Creating or editing back stories for different characters.

[Bat Vader]

This may sound a bit odd and if it does please forgive me. Lately I have started to crate and edit back stories for the main characters that I play as in games. I sometimes will even combine two different game universes into one. The best example I can come up with is my Mass Effect 2 and Modern Warfare 2 cross over back story for Shepard.

What I like to think happened is that General Shepherd from MW2 is an ancestor of Commander Shepard and her family in the Spacer background. After what General Shepherd did in MW2 his family was black listed and shame was brought upon them. A few years later some members of his family change their name to Shepard because they want to keep the name but not be noticed as much.

167 years after the events of MW2 a descendant of General Shepherd joins the Alliance military to try and erase the still existing ill will that is based around his ancestor's name, he later marries Hannah, and later they have Commander Shepard.

Does anyone else like to create back stories for their characters or edit and combine preexisting back stories and universes for different characters?

 

[Zhukov]

I never saw the point of creating a backstory that I could not express within the game and have the game react to.

So no, I don't make up backstories.

However, I do construct personalities and beliefs for some of my characters. Then I try and act according to those ideas within the constraints of the game. Often I'll start out just doing whatever appeals to me, then try and create a personality out of whatever I ended up doing, then roll with it from there.

 

[cennsor]

i don't really do it myself, but i think it's a nice way to express your creativity.

 

[Eleuthera]

I do so occasionally. For (most of) my WoW characters I came up with a who's related to who and how do they all know each other kind of flow chart. And eventhough I never played on a RP server I still roleplay parts of all my characters, my main turned out to be a bit of a racist...

 

[Doom972]

I sometimes like to think up backstories for the characters I make in RPGs. Not as detailed as your and no crossovers though.
I do it so that it would be easier to make choices based on the character I'm playing rather than myself.

its pretty much required for games like skyrim. in that case where you character can lead every single guild and be a jack of all trades a decent background. likes and dislikes, not to mention character flaws can add so much to a play experience.

I agree. I did it in all the Elder Scrolls games I played.

 

[Maximum Bert]

For videogames no I see no point however I have occasionally created characters in other games for fun, I used to create a lot of characters for warhammer but I was more interested in creating interesting rules for them to use in game rather than elaborate backstories some of these were based off of famous characters mentioned in the warhammer armies books.

I have recently had to create a brief outline of a game story which I have left incomplete or rather unfleshed out due to the huge workload it put on me (I stopped at 14k words or so I think) and the fact that it would never see production (so why bother fleshing it out fully until such time as it may have a possibility of being used) but I actually quite like some of the characters I put in it drawn as they are from relations to personal people and my love of mythology I actually feel quite attached to some of them so I may actually develop them further purely for fun.

 

[hazabaza1]

Generally no.
Sometimes I might make up certain traits in a game vague enough to do so and build my character around that, like in Dark Souls or Elder Scrolls, but normally I leave that stuff to the developers.