I kind of like backstories, I'm one of those guys who reads the manual before playing a game. Actually, when I'm bored I often reach for the nearest game manual because is it's good light reading. Nay, I really like backstories, but that's the kind of guy I am...

Backstories are not neccesarily bad things, but they tend to get overdone because everybody just loves to write their own long-winded epic that really does nothing but plagarize the novels/movies they read/saw when they were younger.
They're basically creative masturbation in many cases.

Stories are really helpful in building up games. It's what most
newbie gamers are looking for.


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Julius
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Quote:

Original post by empyrean_night It seems we've gotten off topic. Backstory is not plot flow. It may contain elements of it, but actual backstory is the passive memoir of an event.

Okay, but many of the posts here are referring to how the backstory is introduced. In fact, I don't see much plot flow discussion at all except as a tangential argument to better understand what does and doesn't work for backstories.

But I completely agree with everything else you said.

Having a backstory library helps a design team stay fairly consistent. There's details in backstory elements that players would never need to see, but it helps the rest of us remember whether someone had green or grey eyes.