“Life
isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
— George
Bernard Shaw
Lifepaths
and other background mechanics in roleplaying games help players gain
some sense of the world their characters inhabit, even if they
themselves just discovered it.
They
provide backstory and motivation, context for developing characters
over future misadventures. Few
games use them,
despite their origins in the earliest days of the roleplaying game
hobby.
Many prefer to rely on genre stereotypes to define character roles,
leaving the (often optional) job of developing a backstory to
players, if they bother at all; some fill it in during play, but most
focus on where their character is going, rather than where they’ve
been. Lifepaths and templates serve as game mechanisms
to provide some sense of a character’s past — even if only
defined in terms of stats and equipment — but offer more story
hooks to entice players to create more depth to their fictional
personae.
