Delta said:
You know, I find this particular notion to be curious, novel, and disagreeable. As an old-time gamer (I guess), I'm used to coming to a ruleset, reading it, seeing what tools can be put together for a character or gameplay experience. I'm used to filling in the character's abilities first, and letting that tell me what his location, history, name, personality should be after that. (For example, see any PHB steplist for creating a character.)
...So at any rate, the idea of an RPG character that is fundamentally unrelated and transcends the gaming system itself is not something I can philosophically agree with. Like a bunch of other stuff around 4E. For whatever that's worth.
Well, it says a lot about your preferences for a game.
Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying worked like that. You just started rolling and let the dice fall where they may, thus deciding what your character would be like. That's a totally viable way to create a character. And it does have a certain "old school" vibe to it. But it's not how most people want to play, and even in the "old days," most people didn't create characters that way.
Things like Point Buy, placing ability scores in order, and choosing class and race are all about letting the player
formulate a concept first, and then attempt to
execute that concept using the ruleset. That concept may start out as simple as "I think I want to create a heavy fighter," or as detailed as "my character is a human fighter who learned to fight serving with a mercenary company, and then struck out on his home after the baron betrayed his entire troupe, leaving him as the sole survivor bent on vengeance."
Obviously, that concept is a little cheesy, but it's just what came to me as I was typing. The point is that the rules do allow you to take a character concept and attempt to find the rules-based execution of that character. DMs do this all the time when making NPCs - they have to.
When converting an existing character to a different rules system, you need to back that concept out of the mechanical representation on your character sheet. Usually, if you've actually been roleplaying, that concept has crystallized
as you played. So, to "convert" the character to Fourth Edition, all you have to do is take that now-solid concept and execute it using the new ruleset.