Drop Dice

In the past, I have been a game store style GM. I would make a world and say "join if you would like." After getting players who showed up every week, for a while, I would start working their background in. This style worked well enough for me when I actually ran a game at the store. Since having a group that plays regularly, this play style is kind of limiting. I feel like my story-line is separate, from what the characters are interested in. It creates a dichotomy between personal story and GM Story.

 Oddly enough, I notice that in certain settings I ran differently. In Star Wars, I am almost always character heavy through out my story, if I had one prepared for the sake of their story. I cant really even explain it, but I guess its more media influenced. I feel like fantasy characters are almost wrapped up, in the story, where as sci-fi is more character centered. You see that most common in TV shows. In movies for example:
Star Wars is about the characters and their personal interactions with the Empire

Lord of the Rings is an epic. The characters are part of it and they have value but the ring needed to be destroyed by someone. It could have been anyone at all.

I think its more because of these iconic stories. that I have always done that in the past. I have always been ok with this formula. even though I knew my players often gravitated to my sci-fi campaigns. Not to say either way is lesser. Its just a preference.

Another thing I have noticed is I have not been much for completion. In the sense that my players have always had an ending, but it has never really been as memorable as some of the middle parts. I cant really think of a time, where my players thought of my end boss as more than a big guy with lots of hit points.

Something else I did, in the past, was plan a big epic story arc, at least 12 sessions a story arc. Every play session was a direct pick up from the last session.

Since tooling around and listening to other GMs and writers, I have kind of changed my mind on this. Firstly, I have come to the conclusion that I get GM fatigue faster than my players get player fatigue. I think its because I have always done long story arcs, that were not directly focused on continuation. I have almost always done mini-campaigns. I get my fatigue when I feel like the PC's are not accomplishing much, which in reality is my fault. They had almost no influence on the world, unless they started to siege other cities and take slaves.

So, this time I took a very different approach. I let the players make the world. The world being a continuation, of a world that they almost destroyed with previous characters. Their new characters have no direct connection to the last set, but its a neat concept to play out. Let the players fix the world they destroyed. I am also going into this with a different event style of story writing. Instead of doing long continuing story arc, that I hope is just building and building up, I am going to focus in on smaller stories, like a serial. The larger story will be there because of the supported smaller stories.

How does the back story work in? So, I linked a forum in the background tools post about hash-tagging peoples background and adding those hash-tags, to my plot points. My goal is to make every session hit at least one character's background, and if possible more. I thought this was so simple, yet a great way that works for me. The goal to finding a way to incorporate backgrounds is finding what works for you. I am not going to tell you that you should do it my way. I am going to refer you back to the internet. There are so many good opinions out there.

The big thing to remember is don't write your story for you. Write it for them. That's where the backgrounds become so important.