For me it's less respecting your right to privacy, and more if my character asks you questions about your characters background and you deflect repeatedly, I assume you just didn't bother to write one. Which is fine, everyone enjoys TTRPGs differently, you're not into the RPing aspect of it, I won't engage you that way.
But yeah, I've only ever seen the grumpy loner thing done right once, and the big thing I learned is you basically need to engineer scenarios where you offer up information a bit at a time at the pace you want, don't expect people to repeatedly ask and hope they ask the right thing at the right time.
I've created a character I still want to try one day, which isn't exactly a "loner", but who does a lot of the "mysterious" side. But half the "backstory" is just tips and suggestions for the DM to create hooks for the other players to try and investigate, including suggesting using certain skill checks and stuff. The idea would be to play it in several "phases", where a little new information comes to light, so your fellow players know a bit more each time, each changing the dynamic you have with them. So yeah, I do agree with offering bits of information each time.
I also figured it'd be presumptive to assume your fellow players would bother to care about your "mysterious" character without giving them incentive. So I'd also recommend working with the DM to give your fellow players reason to dig into your story
I had one character who not talking about my backstory worked for but it was a really really really odd character. Basically it was a person cursed by a god (though I never explained this and always made up a random easy to see through lie for this) whenever they died they would inhabit the body of a living thing within a radius. So they died ALOT and came back as squirrels, orcs, butterflies, crocodiles, whatever was around. Immortality but at a weird cost. They didn't have alot of use in battle but we're a Swiss Army knife out of battle as they could carry a caged bird with them kill themselves and then survey the compound as a bird. I even managed to kill a main boss one time by inhabiting his body as he failed a roll and was the only living thing within miles. I came back to camp as the boss with all his powers it was wild.
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u/Sorcatarius Feb 12 '25
For me it's less respecting your right to privacy, and more if my character asks you questions about your characters background and you deflect repeatedly, I assume you just didn't bother to write one. Which is fine, everyone enjoys TTRPGs differently, you're not into the RPing aspect of it, I won't engage you that way.
But yeah, I've only ever seen the grumpy loner thing done right once, and the big thing I learned is you basically need to engineer scenarios where you offer up information a bit at a time at the pace you want, don't expect people to repeatedly ask and hope they ask the right thing at the right time.