I know one novelist GM. I haven't played in his campaigns, but those that have, have enjoyed them. Are novelists are better or worse GMs than other people? Are they micromanagers with their worlds (more often than not)?  

I think that James S. A. Corey's excellent "The Expanse" series is based on Ty Franck's  MMORPG (then table-top RPG) setting. IIRC Steven Erikson's Malazan series is based on his fantasy world (and he uses GURPS). I would have loved to play in their campaigns - although I don't much care for Malazan series.

I play every Wednesday night in C.J. Carella's game. He has written superhero novels, modern fantasy novels (starting with _Shadowfall Las Vegas_ and now has a very successful military SF series going. He's a great GM. Of course, he was very involved in roleplaying games before he was a novelist. He created the Unisystem, wrote tons of GURPS material, wrote for Palladium and created the Buffy game and All Flesh Must be Eaten. I've been playing in his games (and GMing with him in my games) since the late Eighties.

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Bill Reich
https://sites.google.com/site/grreference/

What, seriously?

The reason "orphaned sociopath with amnesia" is such a common character back story is that a very, very large portion of players are not interested in the slightest in playing a character - they want to kill things, or disturb shit, or just pfaff around in a fictional world without consequences.  A similar portion of players are so emotionally invested in their character that any attempt by the GM to motivate them by leveraging their character's relationships is tantamount to railroading.  This is a trope that goes back to the very beginnings of roleplaying.

People who want to play a character will do so without needing any further prompting.  People who don't, won't, and no amount of encouragement will get them to.  Know which you've got in your group and plan accordingly.

I think that almost everyone I have played with over the years has been a mix of those two attitudes and a group where most of the players lean toward roleplaying will get some roleplay out of the most hardened murder hobos.

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Bill Reich
https://sites.google.com/site/grreference/home

I met most of gaming crew in high school and college then online. I never got much into the pick up game at the FLGS thing but it was healthy around here for awhile. Never had the gaming drunk/stoned issue come up but we were pretty straight arrow. Worst that happened was playing -way- to late and sometimes things got weird about 3-4 in the morning.

Gaming drunk? Once or twice. Gaming stoned? More often but the weirdest was gaming with the GM's two exes in the game.

I found powergamers faked their chargen, random or otherwise. 'Policing' my players is about as attractive to me as keeping all my players in gimp masks.

I often GM with half or more of my players on Skype and I don't want to do all of the dice rolling. So they could be cheating me blind. But I don't think they do and I don't worry about it. As for chargen, I don't have to make any effort to police my players and I don't have to be there when they are creating a character. I know what a character created with Adventurer or Cinematic point totals looks. I'm not even checking for cheating. I just know that none of them have cheated. It isn't rocket science.

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https://sites.google.com/site/grreference/home/reffiles/b-spell-lists

Do PCs talk to each other in your games?

Does it depend on the game? Do Call of Cthulhu PCs talk more than D&D PCs?

Does it depend on the game format (tabletop, online text chat, PBP & PBEM, live action etc)?

 I suspect PCs pretty much never interact in-character in my D&D tabletop games, and that this is a big difference between tabletop and text-chat or pbem play where that is often the focus of play.

Do you think it's something worth encouraging? Do you discourage it?

It happens all the time in the games I GM and the games in which I play. We have a fairly new player now who tends to say "I  tell them what I saw" and I say "so tell them," so I guess I am encouraging it.

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https://sites.google.com/site/grreference/home/05-the-black-mountain/at-the-high-point-inn

I'd love to understand how big the backgrounds are (paragraphs, pages?) and how all the information helped.

Frank

The campaign with the biggest back stories began with my telling the players "After this campaign wraps up, let's start one where you are all young nobles in Old Meyoss (a big city which they knew about but it had never been the site of a campaign) but all of you have serious issues. Maybe your family lost all of its money, maybe you are out of favor with the government and the Bureau of State Security, maybe both. Maybe it is something I haven't thought of." They all had some weeks to come up with back-stories and I stood ready to edit, especially to avoid duplication. I got:
1: The son of the Chief of the Constabulary. His father was in hot water with the other nobles because he had gotten the government to allow his constables to arrest nobles and interfere in some of the crap they pulled. They also looked down on him because he had a job. The kid was proud of his father but most of the other noble kids avoided him.
2: The daughter of a noble house of the previous rulers of the city. Differing in both ethnicity and religion from the new rulers, the Sha are still a large minority and mixed-race people are probably the majority. I had outlined all that in my description of the setting but Joanne fit her character into it. She had the least money problems of all of the characters but the greatest social problems.
3: A youngster whose father had been a very important city official but had been arrested, tried secretly and executed by the Bureau. He and his family had the cash they had on hand and the house they lived in. He was probably the worst off. Maybe his social problems were greater too.
4: A young man who had gone against the wishes of his rural minor-noble family and come to the city to study at The Stone House, a school for Earth magicians. His mother sent him a small allowance but that only provided enough for his food and tuition.
5: A young woman who had inherited a little money from an aunt and gone against the wishes of her family and attended The School of Three Swords. The upper classes of the city, except for the Sha, are pretty patriarchal and she faced great disapproval.
This all impacted how they became allied, got involved in minor quarrels and a few duels, and eventually combatted the big problem facing the city, it was lousy with vampires.

I have found backstories to be an interesting side issue in character creation. If someone wants to play the mysterious stranger, with no family or connections, that's ok too, but I rarely encounter that. I've started campaigns with all of the characters knowing one another and some of them related and they had big backgrounds that gave them motivations. Those generally lasted a long time. But I've had "five strangers meet at the caravan hiring hall" too and that lasted a couple of years.

https://sites.google.com/site/grreference/home/05-the-black-mountain/at-the-high-point-inn