Character Bios

A bio is not important to me for playing a character, but I like to come up with something funny or entertaining for people to look at so I will eventually add one. Few of my long-played characters are without any bio at all, although sometimes there isn't much there. I do get compliments on my bios fairly often though (on the characters that actually have something written there.)

Two of my current characters are pacted. The one I've mostly played for 43 levels has a rambling bio about a fight with hellions over a chess game, and how it lead to special training under "Sensei Guido" and later she thrashed the lead hellion 3 games to none... using the Sicilian defense, or something like that, and then ran the hellion in for kidnapping and attempted murder, but they still play chess by mail. It's meant to be funny and a little surreal, and I've got a few compliments on it being very original.

The other character has a much more obvious background, she's "Valkyrie of Atlantis" but I haven't come up with a good bio yet (didn't play her much until recently). Right now it says, "She's like a fish out of water..." but that's just a holder until I think up something better.

ATM 3 or 4. but thats cos i still havent finished wrting up the bios for everyone else. takes time n effort, sometimes of which i cant be borthered with lol

Of my Characters, I'd say not even 10% of them have a Bio description of any kind. A good number of my Characters have something of a background mentally though.

/side track - rant
While I understand the desire for the Bio box, I personally don't care for it generally. I know I've upset a number of RPers with the previous statement.

While sometimes I find the Bios given interesting, if I look at them, It's just one extra tab I click on when I'm looking at a Character's Info.

I guess my feeling about this also stems from players who run Costume Contests and require Bios as part of how they judge entrants. How does a Bio help with the costume? It doesn't!
The Bio just a RP tool that has nothing to with a Characters visual aspect, which is what a costume contest is about.
/side track - rant

For me, a bio is usually the last, if even considered, thing when I create a Character. What draws me to creating a Character is usually a visual thing or a powerset makeup that sparks interest to me. That to me is more important than a 1024 Character description.

Thank you for the time...

@Travlr (Main) / @Tymers Realm (Test)

Nearly all of my characters start as a concept. I might play one more than another because of their powers or what have you, but they all begin as generally an idea of the person, why they're a hero or villain and usually I've some idea of the type of costume they'll wear (one or two have started simply as costumes I'd wanted to run around the city in, and I've developed them from there) but I often get lazy and don't end up writing the bio. All my main characters have one though.

I would say that around 30% of my toons have bios. Honestly, bios have very little to do with whether or not I enjoy them, although I do have some bios that I absolutely love. One of my favorites is also one of the simplest. He's a stalker and his bio goes like this...

If you can read this you're already dead. -Silencer-

To parallel much of what has been said, I have bios on each and all of my characters (over 120).

A fair portion of my characters are ones I drew up from my youth when I used to draw and make my own heroes from scratch. I'd written their bios as part of an info sheet I had with each drawing, and for the most part, have closely related bios for the ones I now use in-game (updated for the times, the CoH lore, and improved writing/description styles after years of English classes).

On occassion, I'll update or modify the bios if I have taken the character down a particular path, i.e., now has the Circle of Thorns as his sworn enemy, etc.

I have truly enjoyed using the bios on my characters to simply allow more depth and meaning for the characters' personas, and as such, make them more meaningful to play. ALthough I have many alts, I'll always go back to a toon and run them for awhile simply due to the fact that I love the character's backstory or premise.

I tried to make characters without bios, just to see if I could do piecemeal updates as they leveled, hoping that would create a stronger desire to play them more often, but I'd usually delete the toons in short span instead.

Although I'm not a big RPer, a couple of buddies and I have used our bios as premise for our interaction when we team. An example of one is a character of mine called Irish Fighter (Protector), who is a slow-aging SS/Invul mutant that fought alongside other heroes during WWII. As such, my buddies constantly call him 'old man' when we're chatting in-game. Makes it that much enjoyable.

My only "problem" with the bio box is that, for RP purposes, most of what people put in there wouldn't be known to people just passing by, even if the hero was famous.

