Xenon wrote...
Jericho Antares wrote...
A flood of powerful "avatar" OCs also tends to turn an interaction-based progression (RP) into a clamor of the avatars each trying to be that main character spot, since any writer with an avatar character would put them as the protagonist in a literary work. In the end you have a collection of characters that each have those protagonist traits (family killed, close friends killed, orphaned by parental choice, etc).
This makes all the backgrounds kind of smudge together for each character, and traumatic experiences that would be spread out through a cast get contained into one person five or six times over.
A spot-on analysis, considering my first avatar was orphaned and then had his love interest murdered and my second murdered his parents. What the fuck, right? You learn things after a period of time, mainly that realism is so much more practical.
I just like the depth that comes with having a less all-in-one character. The things that define each real person are ridiculously intangible and we are vastly different to begin with even if our parents weren't murdered and we didn't have to survive on the streets.
An example of my preferred background is: "He contains the spirit of an outdoorsman and an unquenchable wanderlust, a frantic notion borne from clinging to the days he went camping with his father, who had passed away when (insert name here) was but five years old. Though when asked of his father he voices nothing but hate, he still quietly holds on to the last shreds of memory he has: A wispy figure, a half-forgotten smile, and the smell of the great outdoors."
The above is my background (at least one facet of it), and everything within is true. It's nothing super insane or eye catching, but you don't need to have a ridiculous past to be a complete person.
I do realize that if a background were written in the above fashion it would be very long, but if you are creating a character without even thinking about the world, I'd hope the more in-depth and ultimately more interesting character would be worth it.