Backstory is unimportant for roleplay, but is important for characters (mostly).
Random people you meet in walk-up roleplay won't care about your carefully-laid tracks of childhood experiences and meaningful non-events that only happened off-camera and away from the current moment. Does anyone often find themselves rehashing about their history with people in real life? You're not roleplaying your history, you're roleplaying their current existence.
Conversely, having an idea of what your character has gone through helps keep them consistent, which is incredibly important in portraying a "living" character. Me personally, I tend to give myself a rough guideline and nothing beyond that: It doesn't matter to me what my character's parents' names were, or what he did during his teenage years. If I need to explain something, I can revisit the framework and come up with a reasonable conclusion that fits the narrative.
Note that this is not me saying that I just throw things into my backstory kits as the need arises. That's just metagaming in an unfair or attention-hogging way. More, I think that "My character grew up as the son of a carpenter" is perfectly suitable to begin roleplaying. If you suddenly find yourself needing more depth, you can provide it: "One time I helped my dad put together a house, so I'm familiar with how foundations and the like work."
Personally, I've been playing Warren for years and years and his backstory is probably five lines to summarize. It's not necessary for anything but my own framework, and if I play my character correctly I won't ever need to explain why he knows or does what he knows or does.
Random people you meet in walk-up roleplay won't care about your carefully-laid tracks of childhood experiences and meaningful non-events that only happened off-camera and away from the current moment. Does anyone often find themselves rehashing about their history with people in real life? You're not roleplaying your history, you're roleplaying their current existence.
Conversely, having an idea of what your character has gone through helps keep them consistent, which is incredibly important in portraying a "living" character. Me personally, I tend to give myself a rough guideline and nothing beyond that: It doesn't matter to me what my character's parents' names were, or what he did during his teenage years. If I need to explain something, I can revisit the framework and come up with a reasonable conclusion that fits the narrative.
Note that this is not me saying that I just throw things into my backstory kits as the need arises. That's just metagaming in an unfair or attention-hogging way. More, I think that "My character grew up as the son of a carpenter" is perfectly suitable to begin roleplaying. If you suddenly find yourself needing more depth, you can provide it: "One time I helped my dad put together a house, so I'm familiar with how foundations and the like work."
Personally, I've been playing Warren for years and years and his backstory is probably five lines to summarize. It's not necessary for anything but my own framework, and if I play my character correctly I won't ever need to explain why he knows or does what he knows or does.
![[Image: yEROfKO.png]](http://i.imgur.com/yEROfKO.png)
