Why would a farmers kid who has had a nice life on the farm, loves their family, their whole family is still alive, and they have a sweetheart, why would they join an adventuring group?

Why would a noble who might not be in line to inherit the throne but they would have a very comfy and relaxed life with basically anything they could want join an adventuring party?

Why would a wizard who has a comfy job in a wizarding school with a family and their students love them and they won’t have anything else they want join an adventuring group?

Why would a cleric who has a community surrounding them that attends their temple, they all believe in the deity of the temple, and they have found their calling, why would they join an adventuring group?

The answer most of the time is that they wouldn’t. It doesn’t make sense for them to join a group because they have a good life. The most common reason would be that they want something more and something greater. That’s a pretty safe and simple story, but not all that interesting if you’re playing that character. So how are you going to able to spice up your characters story?

And when I say spice up the story, I don’t mean add in some tragedy. How are you going to make it more interesting without adding in some tragedy, some death in the family, some desire for revenge, some scandal happening to your PC?

Let me see what I can do with the four examples I gave of pretty comfortable backstories:

As cleric you’ve had a good life and have set up a nice temple and community in your peaceful little town. You have made friends and settled into a nice groove. One evening while you are praying you are shocked to hear a voice speak to you. It commends you for doing so well and tells you that there will be another cleric of your deity coming to town. They are older and have some information that you must carry on for them and find for them while they take over your duties. The next day a cleric comes to town and they tell you of an artifact, a relic of long ago, that would help increase the bounty of your farming communities crops and help the kingdom as a whole find peace. They are too old now to continue their quest to look for it, but your deity had sent them here to find you so that could continue the quest. It’s hard, but you have heard the word of your deity, and everything they said came true. You pack up your bags, promise to return, and say many a sad farewell as you head out on the road to find those who can help you complete the quest.

The life of an academic suits you greatly, you’ve spent years at the university studying, then teaching, and the city that you’re in has become your home. You have a family and two kids. You’re in the middle of a class when you get a message sent to you from an old teacher. They have some exciting news, they have discovered a lost ruins and texts for magics that you thought had been lost ages ago. You agonize over it for a week, but eventually, at the prompting of your spouse, you send a message back saying that you will head out there, you just need to convince the school that they should fund your research. When they hear about it, they quickly help you find an adventuring party so that you will be safe on your travels.

Your life has been practice sword fights, sitting through fairly interesting meetings, and generally learning how you’re going to be able to rule your lands when you inherit the seat of power. It isn’t much of a lands and you are going to be under the king, but that’s just fine with you. You’ll have a simple but nice life dealing with the problems of a few farmers about whose cow is whose when someone’s fence breaks. But you know before that you have one last thing coming up.  You’ve been putting it off for a while now, because it isn’t something that you wanted to do, you’d rather learn from watching your parents at home. But every generation, the child who is taking over the seat of rule has to go out and see the real world like they were nobody. You understand why, it will give you a perspective on things, but you’re not all that excited about it. Your parents have put together a group for you to travel with, so the time has finally come, and you set out on your own, not sure what you might find.

Life on the farm has been wonderful to you thus far. You love the routine of it. You love your cows, your parents and siblings, and your sweetheart. The only thing you’re not sure about is if they think enough of you. They are the child of the towns doctor. You’re just the child of a farmer.  You are betrothed and everything is set for you to be married in two years time. With the blessing of her parents and your parents, you decide that you are going to go out and see the world for a year so that you are going to better be able to provide for and help your sweetheart with their dreams as well as yours. After a tearful good bye, you set out on the road where you run into a band of adventurers who take your under their wings.

Those aren’t my normal backgrounds, there is no revenge in them, though I did keep the quest for a lost artifact that I’ll often use as a potential backstory plot hook. But in the case of the first two there is a big plot hook for the DM to latch onto. The last two fall more into the adventuring for adventuring sake. But because everyone has their family still, and they have a clear objective of what they are looking for and possibly timelines for things as well, there’s plenty to play around with as a DM.

For example:
With the cleric, the artifact 100% won’t do exactly what the legends say it will do, so yeah, you’re going to have to deal with that. Also, you’re going to be racing against someone else to get the artifact.

