Character biographies

Been thinking of pushing this subject with the rest of the staff. Right now, I'm considering asking the crowder PCs to post their bios in the bad crowd forums.

"You can't unread something and a backstory can and will give you insight into a character, things you shouldn't necessarily have when meeting them as a complete stranger IC. It's indirectly opening a Pandora's Box for metagaming, and also in some cases some people love to just use their Bio as an excuse to tell the epic story they want to tell, regardless of the setting and its feasibility. Why their Big Damn Hero is suddenly a scrub getting his ass kicked by Deaders, the world may never know, but dammit, he is the most feared thief in all the Cassian Republic, he swears!"

That's fucking retarded and incredibly disrespectful to your players. I have yet to see any encounter even on other servers where someone already knows a character's background in-character just because the player read it on the forums. I've never had any problems with people metagaming a written story, especially because the in-character telling of the tale is often so much better - and I only knew a handful of people on Dalelands, for example, that even bothered to read the biographies. Some players enjoy writing their backstories and posting them for others to share in - to deny half of the playerbase that opportunity on the chance that, "Oh, they're all fuckwits and MIGHT metagame this information even though such a thing would have absolutely zero bearing on anything important to the server plotline" is absurd.

I can see both sides of this. What I don't see is where anyone here deserved to be called fucktarded and spoken to harshly.

I think letting people post BIOs privately into their factions is a good compromise between open bios and no bios at all.

As clarification, this is really two different issues:

1. Creating a section on the forums to write the character's backstory for people to read at their leisure.

2. Implementing some sort of in-game inspection window where you can describe what your character looks like for others to see.

#1 might be helpful to DMs in understanding the types of characters they have in their factions / events, perhaps even giving them some ideas. That is supposedly the use they have on other servers.

#2 is vital to RP, in my opinion. Character models in-game can only go so far in portraying what your character looks like. Its also considered "bad form" to dump your character's backstory into an in-game description of your character.

I don't think much of forum biographies personally, but it is a small of effort on the staff's part to drop a forum for them if they decide they want to.



OMG ys pls In game Description editor plsplsplsplxplxplxplox


Portraits are unnecessary, the description is the important part!