Hi guys, just a quick post to see what and how to make an I depth background to a character without blabbering on and making people bored of reading?

Have it in the background.

I don't think people are entitled to reading a massive wall of text to prove "look! I make an in depth character!" You show the depth of a character by roleplaying them. Let the characters speak for themselves in regards to depth. Speaking for myself, I see no merits to appeasing someone who thinks depth is the ability to make a wall of text detailing all the things they have done (and I don't consider depth to be a superhero who destroyed 200 demons in detailed ways, by the way, as an example).

A character with a relatively boring life and background that is presented well can have considerably more depth than an emo megamaniac supermage with a hundred powers and dozens of world-saving achievements.

Does your own background for the character feel like a chore to read? It might well be too long and drawn out there at such a point. Stretching it out makes it more an effort to contend with and unless it hooks the reader, it becomes in large wasted space. As it is, it is very difficult to create such an in as it were, meaning that if it loses momentum and interest it is all but guaranteed to hold no point or matter to the majority of readers, especially on a roleplaying forum, where the reading and writing go hand in hand; you haven't the luxury of holding the reader captive, so to speak, so they can progress with reading the rest of the information.

That said, as with @ArenaSnow's suggestion, never play the entirety of your hand with a character's story. Leave elements suggesting there is more to it than said, not just cut and dry of "This happened, then they went here and then other things happened." Making details ambiguous and open allows not just for the wonders of imagination to work in your favor, but encourage a reader, rather partner or partners in this case, to work forward on it and contribute to attempting to glean and pry that information, @Zerox.

rather than describe the elements we feel should be delved into for this process, we'll do it through an example. That of a female elven warrior. No idea who she is, or what she's done. It's all done on the fly.

It's well and nice for her to be a mistress of the blade, skilled with spears, pikes and halberds, able to reliably hit the femoral arteries on orcs from a kilometer away... But that only covers skills as a warrior. Is she good at tracking? Can she cook? What's her view of young children? How does she treat dwarves and humans? How will she respond if that human companion tries to seduce her? Does she know how to read? if so, is there anything she really likes reading more than other subjects?

In the end, there's so much one can cover to make a character in-depth. If the elf is 342 years old, then there's no way you can cover her entire life in the character bio. Nor would you want to. Plot hooks in a bio are fellow players and GMs' best friends for building story.

One sort of plot hook to include is that encounter with the powerful human mage twelve years earlier. You don't actually need to cover anything beyond defining whether it was a good, bad or neutral event. The other players or the GM(s) can use that to build story from. Maybe one of the other PCs or an NPC is the mage's son or apprentice? Perhaps the mage proves to be the villain of a story arc?

Her skill at cooking might come from her father, who was made extravagant meals for the High King back when she was a naught but a child, learned over the span of seventy years. Or it could be because her mother was dead and her father was a lousy cook who could burn a salad in making it, and she had to take care of making all the edible food for her family.

She might hate dwarves, on account of how they're dirty, smelly and live underground. Or she could see them as master artisans, frequently trading with them for metallic ores, used by a smith she's known for a century and a half. Humans might be almost as disgusting, or perhaps the polished attitude and manners of that human knight might be all sorts of interesting when compared to smelly dwarves and elven men she'd known for centuries.

We would also ask why she fights the orcs. The setting might tell us why, but it could also be that it doesn't. Even if it does, we'd like to include the reason why she personally fights them. Perhaps one raped (and later killed) her mother? Perhaps her mother was transformed into one through dark magic, and she had to slay her to protect her infant brother?

Cover enough events like these, and we've not only got a decent bio, but we've got a blueprint for writing down personality, perhaps even most of her goals in life. Everything is, after all, tied together somehow. Even if one element is tied down just by a single thin thread.

God that takes me back to when I first started out and cranked out this super ambitious 4 page backstory to my character... Impressed the veterans back in the day, but I doubt most of them actually read it.

