When Do You Create A Bio . . . And Why?

[Lunchmoney]

4 hours ago, America's Angel said:

I like to create a little shared universe for all my characters.

I did similar for several of my toons on live. https://cit.cohtitan.com/profile/9869 The characters Purple Clown, Purple Electron, Purple Atom, Purple Experiment and Purple Result are all the same character just at different points in it's existence. 

[RebornRose]

What a fascinating topic!  I love the diversity of answers, and being able to see parts of my process reflected in the processes of others.

 

Most of my characters have a bio story, even if I haven't posted it in the biography space*.  I'm a bit of a perfectionist about my delivery though, so I often go through many revisions before the story is "ready for print".  

 

Like a few other posters have said, most of my characters are connected and share the same universe-well I suppose it's a multiverse, seeing as there are five shards. Right now some only exist as vaporware in my head, while several more exist as in-game charactets, but waiting are in the "bio" queue.  At some point, I will achieve my goal of giving each character a bio that suits them, and then I can...create a new concept😁.

 

*I was gonna complain about the size of the biography field, which is too small and can get wonky with formatting, but then I remembered that DCUO doesn't even give you the option of creating an in-game bio for your characters, and decided to not to.

[MWRuger]

I always create bios for my characters, usually as soon as I start playing them.  I usually write them in Word, edit them to fit into the wholly inadequate text editor that CoH provides. Once i decide on a final costume, I take screen shots and save it as a word document. I probably have 150+ characters between live and now.

For me, bio creation is very easy and enjoyable and essential to my play of the character. But I've been reading comics since the late 60's, roleplaying since the 70's and storytelling my entire life, so your mileage my vary.

If you really want a Bio, I can help. Back on Live I used to write bios for people who got stuck.

 

[lemming]

A lot of my chars are based on song titles and I'll paste some of the lyrics.

The ones from TTRPG have pretty extensive origins, but only a smattering gets here.

 

Some get more bio the more I play them.  Then again, that's how my TTRPG characters got bios, more developed, the more they got played.

[Placta]

I usually write a bio before I make the character. At the very least, I need a "real" name so I can come up with the hero name, and while I'm coming up with that I generally come up with at least the frame of a story I can have in there until I can figure out the rest of it.

[Bopper]

When Do You Create A Bio . . . And Why?

 

Whenever I take a bio break... usually because I had coffee.

 

[Xenosone]

6 hours ago, Dahkness said:

When I reach vet lvl 100. Then I know I like this character. It’s usually a one liner… Hail Satan. 

Lord Recluse scoffs at your Satan. May Recluse reign eternal.

[Ghost]

I’ve never tried copy/paste - maybe I should.

 

I usually come up with the background by level 20, after playing the character a bit.

 

Ive had the first sentence start halfway down the page - have no clue why.  Actually deleted a character out of frustration over this because I couldn’t fix it.

Triple line breaks when I was only trying to start a new sentence.  
Entire sentences deleted while trying to delete one letter.

The ability to actually navigate the “page” drives me crazy - Can’t always move the cursor in the right direction. 
 

Ive never understood why the original developers tried to make it more than just a simple notepad.

Edited July 4, 2021 by Ghost

[Snarky]

usually after a really big meal i need a bio

[Outrider_01]

Depends, I usually have a concept but not a backstory.  Sometimes the concept creates the backstory, have a few characters I find some theme (twisted and crazy mind or plague) then roll with it in a poem I scrapped from the internew then changed to suit my needs.  Feels like a monster or hero sung out of an old song that nobody believes in, yet the song exists for a reason.

[Shred Monkey]

I build my toons over the course of leveling to 50.  I change costumes and often change names as I go.  Usually they're settled in to a final name and costume before 50... but they may not have a backstory yet.  I'll almost always fill that in eventually, unless it becomes a toon that just gets shelved because I'm disappointed in them.  And the Bio comes last.  The Bio usually is written from the perspective of the backstory, so it doesn't tell the whole story, it just introduces... more like the opening paragraph of a novel, rather then a summary of the novel.

 

 

[ZekeStenzland]

I generally have a bio in mind when I create a character, but…

 

First, sometimes it can be tricky to trim it down to the character limit. If it doesn’t fit the first time, I prefer to let the bio percolate for a bit. 
 

Second, the rich text editor is still fairly buggy. Often I find that the only way to get out of weird states is to exit the editor back to the logged in character and try again. Which you can’t do when you’re creating the character. 
 

So while almost all of my characters have a bio, you can’t always see it in game. 

[Dusty Longshot]

All my characters have backstories...some small, some too large to put on the I.D.

But there is not a single characters that I create "just for fun". There has to be a reason for this hero (or villain) to exist.

