One of the reasons I love D&D is that it’s easy to pick up. Just about anyone can understand the basic rules, throw together a group of friends, and have some fun killing monsters for a few nights.
But turns out that while D&D has an easy learning curve for beginners, it is difficult to master. When you spend as much time as I do playing, you start to think about how to improve. There’s a lot of information out their for dungeon master skill building, but not as much for the players who are involved. So this series is all about the players and what skills we can bring to the table.
These posts are targeted at regular players who want to improve their game. None of the ideas or recommendations that follow require innate skills, methodical practice, or particular styles of play. It’s just a collection of things I wish someone would have told me when I was new to the game.
The three major sections are:
So without further ado, let’s get started!
The key to making a character is understanding what role your character plays in the campaign you’re about to join.
You are not creating the hero of the story.
When you realize this, you see how it’s not so crucial that you perfect that nuanced tapestry of that heroine who is capable of driving interesting, emotional narratives 24/7. If you’re playing with 4-6 players, you’ll get 15-25% of the focus. It’s OK if you’re character isn’t the next Walter White.
On the other hand, you ARE creating an integral piece of an adventuring party that the story is built around.
You may not be the main character, but you are a major part of the Voltron that is the main character. The story will gain it’s depth and nuance from the interactions, relationships, and goals that your group develops together over time.
Don’t stress about making the best character concept ever. Focus on building a base that supports interesting party interactions and story beats.
You want your character to contribute to the story you’re all building together. That means your character shouldn’t have some bespoke mission to hunt down a rogue order that you homebrewed yourself. That motivation is going to be orthogonal to every other character’s goals.
At the same time, your motivation should not be so generic that you don’t contribute to the forward momentum and world building at the table. “I’m just down to adventure” isn’t going to give you, the DM, or the other players much to go off of.
Instead, read through any prep materials your DM sends out ahead of time. Learn a bit about the campaign setting. If you have an idea for an interesting character goal, share it with the DM and work to tie it into organizations and factions that already exist in the world.
At the same time, develop at least 3 NPCs who are broadly interesting and could show up later in the campaign. These characters may have a special significance to you, but they should also be interesting to a broad range of players.
For example, your former rogue teacher is too narrow. But you can expand that NPC to make them interesting to many types of characters. A few tips to make an NPC broadly relevant are:
Your former rogue teacher who runs a shadow cabal of assassins across the continent has hooks that many players can engage with. Creating an NPC like this gives your DM raw materials to develop interesting adventures that also tie in to your backstory.
Motivation, motivation, motivation. That’s what everyone talks about when building characters. Everyone wants to pick some interesting, gritty, or hysterical life’s mission that they’re questing for. This is thinking too much like the hero of the story.
Instead, I would recommend that you don’t pick a specific goal or motivation ahead of time. If you hold out, you can pick something later that is directly relevant to the campaign and the story that you’re building at the table with your friends.
Instead, decide on a motivational framework — something that will guide you at the table when deciding what story beats your character would care about and what goals they would form.
Your motivational framework should be 1-2 sentences long. It shouldn’t be so specific that you can only see 1 path to achieving it. Instead, force yourself to list 5 different paths that would satisfy your motivation. How similar are those paths? The more diverse they are, the easier time you’ll have integrating your character into the campaign.
For example, a druid that says “I want to discover the rarest animal in the world” does not have a great framework. But “I want to have a lasting impact on the world of animals” is pretty good. You could:
You may do all or none of these things. But this list gives your DM a way to weave your goals into the story. It also helps broaden your sense of what your character is interested in.
And while you want a flexible goal, you don’t want it to be so generic or bland that it doesn’t give you direction. Once you have your motivation framework and 5 examples of success, write out 5 specific steps that you could take to advance a goal within your motivational framework. Using our druid example:
You’re looking for these steps to be distinct from one another. You also want them to be self contained. They shouldn’t require your DM to craft an entire scenario with home brewed rules for you to advance your character’s interests.
Personality is something that’s often underdeveloped. You want more than just “chaotic and bubbly” or “lawful and serious”. Take a moment to think about what your character likes & dislikes. When they’ve got some time off, what do they enjoy? Try to list 3 things they like and 3 things they dislike:
Likes
Dislikes
These likes and dislikes can flow from your goal, but they don’t have to. They don’t even need to be coherent. Resolving apparently contradictory character traits is a great way to make a unique character.
You should also take some time to think about how your character interacts with others. Are they trusting? Superior? Sarcastic? What tactics do they resort to during negotiation? Intimidation? Bribery?
