Why is it bad roleplaying to have dead parental figures? Becoming a hero/adventurer/vigilante so nobody else feels your loss, having a vendetta against whatever killed said parents or not knowing what happened and digging into the conspiracy are all far more interesting hooks than "haha both my parents are alive and well adjusted. are your expectations subverted yet?"
>Why is it bad roleplaying to have dead parental figures?according to whom? Are you making up issues in your head?also it simply depends on which kind of narrative you´re interested in. If you dont have parents at home, that means you´re simply not interested at exploring that aspect in your game.
>>98484634Why do you feel the need to make up things to complain about?
It's not.But when *every* adventurer has dead/missing parents, it raises questions about what kind of setting this is.
>>98484634I don't mind if you're keeping it consistent.Character with only one parent should be no better than Neutral, partial absence of parental influence makes for a troubled upbringing.While full orphan is pretty much inevitably Evil, ward of state is on a pipeline from one institution to another, with their final stop being either jail or ghetto gutter.Exceptions can be made for having a well justified surrogate.
>>98484833It's not a common enough problem to even be a meme, but I would agree that when almost every player shows up to the table with an amnesiac character because they couldn't be bothered to think up a personality or motivation, that's a problem. Everyone having dead parents and loved ones is much less of an issue, because let's be fucking real, the game is probably not going to include going to visit every character's parents.
>>98484634People associate dead parental figures with teenagers new to roleplaying, who often create characters with dead parents to escape how their parents define their life in their life in the real world. Because these teenagers are trying to escape being defined by their parents they often don’t want to consider how the absence of parents could define a character, and not considering how an event which is supposed to be traumatic defines your character is “bad” roleplaying. Personally I wouldn’t care if I was DMing a party entirely composed of orphans.
>>98484634It's not bad. It's just been done to death, and so it feels uninspired and lacking in creativity.
>>98484634A common complaint is that it's used as an "anti-hook" or a means to reduce character vulnerability. Dead parents, no guardians, no significant NPCs in one's life means nobody to be used as a hostage, fridged jumpscare, etc. Plus, at such oppositional tables, the GM still needs the adventure to continue so having no background is no handicap (NPCs will appear to give necessary exposition anyway).So it's indirectly a condemnation of tables where players don't trust the GM to run parents (and similar) with a fair hand, and GMs can't trust the players to engage fairly with the world.
>>98484833It just tells you being unattached correlates with adventure, which isn't surprising. Kinda like how broken homes correlate with criminality because dysfunctional children become subnormal and dysfunctional adults.
>>98484634>>98484634it's not innately bad and absolutely can be done well, but it's developed a stigma for being an overused generic tragic backstory, giving the player a convenient excuse to not have to think about their character's relationship or interactions with their family, or why they chose to abandon their aging parents in a preindustrial society where the closest thing to a retirement is being kept fed by your children in exchange for looking after their own kids while they're busy out in the fields
>>98484634>Why is it bad roleplaying to have dead parental figures?lazy DMs love extremely formulaic forced drama plotlines and when they're hungover and haven't prepped for a session they enjoy reaching into a hat and pulling out your character's mom/dad/wife/sister to say "okay the bad guy horribly murdered them here's your next adventure hook!" in lieu of a more natural development. The ttrpg zeitgeist incorrectly blames PCs for making orphan murderhobos when really this phenomenon is a completely natural and expected outcome to constantly encountering bad and lazy dungeon masters who punish them for bothering to care about the world beyond their character sheet, if you know a hack DM is gonna kidnap/murder/etc your spouse and parents within fifteen sessions you might as well skip the superhero origin story where he feels soooooo clever for being a lazy piece of shit and just do it yourself. In games where you can actually be rewarded for being invested in the world and relationships provide concrete advantages and aren't just plot hooks for the next dungeon crawl you don't see players have this same issue; in Vampire the Masquerade defining your relationship with your Sire is a hugely important part of who you are as a vampire and also influences which disciplines you have access to, what alliances and enemies you inherit, what connections you can call upon, your standing in the clan and princedom, etc. and players in VTM are not reluctant to spend a lot of time developing their relationship with a sire the way D&D and D&D clone games like Pathfinder, SOTDL, Draw Steel, Dragonbane, DCC, and the hundreds of other shitty knockoffs and OSR hacks are.