Over the years these backstories have developed and little details have changed, but the overall story stays the same.

 

My main for example, Star Jewel (Energy/Energy Blaster), she was born with her powers but they only started manifesting around the age of 4.

And it wasn't until she was halfway through 16 when she actually (yet accidentally) used her powers. Which forced her to leave school and move to Paragon City. (No, she wasn't born there). She wasn't even registered as a hero a few years after moving there and being trained.

 

Her sister, Mystfury (Storm/Elec Defender), wasn't born with powers. She didn't even choose to have powers, they were forced on her by the Circle of Thorns when she got kidnapped by them while visiting her sister in Paragon City. Her backstory is dark and terrifying.

 

Then there are Emberflair (Fire/Psi Dominator) and Omegamax (SJ/EA Brute), both in their teens when they got their powers from magic space stones. Think Power Rangers meets Avengers Infinity War. There are 6 stones made of some exotic magic substance, each having a specific set of powers. Some big bad creature wants all 6 stones. Some old wizard from another planet tries to protect them. He loses 3 and brings the others to Earth. Emberflair and Omegamax find the wizard and the 3 stones. They merge with 2 and gain powers.

Their I.D.'s show nearly similar stories with only minor differences as they are told from their perspective.

 

Miss Unity (SS/WP Brute), similar to Captain America's origin, was created around WWII using science and tech. But she's not from the U.S., she is Europe's Super-Soldier. Working for the resistance during WWII she was nearly killed during a transport mission. Rescued by fellow resistance fighters and brought to a lab where she would become a super soldier voluntarily.

 

Lumitia (Ill/Rad Controller), alien princess, not of Earth, daughter of an emperor. Wanted to secretly study life on Earth but crashed instead. Earth's atmosphere changed her cell structure giving her the ability to manipulate light. She's an Illusion controller. Also, she's being "hunted" by the emperor's guards who need to take her home.

 

Novaspark (Peacebringer), daughter of Star Jewel and (unknown male), she inherited part of her mother's powers.

 

Dawnshade (Dark/Dark Dominator), orphan who was experimented on by a mad scientist.

 

And I could go on for a while, but this reply is already a whole lot longer than I planned. But you get the idea.

 

Edited July 6, 2021 by retrobytz

[Coyotedancer]

My Excelsior "bird things" don't have bios and never will. I know who they are and why they do what they do, but I avoid roleplay with them like the proverbial plague, so there's really no point in wasting any time fighting with the game's text interface to drop in details that don't matter. It would be more useful on that server to list the characters' combat stats and speed-run times, but honestly I haven't bothered to do that either. 

 

The rest of my characters, who are on Everlasting, do all tend to get a biography at some point. Usually that happens some time after I've spent awhile playing them. I only do casual, mission team roleplaying these days, but even with that, having at least a short bio is expected practice and it can save me from having to explain OOC for the twenty-seventh time this week that, yes, my player character Oranbegan really is a Madness Mage, and yes, he has a good reason for not trying to feed your goodie two-shoes heroes to his pet demon.

 

Call it a biography of convenience as much as anything.

 

 

Edited July 6, 2021 by Coyotedancer

[Clave Dark 5]

On 7/4/2021 at 12:06 AM, Ghost said:

If the bio system actually worked, I would have one written for all my toons - I’ve already got their backstories in my head, I just hate dealing with the current system.

 

OK, I'll bite, how does it not work?

 

My answer for the posted question: most of mine have one, even if it's a half-assed joke (which I have gotten "good job!"s on anyway).  I generally have to have some sort of idea for the character anyway before I make them, I just do not hop on and think I need a Time/DP defender, hit the random button and go.

[Ghost]

delete

 

Edited July 6, 2021 by Ghost

[Ghost]

30 minutes ago, Clave Dark 5 said:

OK, I'll bite, how does it not work?

 

My answer for the posted question: most of mine have one, even if it's a half-assed joke (which I have gotten "good job!"s on anyway).  I generally have to have some sort of idea for the character anyway before I make them, I just do not hop on and think I need a Time/DP defender, hit the random button and go.

 

Not sure why you dont have issues with it - but a few problems I've run into, that I posted about earlier

 

 

 

On 7/4/2021 at 4:45 PM, Ghost said:

 

 

Ive had the first sentence start halfway down the page - have no clue why.  Actually deleted a character out of frustration over this because I couldn’t fix it.

Triple line breaks when I was only trying to start a new sentence.  
Entire sentences deleted while trying to delete one letter.

The ability to actually navigate the “page” drives me crazy - Can’t always move the cursor in the right direction. 
 

