Why not choose some sort of biography of player like in which family he/she born, childhood, teenage years, student years, profession. For example basic character would be from middle class family, spend childhood in kindergarten, regular kid in school, studied in university and nowadays unemployed, this will get you basic starting gear.
My vision of biography
Family
Orphan; Poor family; Mid class; Wealthy family.
Childhood
Street life; Kindergarten; Home education.
School years
Bully; No-one; Regular kid; Genius; Inventor.
Student life
Conscript; Drug dealer; Student of (name of faculty); Famous (?); (Cultist?).
Nowadays
Criminal; Deserter; Unemplyed; Worker (where?); CEO; -Star; (based on skill profession); etc.
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.
In regards to the branching life tree suggestion I like the idea until you (H G) used the addiction example to explain how it could fall short in customization. And adding more branches may make some/me/who ever feel like they have to play a game of Alter Ego just to start a new character.
[size=8pt]Killing ideas with no new suggestions[/size]
@Hyena Grin
I mean that we should have background story start like in mount & blade, but with more freedom, maybe some sort of choosing background for the cost of some points, which wil give you traits, that can’t be aquired in other way, and profession give you starting gear and trait.