>>98484634Its common for players to go for tragic backstories to the point it's seen as cliche. However, cliches are usually cliche for a reason.Vengeance for dead parents, finding lost parents, or fulfilling the wishes of dead parents make for good character motivations.As opposed to the subversive happy backstory where the reason for adventuring boils down to, "That's where the plot is". Wanting to be the best baker has safer alternatives than dungeon crawling.
>>98484634>Why is it bad roleplaying to have dead parental figures?It isn't.
>>98484833Damn old /tg/ was insanely uncreative.
>>98484634No healthy well adjusted person is risking their life to dive into dungeons or dragon pussy
>>98484634If my parents are dead, it's because they died as a result of gameplay, during the game, which was adjudicated by the rules that define the game.
>>98484923Their motivation is to explore the dungeon and kill monsters and get magic items, because that's what you do in the game, which isn't a book or a movie or a play or a narrative. Faggot.
>>98487206gameplay begins at chargen
>>98487215Starts in the dungeon.
>>98484634Idea: Make a pure innocent woobie character that your character would do anything to keep them safe and is the sole reason why they're an adventurer to bait the DM into abusing them so that NPCs you actually care about dodge the drama stick
>>98487230You think I'll only pick one? kek
>>98487219>Gameplay is only combat>>>/v/
>>98487482Nogames award.
>>98487482even /v/ understands chargen is part of the game
>>98487482Ironic, lol
>>98487210it seems a little disingenuous to pretend every player at the table is playing a glorified board gamethere is a reason people are playing a TTRPG instead of catan or dungeon!
I have death a character with death parents but it is treated as utterly unremarkable (one dies in a random skirmish, the other of tuberculosis) and will find it odd if your parents are alive and happy after working with and working with too many runaways and orphans and abandoned children. Technically the mother is still alive, but she doesn't know it. The real meat is in the everything else built since then, not the parents, although they do provide foundation for her original skills and character.
>>98487631Write a book faggot
>>98484634if you have a character look at a part consisting of orphans and make a snide "wow, you all lack parents, our king really should do something about it" you will probably get called out for being too ironic and metaeven though the improbability of 5 superpowered orphans being the hope of the kingdom does sound contrived to a rational third-party observer
>>98487638do you actually just hate TTRPGs?if you only sit at a table to progress from square to square and occasionally yell out attack or roll for bend bars, you might prefer to play a boardgame
>>98487644Write a book faggot
Don't we all become orphans sooner or later?
>>98487683a 70-year old whose parents died 30 years ago would technically be an orphan but no one would actually call them thatwhereas a whole bunch of 20-30 year olds who all lost both parents at roughly the same time to different causes implies either a world where every catastrophe is occuring simultaneously or they are all some kind of chosen ones who were all chosen for the specific reason they lost their parents early on
>>98484785>according to whom?*whomst've
Most orphans in real life had and have alive parents. Most of the time, you wouldn't want to meet them, because they abandoned them expecting them to die or be someone's trouble.
>>98487683some people die well before their parents
>>98487701>whereas a whole bunch of 20-30 year olds who all lost both parents at roughly the same time to different causes implies either a world where every catastrophe is occuring simultaneouslyit's really not strange for single digit amounts of orphans with dead parents to exist in a setting with constant low-level trouble. actually, them all being orphans can be a great reason why they're adventuring together - maybe they were an urchin gang, or they're working to deal with the threat that orphaned them in the first place.
>>98484634>Why is it bad roleplaying to have dead parental figures?This is the first I'm ever hearing of this. It's one of the most common plot hooks there are. At worst your parents shouldn't even come up outside of that. I feel like I used to not even be able to have a game without some Princess Bride elements.
>>98487753Because some people are deadly afraid of clichés or confuse originality with good.
