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Aroka
2010-08-04, 06:19 PM
I'm looking for a good, functional, tight format for biographies for premade PCs - any suggestions? It should fit enough info to get a handle on the character's looks, personality, motivation, and background, but doesn't need to be very thorough (I'm not into long backgrounds; history made in the game is always better than history brought into the game; plus I'm going with "blank checks", where PCs get to fill out details on established contacts during play in a "hey, I know this guy" way).

Right now, I'm thinking about something along the lines of a set of questions with first-person answers ("Who am I? What do I look like? What is important?"). They should be broad enough that I can use the same questions for all the characters and still cover everything that's important about them.

Any ideas? What format do you use?

DabblerWizard
2010-08-05, 07:06 AM
It sounds like you want help creating backgrounds for pre-made characters and you're hoping for some questions to get you started?

http://www.miniworld.com/adnd/100ThingsAboutUrPCBackGround.html

The above website provides some great starter questions for players creating PCs, and should be entirely useful in your case as well.

I would just pick and choose the questions I like, and go from there.

Aroka
2010-08-05, 09:22 AM
Kind of. I'm really mainly curious about the formats people use to provide info on premade PCs. For instance, I really like the premade PC short bios in RuneQuest's River of Cradles - a series of questions with one-paragraph answers (or sets of questions, like "Who am I? Where do I come from? Who are my family?"). I used something like that in a RuneQuest campaign almost 15 years ago, but the questions themselves aren't all that useful.

I'm specifically looking for a compact way to present the maximum amount of relevant information. The 100 questions are decent inspiration, but so many of them are of questionable value, completely pointless, or specifically not something I need to decide for premade PCs.