Nowadays I try to keep things simple and concise. Not every character needs a Shakespearian drama background. What's in the past hardly ever gets brought up anyway, so why waste time and energy on it?

In-depth characters and in-depth backgrounds aren't the same thing. As long as a background satisfactorily explains why the complex character is complex, it can be as simple a background as 'one paragraph summary of pre-event life, one paragraph on the event that made be complex, one paragraph of summary of life since.'

Make them a scuba diver, they'll be really in-depth then.

Show, don't tell.

<Snipped quote by Hero>
Not really, tho.

You know what I mean, damn it To properly explain myself, I should have said "don't just tell, show it", as it's pretty common to just HEAR about how mysterious and deep a character is, but never actually see an example as the story goes on.

The Harbinger of Ferocity and Ellri have the right idea. If you want to make an "in depth" bio, the best thing to do is not mention too many fine details. Depth is kind of weird, because what most people describe as depth is something that is difficult or impossible to entirely know. That goes for your bio and even how your characters act IC. While you're add it, try writing down a few odd quirks. Maybe your character slaps the frame of a door before walking through it, or draws butterflies in the dirt outside wherever they plan on sleeping. Details like that will keep readers guessing until you plan on explaining them.

Also, lool @ Arlene's article. Replacing adverbs with different adverbs doesn't make dialog exciting. and will people stop vilifying info dumps already?

and will people stop vilifying info dumps already?

Ikr, I have word walls to post and not all of them are villainous. No, not all of them.

Just adding a bit of an exception for what others brought up in regards to leaving some information to the imagination or to be a surprise, if it's something major about your character, pass your ideas by the GMs first. Personally I encourage players to PM me if they have stuff they want to keep hidden from their character sheets and thus other players, but if your character is in fact a secretly ultra rich baron who knows forbidden magic while being related to the Space Emperor with a pet dragon, I rather find out about it before the game starts so I can work with you to make your ideas work or explain why they don't fit or give an unfair advantage, and I certainly don't want to find out 10 pages in a roleplay about something I wasn't privy to.

Ellri pretty much covered the gist of what I'd recommend, but a lot of it just boils down to cause and effect and making a character be consistent and grounded. What I mean is if your character has skills or talents, briefly explore how they learned them. If your character has certain fears or interests, what happened in their life to develop that? Just keep that train of thought in mind while writing a character, even if you don't write down everyhing in the bio, you should always know how a character came to be. Give them a reason for being who they are.

Which brings me to keeping things grounded. Unless you're joining a game where it's deliberately over the top or fantastical, don't be afraid to make most of their experiences mundane. I think a lot of people get it in their heads they need to have a character who is exceptional at things because they don't want their characters to lose or be at a disadvantage, and I have seen way too many traumatic childhood stories full of dead parents and torture to wonder why the cute little hobbit girl doesn't go around dressing like Reaper.

Try giving them parents, a family. Figure out a way for them to go out into the world on their own accord and learn hard lessions from choices they make. Characters can fail and mess up, as well as have typical experiences and still be compelling. The best characters are the ones who still have room to grow and develop as people and learn new skills. A character who is always stagnant and never is forced to challenge their world view is kind of boring. Always let situations in a roleplay have the potential to offer avenues for different perspectives and growth.

For example, I have a character who was trained to be an assassin to infiltrate a king's court since his youth and he spent years undercover until ordered to act. Only when he did make the move, his attempt was botched and he accidently killed his only real friend he made while undercover and nearly died after being cut down by the guards and left for dead. Since recovering, he's vowed to never take a life again and try to earn his second chance at life and honour his slain friend. However in the roleplay where he is a part of a mercenary company trying to survive an invasion, he is constantly going through extreme situations that are driving him to take drastic actions and he is struggling with his moral code since he is seeing situations where taking a life might be necessary to protect the people he cares about and innocent people who are caught up in the war. He has so far been able to follow his personal code, and he genuinely is trying to act selflessly for others, but there may come a time where he will be forced to kill and he is terrified of that and the "old him" coming back in the name of survival. A big part of his story arc is seeing if he can maintain his sense of self and morality when the entire world seems to be falling apart, and a past he's deeply ashamed of may be better suited for him to protect the attachments he never expected to form and the oaths he has sworn.