>>98487753in a vaccuum, dead parents are a no-brainer to use to justify a character with no familial attachments and can therefore go anywhere and do anything without having to worry about writing homebut when 4/5ths of all important characters are oprhaned, usually violently and at a young age, people start to question if they should make the 11th character an orphan toojust to shake things up a bit, they might actually have a home address and send home some money to their poor parent farmers who recovered from the mysterious plague
>>98487210Shut the fuck up, nogames.
>>98487779>but when 4/5ths of all important characters are oprhanedsure, but that's more of an organizational problem. A lack of planning between the group. >they might actually have a home address and send home some money to their poor parent farmers who recovered from the mysterious plagueUnless you want said family to suddenly become a plot hook, it'd be best to regard them as little as possible. Given that the bulk of the party's characters are, presumably, adults, it's not like you need to go out of the way to specifically mention them without cause. Revenge is a cause. >>98487772It's a depressing state of affairs when the classics are so disrespected.
>>98487785nobody tell them that as back as BX, the first thing you did in keep in the borderlands was to enter the keep and talk to the locals in order to find out where all the baddies are and where their loot is keptand you were expected to have to at least talk to the castellan before learning where the caves of chaos arethe total lack of anything other than single sentence descriptions for characters meant both the players and the DM had to have a minimum of improv skills to tease out important info
>>98487753>I used to not even be able to have a game without some Princess Bride elements.Immunising yourself to cosmic brownie shake before serving it at the table would technically qualify...
>>98487791>sure, but that's more of an organizational problem. A lack of planning between the group.theres always a lot of drop in players, especially if you play at LGSs or for group eventsyou just kind of end up having characters with 10 minutes of prep time and this limits your ability to warn them in advance you already have 3 one-eyed fighters who lost their parents to some tragedy in the past>Unless you want said family to suddenly become a plot hook, it'd be best to regard them as little as possibleit is sometimes nice to have something to say during a long restlike saying you are writing to your family while everyone else is sharpening their swords it doesnt need to be a plot hook or anything, just a neat bit of trivia for your character to mention
>>98484634Because 99% of the time, the person playing that archetype doesn't use it well. At best, they use it to justify murderhobo behavior (poorly). At worst, it just never comes up.>>98487518Nah they're right, if you think TTRPGs are only combat you aren't playing a TTRPG, you're playing a wargame.
>>98487806>theres always a lot of drop in players, especially if you play at LGSs or for group eventsI mostly played with my regular clique rather than strangers, so perhaps I'm just blessed that way. But in any case if you're just doing pick up games with randos there are worse things you can put up with than generic backstories. You're probably not there for something super long term anyways. >it is sometimes nice to have something to say during a long restHow long are you resting. But sure, having something to say can be nice but anything would work just as well.>it doesnt need to be a plot hook or anything, just a neat bit of trivia for your character to mentionYes, but as a piece of advise let me say out right that you don't always want to put ideas in your GMs head.
>>98484634Because it's overdone, and usually leads to stupid angsty bullshit.Like I dunno man why wouldn't you want your character to have a pair of loving, caring parents? Why can't the character just be an adventurer because of curiosity or wanderlust or a thirst for knowledge about something they must travel to learn about or because their parents raised them to help others and they believe they can do the most good traveling the world righting wrongs? Why do your parents have to be dead for you to adventure? Why must sorrow or revenge be their motivation?
>>98487813Let's be blunt. They're trying to play Batman. >Nah they're right, if you think TTRPGs are only combat you aren't playing a TTRPG, you're playing a wargame.And if you're just there to play story time you might as well not have a game at all. It's a balance but you're not there to write the next great genre novel.
>>98487779Orphans being used as a human fodder for high risk job seems perfectly plausible, is somewhat cynical.
>>98487821>Why do your parents have to be dead for you to adventure? Because ADVENTURE by itself is not a career path. And having your character say they were just bored of regular life is hardly more engaging.>Why must sorrow or revenge be their motivation?Why should you have a combat based motivation in a combat based type of game. That's a real puzzler alright. Because if you do it right it's going to be rad as shit when you finally find the guy.
