I've been wrapping up Exiled, the weekly actual play I've been running, that was mostly FASERIP and part of the end has been a series of 12 one shot RPGs featuring alternate universe characters.
Some characters are just origin swaps of other characters so I wanted a way to delineate the differences and to let them understand their characters, so I cribbed the Backgrounds from 13th Age.

You will get 8 background points to help with your character on rolls, allowing them to get column shifts making it easier to succeed on rolls that they should be able to do. Backgrounds are things that your character has done in the past, usually best viewed as major periods of time in their life.

For example if you played Wonder Woman, Supreme Court Justice -
3 - Raised on Themyscara - reflecting your time growing up and learning to fight could help for things like knowing Grecco-Roman mythology or wrestling
3 - Raised the Bar - reflecting your time in law school could help for legal proceedings, knowing the law, and finding law contacts
2 - On The Bench - could reflect your contacts and power in the US Government, ability to wield hammers and your ability to always have an interesting conversation starter.

You have 8 points to split with a max of 4 in any single rank so you could try 3/3/2, 4/2/2, 3/4/1, etc depending on what you think is most important. In the game you'll be able to call on these backgrounds in rolls. You reference one background max, and you get column shifts up to the max rank value.

It helps save room on character sheets, lets you boil down characters to what the player thinks is important, gets around the 20+ versions of Martial Arts and so on.

Interesting, but I do have some questions about this approach.

First, I want to make sure I understand how it works. In the example you provide above with Wonder Woman, if the player attempted a grappling attack she would gain a +3CS bonus to the attempt because of her time on Themyscira honing her skills in that regard, correct? Would this bonus stack with the Wrestling talent, giving her a total bonus of +5CS? Or is this intended to replace the need for the Wrestling talent, giving WW a better mastery of the skill with a +3CS bonus over others who only have Wrestling with the +2CS bonus?

Second, while this is great for characters with a lengthy history to draw upon, what would you recommend for new characters who are only just starting out their heroic careers? For example, a young Spider-Man could including something about his experience as a brilliant chem student (which is what allowed him to invent both a chemical compound that mimics webbing and also a device which allows him to spray it in multiple ways to achieve different effects)... but what else? Young Peter Parker had no other real life experience to draw upon. Would leftover points be able to be saved until later when some other defining characteristic could be revealed?