How dumb of an idea would it be to, over the course of a campaign,

>>54584264
>Is that too obnoxious?
Depends on if you let your players make their own backstories. If yes then the answer is yes. If no then answer is sometimes.

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>unknowingly being a princess

>>54584264
Personally, I like to have control over my character's backstory and personality and I would feel that a GM who changes my backstory on a whim is overstepping the boundaries we have set for the game.

>>54584264
Pretty dumb. Taking away players' custom-made backstories and roots in the setting is a great way to promore disengagement and push them toward murderhobo behaviors.

You want to further immerse players, not yank them out and say "lol actually it was all a lie aren't I clever?"

Only in a very lighthearted game and only in a way that doesn't change who the pc is at their core.

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>>54586028
>>54585871
A surprise twist about a characters background can be interesting narratively, but I just don't think it'd work for these reasons. There's just too much risk of making the players feel like you're invalidating and railroading something that's actually quite personal and important to them.

>>54584264
Bad idea. I'd be pretty pissed if I put a lot of time and thought into a character's backstory only for the GM to reveal "but it was all actually a lie!" If players want backstory-related surprises, they'll include little things like "my character is an orphan and has no idea who their parents were" for you to work with.

>>54585836
>unknowingly being a princess(male)

>>54584264
Just tell them straight-up that the game will contain the theme of altered memories.

So this was actually something I did to my players. The key part was that their characters were immortal and had been living for a ridiculously long time, but due to some shenanigans from another immortal, each person had lost their memories some fifty years prior. I was able to spring grandchildren out nowhere and see how the character would deal with it. It really spoke to how the character was now.

Considering that the fifty years they were given allowed them to come up with whatever they wanted in terms of backstory and the task was then to deal with their past in whatever way they wanted.

I had one Player who got grand kids sprung on him but just sort of begrudgingly took them in until he could find a way to drop them off somewhere safe. He hated the idea of his past coming to haunt him. Meanwhile another player was going completely into investigating their past. It was a fun game to run.