later has wife.
– Mouser. Loner rogue who takes up with Fafred.
– Lancelot. Loner knight errant
– etc.
I’ve thought about turning this around and making a D&D game where everyone had to define their family, and then I kill off all their families in the 2nd adventure so that they swear revenge.
The campaign I’m currently in has a bit of both. My character’s entire village was wiped out by a cult of sorts trying to end the world. (Cliche, yes indeed.) But our summoner has a noble family we use for information and resources.
I find that having a family adds an interesting element, resources, and provides the bad guys with a handy target for when we’re off adventuring. (We came back to find that their entire mansion had been sucked into hell. Next mission: kill Hell.
There’s a joke on the Character Optimization boards over at the Wizards.COMmunity. It goes something like this:
“There IS an optimized background: the character is an amnesiac orphan whose birth parents are dead. He grew up on the streets of a town that was burned long after he left due to a baking accident. The fire also killed everyone who ever knew he existed.”
GMs never just seem to play nice with people’s family.
T
It’s very true. That or they are mega-powerful or influential. I think the fear or having family used against PCs is realistic. I often attempt to have family provide support and care whenever possible as long as the PCs take reasonable steps to secure their anonymity and safety.
From the sound of it, then, this issue comes down to a generalization that family = liability. I actually see a parallel to video games here (it was clem’s comment about GURPS that made me think of this): in 99% of games that feature NPC escort missions, I hate them. And most of my friends hate them, too — those NPCs are always insufferable, their AI tends to be shitty and they drag you down.
How could we, as GMs, go about rehabilitating the image of PC families?
Well, the easiest way would be to use them as NPCs in a manner that doesn’t involve them getting killed, robbed, raped, kidnapped, knocked-out-and-doppelgangered, held hostage, trapped behind enemy lines, or sucked into a planar void never to be seen again.
T
Then what else is there? This is (generally) fantastic roleplay after all. Harold Pinter’s long, uncomfortable silences, and Dr. Phil’s tear-filled family bonding moments really aren’t the right, um…
“Idiom, sir?”
Idiom, yes; thank you, Patsy.
OK, seriously. I think that GMs shouldn’t fall into the “Robin, the Boy Hostage” routine, and that there is something to be said for putting the PCs family at risk without targeting them personally. (Expample: Invading Horde threatens the home town, instead of BBEG kidnapping PCs entire families.)