*shrug* Most are interesting to read though and add more to my enjoyment to the game than they subtract by giving info I shouldn't know... And I suppose a good RP would just ignore what they wouldn't know anyway.

All of my characters on Virtue have bios. Of the few that languish unused over on Infinity, I think half have bios.

Most of my characters have bios, some of them being brief and some being epic. I usually never write the bio upon their creation though. I like to play with them for a little while to get a feel for who they are and what they do, then I'll be able to envision their back story. I almost never create a character with a back story in mind. I just whip up the toon and let my imagination take over after the fact.

Any character I consider a "keeper" has a bio, and if I have a decent idea for one, I write it as part of character creation. However, I don't care if anyone else reads the character's background, because I wrote it for my own enjoyment.

All of 'em.
If I can't think of a decent backstory, and if it's not a character I could RP, I don't make it.

Sure there are edits, changes and, in the case of my first toon, major retcons
(He was originally from a world attacked by Rikti and, despite being a robot, had two Kheldians merged with him. Now he's a warrior/scientist in the wrong galaxy, but determined to help out)

I don't mind the running out of space in biogs. I DO mind how borked the text boxes are atm. Ever since I14, sadly =/

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

You know what I wish this game had as a feature?

And maybe this would be too difficult to engineer at this point but, I wish there was a game-to-Web digesting function. This function would scan all the registered characters on all the servers, give us a full body screenshot of each and output all the bios, or lack thereof, to text on Web pages. Then I could see who had the cool bios and cool designs without all the clicking and crowd watching I sometimes wish I had the time to do in the game.

Not really a formal suggestion. Just a vague idea really.

100% of my characters have a bio.

I may be odd in this, but when I'm thinking of powers and what I'd like, I make a character based upon the story that comes to mind. Unsurprisingly, the story becomes their bio.

I'd say about half of my character have typed bios. For the rest I either A) can't come up with anything or B) am too lazy to write it out. However, nowadays I rarely make a character without a concept and most of the ones that don't have anything are from way back when I first started the game.

Most of the time I go with the typical origin story style, but occasionally I use:

1) The reason they decided to become a hero/villain (with no indication of how they got their powers)

2) A monologue - The character describing himself/herself to the reader. This was especially fun for my Freakshow turned hero, as he talks in half English and half 1337.

3) One of my personal favorites is a bio written as if the reader has seen the character before. She is a woman that was attacked on the streets and ended up in a coma. That triggered a mutation that lets her mind manifest itself as a hero to track down the thugs that attacked her. The bio reads as if the reader saw the story of the attack on the news and is trying to figure out where she got the powers and how it's possible to fight crime while in a coma.

4) While not used often, sometimes I'll just put a few lines as filler until I come up with something better. My favorite use of this was Robotic Pirate Ghost, whose bio simply read: "He's a robot. He's a pirate. And he's a ghost. What more do you need to know?" While I really liked the simplicity of that one, his bio has since had an upgrade and even has tie-ins to future characters to be created when GR comes out.

I was pretty good at starting with a bio for a while. Then I switched to a “Bio to follow” note, rarely ever filling anything in still. And now more often than not I'll just put an MRP note and -maybe- an RP note or two.


I have three bios I'm happy with (out of about 10 characters I play regularly) but sadly the best one is for a character I don't even play much anymore. Out of the others I have, I am fond of a robot character whose AFK typing message (“Loading”) and bio (Something like “Destroy all humans!” which is like 3 or 4 lines long after conversion) are in binary.

good luck D.B.B.

For most of my characters, a quick bio will be made up for them on their creation. It doesn't matter if it's short, it works as the backbones as to who the person is, and will most likely get expanded.

For others, their bio may come a little while after their creation, when inspiration hits, and sometimes, they'll get their signature uniform changed due to this.

For almost all though, they'll have to somehow join my relationship tree in my head from any angle, even if it's minor.

And putting it to paper gets me this...






Before you ask, yes, it does get a bit confusing. :3