I've always wanted to make a rogue with a super edgy back story and they are wearing black and all that with a mask but as soon as you talk to him he is just super enthusiastic about helping people and is super friendly with an NZ accent.
One thing I'm curious about is whether player-initiated exposition is a good idea.
Normally, the DM has to take the initiative to explore your character's backstory. For example, he might say "You recognize the leader of the bandits - he was with the man who killed your father."
What if instead, when the DM has a generic group of bandits attack, you remain in character and just confront the leader of the bandits. "You! You were with him! Where is the man that killed my father?"
On the one hand, this forces the DM to suddenly improvise when he already has a lot to do since he's running the entire adventure. The DM might not like that. On the other hand, it also takes some of the work off of the DM, since it's no longer his job to make sure that your characters's backstory is being revealed the way you want it to be and he gets a memorable NPC for free.
If the DM doesn't want to roleplay a dramatic dialog right there and then, he can say something like
The man was just a hired thug. All he knows is that the murderer and his elite guards left in the direction of [city the players were going to visit later anyway].
The man was killed during the fighting, but you find half of a strange icon, the holy symbol of a god you don't recognize, hanging from a golden chain around his neck.
This way the DM can decide what the clue means when he gets around to it. Even if the bandit is just dead and the DM gives you no clues, you can roleplay your frustration. In any case, now everyone in the party knows something you (as the player) want them to know, even if it's not something you'd tell them in character.
What if instead, when the DM has a generic group of bandits attack, you remain in character and just confront the leader of the bandits. “You! You were with him! Where is the man that killed my father?”
You've sort of reinvented Fate. In Fate, you can spend a fairly renewable resource to "Declare a story detail". You typically need to justify what you're trying to do with something on your character or the scene. So if your character has the property "Everything I do is to avenge my father", it would be likely be an easy sell to the group to be like "That bandit! I saw him the night my father died!"
Fate has a lot of good ideas that are more in line with how I think people would intuitively play RPGs. I think a lot of people playing D&D and its close relatives would enjoy Fate more. D&D is by comparison extremely limited in how creative you can be, rules-as-written.
The GM in Fate is also encouraged to invoke your character's backstory. If your character has like "Cultists want your blood" Trouble, the GM can offer you fate points to make that come up. That's a core part of the game's resource economy. So when you finish dealing with the bandits and settle in to the inn, the GM can be like "As you're sipping the host's tea, you catch him grinning at you slyly. You hear footsteps outside. For a Fate point, how about this guy is in on the cult and signaled for his friends."
This puts a lot more narrative control in the hands of the players. Some people really like this. Extremely controlling GMs probably won't. Players who just "want to be told a story" but aren't watching a movie for some reason also probably won't. But when it works, it really makes the game's story collaborative.
By comparison, D&D feels absolutely barebones, especially for character and narrative. It's just missing whole systems
I'll never forget one of my first campaigns, where a few sessions in, the one "edgy" character in our crew of demented murderhobos decided that he didn't want to go in a cave that the rest of the party were going in. Nothing could move him on this.
Every 15 minutes or so through a multi-hour session while the rest of us explored the cave and fought beasties, the DM would ask him what he wanted to do, as a kindness that turned into a running joke by the end. His character was determined to use his abysmal crafting skills to try and make caltrops from stones outside the cave. I think that when the average rolls were calculated out over the time it took, he crafted something like three poor quality caltrops.
The player insisted that he was fine with all of it, seemed to have fun just hanging out, and it did technically fit his character. Still, it really cemented the importance of being flexible with your RP to not kill game flow.
A session or two later the DM gave each of us a "joke" magic item of questionable utility. Edgy got a pouch of infinite stone caltrops. The DM then learned a hard lesson about the cheese potential of "joke" magic items.
Full credit to the guy for managing to play 40 sessions like that, though.
Characters rarely, if ever, turn out exactly as they're envisioned- that's part of the beauty of them. As long as you play someone that works well with the team and keeps the party together so everyone can enjoy the adventure, then you've done well. Sure, this guy probably turned out to just feel like a haunted, cold person travelling with the party for no clear reason, but that can still contribute to having a solid party dynamic.
