Written Character Histories are Evil

At the very beginning of this blog I talked through all the major points people run into on character creation. I started from conception to appearances, then histories, and finally personalities, but I’d like to revisit the history section today. When I first discussed it, I pushed away from the idea that many larger roleplays press, which states that longer histories are indicative of a more thought-out character. To a gauge a character’s depth on the author’s ability to summon an encyclopedia’s volume of information for their 20 year old character is obviously dumb, but it may be worse than that.

The more I think about it, the more I become convinced that character histories are, in fact, quite evil. When I say character histories, though, I should be clear that I mean written ones. Every character, even if you roleplayed a creature created immediately before the RP, has a history or biography. You, as the writer, should know your character’s history at least loosely, but I think asking roleplayers to write one up is a mistake.

Thankfully here I have a pretty closed, safe environment, but if I took this idea to a large forum and suggested it, I would likely be branded as an idiot or, simply, a bad roleplayer. I may be both those things, but I think this point has a great amount of merit despite being controversial. So why would I say such a seemingly backward thing?

It turns out I can think of a lot of reasons.

It Demands Characters Start Developed

When a character is created, a pressure exists when writing the history of the character. Roleplayers have learned, whether explicitly or implicitly, that characters are better received if the roleplayer doesn’t look lazy.  People get concerned about this, so they look for ways to appear above it, and what better place to do that than a history?

If you simply write, “John is a boy who grew up in an average, middle class family. When he graduated high school he realized that college was unaffordable and not even in his scope of interest; he took up welding as his trade, having natural skill with it.” People would crucify you, and it sucks that it’s the case.

There’s no reason a character should need to start radically developed. I’m not saying you can’t, but calling for a lengthy character history all but demands it. That isn’t good. If the ‘objective’ of roleplaying (beyond just having fun or writing an interesting story) is character development, then the character sheet robs you of much of that. Furthermore, it also heavily inspires Special Snowflakes. If you feel like your 20-something character needs to have a lot of depth, he could very quickly become unbelievably unique in his respective world.

It Tells Instead of Shows

Even if a character has a detailed past, and it has significance for their present status, it still only tells the reader instead of showing them. Naturally there’s no way to “show” someone your character's entire history short of time traveling or lengthy flashbacks, both of which are annoying, but you can certainly “show” the significance inside the roleplay.

If your character has severe emotional problems because of something they experienced growing up, how much more effective is it to simply show that damage in a roleplay? Now, you may say, “Why can’t I do both? Can’t I tell them in a biography and then still show them in a roleplay?” The answer is that yeah, you can, but it won’t be as effective. If you’ve already told them about the traumatic experience, then showing them simply reinforces it instead of introducing it.

For example, if a character has a deep friendship with another character and you tell the reader or other roleplayer that, showing it in a roleplay merely says, “I’m following what I already said was true.” It takes considerably longer for the reader to understand and appreciate the depth of what you told them. In essence, first impressions are key, because they establish the rest. A written history starts you on the wrong foot.

It Allows Unconscious Meta-Gaming

Meta-gaming, like God-moding, is something that people quickly learn to not blatantly do, but that doesn’t mean you’ve eliminated the problem. When the reader already has the entire backstory to a character, it eliminates any sense of mystery or intrigue relating to them. Seeing how self-centered people are when roleplaying, it becomes really hard for them to go, “Okay, I know the story behind the guy I’m RPing with, but my character doesn’t—would they be asking questions at this point?”

I did a roleplay not terribly long ago where my character interacted with another person who was very notably far away from home. In that character’s history, I knew that they’d been moved by magic, against their will, to this location far away, but my character didn’t know that. But you know what? I never bothered to have my character ask the obvious question. That was meta-gaming of me, because if it had been an actual mystery to me, both IC and OOC, I would have certainly asked. It was my fault, but the character biography prompted it.

