Improve your GMing: Background creation with around the table questions

Rating: 4 of 5 stars

Details: Instead of everybody doing background stories on their own, let others influence some part of it and create a connection between characters as a side effect. One way to achieve this is to frame some questions everybody has to answer about the character of his left or right neighbor and share that information with that player.

Some examples:
Your character knows a secret of the neighbors character. What is it?
Or the variation: The neighbors character knows a secret of your character. What is it?
What does your character not like about the neighbors character?
How did your character met the neighbor's character?

And since there has to be an explanation how that character knows these things a connection between characters is created.

The technique is not restricted to character creation. It could also be applied after some time thereafter. For example by saying that the group has spend some time together and the members have learned more about each others during encounters.

Usage in the session: When we played a one-shot we used this to create the some background for the characters.

Impact on our session: It was fun to see how different the players did answered the questions and most answers were original and made a good base to start the game with. Also did the players get into the mood for more than only some combat encounters and we had some descent roleplaying.

Advice: Whenever I am in a game with new characters I would like to have at least one around the table question. Why?
For a one-shot this helps to create a bit of background story since most players probably would bother to make up a background for such a game.
And for a ongoing game it helps to create connections between characters. And the players do learn about each others background stories. Especially questions about secrets could be the cause for some interesting developments in game. I had enough campaigns in the past where background stories did contain some hidden facts about a character but they never came up in the game. But since one in the group knows about it, if using this technique, it is more likely to come up and have some impact on the game.
This should not replace the creation of background stories by each player but it is a nice way to contribute to the stories.
The questions/answers should be framed in such a way that the answers do not have to much impact on one characters background story. If a player has a clear vision of his character and such an answer would force the player to go into a direction she or he does not want to the player should be allowed to either ignore it or to ask for another answer.
And I would also advice against to many questions. One or two (one for each neighbor) is enough.