@Zordelraak
That was actually my first inclination when I was thinking about backgrounds, to build a life from childhood to adulthood, each ‘branch’ of the tree trimming your options down to prevent overtly strange combinations. It’s a nice sort of roleplay concept for character building, but I had one major issue with it. It doesn’t really leave any room for fine grain quirks.
For example, how do you fit ‘addicted to crack’ into that kind of setup? I mean you could have that as a feature of, say, having ‘prostitute’ or ‘criminal’ as an adulthood profession. But you shouldn’t be forced into a particular set of character backgrounds if you want to play with an addiction - it’s totally feasible to have a college student or crooked cop who is addicted to crack, or whatever. Just as it’s totally feasible to have a criminal or prostitute who isn’t addicted to anything.
You could probably build a background tree which allowed you to make more refined choices(have whole sections dedicated to refined background elements), but at that point you may as well just structure background creation around something more open-ended and point-based, similar to how traits are handled but with more limitations and more structure. That way it is easier to add in new stuff without having to conform to an overly rigid background creation structure. All that matters is how much a background costs and whether or not it renders any other backgrounds incompatible.
