Quote Originally Posted by Quertus View Post
Can you guess, as I at long last now can, why the practice of “meh, the character can always develop a personality later” bugged me from the moment I first heard it?

A lot of words to say very little? Thoughts?
Your first mistake was, I think, expecting roleplaying from a roleplaying game. Because the truth is, there are very few TTRPGs (let's focus on those and ignore other RPG types to make this discussion of bearable length) that actually have roleplaying as a part of them - DnD, the most popular one, barely pays lip service to it.

That doesn't mean that you can't roleplay in DnD, you absolutely can, as is demonstrated empirically by all the people doing it. What I mean by that is that DnD doesn't give you any framework to support that roleplaying, and that matters a lot when it comes to people who want to get into roleplaying.

Because the truth is, roleplaying is hard. It's a skill you need to learn how to do, and what DnD is doing is the equivalent of handing you a sword and saying "sharp end goes into the enemy, figure it out". Sure, that is almost always how you use a sword, but there's a reason most swordfighting manuals from 400 years ago have about a hundred pages. Which is why turning to the player and saying "make me a good backstory for your characters" doesn't work, and why writing adventures in a vacuum is very difficult from this point of view - you have no framework to even start communicating, so you need to establish it yourself.

For a TTRPG that does roleplaying, let's look at FATE - it has 5 aspects, which are short, punchy ways to describe who your PC is. The advice the system gives is to attach descriptive language to them, don't say "I fight with sword good", say why and how you fight with sword good, e.g. "Studies the sword to reach inner peace". Of those 5 aspects, one is the High concept, one is Trouble and three are for fleshing the character out.

High concept is almost the same thing as a class, but instead of "warlock", you need to make it say "Sold his soul for power to never be enslaved again". Trouble is something your character struggles with, let's go with an example of the most stereotypical "Turned to alcohol after his squad was wiped out". The remaining three can be anything you want, but the FATE rulebook basically says that you should create the character with other PCs and these three can be based around the first meeting your PCs had.

Important caveat: aspects can change. It's not really important how right now, but character development is reflected in aspects, aspects don't serve as a way to lock you down into a given personality forever.

Point is, if you were writing a module for FATE, you can make a quick chapter on what some of your PCs aspects should be at the start. And you can do it because FATE gives you a framework for communicating about the necessary building blocks of roleplaying. Compare that to DnD backgrounds, which are "eh, figure it out and pick some skills and gear to go with them", and you can see the difference.

And now, for a final blow, consider someone completely new to TTRPGs, trying to come up with a backstory. Where do you even start? How do you do it? The game doesn't help you with it, and feinitely doesn't help you roleplay that character - if anything, it hinders you, because its main focus is combat as a tactical puzzle, so you have to keep a whole bunch of not-character-related-info in mind.