Topic on Talk:Backstories

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You make it sound like there's no in game difference between a regular or special backstory, only who came up with the backstory, but that's wrong. The regular and special backstories work quite different, and especially for the purpose that you use this list for, it's quite helpful to know the difference!

A pawn is either randomly generated or chosen from the pool of 282 unique colonists.

A randomly generated pawn receives a randomly chosen regular childhood backstory and (if old enough) a randomly chosen regular adulthood backstory. A randomly generated pawn never has a special backstory!

A unique character on the other hand has a fixed special childhood backstory and (if old enough) a fixed special adulthood backstory. These always match their name. For example, if you see a character called Engie, you are certain she has the Foundry apprentice childhood backstory and the Combat engineer adulthood backstory. Listing which childhood and adulthood backstories come together may thus be quite useful, but this only applies to unique characters.

Another good reason to separate them is the availability. There are a lot more randomly generated pawns than unique characters running around, and the randomly generated pawns have a much smaller pool of backstories available to them, so you'll see the regular backstory a lot more than the special backstory. If we keep all the regular backstories on the main page, then most of the time, you find the backstory instantly, and only on a rare occasion is it not listed there, and would you have to check the unique backstories.

Finally, it can be useful to have a proper list of backstories for when rolling new characters, either by spamming the random button, or by using Prepare Carefully. When spamming the random button, the regular backstories have a pretty good chance of popping up quite fast, whereas the special backstories are quite rare. There's also a question of balance. Some of the special backstories have ludicrous stats, and not everyone will be happy with them. And then there's the fact that a lot of special backstories have a hardcoded name and gender reference. If you use Prepare Carefully, you may want to avoid those backstories, as they look quite odd in your Bio.

I do agree with you that columns for stats would be more useful than columns for faction types. I'd like to give each stat their own column (with disabled jobs as Ex.png in those columns, but it's gonna be a bit finicky to give them a proper layout.