Questionnaires and Decisions

I ran across one of those character-creation sheets the other day, the ones with 200 questions that are supposed to create your unique and wonderful protagonist. As usual, my immediate reaction was severely negative, which got me thinking about why.

The first problem I have with these lists is that they all seem to start from the assumption that a character is a collection of bits and pieces of specific information, and that if you know the information, you then will have a character. To me,...