Re: What Is The Minimum You Need To Know About Your Charater?
What do I NEED? Next to nothing. A name, a general type, and a ballpark understanding of abilities, and I'm ready to go. I've had friends invite to their games, pull me aside, and say, "So, I need someone to run this NPC for me. I haven't bothered with stats yet, because I don't know how relevant they're going to be to the game, but this is what the guy is and this is the kind of resources he has, and this is his general reputation. Go."
When I'm building a character that I intend to play, I tend to be far more elaborate than that. A name, most of the stats, a general background, and the basic gear are what I usually put together, at the very least, before I feel like I'm ready to play that character. And when I say, "general background," I mean GENERAL. Like, "He's a Marine Corps sniper, no family, didn't have any real close personal connections until he joined the Corps so that's become his life." I feel like I need that much to give me a grasp of who the character is so that I can play with some sense of consistency, rather than changing the character significantly every time I sit down because my mood is different that day.
And, yes, sometimes characters inspire me and I get FAR more specific than that. But I feel like I need that much, at the very least, to give me some idea of who the character is now, and how he got there, to establish a trajectory to follow for his story arc.