>>98487826Even children with parents were used by their own parents as cannon fodder. The life expectancy of children was between 30 and 40% of death before age 5 even if they did nothing dangerous. Because children in pre-modern societies could be put to work almost imminently, even if they were basic jobs like scaring crows, doing odd jobs, or taking care of the younger siblings while the parents work. It made a ton of sense to have lots of children, because they would begin work in 4-5 years.
>>98487825>Let's be blunt. They're trying to play Batman. Yes, and instead of understanding he's at his best as a noble, heroic individual and the world's greatest detective, they think Flashpoint Batman is how it should be done.>And if you're just there to play story time you might as well not have a game at all. It's a balance but you're not there to write the next great genre novel.But a story is being told, regardless of whether you like it or not. It's not just a game about rolling clackety rocks to get big number, sometimes you have to actively make the wrong choice because it's what your character would do with the knowledge they have, which in many case is not the same meta knowledge you as a player have. It's an RPG, a role playing game. A good one intertwines the mechanics and storytelling in a way that feels natural, a bad one divorces them entirely or only considers one half of the equation and treats the other as something they're forced to include.
>>98487838>But a story is being told,To facilitate a game. Narration is just a tool, as much as the dice and stationary are. Trying to make your story the best one ever is just going to doom the game out of autistic desire to copy someone you saw online. If you care about narrative what till it's done then transcribe it.
You pals, focus too much on the parents. It takes a whole tribe to raise a child. Ancient tribes routinely adopted the children of those whose parents died. There's more to life than just your parents.
>>98487848Wipe out the tribe. Got it.
>>98487828>Because ADVENTURE by itself is not a career path.It absolutely was for a time not too long ago. Hell, 300 years ago people were still exploring the planet, and even now we don't know what's truly at the bottom of our oceans. In a fantasy world that's in medieval stasis where unclaimed and abandoned tombs are ripe with riches and supernatural threats are constantly attacking the common folk, adventure is absolutely a profession.>And having your character say they were just bored of regular life is hardly more engaging.If you think that and dead parents are the only two options, this hobby might not be for you. You simply lack the creativity.>Why should you have a combat based motivation in a combat based type of gameYou misunderstand TTRPGs. They are ROLE PLAYING games. The focus doesn't have to be combat, and in many TTRPGs combat is basically a failure state (I.e. VtM where breaking the veil is a death sentence for you at best and doom for everyone at worst), and entire systems exist built around social interaction such as Dogs in the Vineyard, and many Supers systems abstract combat because it makes no sense to have hit points when you can survive being hurled into the sun and then throw that sun at the guy who hit you.>because if you do it right it's going to be rad as shit when you finally find the guy.Except you won't, because revenge is a hollow motivation. You know the saying, two graves and what not.
>>98487853eh, it was good enough for Conan, should be good enough for anyone else
>>98487854>and in many TTRPGs combat is basically a failure statethats a bit of an oversimplification at besttons and tons of BX adventures treated combat as the norm and avoiding it with clever tricks was a critical success for the playersthe village of hommlet frequently has combat as a given and it treated combat as the first option not the last
>>98487848True.Historically and anthropologically, human upbringing has always relied on deep networks of aunts, elders, neighbors, and collective kinship. Grounding a child's worldview solely in their parents makes the setting feel tiny. Showing how an entire village, guild, or neighborhood shapes a character's morals, trade skills, and flaws creates a far richer world.Audiences naturally crave communal narratives, which is precisely why the "found family" trope is wildly popular. Highlighting mentors, adoption, and broad tribal support systems reflects a truer, often more emotionally dynamic human experience.
>>98487844>To facilitate a game. Incorrect. The story IS the game. Every time the dice are rolled, every time a character acts, that's a story. That's a narrative. Something is happening that progresses the story, and thus the story will impact what mechanics are needed next. It's not one facilitating the other alone, it's a closed loop of both feeding into one another, and if you can't understand that then either go LARP (if you think the mechanics don't matter) or go play wargames or baord games (if you think the story isn't important).>Trying to make your story the best one ever is just going to doom the game out of autistic desire to copy someone you saw onlineI pity that you have no friends to enjoy TTRPGs with, and that the only people you can play with are the dregs and outcasts.>If you care about narrative what till it's done then transcribe it.The narrative will be important. It has to exist to facilitate the adventure. Otherwise, again, you're just rolling dice with no point to it, and I can do that on my own time without the need to bore 3-5 other people.