Knowing your likes, dislikes, and how you interact with others will make role playing much easier. Your motivation is helpful for making big decisions, but it won’t guide the small, day-to-day interactions as much as your personality does.
Having a clearly defined personality can also help the DM develop interesting challenges and NPCs that will have memorable interactions with your character. A filthy mountain hermit who lives on the side of a cliff and has the magic item you need will be a much more interesting quest for our “afraid of heights and getting dirty” character.
With a clearly defined personality, your DM can also put plot hooks in areas that you’re likely to find without having to railroad the party. For example, a noble with a map to a sacred hoard of artifacts might just happen to be getting their dress clothes tailored when you visit the fancy cloak shop.
Ask the DM and the other players what kind of game they’re looking for. Develop a character who contributes to that. You may absolutely love your derpy, disaffected medic who just wants to bring universal healthcare to all peasants. And that sounds like a fascinating character to play. But if everyone else is interested in high adventure and doesn’t like the idea of 4th-wall-breaking meta-commentary, you might want to save that character for another campaign.
Similarly, try to understand how much conflict and planning the other players enjoy. If the party as a whole prefers carefully planning out their actions to avoid conflict, your rogue who can’t help stealing from every new NPC will be funny once and irritating for the rest of the campaign.
Take a moment to think about what kind of dynamic your character will create when they pursue their interests. Does that match the tone and goals of other players? Will it create a lot of discord between players? This isn’t a book where carefully scripted moments of dialog allow characters to reconcile differences. Quirky conflicts usually just lead to frustrated players.
This isn’t a concrete rule, but if you find yourself just absolutely loving the character you’re building, that could be a bad sign. If all you can think is how cool they’re going to be, and all the interesting things they’re going to do, there’s a good chance that you’ll struggle to play that character in a way that shares the spotlight.
Your character is only going to get 25% of the screen time at best. And usually that time will be spent interacting with others. So when you envision what will be fun about playing your character, the first things that come to mind should be interesting potential for interactions.
Again, this isn’t a hard rule. But if a character really resonates with you, and all you can think about is how awesome they’re going to be, you might be better served coming up with a second character that more comfortably fits into a larger group of protagonists.
As I mentioned at the beginning of the post, your goal isn’t to birth the next Hamlet, fully formed from your brain. D&D is all about what emerges at the table. Your initial character build is meant to support that collaborative, improvisational story exercise.
So don’t exhaust every interesting detail of a character’s backstory ahead of time. Specify enough to have a sense for where the character starts and how they might grow. If you really let your character evolve in response to the story, they’re certain to be unrecognizable 10 sessions in. That’s because real people who are a product of the world around them are messy and complex and full of contradictions. Only artificially constructed characters have nice, neat descriptions.
If you specify your entire backstory, your character might be rigid and unresponsive to events as you try desperately to stay true to your “source material”. Or you’ll throw all that precious prep work out the window and you won’t have a history to build off of as you move forward.
Instead, intentionally leave areas unexplored in your history. Demarcate these areas with open ended questions:
As events unfold during the campaign that suggest an answer to these questions, you can go back and fill them in.
This might seem uncomfortable at first. Somehow, editing your character backstory can make it feel less “real” and more like “fiction”. Setting aside the fact that this is all a massive exercise in collaborative fiction, I understand where this feeling comes from. Part of the allure of D&D is that, by relying on dice and the DM, the story is sort of like a simulation of quasi-real events.
You can maintain this sense of reality by thinking of these questions as already having an answer — you just don’t know what the answer is yet. Then, when you go back and flesh out the backstory, it feels like you are getting further acquainted with your character, not revising their history.
I’ll wrap this post up with a final question you should answer, which nicely summarizes the rest of the advice in this article: Why are you here?
More specifically, why is your character here, in this moment, with these people, doing these things?
I don’t want to hear how this particular adventure technically aligns with your longterm goals. Or how having more allies increases the odds of your individual success.
Why is your character going to invest in these people? Why will they join something bigger than themselves? Maybe deep down they’ve always wanted a family they never had. Or no one has ever looked past their misshapen features. Or they’ve always been sleeping with one eye open and they just can’t take it anymore.
It doesn’t have to be instantaneous. You don’t have to be besties from the start. But going into the campaign you should have a sense for whatever that yearning is that will keep you sticking with the party. That seed that will eventually grow into powerful bonds.
Because at the end of the day, everything you do is about building the party. Sitting down with your friends and turning into a band of unlikely heroes that save the day.
