
Irontruth |

To start, the method/concept that this is based on comes from another game (which I talk about way too much sometimes), Mythender.
You can get Mythender here for free. I highly recommend it. I directly stole a major portion of character creation, including some of the actual text.
The basic concept is this, before you:
•roll/assign stats
•pick a class
•pick a race
•pick a name
You must first have an idea of who the character is. To do get the creative juices flowing and have characters who feel more complete, I provide my players with a menu of questions that they can answer.
Here's an example of what I just used to help start a campaign.
Even though it isn't really finished, I've used it already. I still want to add more text to it to help make it clearer and more easily usable if I'm not present to explain them all. I'll probably even change some of the questions over time as I figure out which ones tend to solicit poor answers, or answers that are unhelpful.
The basic process is that a player chooses one background and one drive, then answers all the questions for each. The background and drive form a little character history. The answers don't need to be long, a single sentence is usually enough. They don't represent the entirety of your character's back story, but rather the foundation.
The goal of this is to help jump start character creation AND provide useful information to the GM to build adventures around. It's not that I'm going to use the answers to "punish" the character, but rather it is an opportunity for the player to make suggestions about what they want to see in the game.
As a GM, I don't want to just have bad guys with evil plots. I want bad guys with evil plots, that the PC's WANT to stop. To take some stress off me, instead of trying to invent why, I'm just going to ask the players.