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I compiled a list of 25 character backstory questions you might want to ask yourself when you're making a (heavily plot-driven or character-sriven story) character. (Oh, and if you're wondering why it says "you" in place of "your character", it 's also for my D&D campaign.)

Character Backstory Questions

1. How wealthy is/was your family? Were they poor, middle class, or upper class? Why?
2. Where did you live? Was it a rural area or a town? Or did you live in the wilderness?
3. Do you live near/in the place that the adventure starts or are you a newcomer? If you’re a newcomer, why did you come here? If you live near, which people do you have a connection with?
4. Who are your parents? How is your relationship with them? Are they alive? If not, how did they die?
5. Do you have any siblings? If so, how is your relationship with them?
6. How do you know the other PCs? What are your thoughts on each of them?
7. Who are/were your friends that played an important role in your backstory? Are any of them PCs? (Check with the player first before making this a part of your backstory.)
8. What was your education like? Was it in a classroom or learned through experience?
9. Who was your first love? What happened to them?
10. Why did you become the class you are? Family tradition? A divine calling? Did you know since birth that it was your destiny?
11. If you weren’t adventuring, what would you be doing?
12. Why do you adventure? (Please give more motivation than killing monsters and acquiring treasure.)
13. How do you feel about the gods?
14. How do you feel about other races? (humans, elves, dwarves, etc.)
15. How do you feel about evil races? (goblins, orcs, ogres, etc.)
16. Why do you stick with this weird band of misfits who like to tie male newcomers up and knock them unconscious?
17. Do you have any rivals? Who are they? How do you feel about them? Why are you rivals?
18. How do you feel about magic?
19. What are your goals?
20. What are your favorite things? (foods, hobbies, seasons, holidays, colours, etc.)
21. What do you fear most?
22. What do you hate the most?
23. A large band of goblins and hobgoblins is approaching. What do you do?
24. An orphanage is on fire, and the children are trapped inside. What do you do?
25. The home of the local money lender is on fire and he is trapped inside. He recently put the orphanage into debt and was planning to replace it with expensive houses. What do you do?

For number "3. Do you live near/in the place that the adventure starts or are you a newcomer? If you’re a newcomer, why did you come here? If you live near, which people do you have a connection with?"
Even if the character doesn't live near where the adventure starts, it doesn't mean they don't have relevant connections. Might just be the wording that threw me off, but wanted to mention this.

The questions aren't bad or anything, but clearly D&D focused. Questions that could've been made more universal would be: 6, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 23, 24, and 25.

Changing some of these a bit can make them more appropriate for more general character creation, and the last three are hypothetical questions which can still be answered for characters of other settings, as they are more about what you do in a: [threat approaches], [innocents in dangers], and ['grey morality'] scenarios.

Some things I'd add would be:

1. How important is the character?
2. Does the character play a thematic role?
3. Will the character learn a lesson?
4. What sort of ending will they have?
5. Is there a lesson to be had from their arc? What is their arc? (Assuming they have one).

There is almost certainly more, as making characters is basically making up a person, and people are generally pretty complicated. I will say that I'm not sure on how important some of the questions (including some of my suggested ones) actually are, since for certain stories/works I feel they may be irrelevant.

i.e. In D&D you probably won't know what sort of ending a character will have (tho I guess it depends on the sort of game being ran).

Anyway, I guess the main (and mostly relevant) question would be something like: What role does this character play in the story?

Then you can go from there, to find more appropriate questions. In D&D a PC would be one of the protagonist's (generally), as an example. After all, you probably won't want to ask yourself the same number of questions for a one scene character as you would for the protagonist, which is the part I find makes it difficult to make relevant questions.

So I guess these are good enough questions to look over when trying to figure out your more important characters?

Eh, will be interesting to see what some other people think, as I find characters a bit complicated; and while I imagine there are different ways to go about creating characters, it would make sense for there to be some general overlap in regards to questions one ought to ask themselves when trying to get the best results (even if only as a guide).

TL;DR
Not bad, but I'd say some questions could've been altered to be more broad and less D&D focused, so as to more clearly apply to more potential characters.

P.S. I should've added headings.

It's a pretty good list for generating a D&D character, especially for player's new to RPing or used to a more hack n slash approach. Although like Zake said, I'm not sure how practical it would be for creating a story character, even in a fantasy setting. The way a plotted story vs a spontaneous collaborative one are developed is just so fundamentally different.

It's interesting to think of the kind of questions that would be useful for creating a more standard story character though. Zake had some good examples but I'm sure everyone has their own approach.