WISH 13: Character Backgrounds

Let's go back into the world of make-believe after all this political stuff in news.

Today's Game Wish from Turn of a Friendly Die is about character backgrounds.

How do you like to build character backgrounds? Do you think they are important or not? Do you prefer to write an elaborate background, or fill in later? Do you find character quizzes like the one in the ADRPG or related exercises like the round of questions in Everway character development to be useful?

For a long-term campaign (including PBeMs and PBMBs), as a player I like to detail the character's back-story as much as I can. As a GM I also prefer the players to detail the back-story; it both gives me plot hook ideas, and shows me that they have read the setting material and understand my game world. Karl Tolhurst of Umlaut is a classic example here.

Another good example would be Javin, my character in a long-running RuneQuest campaign a few years back. We used 'Central Casting: Heroes of Legend' to come up with the back-story of son of a boat-maker who took up river-piracy following the Lunar invasion of Pavis.

Yet another would be my first on-line character, a GURPS Cyberpunk techie who'd been framed for causing a rail disaster and was disowned by family and friends, who proved a wonderful case of an ordinary person caught up in a situation where he was way over his head.

This isn't to say I've always developed the background in advance; I've had some good develop-in-play characters as well, although that's not my preferred mode. I also occasionally find a character working out differently in play to how I'd envisaged him before the game started, especially personality-wise, which sometimes requires retrospective changes.