hzl

It's nice to have a few hooks and characters and things that a DM can use if the player wants them, but player interest is the key part. A character's background is there to allow for opportunities to tie the character into the world and vice versa, but you can also achieve the same thing by just giving weight to interactions and having them reverberate through the campaign.

Like, in the campaign I'm running now my players came across an ancient shrine to an axolotl-folk storm deity that was built as a sensory stone playing a ritual, with a hallowed ground spell creating a tongues area of effect. Some spiders had made a nest around it and were communing with it, but rather than talking to the spiders, they immediately shot them and lit the forest on fire. So I added a spider-folk cleric of said deity, gave them some ettercap followers, and had the surviving spiders that ran from the fight go fetch them to get their revenge. Now they've got someone extremely formidable that they have to deal with who is only there because they burned the forest around the shrine.

They weren't initially intended to be in the campaign at all, and even the shrine was initially mostly a throw-away set piece to make a bit of forest more interesting. But because there was a significant interaction there that ought to have consequences, it made sense to add more context around that location.

Letting the players determine which bits get fleshed out on the basis of which bits they show interest in or interact with gives weight and substance whether they go in with a backstory or not. Some players are going to want to load up on backstory and give the DM plenty to work with straight from the beginning, some won't. As long as you're responsive to what your players do show you they're interested in, it'll benefit your campaign when you lean into it.

Do people who make these memes actually play at tables like this, or is this hyperbole for the sake of clicks? Do they play at all?

I have a feeling that people who spend their time posting memes about shitty relations between players and DMs probably aren't actually playing that much.

Also, like, every social media platform seems to thrive on conflict, so there's probably a relationship between spending loads of time engaging with those platforms and having a shitty attitude in general.

Makes sense. The biggest strength of robust worldbuilding isn't showing it all to your audience, it's hinting at small pieces of it that shows a connection between them and hints at something deeper. Having what feels like a detailed history makes the world feel real, because you can see shadows of it in the foreground. If you actually dig into all of it explicitly in your story that just makes it feel shallow, because you're showing the whole iceberg.

It's why the mystery of the clone wars and Anakin's apprenticeship and betrayal of Obi-wan were intriguing in the original Star Wars trilogy, but end up just being some action movies once it's all fleshed out on screen. Depth stops being depth if you bring it all up to the surface.

Weird timing.

Because the internet has a thing for identifying with assholes. Look at Rick Sanchez or Dennis Renolds or Starship Troopers or Warhammer 40K or Helldivers. Take any character or group that's explicitly coded as terrible in the source material, hand it to the Internet, and they'll start making memes about it and eventually unironically decide that character is legitimately great actually. And the people spamming the shit everywhere will always act as though such a thing could never happen.

Meanwhile in the US...

No, it makes fence-sitters feel like there's something to identify with in a baby eating lunatic and slowly shifts the Overton window further and further toward normalizing straight up evil.

Homelander memes: helping the internet make fascists feel normal and relatable since 2024 or whenever.