I believe I covered this in my gu- I mean I believe it was covered in the guide linked somewhere up above but just remember, building a character profile is an ongoing process of improvement and refinement. People will not overlook you or ignore you just because you can’t articulate yourself like a Da Vinci of literature. My advice for a first timer? Keep it simple and down to bare basics. Once you have more practice at playing the character, go back and tackle it again.
By bare basics, I generally just mean a simple physical appearance. Think about how you would describe one of your friends to someone else. Don’t worry too much about how to word things to start with - that comes later. Just get all of the building blocks in place and you’re good to go.
As per character background, if you’re not 100% sure what direction you want to go in with your character, keep it simple and perhaps a bit vague too. Don’t go selling all of their secrets to the rooftop mafia!
Yeah. To be clear, I’m not saying that people shouldn’t do ‘novella’ format RP (though I think this is unsuitable for the MMO medium) or write enormous arcs, journals, etc for their characters. That’s all a part of character investment.
In terms of profile building though, the point is to have other people read it and I would safely assume the majority of MMORPG role-players do not want to open up a novel whenever they give someone’s character a cursory glance.
I normally mention basic facial features, skin/fur tone, size and voice initially.
Sometimes extra fluff appears over time, but that’s typically all that exists in my about section.
People who put their chars full appearence in a glance are the Devil’s minions.