>>98487860to be fair, a lot of fantasy oprhans were actually raised by someone despite losing parentsusually an uncle/aunt or a very helpful mentor being a street urchin like aladdin who were raised totally alone or with only other street urchins isnt that common
>>98487859I didn't mention B/X, I specifically mentioned one of the more narrative-heavy systems out there, Vampire the masquerade where the core setting makes a huge deal about maintaining the veil of secrecy about the supernatural and obviously two gangs of vampires getting into a magic fight in london is going to cause problems.Also, B/X is a hack of a wargame. of course it's going to be combat-centric. It's not a true TTRPG because the narrative elements were tacked on lazily by some old fat guy who died some years back. A true TTRPG melds narrative and gameplay at a fundamental level. You can't have one without the other to have a TTRPG. Anything else is either freeform RP where dice are rolled for no reason, or a skirmish game where the only objective is to watch number go up.
>>98487868Well, that's also true because mortality rate of street children is high, not as high as orphanages but it's still high. Even 1-3 years can be pushing it, without ever being absorbed by the wither community in one way or another, doing odd jobs, joining a gang, an apprenticeship, selling oneself as a slave or a prostitute, a beggar guilt, having seasonal work, joining a church or pilgrims, or becoming a camp follower.
>>98487861>Incorrect. The story IS the game.That depends on the people playing. You might like a stronger narration focus. Some, such as myself, want just enough flavor to give weight to the adventure. You can't say any one way is right more than I can and this is where we're having an impasse but the fact that we can come to different conclusions is one of the better parts of the hobby. >I pity that you have no friends to enjoy TTRPGs with, and that the only people you can play with are the dregs and outcasts.That's a rather bold assumption. I've been playing with the same group of people for over 20 years. >The narrative will be important. It has to exist to facilitate the adventure.I already said as much, but even I'll admit that's a vague enough statement to mean just about anything. One group might want to go down and fight a wizard to rescue a princess. Another might want to create their own lord of the rings.
Death by childbirth is sometimes treated as a cliché, but it should be turned into something utterly unremarkable. It was incredibly common. Prior to modern sanitation and medicine, maternal mortality was a structural constant. A woman often faced a 10% to 20% lifetime risk of dying in childbirth across her childbearing years. Because it was so common, historical societies adapted to it in practical ways that modern fiction completely overlooks.A widower with small children or a infant couldn't afford a multi-year mourning period; he needed a household partner immediately for survival. Blended families weren't an anomaly or a vector for "evil stepmothers", they were the basic operating structure of human society for centuries.Expectant mothers routinely confessed sins, settled debts, or dictated wills before labor. Giving birth wasn't just a joyous event; it was viewed as entering a battle where survival wasn't guaranteed.Death by childbirth shouldn't be something extraordinary, it should be like having your parents die in a war. It was so common, that many cultures had rites to mentally prepare women to die like soldiers, and would be honoured for such.
>>98487891that just means some, or most, of your characters would have one parentwith 1 or 2 of them with no parentsbut if the entire party consists of people who all lost both parents, then that starts to veer into improbable territory without some kind of meta-narrative like a deadly plague sweeping across the country
>>98484634because it limits and disconnects the character from the world that they have no attachment to. Once you start playing games were relationships and family matters and is facilitated by the rules like harnmaster, pendragon or MSH you'll see how it's an endless source for events and character motivation
>>98487907as has been mentioned, a character with no parents who isnt tied down to any place or any person and who needs very little explaining about their backstory is the ideal candidate for a murderhobo adventureit only strains the willing suspension of disbelief if this is the only type of character who keeps showing up and is never addressed in even a token way like an offhand mention of a big war
>>98487900I disagree. Misery loves company. Traumatized people are drawn together by mutual damage. It is a comfort to the wretched to have companions in grief.