With the wizard, you are going to get to the ruins and find everyone dead from some curse and then you’re going to find that you’ve been cursed as well. Now you have a deadline to figure out how to break the curse that was laid upon the ruins so that you don’t end up dead as well.

With the noble, as DM I would have you stumble across a plot against yourself and your family to kill all of you. However, you’re only ever going to see the edges of the plot, unless you want to keep your disguise and infiltrate the organization and find out who is at the top of it and who is after your family.

With the farmer, something is going to happen to your village or your sweetheart. Most likely a questionable noble is going to show up in your village, fall in love with your sweetheart and demand to marry them. When that gets turns down because you are betrothed already to them, they are going to start demanding taxes and making the life of your town miserable and you’re either going to have to deal with that noble yourself or do something to get the attention of someone higher up to rein in that noble.

Which of these backstories would you want to play? And have you made a character before with a non-tragic backstory?

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Let me start out by saying when I was going for a retirement goal this is the one that made the most sense for the Soothsinger that I was playing previously. It also looked, from the symbol, like it could have been a more combat focused character. It was disappointing when I opened it up and found out that it was yet another support character as I’ve played the Tinkerer, Soothsinger, and now Sawbones who have all been more support focused characters.

But before we get into my build for the character and how they actually play, let’s talk about what they are built for. The Sawbones refers to the fact that they would have been a field medic prior to becoming an adventurer. They have a lot of healing cards, but if you think about it, a lot of medical practices could also be to cause a fair amount of damage. There’s a lot of focus on healing on the cards then with some damage on them, or cards that do large amounts of damage. This character also hands out a lot of tokens as well, so they are heavy on wounds but also immobilizing, stun, poison, or even muddle.

I think the standard build for this character would focus on healing. There are nice ways to boost that, and there are quite a number of cards that give you XP for handing out healing. They also have an interesting concept that allows you to keep your fellow adventurers alive and that is by handing out med packs. These are cards that go into your allies hands and don’t count against their total card count. So a character with fewer cards you could theoretically help keep alive. These cards also have some solid healing on them which is nice as well. The downside is that you have to be next to the other players when you are doing this. Being a Sawbones, though, means that you aren’t too soft a character and you can soak some damage. However, your healing works better on others.

Now, I wanted to play this as more of a combat build, however, when i started with that, I found out it didn’t work as well. There was some possibility for it, because you have some nice damage cards, but your best damage cards are the ones that end up getting put to the trash instead of the discard pile. But when I was able to do 14 damage on the first turn (out of 45) to a Drake, that was awesome. However, if you make it too combat focused, you aren’t going to be an extremely effective character as you limit yourself in what you can really do on a turn. I’ve actually gone fairly item heavy in hopes of being able to support more damage that way. Having a base 3 attack versus a base 2 attack thus far is the best thing that I’ve come up with for that.

The biggest thing that makes this character solid is the ability to move around the battlefield. With the deck that I’ve put together, I can most more than the base two on a good number of the cards. I have a several move four cards and a move five as well. This is a piece that I do like quite well, because the Soothsinger had a few cards that would allow it move around the battlefield, but only two or maybe three that I had in the deck. The Sawbones, thematically, makes sense to have that ability and it comes through on the cards. This, however, does come at the cost of speed from the cards, I have a couple of fast cards, but after playing the Soothsinger who was basically always first to go, the Sawbones will sometimes go after the enemies which is a bit of a weird feeling.

This character was a bit of a disappointment for me when I started playing it, because, like I said, I wanted someone who was more combat focused. That said, I’ve come to enjoy it at this point, though I do hope my next character (and I’ll probably make it be) will be more combat focused. It’s a solid balance of combat and healing, and with a few powers, one that burns a card but I can just kill a regular or elite monster or now another one that will allow me to kill a regular monster as long as they have two negative effects on them, that’s going to make me much more viable in combat. It’s interesting to see how you can use characters who seem to be more focused on healing for good amounts of damage and I hope as I continue to level up the Sawbones that I’ll be able to play them with more of a combat focus.

Complexity: Medium
Combat: Medium
Support: Medium/High

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