Bios aren't about where someone is from or about what they've done in the world, it's about who they are. You can write the bio of a 60 year old man, with laugh lines that crease his face even in his sleep and a smile that's as warm and worn as a desert mountain, without knowing anything about the world. Add a few details that add mystery, a couple other personality traits, a decent flaw, and boom: character that's independent of the world. It could be sci-fi, it could be fantasy, all you know is that he's a cheery old man with layers of scars across his back and a tendency to adopt a peculiar, almost martial, position around strangers.
Is 60 years old or young? Is this a time when laughing is plentiful or rare? Does society favor men, women, or is it well balanced? Does the reference do a desert mountains have significance in the world, or are they unknown?
I understand there are things that are "separate" from the world, but I'd rather discover most of those things about a character after they're already in it. If my character has a personality quirk of being afraid of spiders, it means very different things if there are incredibly deadly buggers out there compared to things that eat flies, and you don't often know that sort of thing till the game gets going. The exception to this, of course, is if there's a well established world that the players are already familiar with.
And this is the sort of thing that makes characters truly interesting. Consider the martial position I mentioned. Without a world, there is no way to know why he has that. Yet, I challenge you that, within ten turns of play, I will know why he stands that way. I don't know who that character is, without a world he's as enigmatic to me as he is to you, and that's the beauty of it!
Perhaps the world is one ruled by women, where men are an oppressed slave race kept as animalistic breeding stock and manual labor. Then my man is an old footsoldier, a used and discarded former weapon that's waiting for slaughter now that he's outlived his purpose. Perhaps he smiles because he knows that everything ends one day, and he'll finally be free. Perhaps he smiles because, for all the oppression and cruelty, he's still alive, the sun still shines, and he can listen to the birds sing for one more day. Perhaps he smiles because he will not be broken, and his smile is the only vengeance he has.
A good character doesn't need to be a hard and fast description of anything, it's a promise. The player promises that the character has these attributes for some reason. They don't have to know the reason now, but they will. If the backstory is plentiful, then there can be elements of the character that are made concrete in the very beginning. Otherwise, everything is a mystery that the player promises to solve later.
tl;dr: You're hitting all the selling points. Everything you mentioned is what will make the character interesting when the player figures it out, and keeping it abstract in the beginning lets the player integrate until the world without disrupting.
Look I just want to spend less than thirty seconds on the character sheet okay? Is that too much to ask?
Absolutely. You can't write a good bio in thirty seconds, period. If you aren't willing to give your neighborhood GMs good bios, you're a cruel cruel soul that deserves what they get.
Unless you get a puppy, or something else that's nice.
No way, man. Bios are exhausting to write and not generally worth it. If the player wants to write one then that's fine, but some people just want to play the game or experience the world rather than get blocked by the necessity of a purely creative wall of text. Besides, why is a long, drawn-out bio so important to a GM that it's considered cruel for a GM to not be supplied one? To me it seems cruel for a GM to require one from the players if anything.
I didn't say the character had to be a wall of text, people like me write characters like that because we're insane, not because we expect other people to do it. I never said a word about a long and drawn out bio, check the old man example I gave earlier, it would probably run about 6 lines, maybe 7 if I added more physical description. As for the cruelty, think of it this way: A GM who is writing a world is holding a city in his/her head. Hundreds of lives, friends and enemies, kings and beggars, each one with motivation and a reason to be. The GM thinks for all of them, feels for all them, is all of them. Then suddenly 6 schmucks show up that the GM can't control and have the apparent personality features of balsa wood until the players so otherwise. The GM needs to know how to react to the players, how to shape the world. You can't do that with "Aaron has red hair and likes dogs. The end.". The players need to make the GM curious about their characters, to interact with them, to explore them. After all, the GM is doing the legwork of making literally everything else interesting.
Not giving a character a bio and sticking it in a world that a GM has built from the ground up is like painting a stick figure on the Mona Lisa and claiming you're helping.
As for RTDs requiring a bio going against their very concept, that's just silly. RTDs can be anything from "Roll to Not Explode" to the epic ones like Their Coming is At Hand (I and II). The line gets blurry. Take a look at the majority of the big old RTDs that sleep in the deep pages. The leviathans, the ones longer than hundred pages, most of those require bios. A lot of the GMs that can say: "I'd like to sneeze" and have people lining up to pre-in, (Dwarmin, DigitalHellhound, SeriousConcentrate, Harry Baldman, GWG (before he went a little crazy), FFS, lawas and the list goes on farther than I can remember at one sitting) almost always require bios. Some of the really awesome ones don't, like TCM, lawas, Sean himself, etc, but RTDs require whatever the GM says they require. Nothing more, nothing less.
You also have to remember that some people want to play as normal people who decide to become adventurers. Not everyone wants to come descended from a line of heroes or have a cruel and depressing backstory.
Tragic backstories are far from mandatory. One of my favorite characters was an old man who literally cracked his leg the first time he descended a flight of stairs. Still, he had a bio. Shawn Ordo was an eight year old kid with big eyes, and that was about it until the GM gave him super powers. Normal people are great to play as, but everyone has a story, and everyone has traits that make them unique. Look at any random person on the street, and you'll find that in everything they do, in every snapshot of motion and expression, there is a character. If you have to give your character a tragic line of hero-kings with a genetic foot fetish to make them stand out, you need more personality and less history.
Just... please don't make me make a character out of whole cloth. I can't do it, and if you force me I'll either not play or just make Derm.
Nothing wrong with that in and of itself. I just don't like it that you want the GM to create a new and interesting world for you out of whole cloth when you don't even want to give them one character.
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Topic: Roller's Block (RTD Brainstorming Thread) (HAPPY LATE BIRTHDAY) (Derm is 5k) (Read 744886 times)