I may talk for hours about the other tools that one uses to create characters, about what is really important – goals, concepts, meta-game player interactions, mechanics – you name it, but in the end the tool 95% of all gamers are going to use to describe their characters is the background.

Backgrounds make sense to us, especially since we are telling stories in our games. The background is our first chance to build the story without interaction, without interference from the other players, like writing the prologue for the novel about to be written. We role-play to have characters like we read about in books, it would only make sense for us to use that same medium, the story, to describe our characters. So a good GM should encourage backgrounds, because it is easy to get people to write them, and to write good ones. But the GM then faces the challenge of helping turn that background into a character that fits both into the system and into the campaign. As with any challenge that modern society has faced, we solve it the only repeatable, indisputable method we have – math!

Welcome to Backgrounds 550 – The Advanced Course. What awaits is a long dissertation on applying mathematical principles to analyze and use backgrounds. What could be more fun?

The first thing that needs to be done is understand what we are trying to accomplish with a background, then we can find tools with which to measure the success of the background in reaching those goals. Backgrounds have three purposes:

Integrate the character into the plot of the campaign: This is to generate the outside entities and events that will affect the character (and the party) due to the history of the character. So important I'll repeat it twice – this is the outside events and usually go solely into the hands of the GM after character creation, although crafty GMs will integrate these elements into other character's so that the outside character gets to hit the originating character with his own plot.

Describe the character: The background will often offer many descriptions of character abilities, emotions, appearance, weaknesses, clothing styles, etc. Backgrounds, being historical elements, also create a descriptive history of the character.

Provide motivation for the character: Aspects of the background really only have an impact on how a player will play their character. The effect of events and feelings on the character create motivation and dramatic effect in play. This emotive history can be accessed by the player and the GM to create role-playing opportunities in the game.

We add the term plot history to match up with the other two histories described above and create the three historical elements: plot, description and emotion. Each element in a background has the potential to impact one of these areas, and thus they give us the means to analyze character background.

Lat's take the following paragraph from the background of one Annise Milaka as an example:

Things came to a head in 704 when she seduced the Kemas Terhune (at that point just the heir to the Baron Terhune and 20 years old) in order to gather information concerning what she viewed might be a political plot against her family. When she told her mother this news, and eventually admitted how she got it, they had an argument that lasted for days. The cause of the argument was unknown but the entire palace was soon painfully aware of the disagreement. It culminated with Annise running away from home in the night, with only a few clothes and some money.

This paragraph contains the following background elements:

1. Seduced Kemas Terhune for political reasons
2. Kemas Terhune is the heir to the Baron of Terhune
3. Annise had a severe argument with her mother
4. Annise lives in a palace
5. Annise ran away from home with little in the way of belongings

Each one of these elements can be rated based on the three goals of backgrounds:

Plot
0 – This element has no impact on the plot outside the character or the impact is already resolved (villain has already been killed, etc.)
1 – This element is plot relevant but requires no changes to existing plot
2 – This element affects plot on a local or isolated level, causing adjustments to be made to existing plot.
3 – This element has far-reaching effects on the campaign world.

Description
0 – Descriptor is unimportant to mechanics (i.e. Normal hair color)
1 – Descriptor will require a mechanic, but it is a normal mechanic
2 – Descriptor requires notable mechanics in order to accomplish, but is reasonable
3 – Descriptor will require mechanics outside the standard rules or something that will require more involvement by the GM.

Emotion
0 – Event does not have any effect on the personality of the character
1 – The element is relevant to the character's personality, but creates no motivations
2 – The element creates a motivation and an emotional change in the character that will be role-played.
3 – The element creates a driving motivation for the character that will figure in all decision making.

In the above example:
Element (Plot, Description, Emotion)

1. Seduced Kemas Terhune for political reasons (2,1,2)
2. Kemas Terhune is the heir to the Baron of Terhune (1,0,0)
3. Annise had a severe argument with her mother (1,0,1)
4. Annise lives in a palace (2,1,0)
5. Annise ran away from home with little belongings (2,0,2)

The first element is relevant to plot, as there is an NPC in a position of power that has a connection to the character. We put a one in description because one assumes Annise must be at least somewhat capable of seducing someone, maybe a high appearance rating or persuasion skills. One also assumes that there is a high emotional content to a seduction – in this case the political bent to the seduction leads the character down a path of “do whatever is necessary to meet their goals”.

The second element is listed as only a one in description because, as it turns out, the fact listed in the background is taken from existing printed material and requires no change to the plot.

The fourth is hard to analyze with the information that we have – it gets a two in plot because there are many ways in which living in the palace might affect the plot – people she knows, things she has heard, places she may have knowledge of. But it also probably affects character creation – either she spent some character creation points on royalty or she will be picking up some serving skills. Both of these are likely minor from a mechanic perspective, as the system has ways to deal with them, and thus only rate a one.

