One more bit of advice I would suggest to people regarding their character's history is to not get too bogged down with it. I've seen far too many (myself included when I started to RP) not actually RP because their history wasn't "done." It's understandable that you want to know who your character is before you get started, but a lot of people spend so much time thinking of who their character was that they never really figure out who their character is now.

My best RP toon, and the one who I'ver written over a thousand pages (really) of stories and in game RP for is one who I started out with only the basic of history for. I came up with a character concept that I really loved, along with a loose history, and just jumped in and started RPing with her. Over the years, I've really come to love getting to know this character. What I started with was, "Anti-authority paladin." From there, I decided that my character had a Farstrider father who was very demanding and wanted her to follow in his footsteps. She rebelled against him. During the attack on Silvermoon by Arthas, she lost all her friends. She became a blood knight to fight back. And that's really all I had to start RPing on.

I've had tons more fun RPing on her than I have on any of my toons that had a detailed history mapped out. I'm really a believer that the concept of your character is more important than their history. So yeah, my advice is to not obsess about crafting a perfect history. You can always figure out their history as you go along, uncovering reasons why your character acts the way they do. Tends to be more fun to discover these things than to force them, in my experience. :)

Reply