It Creates a False Sense of Completion

I’ve addressed this before, so I’ll be brief on this one. A written character backstory creates a false sense of completion that incorrectly tells the writer they’ve completed something. How many characters have you written with huge backstories that you never roleplayed? Or only once? I can count several, personally. A lot of that was because I was so worn out after the history or because I had entombed myself in so much character development that there wasn’t anything left to roleplay. Bummer.

The Benefits are Small

For all the time it takes to create a history, and all the reasons I listed above that are damaging, character histories still prove to offer almost nothing useful. At best you can say that it forces people to look more deeply at their character sheet, hopefully eliminating lazy characters, but that’s still a pretty hard sell. Writing a long history is not hard—it’s not even terribly hard to write a good one—so it’s not much of a test for the writer’s quality. And even if it were, then so what?

Pretty much all benefits of the character sheet including a history are nullified by bigger problems. Here’s a few:

If not Useless, then Hard to Get

As a roleplayer, by the law of meta-gaming, 99% of the information supplied in the history is automatically off limits. You might have said that the history provides benefits because it informs the roleplayer, but to what point and end? If your character knows anything about the other person’s history, except in special occasions, then you’ve already broken a handful of rules, not to mention the fun of it. Most roleplays don’t let your character start out with a lot of renown (Savior of a village, hero of the north, etc.) so there’s almost no reason you need the other writer to know it OOCly. All it does is lead to meta-gaming, even if unintentional.

On some occasions, there is information in the history that’s useful for the roleplay. Things like profession, relations (organizations, families, and so on), or maybe their current location are all things that may be useful to know. But the problem is that when you swamp the reader with 45 paragraphs of backstory, getting to the useful things is a chore at best. You’d be much better served by just having the roleplayer lay that information in their own small sections near other handy information like their age, sex, nationality, and so on.

Narcissism

I doubt many people would admit to it, but a lot of folks like histories on a character sheet because it basically is free reign to show off. Similar to a false sense of completion, it allows the writer to go “Look at how well crafted my story is” without doing anything at all to contribute to the roleplay. Immediately, because they have a nice fat history, a sense spawns that, indeed, they’ve created a great character. Maybe they have, but you’re certainly not going to know from a fifteen page history—or even a one paragraph history, really. All it really does is allow the roleplayer to preen publicly. They’ve been given license to write and write and write and then display it with pride. Too bad no one cares except the smothered staff member who has to grade the thing.

More Likely to Restrict than Release

Others will argue that the history allows the roleplayer to spend time with their character, learning them and fleshing them out before they get into the roleplay. But the reality is, unless your history is basically just one big flashback written like a roleplay (please, please don’t) then you’re really not learning much about your character except what they can no longer be.

It’s very common for people to write characters and then realize that they roleplay differently than they’d thought. On paper the character is one thing, but in action they’re another, and all the history does is go “Too bad.”

Okay, the roleplayer should know their character’s history, that’s a given, but they should also be able to change it if it doesn’t work out. By revealing the character slowly, they’re afforded the opportunity to go “Oh, it wouldn’t make sense if her father died in this way, because they act more like…” And so on. By not revealing the history all at once, the roleplayer is better served because they can reveal things as they feel confident about them, allowing the character to be less synthetic.

The Takeaway

It’s unlikely your character is going to get accepted on many RP sites if you simply refuse to fill out the “History” portion, unfortunately, and you’ll most likely just look like a pretentious jerkbag or a lazy fool. But in all honesty, I would say people should avoid writing down their character histories—especially publicly; I can understand if you need to make notes for yourself to remember everything, but you don’t need the whole RPing community to know.

However, since this isn’t often an option you can take, I would say be careful of what you show. If you can, keep things slim and vague. You’re going to draw some attention because it’s not long, but the guy who judges you on that can go ahead and get over himself. If you’re running into walls of “Your history must be ‘This Tall’ to go on this ride” then you might just be on the wrong RP site to begin with.

Keep your characters open ended—it’s more compelling for you to write and for the other person to read about!