I can take this as a question I guess…
Something along the lines of “How does character development work in a classic game?”
At a certain point, yes the classic exploration game is about the exploration of adventure locations and the struggles of ‘adventurers’ within them. This isn’t to say characters don’t develop - but they generally don’t start as developed.
The character begins largely as a cypher, with information about them only as far as necessary for the character to begin to interact with exploration challenges (stats, equipment, abilities). Personality, goals and relationships aren’t usually part of that, but if a player wants they can decide the PC’s personality and past. What the player can’t do is dictate the character’s future.
In a classic game, character relationships, goals and personality are earned through play. Encounters with factions and NPCs create enemies and allies while incidents, curses, blessings and interactions with strange things add oddities and quirks to the PC. Presumably with a structured enough campaign design one can start with a more heavily sketched out character (5E in some ways seeks to start PCs with relationships, personalities and goal … but doing so by the book requires using the Forgotten Realms), but it’s not needed or especially popular.
Another distinction is that the setting and GM in a classic playstyle will rarely force player action based on character psychology. In the absence of curses, charms and other rare mechanical effects, how the character’s inner world effects their actions is another player decision. The setting and GM of course also aren’t their to help build a psychological profile of your character or indulge the players desire to act out a specific one. If you want your PC to run from certain creatures - they can, but this doesn’t mean the GM and setting have any duty to treat that character in a specific way or insure their survival, and likewise your fellow party members may soon resent impetuous acts and desertion. I have been in games that descended into lethal PvP over someone playing some aspect of their characters personality in a way which endangered the party.
To respond to the example, in a classic game you don’t say “I’m an archeology professor/explorer whose advantages are: charm, luck, scholarship and disadvantages are: phobia - snakes, womanizing, hatred of father”. Your character starts simply, and while you can evolve traits, fears and such that effect play, as a player you don’t have the privledge of falling back on your personal fiction to redirect the locus of play to your specific character or the expectation that the setting and GM will bend to accommodate your backstory.
Over time your explorer may develop certain traits and behaviours, either through mechanical effects (cursed with a fear of snakes - must Save v. Spell to avoid fleeing from serpents) or simply ticks that the player decides on. Such personality traits, like relationships between characters or between characters and NPCS are almost always amechanical, but are usually accepted with better cheer by fellow players because they were developed through play and shared experiences. Coming into the cooperative endeavour of the adventuring party asking for special consideration from the GM because you’ve decided your PC has a special destiny or demanding that your fellow players indulge dangerous limitations you’ve placed on your PC for kicks is generally not something that the ethos of classic play approves of. This is not encoded in any ruleset I know of however, and if your table wants to make things harder by establishing backstories and foibles for PCs prior to play, as long as your GM is on board to work those prior relationships into the setting it can be done.
Of course design principles that usually include high lethality rulesets, location based play, faction relations and the party (rather then individual PC) as narrative agent often makes such preparatory work tragically futile either through character death or simply different goal and PC/NPC relations emerging through play.
I will add that in every classic style game I’ve played or run over several years, and that lasted more then two or three sessions, interesting characters have emerged. My ratcatcher who transformed slowly into a revolutionary mystic of a forgotten anarchic rat goddess, my evil parody elf/door wizard who ended up repeatedly heroically risking himself to protect his party until getting killed doing so, and even my fighter who became greedier and more impetuous until he decided to prove that a trapped statue didn’t really breath fire by stepping in front of it - the molten gold and silver from his armor was hard to recover. These are only a few of my PCs in two games - everyone I’ve played with has stories of characters with personalities, most of which evolved through play.
