! MY ROLEPLAY DM RULE: NO more lazy orphan cliché PC backstories allowed! ! MY DM COMMITMENT! NO more lazy orphan PC backstories allowed! I Will create NPC parents for your character! And they WILL be irritating! . <Player moans endlessly that they desperately want to have a dull cliché orphan backstory...> . Yeah, well,  <shrug>  "If" I am your DM!  - Then your parents are going to turn out to have been alive, all along,  (or be raised back up as intelligent undead)  They are going to find you!  They are going to want to reconnect with you,  And they WILL annoy the hell out of your character for comic effect!  - For MY amusement!  <I did not watch decades of sitcom viewing to waste all that potential inspiration and material!>   - Plus it is an easy bed for story seeds.  . - But no one says you have to be in my game!   . That's your choice!  It's not the law of the land!  "You know where the door is!"  "No hard feelings!"  &qu

"! "They used to drink from a hose" !" Oh "HOSE"! That makes far more sense now! They meant "hose" ! I always wondered why local prostitutes were so integral to local water distribution! ...And why there was always such a thirst-quenching prostitute hanging about in their backyard all the time, back when they were just kids. I thought there must be a very common yet unspoken, dark-as-all-hell, family secret! ? - Turns out, I was just mishearing what was being said by my Boomer elders the entire time! !