Two articles ago, in the article entitled How to Forge Characters, I spoke fondly of a minimalist approach to character concept creation and explained why the backstory is an absurd method for players to use. You looked at your friends mouth agape with awe and fear and then calmed down after a bit, and then you may have been wondering about the unaddressed pygmy elephant in the room. You might’ve thought:
“Well, okay, sure, we don’t need a backstory. Actually wait, Bitterblossom, if you want that fun, meaningful, truly wondrous game, isn’t it a good idea to have personal plot or world tie-ins for each character, created by writing a backstory?”
Good question, my straw or steel man depending on the situation! Here’s the answer. Every character will be tied into the plot of the game by nature of them being a PC and thus being in all of the action.
The inclination that a personal character tie-in (one where the character has some pre-written personal connection to the situation) is better than the general plot tie-in or the same thing but without the pre-written aspect is understandable but misguided - that sort of thing works in movies where there is a script with actors to actualize everything in an emotionally-satisfying way but not so much in the average TTRPG game. However, a pre-written world tie-in is a different story (heh, pun).
What’s the difference you ask? Pre-written plot tie-ins are effectively demands made by the player on the DM, often before the player has any significant knowledge about the world or the game, to shunt some game time towards the player character’s personal story. Pre-written world tie-ins, by contrast, are ways in which the player incorporates their character into the DM’s world - by doing so they open up more paths for plot tie-ins that are often more impactful though none are pre-written.
To give two examples from one of my older campaigns where I mismanaged my game pretty badly and asked my players to write backstories (and they reaped the consequences more so than I did, as often happens unfortunately):
Plot Tie-In One of my players wrote a variation of the archetypal hero’s journey set-up for their character - a long pre-written epic about the secret dealings his noble family made with a dragon and how it ended up destroying them and how he wants revenge sort of but also didn’t entirely trust his parents and sort of blamed them for what happened.
World Tie-In Another character wrote something devoid of plot tie-ins about being a dwarf who became a druid, travelling from the mountain keep where he was raised to this druid community.
In the first example, the backstory was a burden for the player. The player had two pages they needed to adhere to when roleplaying that needlessly muddied the perfectly-alright character concept of: “Seed: My ancestors toyed with the power of the dragon and it destroyed my family. Drive: I seek revenge.” Further, in order to turn his long backstory into an actual plot tie-in, it required a whole dragon plot to be spliced into the campaign - in essence, the player created a backstory that took away his agency because he was dependent upon the DM for any of it to come to fruition and all the while he had a hard time pursuing any other leads relevant to the plot of the campaign. He got his dragon plot eventually, but I think he would’ve enjoyed the game a lot more had I not told him he had to write a backstory with plot tie-ins.
Compare that to the second example where the player didn’t ask for any plot tie-ins. At some point early on in the campaign, the PCs had defeated this evil wizard and trapped his soul in a gem which could be used as a key to release this ancient genie. When the party decided that it was too dangerous from them to release the genie or hold onto the gem, the dwarven druid offered to take the gem back to his people who he thought would be able to keep it safe being druids and all. Man! That was great! This player reacted to something that occurred in the game, came up with an idea that tremendously-influenced the campaign, and ended up with a whole adventure back in his home area. It was awesome!
Plot tie-ins are great when they come from the campaign and player decisions within but they often hurt the player’s ability to invest in the game when they are written beforehand. Simple world tie-ins by contrast are seeds that can be turned into meaningful plot tie-ins and are thus the much better bet if you want to have a character incorporated into the story in a personal way.
In sum:
World Tie-Ins Yes!
Plot Tie-Ins Yes!
Pre-Written Plot Tie-Ins No!
I will end with two pieces of advice, one for the player and one for the DM.
To You the Player: Give yourself the gift of preferring your plot tie-ins be forged from your decisions during the campaign and they will often be far more impactful than anything you could’ve come up with beforehand.
To You the DM: Let each player discover things about their character and their character’s place in the world during the campaign, even if it requires something to exist that was not created before the campaign started.
Very true. My players have vague backgrounds that I elaborated on. Some (so far) have even had "flashback" one-shots exploring how some characters got to be where they are. And this offered the opportunity to tie-in mainline NPCs, magic items, and the greater arc into their back stories resulting a few satisying, "No way!" moments.