Meanwhile, I hate history. For the most part I don't see the point in making a history, especially a specific one. Most of the time 90% of what's in the history has little to do (or nothing) with the RP. I know it's a tool to help people decide on their character's life, but I, personally, don't need that. Anything that's of importance will come out through my character. I don't like when people assume things of my character because of what happened in their history. This is why I don't read people's histories because, like I said, if there's anything that's relevant to that character and the RPer will share it through the course of the RP.
So much this, I absolutely can't understand why history is a needed area. No character should know what your character's history is, so it has no use interaction wise. Often back stories are thought of and developed as the RP goes on, so history as one is making the character (when said person knows very little about their character btw) causes grounds for plot holes. Also I find it to be slightly redundant, as a lot of the personality section serves many jobs I see the history section does.
Granted I can see where history can be an important section. The Sword Art Online RP would be an excellent example, the character backstory is fairly central to how they ended up in the game, why they make certain choices, etc. Youkai and Pokemon Trainer Academy, not so much. Yes history could be helpful for explaining the character's personality, but most of the time it is a fairly useless section. Especially since the players are supposed to be
kids who in reality have very little history or important moments to begin with. Specifically with kids, I think it creates a lot of cliches or overused plot character archetypes.
Tl:dr History should be optional for: RPs having kids as the main character (exception to Fallout where the kids' lives would be fairly eventful due to the world), RPs that are sandbox, and RPs with little use for it. An example of an RP that I would see as not needing a history section would be my latest RP (that isn't up anymore) where almost every character would have had the same history in the first place.
I also dislike the personality section, due to my preference for doing character development in the RP itself and having others interpret the character, but I could see the need for the personality section. It gives direction (more so than the history) and a reference point. Also some people in real life can actually tell another person's personality just by looking at them, so there is reason to have the personality posted up. Still, I feel personality sections could be less emphasized, and often enough just a few words can be used to summarize a character (and still not have the character be shallow or stereotypical). For example in YA Frio can be summarized as: Stupid, Powerful, Devoted, Reckless. With those four words I could come up with several characters that are nothing like Frio, yet have the same basis.
I would also like to point out something else that should be emphasized. Evolving SUs. I'm pretty sure most of us constantly refer to SUs to get information about a character that we forgot or want to know. But very often SUs are outdated, as characters get more developed. I feel like too much work often goes into the first SU that never gets used, and then a lot of development goes into the actual game, moving the character into a completely new (or maybe not so new) direction. I feel like the SU should be updated or reported every once in a while to convey key changes in a character.
What if Dante in the Divine Comedy just stayed exactly the same throughout the entire epic? Not only would the story be bad, but the plot would get nowhere because he would spend most of his time faining at the sight of famous dead people, or monsters. (In the Divine Comedy btw there is very little in terms of explaining the history of Dante)
