The Secret Tactic the
Best DMs Use
But Won’t Share

Comic books figured this out decades ago: an unstoppable hero gets boring fast. The trick that keeps readers, and players, invested isn’t more power. It’s giving the character something to lose. That’s the secret tactic behind this issue, and it starts with a stack of backstories most GMs never read twice.

I love comic books. From the time I was a kid, I was attracted to the art, the stories, and the amazing characters featured within. I see many parallels between comic book stories and TTRPG adventures.

I found that very often with comic book stories, especially with the stronger superheroes like those of the DC universe, the stories became stale because it is not easy to come up with interesting god-level stories month after month. Whereas the Marvel heroes are famously flawed, which naturally leads to very interesting stories, characters like Superman are unstoppable… and after a while, it becomes kind of ridiculous to keep throwing out other gods to fight him, and to come up with new reasons those other gods have beef with the guy becomes almost impossible after a while.

With characters in 5e (and other systems) being almost super-powered, it becomes a massive challenge for the Game Master to bring the sense of high stakes to the gaming table. But what Superman writers eventually found in monthly comic books was that fighting a mega-powered villain every issue was not necessary. Superman’s real weakness was not Kryptonite: it was his morality. The values instilled in him by his Earth parents, and eventually by messages from his birth parents post-mortem, forced him to make tough choices.

This is why it’s important to have players create backstories, and for the GM to read those backstories and incorporate them into the game. This is not a game of Gauntlet or Golden Axe. This is role-playing. Even the most hack-and-slash games benefit from characters everyone at the table cares about. If not, why even give them a name beyond “Warrior,” “Rogue,” or “Wizard”?

A PC backstory, when incorporated into the campaign’s story, immerses that PC and invests that player in the outcome of their decisions. Sometimes, like in the Superman scenario above, neither choice is right. Neither choice is wrong. Inaction even has consequences. As Rush says, “You still have made a choice.” And all of those choices have consequences that affect the character and everyone else at that table. A character with a backstory has people they care about, things and places that are meaningful to them: a father who died in the poppy field just outside of town, and now the dragon threatens to burn it all down; a grandmother who bakes cookies every morning in Doodleville, which is about to be raided by orcs.

If you are playing a game like 5e or Draw Steel, a defeat in the traditional, video-game sense is hard to come by for the PCs. But defeat has many faces, and having players create meaningful backstories is a gift the GM can give themselves: it helps create a TPK that won’t tick off the whole table, but instead makes for such an emotional response that they will never forget it. A scene that crushes the PCs can also set the stage for a truly epic path to vengeance.

Take that orc raid from above. Instead of describing the orcs raiding the town, pillaging, murdering, throw in a description of the baker, an old lady in the center of town, crying in a high, shaky voice as she is scalped by a massive ogre and his lanky henchman. Then they eat her famous cake as a final insult. The PC whose grandmother that was will likely make a spectacle of their grief, and the other players will be affected by it too.

So here is the rundown: have your PCs make their backstories, but rather than leave it completely open, give them a few handrails.

If the way I think about defeat and backstories resonates, check out what my brother Vase and I are building. Left for the Vultures runs on these exact ideas. The PCs’ backstories are integral to the story and evolve through the campaign as wounds shape who they are and what they believe. Players grow attached because the consequences land where they actually hurt: on the people and places their character built their identity around.