Point I'm trying to illustrate with that character is it's good to have them be challenged and struggle because of their life experiences and morality, even if they're in a situation that contradicts what they stand for. I really feel like people gravitate to dark and edgy characters who were tormented and somehow turned into remorseless killers, and it gets really tiresome to read because those characters never have anything more than superficial depth in most cases and they never really change and adapt and every conflict is met with heaps of ultra violence or otherwise over the top aggression. Tropes and cliches can be done well and convincingly, but a big part is to try and take the setting into account and ask yourself how your character feels about certain things, and try and give them a variety of opinions and experiences that make them feel like a real person.

The last thing I want to mention is to give your characters flaws and redeeming factors. Maybe they're illiterate or suffering from an old injury, maybe their warrior's code is super inflexible or they're afraid of lightning and old people. Maybe despite being a master thief or highway man, maybe they are supporting a loved one or volunteer at a soup kitchen. Maybe they're creatures of bad habits and can't help themselves, and despite noble attempts to reform, they're prone to relapse or addicion. Don't be afraid to make things hard for your character; we all have flaws and shortcomings, and it doesn't make us any less unique or interesting as people.

I think the best way to make an indepth character is to care about them and to care about continuity. One makes you interested in knowing the reasons behind their actions, learning what they fear or truly care about, in just knowing more about them in general, which is always helpful to round out your character. The other helps you build off the setting, the people who've affected them and helps ensure they fit the story. Both help keep you invested in the rp itself, too, which is always a bonus. ;)

Writing out their backstory without making it a slog to get through is a lot trickier... I have written 30 page histories that probably no one actually read in their entirety, and I have since decided that is far too much effort for everyone involved. It takes way too long. But a good rule of thumb is to know the key events that shaped your character into who they are today. You don't need to include all of them in your write-up, though if they might affect more than your character it's always a good idea to at least check with the GM before you cement them in. It's just good to have an outline that you can build on in the rp itself.

Rule of thumb, if you don't want to get detail intensive, is to include family details (parents alive or dead, siblings? Important pets) and formative years (grew up poor or rich, tough love, no love, all of the wonderful memories or not). And then the event, or short series of events, that led to their current situation.

Depending on how much you include, this can be two to three sentences or multiple paragraphs... But it should help cut down on extraneous info, if that's what you're trying for.

It's difficult to invent a realistic, complex character completely from the depths of your own mind. What a lot of writers find easier to do is to take inspiration from real people. Real people already have their own backstories and experiences much deeper than any psychologist could take down in full. The thing is, when you inject even the outermost characteristics of these real people into your work, the very existence of these characteristics existing within your character already implies the existence of the complex backgrounds behind them as well. If you know someone in real life who is depressed, and you inject their simple real-life traits that show they are depressed into your work, your character immediately becomes more believable just by relying on certain characteristics that already have presupposed, predetermined underlying causes behind them. This is much easier than trying to understand and build upon your own idea of a depressed person from scratch. No amount of imagination is a substitute for reality. Truth is often stranger than fiction.

Also, you may have heard that adding flaws to a character makes them more believable and therefore better. It's a good start, but don't just stop there. A character is not defined by a list of 'good things' and 'bad things' about their personalities. A character, especially for RP purposes, is defined by how their interactions shape the world and how other people view them. The impression of 'good' and 'bad' traits is an arbitrary imposition of morals. What is a flaw for a certain situation could be a redeeming trait in another. What I find better as a character-builder is a list of their own set of morals and how they would react to certain situations. The rules (or lack thereof) that a character imposes upon himself or herself defines how they will interact with other RPers, and that's the more important thing in RPs. These rules can clash, develop, or be destroyed. Remember, the best stories usually advance a character and not necessarily a plot.