Quote Originally Posted by Tanarii View Post
Fair enough. My post came across as more judgmental against avatars and one dimensional characters than intended. But if you want to encourage complex characters, especially among new to roleplaying players but also even with experienced players, suggesting a couple of categories of motivations/personality traits as starting places to think about, and encouraging explicitly listing them as opposed to burying them in a backstory, can be useful.
I get that it supposed to work like that and maybe sometimes it even does work, but it really seems a lot of potential problems with little advantages. I think "write down a couple of words that describe your character" is almost as fast and much less potentially problematic than "pick one of these nine categories that manages to somehow be both too vague and too confining".

That said, having like a list with suggestions for motivations or personality traits could probably be kind of useful for some people. It's the idea of turning them into distinct groups and making them an objective reality of the setting that bothers me.