 

 

[Clave Dark 5]

Yeah, I don't recall having seen any of that.  I don't edit them too often but I did edit one just yesterday and it all seemed to go just fine.

[DoctorDitko]

39 minutes ago, Ghost said:

Ive had the first sentence start halfway down the page - have no clue why.

One of the first word processors I used, Bank Street Writer maybe, did this. My writer's group settled on the idea that this was "So you can see the stuff you haven't written yet."

 

I know runs of spaces are infamous for adding invisible non-breaking spaces between each successive space character, presumably as a work-around for something in the parser. AFAIK that was a hack because HTML otherwise combined them, but that can definitely be a cause for the also infamous shrinking character limit problem.

 

I tend to avoid most of the editing issues by writing my stuff in Notepad++ (playing) or vim (at work), then using the copy-pasta.

 

Pre-snap, I recall seeing the occasional player with a bio of "." presumably because they thought it was a required field.

[ZekeStenzland]

4 hours ago, Clave Dark 5 said:

OK, I'll bite, how does it not work?

Doesn’t always scroll the text so that the cursor (and what you’re typing) is visible. 

Sometimes pressing down arrow makes the cursor disappear, rather than move to the next line. Makes it hard to edit something in the last paragraphs. 

 

Sometimes the text you type in is just thrown away. Or entered somewhere else. Or is entered in invisible HTML tags instead of as actual text. 
 

Sometimes backspace doesn’t do anything when you press it. 
 

Honestly, the bio editor has been extremely buggy since game launch. In my experience, the number of times I can get a bio written without encountering any issues at all is less than 10%, and is typically limited to one line bios at that. 

[srmalloy]

2 hours ago, ZekeStenzland said:

Honestly, the bio editor has been extremely buggy since game launch. In my experience, the number of times I can get a bio written without encountering any issues at all is less than 10%, and is typically limited to one line bios at that. 

Going back to live, for years I would write up character bios in TextPad, the text editor I use, and then copy-and-paste it into the bio editor, then clean up the formatting problems from pasting (typically just not separating paragraphs). I see no reason to change my habit given the issues with the bio editor.

[ZekeStenzland]

When I think about it, I use Notepad to write my bio, and then paste it in. But if the editor gets in a weird state, the only fix is often to save the changes, exit back to game world, then go back to editing. But if you’re in character create when the bio editor gets hosed, the only fix is to finish up character create and then enter AP/MI/NP/tutorial and then go back to editing. And when I enter game world for the first time, I’d actually rather play than edit my bio. 

[Black Talon]

Investing time, care and energy in building a character's bio is, I think, one of the hallmarks that determines this as an RPG and not just a first-person shooter game.  Although the 1,023 character limit can restrict things a bit, it also enforces brevity and a get-to-the-point spirit.  Every alt I've ever made has a defined story behind them; this allows me to actually start fricking caring about how they interact with their world, and, hopefully, empathizing with other players who have made their own alts just as much a personal item of concern.  Black Talon - prime alt - has, from his own background, a particular viewpoint on different villain groups; e.g., as an absolute existentialist, he regards the Tsoo as pseudo-mystical wannabes who replace skill with ritual and can't win a scrap without overwhelming their opponents with sheer numbers.  Does this change a damn thing about how the game works for him or any other alt?  Not at all - but it means I can use that bio to write an internal story for him before, during and after the missions and keep it interesting, which is part of what keeps me coming back.

 

Although the scope of CoH, at first creation in '04, disallowed the input of personal involvement with particular in-game groups and/or individuals - it could be argued this changed somewhat with the mission architect - I still find that the range of customization in both character appearance and, now, the expression of various powers, gives this game a particular it's-part-of-me aspect that I've found absent from every other MMPOG (which, admittedly, ain't many) I've ever had experience with.

Edited July 7, 2021 by Black Talon

[merrypessimist]

Generally when I've gotten to the point I care about the character, beyond just "oh combo x/y is fun" stage.  Or when I have a really awful pun name I need to justify.  Most of my alts have bios, naturally.

[Mopery]

One of these days I'll get around to making an AE arc utilizing all of my Abraham Lincoln characters, using the storyline I imagined to explain why I have 20+ of the damned things. I shall call it, "A Lincoln Time", and it will be the glorious story of our Heroes(and/or Villains) aiding Future Lincoln in his task of stopping all the other Lincolns(from parallel and perpendicular universes) from creating a series of paradoxes which would inevitably lead to the annihilation of all existence!

 

But I digress...

 

Bios are totally worth making, and the real challenge is making a compelling story in less than 1024 characters. I love seeing characters with great names, bios, and costumes.

Powersets are usually secondary to concepts, for me.