Finally, the running away from home, while plot relevant (GM now needs to make NPCs that chase the character) is notably emotive as well, creating the motivation surrounding the run away from home – desire to prove herself, anger against her family, or whatever the player had in mind.

This element analysis can be done for the entire background and creates a rated list of elements that can be used to create the character. This can take some time, but it also allows for filtering out the important (from a RPG perspective) elements and the “fluff”. The background paragraph following the above example is mostly fluff:
As she fled the castle on her horse, she came upon a lone rider who stopped her. She started to flee once again, until she saw that it was her brother, who called after her. But all he did was say "I shall miss having those green eyes watch my back." and then he let her go. She said afterwards that it was "typical" of her weak-willed brother to not have the guts to stop her. However, it turned out that her mother also knew of her flight and sent no one after her, proclaiming that she will have to find out about how the world really works before she will come back, and may Peoni watch after her soul.

This is a paragraph of the same length, but has only two elements – her eyes are green (descriptor rank 0) and that her family let her run away (maybe plot rank 1 and emotion rank 1).

Another thing to remember when creating the background elements is that many elements from different paragraphs and different sections of the background are actually the same. For instance, if we break out the elements from the opening paragraph of Annise's background, we see some overlap with our first paragraph in this highly dense introduction:
Annise Milaka was born in 690 in Sarkum, Kanday the daughter of Ranald and Mirael Milaka. Annise was the twin sister of Andasin Milaka. When she and her brother were only four years old, their Mother succeeded Queen Eriel for the throne of Kanday, and suddenly they were princess and prince, her brother next in line for the throne.

Elements:

1. Mother – Mirael Milaka (P1, D0, E0)
2. Father – Ranald Milaka (P1, D0, E0)
3. Mother became Queen (P1, D0, E0)
4. Twin sister of Andasin Milaka, Prince of Kanday (P2, D1, E1)
5. Annise is a princess (P3, D2, E2)

The first two are just NPCs, and not NPCs with any grand powers. They don't become plot relevant until element three, when the mother becomes Queen. This is a pretty important plot point, but is also somewhat canon (with existing plot) so it is also just a one. In fact it is the fifth element that is truly plot relevant – the PC is a princess. The fifth one also allows us to chuck out the “lives in a palace” element from our first paragraph, because being a princess assumes that, and all of the plot and mechanics needed for being in the castle will be taken from princess. These are the sort of overlaps that occur often in a fully fleshed out background and are important to resolve before the final steps of background analysis.

Next, the advanced background analyzer looks at all of the elements and marks them as external or internal. Internal are the elements that directly affect the character, external are those that have no direct connection. For example, Kemas Terhune being the heir to the Barony of Terune is really an external element as it does not connect into Annise, while “mother becomes queen” still has that direct connection with the word “mother” and would be considered internal to the character. All external plot elements have a zero rating in description and emotion. External plot elements are put into their own category for later analysis.

After analyzing all of Annise's background (attached at end of column), there are twenty elements. Of these only the one is marked as external, leaving nineteen internal. This is the first indicator that the player who wrote the background was very focused on the character and not the world. Many players like to create background history for the world as much as their player, and this will become immediately obvious when looking at the internal/external distribution. If the external was high, the GM would need to set those aside for later analysis when creating the plot, but they will not need ot be referenced when building the character within the RPG system.

A GM should be somewhat wary of a background that has a much larger total plot rating in external elements then in internal elements. This is somewhat indicative of a player who really is writing a story instead of making a character and maybe they should be invited to help GM as much as to play. Still, we won't focus on external elements, because they are really just part of the campaign and not the character (by definition!).

Within the nineteen remaining elements of Annise's background, there is only one element rated three in each category, which is a big plus. This means that the character will be easy to focus and understand. You have the largest plot point (Annise is a princess), the most important descriptor for creating mechanics (she is a Halaen Priestess) and the most important motivating factor for playing the character (she is a Halaen Priestess).

But we can't ignore the rest, so for a quick analysis we total up the values in each of categories and find the mean of all items that have at least a one in the category:
Plot: 23 Mean: 1.4
Description: 8 Mean: 2
Emotion: 24 Mean: 1.6

Notice that the background does not focus on the character's abilities or standing, with a mere 15% of the total points coming from the descriptive category while the remaining 85% is split evenly between plot and emotion. It is likely this character is more focused on the world and role-playing then on how cool their character will be (probably a plus). Everything in the plot category is work for the GM, everything in the emotion category is work for the player (although astute GMs capitalize on these as much as possible!) and everything in the description category is work for the system, which is generally shared by the two parties. Annise will be some work to play – lots of motivations – and work for the GM – lots of plots – but should be relatively easy on the system.

