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I’ve been a roleplayer since I was 13. In the beginning I had no regular group, so I spent my time talking to people on online forums, going to gaming conventions, and mostly writing. That’s how I developed most of my writing skills – which later turned out to be useful in my actual work.
I wrote entire settings, adventures, and characters. Back then I was a committed supporter of freeform roleplaying and detailed character backgrounds. Each character came with pages of backstory, family history, personality, opinions. Most of them never saw any real play.
Weirdly, while I ran many convention games at that time, I didn’t apply the same approach to the pre-generated characters I made for those games. I usually wrote one paragraph, half a page at most, then let the players at my table develop those characters however they wanted during the session.
In high school I got into a regular group, and we played together for about three years. I still wrote detailed backgrounds for my characters, but they mostly existed as a story only I cared about. My group members created backstories too, but only enough to fit the campaign. In any case, the stories we built together during sessions were usually more interesting than anything I’d written on my own.
It wasn’t until several years later that I started leaning toward building character backgrounds during play rather than before it. Over the last couple of years, as I’ve expanded my games collection, I’ve found systems that build this directly into their design.
Traveller is probably the oldest example. The various editions of Traveller use a more-or-less random character generation system that doesn’t just determine your skills and abilities – it generates events from your career and even connections to other party members. In the original version, you could die during character generation.
A more recent example is the Apocalypse World Engine games, including my system of choice, Dungeon World (which we published in Hebrew). AWE games suggest describing your character in no more than one sentence at the start, built from the choices you made during creation.
In a DW group I played in last year, my character was a bard named Hispitz, son of Klaus. My entire concept came from a single choice during character creation: under the “gear” section it says “Choose one instrument”, with one option being “Your father’s mandolin, repaired”. I chose it and decided the mandolin was my dad’s because he was dead. That was the whole backstory when we started playing.
Another example: a Wizard in the same group had a magic book he’d stolen from his old master, which by the first session had already become central to the campaign. He cast a telepathy spell on me trying to find information about a mysterious “yellow-caped man” – someone I didn’t even know I’d met. But mid-scene, I decided: that’s the man who killed my father. A bit later we found out the yellow-caped man was also the Wizard’s old master, and suddenly our bond meant something. And we’d built all of that in the first session, because the DW guidelines push you to explore the group’s shared past together. One character took a bond with me that read “This is not my first adventure with…” and we didn’t define what that meant during character creation – we built on it during play. When the Wizard tried to use the Aid move to help me fight someone, the GM asked “How can you help him fight?” The Wizard said, “I remind him of another fight we had while adventuring together.” BAM. Canon.
This approach isn’t limited to systems that build it into their mechanics. These days I prefer it in most games I play. I like to know what my character can do mechanically before I create a background to justify it. Sometimes it’s because I’m new to a game and don’t have a clear idea of what I want to be, so I explore the options and build a character I’ll enjoy playing mechanically.
A recent example: I played in a short superhero game using the Hero System 6th edition rules. All I knew was that I wanted to play a mentalist. I sat with the GM and we went through different options. An hour later, when we were done, I already knew who this character was – the story had emerged from the specific mechanical choices I’d made.
Another example is a game I’m currently playing. I joined a group mid-campaign, playing the Wrath of the Righteous Pathfinder adventure path. They’d finished the first adventure and I was joining for the second. The first thing I asked before creating my character was “What does the group need?” – meaning, what mechanical role is missing? Turned out it was a healer, so I looked at divine classes and eventually picked the Oracle.
Beyond healing, I wasn’t concerned about optimisation. I looked at the Oracle mysteries and picked Time – partly because I’ve always been drawn to temporal effects, teleportation, and genetic memory as concepts. And again, like with Hispitz, that choice ended up defining the character.
I decided that as an Oracle of Time, my character would be plagued with visions and memories from different eras. Every spell would have a time-related interpretation: my summoning spell didn’t bring something from another plane, but from another time. My cure spell didn’t heal – it rewound the wound locally, so it had never existed. I took the “Wasting” Oracle curse and explained it as rapid aging – my body already starting to decay.
That became a running joke in the group. Whenever I said something, nobody was sure if I was talking about the past, present, or future. And every time something happened, my character had already foreseen it.
One habit our group has is “Question of the Week”: after each session, someone sends a question about that session’s events, and each of us answers in character. That helped me expand the character beyond healer-and-time-joke. I started exploring who he was before he became an Oracle – it turned out he’d been a geologist, leading groups of dwarven miners deep underground to find rare minerals. And the cool thing was, nobody could be sure whether that was actually his history, or one of his ancestors’, or something that hadn’t happened yet.
Developing a character’s background during play rather than before it is one of the best things tabletop RPGs can do. You’re not playing alone, and watching your character get shaped by other people – and shaping theirs in return – is something you don’t get from writing pages of backstory by yourself. The sessions do that work better than you can on your own.