@Sorain
I’ve never played a PC from level 1-30. Somewhere along the way it just makes more sense to retire him. But if you consider what that PC will do during his retirement it gives you plenty of options for using him as a recurring NPC or even one day dusting him off (under the right circumstances).

I’d also suggest you check out an article we ran in July called Riding Off Into the Sunset: How to Retire a PC.

Few Adventurers reach some kind of transcendent destany (thats what makes them epic after all) and few want to just keep fighting until they are killed perminantly. So what do you plan to do when the time comes to hang up the sword, wand, or bow? For some races this is not much of a consideration (half elves remain fit until death apparently, and Eladrin live for hundreds of years) but for a human like my charicter, the question held serius weight. By the time you hit Paragon Teir (like this campagin) I imagine there has to be some serius consideration of life after the quest.

For this charicter in particular, it was a simple matter of “What do I enjoy doing during down time that people are silly enough to pay me for?” History is not just a trained skill, but a hobby, however getting paid for that might not always be an option. Teaching the basics of magic on the other hand, is always in demand in any scociety. The Mage Guild (barring the collapse of the local continent spanning empire) needs instructors in the basics as well as the advanced things like actual at will powers, surely.

Besides, all those wise old instructors with tales about their wild youth adventures had to have come from somewhere right?

We have to write biographies for our characters subject to his approval. Four to five pages long, in fact. The last one we wrote up was for an expansive campaign he’d concocted (unfortunately we never finished because he and his wife moved across the country) with no more direction than that we were orphans and had to describe our lives in light of that fact.

Yes, it’s a game, and yes, that sounds suspiciously like a homework assignment. However, it was worth it. We had experience with our characters and could better play them instead of having to get to know them as we played. It was a fantastic starting point, and got us more involved in the story from the get go, as we’d invested some effort and creativity into the characters aside from rolling a few dice and arranging stats.

It seems to me that a role is more than just a set of stats able to cast such and such spells or swing this hard with a sword. There’s supposed to be a person (or elf, or dwarf…) casting those spells or swinging that weapon, and it helps to get in to that role if you know more about it and from whence it came.

@Pierre Gagnon
You’re absolutely right. Soldiers are suddenly in a peace-time society with no marketable skills. Adventuring is about the only thing they’re good at. This kind of thing makes for excellent role-playing opportunities.

@shyDM
You need to find a good balance between the details of your well thought out back-story and the mechanics of the game. I agree that if your background becomes too restrictive then you’ve probably got too much in there. Anything that lets you envision the character as more than his statistics is useful when creating a unique personality.

I agree that it helps to think a bit about what your character is like beyond “level 2 fighter with 18 strength!” I’ve found that it really helps roleplaying if you have even a rough idea of what this character’s life was like before s/he started the game. Once you have that you can start figuring out how far your character will go for a goal, what situations would be out of their depth, or develop fun tavern banter! However, I’ve also seen people make characters with such detailed backstories and mannerisms that they become rigid and uncompromising in actual play, or they seem to have no options for character growth. Hmm.

Anyway, I felt so pleased with myself for making a PC with an actual job beyond “adventurer” when I saw the title of this piece, but now that I think about it, she works for an organization that retrieves objects of interest from ruins and documents them, which might be cheating in this conversation.

Think after the hundred years war, how all those knights and soldiers who were raised from their birth to fight for a living in what was one of the world’s first professionnal armies. When the war’s over, where did they go?

No state could pay them, no lord had land for them, no village had a place for them. All they had was their swords, and their keen sense of tactics. Did they become mercenaries? Brigands? Yeah, most became the latter, becoming the terror of Europe for a good couple of decades.

That’s an example of a job turned bad and, well, perfect for a character.