On the D&D stuff, My DM makes our campaign all about our characters. He has us come up with all our backstories and our own history, throws us together, and puts us through his world, where a lot of our backstory come back to that character. For instance, in our current campaign, our half orc is a barbarian who is CONSTANTLY drunk and ran a tavern in the town we started out in. Well turns out he had one EPIC night where he ended up joining the cult of Orcas, the Temple of Kord, and knocked up an orc chieftess. The rest of us did not know this until we got ambushed in the woods by a bunch of heavily armored, well equipped orcs. It makes the group really tight nit because we are constantly trying to find more and more about the characters we created, and lends a lot of fun to the night.