One of the best experiences I ever had as a tabletop roleplayer was a very intense campaign in which characters weren't created by rolling dice or filling out character sheets. Instead the gamemaster spent hours with each player discussing their characters as people, not numbers or statistics.
We literally described them as if they were characters in a book or people we knew. It gave us a really different outlook on the characters, much more focused on their personalities and histories rather than the mechanics of their representation in the game.
And those discussions with the GM went on over weeks. We'd talk for an hour or two, break for a couple of days to think things over, and then talk again. That allowed us to develop the characters to a far greater degree than anything I had ever experienced before.
The GM was my best friend, and I knew that he was one of the best GMs I had ever met. So when it came time to create my character, I decided to try something different: My essential concept, I told him, was essentially something like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. He would start as a sniveling loser, but along the way he would transform.
To make things more interesting, I also suggested that he have little or no memory of his childhood. That gave the GM a lot to work with; I was going to change, but I didn't know what I would change into or how, and I would have very limited information about my early life.
There are some gamemasters I wouldn't trust with that much leeway, but in this case it felt right.
By the way, I used that same method of character creation, or a modified version of it, for a number of other campaigns I did over the years. I have to say that it ALWAYS paid off. The more time you put in ahead of the game to create character personalities, the more involved each player will be with their characters. They get into their heads much more. Better role playing happens.
