Customizing the character description

[Zizzo]

After that disastrous charisma thread, I figured I'd try something less controversial: the editable 'Character Background' field in the character creation process. From my fairly regular perusal of the Ladder, I gather that very few people change this from the randomly generated default; I, being the oddball as usual, have customized it for almost all of my characters so far (with the sole exception, I think, of my Swordmaster; I'm still trying to think up a backstory for him). Usually I just add a sentence customized to the character, based on race (see my Ent and DeathMold characters, for instance), class (my Alchemist, or my Summoner, who got, "You were notorious as a child for keeping various forest wildlife as pets."), or sometimes name (my eponymous Yeek Hermit Sorceror, or my Zombie Troll Mimic named L'onn che'Nii, who got, "You are best known for your starring role in 'The Hunchback of Minas Anor'.").

On occasion, though, I'll do a complete rewrite. For instance, my very first character ever (a Wood-Elf Archer, but that doesn't really matter for this), got the following background in a bout of frustration after his first few depressingly short forays:

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You are yet another in a long line of hapless adventurers            
attempting to figure out how the game works and ultimately           
defeat Morgoth.  Considering the success rate of your                
predecessors, you are not hopeful.

And then there's my Demonologist, whom I made Human (and female) solely so I could name her Miko Mido:

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You are the sole heir of the Miroku ninja clan, and                  
guardian of the Shikima pact.  You are a well-liked child.           
You have brown eyes, straight purple hair, and a large pink          
hairbow.

(No, I haven't seen any of the videos; I just remembered the name from some of my anime catalogs, and Googled up enough of the backstory to write a character description.) My favorite so far, though, is my Thunderlord Thaumaturgist:

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You are one of many Manwe Maia.  Your eagle looks rather             
shell-shocked, but given your penchant for lobbing around            
barely controlled bursts of semi-random destructive magics,          
this is probably to be expected.

Now, as I said, I know from the Ladder that I'm not the only person who does this, but I do seem to be one of the few. My theory is that this correlates with play style: if you usually play one character all the way through in a headlong rush to either victory or death and then start fresh with a completely different type of character, you probably don't do this; whereas if you have one character type (or a few... or more than a few... ) that you play regularly, starting them over if they die, I'd guess you're more likely to add this sort of customization.

So. Thoughts? Am I completely offbase?

[ISNorden]

If editing the character weren't such a pain in the derri?re (you can't even backspace to correct mistakes), I might be tempted to change a few bits--but not rewrite backgrounds from scratch.

[Nerdanel]

I've done this a few times, basically when an inspiration strikes me during character creation and when I feel irritated by the Maia/Maiar thing.

Poppy the hobbit sorceror I had a brief while ago who also was the first hobbit sorceror I had ever played had this sentence added to her bio: "You have been prophecied to die young." Suprisingly she survived until around character level 30. Well, she was only 22 years old anyway, not even out of her tweens yet.

[Ibnphung]

I used to do this a lot in Zang and Heng, when I usually played only one character - and characters didn't die as often as here - so one written description would last longer. In ToME, new characters come and go rather quickly for me, since I keep trying new race/class combinations, or different approaches to starting stats, so I stopped doing it in favor of faster startup.

[TobiasParker]

My usual is:

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Your the mangled son of a Kobold cook.  After "falling" into a pot of boiling Snaga Stew you have been left with black oozing(/bubbling/bursting) skin and leprous patches of grey hair.

But the editor needs to be fixed...its way too irritating.