>>98487900A tight-knit squad of mercenaries, thieves, or outcasts isn't a random cross-section of society. Well-adjusted people with loving families and stable inherits rarely take up high-mortality, fringe lifestyles. The environment itself filters for people with nowhere else to go.Broken people often feel alien around "normal" people. They naturally gravitate toward peers who won't judge their scars, demand emotional masking, or expect a conventional worldview. Shared damage acts as a social shortcut to trust.The issue is that this selection in storytelling is often random. If five strangers meet by total accident at a tavern and all five happen to have murdered families, burned villages, and secret dark pasts, it feels like authorial intent rather than magnetic attraction. It only feels plausible if their shared status is what brought them to that place in the first place.
>>98487950>>98487941honestly, the anthropic principle can explain away 80% of all coincidences>why are all of them weirdoes with sad backstories and abilities that are, intentionally or otherwise, really good at killing?>because they wouldnt be walking from town to town asking to kill things for money otherwise
>>98487950>If five strangers meet by total accident at a tavern and all five happen to have murdered families, burned villages, and secret dark pasts, it feels like authorial intent rather than magnetic attractionSee to me it sounds like a through plot. Multiple villages get raised to ground and countless families murdered? That means war. In fact them having similar backstories and goals is all the more reason they're going to be teaming up. And you're missing the bigger problem. It's the>By accidentPart that's the issue. First off, taverns are where you go for info, so if Player A is asking about the guy what murdered his paw, he's going to go there to find out and that will point him to Player B who might know a bit more about what's going on. Or you can say through someone's effort they assembled people who all suffered at the hands of the BBEG.
>>98487219>Gameplay starts in the dungeonHow shit is your GM?
>>98484634>Why is it bad roleplaying to have dead parental figures?Hot take but thinking TTRPG characters need (described) parents in the first place is peak midwit self-inserter behaviour.>Well I and most people have parents or family that they love IRL, so my/your character must as wellWhen in reality, your characters parents are not and will never be the same as your actual family, because unless the GM makes them regular characters you interact with (weird) there is no actual lived experience with them. No player will ever care more for their character's family than for Glup Shitto, the random subhuman NPC the party befriended during session 2.
Games aren't stories you lose
>>98489311so why do you bother with sword-swinging character who hits things with swords and wants money and not a stack of HP that deals DMG?
>>98488625its just pointing out that its really improbable for half the party to be orphans and for every third character who joins to also be an oprhanwe all know the doylist reason is because its one less thing for the players to think about their character, but players will eventually notice the large number of orphan characters and have laugh about it if you are luckybut by the same token, theres no problem with having a character who has parents, even if its just a background detail
>>98487825>And if you're just there to play story time you might as well not have a game at all. It's a balance but you're not there to write the next great genre novel.Why are you being a purposefully obtuse faggot? You said yourself you need to have a balance. The OP in that chain is talking about the fact their character can't have a backstory about parents being dead because your parents should die during gameplay, as if character gen isn't part of said gameplay. Said retard then argues that gameplay starts at the dungeon, implying every single thing leading up to the dungeon, including travel mechanics, investigation, interacting with NPCs, is not gameplay. If you are only wanting to play a TTRPG to Dungeon Crawl you should be playing a video game instead, like Darkest Dungeon or Legend of Grimrock. Pretty fucking simple.
Are you just bitching about some annoying reddit thread?
>>98489542the fact that people in this thread have repeatedly mentioned that the status of their parents will have a minimal effect on gameplay means the argument is almost entirely an academic one and people are just getting annoyed that people dont like the same things they do
>>98486426Knows what he's talking about. Also the video is hilarious. "I'm good" lmao
As a man wiser than myself once said, sometimes you gotta spend orphans to make orphans.
>>98489331Honestly I don't think being an orphan needs to be that big of a deal. One bad disease, one day of dysentery, or mundane accident can be the difference between having a path set in life to being thrown to the wolves, be your uncle, stepmother, adopted by a guild master, or to the gutters. Having your biological parents dead can be as common as weather.
>>98489704
>>98490292
Going to munch into your characters feels like such an unnecessary detail if it's not going to be a plot point. It's like trying to make a fuss over their birthday.
>>98484797Tradition?
>>98492488like diddler on a roof?