Of course, this brings up the question of what is too high and what is too low? Where do Annise's ratings fit into the grand scheme of things? Well, that often depends on the campaign, but as a general guideline, anything above forty is probably too much to handle in a normal session, and every character should probably have st least five in every category.

And what impact does the length of the background have? This is where the mean value comes into play. If your background is short, you will want a higher mean (regardless of your total) as the background focuses more on the important events. Longer backgrounds with high mean values (above 1.5) are dense backgrounds that may be hard for the GM and player to remember and implement on a regular basis due to the sheer amount of important stuff, so be careful. Long backgrounds should end up with many overlapping elements and many external elements that are less relevant to the play itself.

One of the most important ways to apply this background analysis model is character-campaign fit. Annise is likely well suited for a campaign where the GM said they were after an “intrigue” or “role-playing oriented” campaign because the background focused on plot and emotion. A campaign that was going to be a dungeon crawl would probably want backgrounds more focused on description as the characters are going to need to have useful skills to help out the party in a bind and our less likely to be affected by global politics on a session by session basis.

Still, any character likes to be somewhat well rounded, so remember that it is always good to give the GM some plot to hit your player with (a rating 3 plot element), it is always good to have something to do (a rating 3 emotion element) and it is always good to be able to do something (a rating 3 descriptor). Character's without these elements will often find “dull” spots in the campaign as they feel useless, uninvolved or don't have anything to do, none of which are fun for the player or the rest of the group.

But also be wary of the opposite – too much of a good thing is still too much. Players with multiple rating three elements in each category can lead to plot domineering and munchkin like system mechanics, things which are also not fun for the group even if they are fun for that player.

Always ready to help a player in need, I am perfectly willing to do an advanced background analysis for anybody desirous of such detail. Just send me an e-mail with your background to greg@blackshieldgaming.com and I will do what I can to help with your character creation problems.

Annise Milaka, aka Jade, The Jade Queen, Mistress of the Jade Mansion

Annise Milaka was born in 690 in Sarkum, Kanday the daughter of Ranald and Mirael Milaka. Annise was the twin sister of Andasin Milaka. When she and her brother were only four years old, their Mother succeeded Queen Eriel for the throne of Kanday, and suddenly they were princess and prince, her brother next in line for the throne.

Andasin and Annise had been very close for their short lives, but living under the shadow of both their aunt's assassination and their Mother being the queen, they started to grow apart. Andasin was continually groomed for his place as heir, while Annise only saw them teaching her to be a lady and be a worthy tool for marriage. And to some extent she was right, as her father and mother threw themselves into politics that were so important and all consuming, they lost some sight of their family as sons and daughters, and viewed them from a pragmatic sense of what they would need to do to make this country strong.

She started to become embittered of her life, and of the life in Kanday. She soon disagreed with how her parents ran the country, and in particularly became upset with the concepts of honor and the focus on military strength when she felt that her family could learn something from the assassination of her aunt, and argued many times that they should at least try to understand the "darker" side of politics so as to be better prepared against it. She also became frustrated that her brother would be the heir, because she viewed him as weak and incapable of doing anything except follow his parents lead. She felt that she was the stronger of the two and deserved the throne when it came, but her attitude caused only greater dissatisfaction from her parents and any question that might have occurred was dashed by her refusal to buy into the Kandayan/Laranian way of life.

Her own bitterness caused her to miss her mother, the Queens, own subtle guidance about what it truly meant to be a lady in power, and what could be done, and while there were things she learned, she was never able to respect her mother as a leader.

Things came to a head in 704 when she seduced the Kemas Terhune (at that point just the heir to the Baron Terhune and 20 years old) in order to gather information concerning what she viewed might be a political plot against her family. When she told her mother this news, and eventually admitted how she got it, they had an argument that lasted for days. The cause of the argument was unknown but the entire palace was soon painfully aware of the disagreement. It culminated with Annise running away from home in the night, with only a few clothes and some money.

As she fled the castle on her horse, she came upon a lone rider who stopped her. She started to flee once again, until she saw that it was her brother, who called after her. But all he did was say "I shall miss having those green eyes watch my back." and then he let her go. She said afterwards that it was "typical" of her weak willed brother to not have the guts to stop her. However, it turned out that her mother also knew of her flight and sent no one after her, proclaiming that she will have to find out about how the world really works before she will come back, and may Peoni watch after her soul.

Annise fled to Coranan, almost as an afterthought, for she thought the most opportunity lie within this city so renown for its politics. Within a week she had discovered and been recruited by the Order of the Silken Voice and was on her way to becoming a Halean Priestess.