Just thought I'd share something I tried in our most recent DH campaign that I thought worked pretty successfully. Perhaps you guys will get some mileage out of it too.

Basically there were three problems I wanted to solve:

- the previous DH campaign had showed that starting-out DH characters are laughably useless at just about everything, but with even a few skill / characteristic upgrades get better quickly (more likely to have some basic competence in whatever crops up).

- players don't often remember the descriptions of their characters that other players give, especially the "traits" - if you're lucky they'll remember that Jim is a Guardsman, but none of the other details would stick. (Even their own, actually. The number of times in our WFRP campaign the player whose character had facial boils insisted he should be able to chat up the barmaid or whatever, then remembering the boils and backing down, was ridiculous).

- we use models for most of our fight scenes (with or without strict measurement of ranges, depending on the scene and the particular wishes of the GM, but at least to show the layout of the area and the relative positions of combatants) and previously, sourcing these models would fall entirely on the shoulders of the GM.

The house rules I came up with, communicated to my players before we even started character creation, were:

- a player that provides a picture of their character gains their character 100 XP.

- a player that provides a painted 28mm model of their character gains their character 100 XP.

As it turned out, every player fulfilled both of their requirements before the first session. Everyone now has a much better idea of what the other characters look like (meaning "quirks" are memorable, not just something you roll on a table then forget about!), we have all the models we need for combat situations, and the PCs effectively started with 600 XP each instead of 400 - which they spent on skills, and didn't feel quite so useless in the first session. This was absolutely successful and I will definitely be doing the same whenever I'm GMing in future.

It even came up with an unintended bonus that I hadn't thought of until after all the pictures were in... by scanning all the pictures and printing them out at playing-card size, I've now got a deck of cards (which I call the Emperor's Tarot) that can be used to select a random player, determine seating arrangements, etc.

Important notes:

- the players must provide the picture and/or model to get the bonus XP. Whether they drew the picture themselves or downloaded it from the internet, and whether they painted the model themselves or asked someone else to paint it for them, I care not. As it happened, everyone decided to do everything themselves (even the guy who insisted he was crap at art, and the guy who had never painted a model in his life before), but that was up to them and I made it very clear to them it didn't have to be that way if they didn't want it to be.

- I make no attempt to rate the quality of the drawings / models. Obviously just scribbling a stick man wouldn't earn the extra XP, but I have no intention of punishing someone for being a bit crap at art. Happily the players really found inspiration in this and did their best to produce good pictures / models, but obviously they vary widely in artistic ability - that's OK, they all made a genuine attempt to do the best they can.

- Some of the players drew more than one picture (facial portrait, static pose, action pose, etc), one made two models (combat pose and riding a motorbike), one additionally sculpted a 54mm (Inquisitor scale) version of their character from scratch, several of them came up with a few sides of A4 as background history to their character - this is all awesome stuff and as GM I'm more than happy to run with it, but there's only 200 XP available, sorry.

Hope some of you like this idea, it's definitely something we'll be doing again in future.

I offer XP for session writeups, for similar reasons. I have offered XP for player portaits, but so far nobody has taken me up on it. Oh, and I gave someone XP for an autopsy report once... that was cool.

Don't think my players would go for the painting models, but you never know... I might offer it.

In stead of giving the PC's xp for their background, I take a slightly different approach. I ask for a short (1-2 Paragraph each) personal history and physical description. And also have them answer a short list of basic questions, something like this:

1: Where you were born?
2: Who is/were your Family?
3: What have you done with your life so far?
4: Have you had any significant others? Who were they?
(Note that signifigant others could include non-romantic figures)
5: How do you feel about the Emperor/Omnissiah/Other?
6: How do you feel about the Ecclesiarchy/Adeptus Mechanicus?
7: How do you feel about the Imperium?
8: How do you feel about the Law and/or Criminals?

From that, I give them a package of advances based on their answers, allowing them skills that make sense for them to have. (Which is also cool, because I don't always go by the book, and sometimes give them something unique to define their character.)

For example: One of my characters is a Noble Assassin who's family owns a backwater feral world. He embraced the local culture and became the black sheep of his family for "Going Native". He got:

+5 WS

Beast Hunter

Concealment

Silent Move

Survival

My Gm does something similar we get some bonus xp (normally 50 or so) for writing up a report of the session.

but god bless my GM i got a bonus 300xp because after a quite in depth investigation (that involved more than one nasty plot twist) because i actually wrote up a report and then filed it to him in triplicate like any upstanding imperial arbitrator should have done. I even had each copy of the report labeled as to which department it was to be sent to.