The last part of playing your D&D Character, there is no 401 for this course.

To me there are three main parts that I wanted to talk about. The first was figuring out how to be in character and staying in character as much as possible. The next was figuring out who your character is. What are some signature things about them that you can role play into.

Finally, I want to talk about having your own character arcs in your Dungeons and Dragons game.

Now, a lot of the time, players, following my recommended character creation, put in story hooks for their Dungeon Master and those are the things that they are really going to use for character progression. And with those things, you can get awesome character progression. But, if it develops slowly, or isn’t the precise hook that the DM is using for your character, it can feel like your character is stagnating and hasn’t changed at all.

Obviously that is less than ideal, so when creating your character, you have to be thinking about, what character arc do I want to take my character on, even outside of what the DM might be doing?

Maybe I start out with a character who hates the idea of adventuring. They are a wizard book worm who was kicked out of their tower for some reason, probably because they have a necromancy spell on their spell list, or maybe because they only ever wanted to learn and not use their magic for anything useful. So now they are out adventuring and dragging their feet. You don’t need the DM’s help to make that characters first story arc one of them learning how to enjoy or at least complain less about adventuring.

That could be a pretty big arc for the character and maybe eventually it’s that they do want to go adventuring, but it should be somewhat obvious, with how I talk about character creation and playing your character, once one arc is done, that doesn’t mean that is where your character ends.

Now, you have to pick out your second arc, and pretty often that can be tied into your first arc. In the case with my wizard who is now gung-ho for adventuring, they are going to be too gung-ho. Now they are putting themselves in dangerous situations, and the more times it works out for them, the more risky they become. Then eventually they are going to get knocked down and knocked out of a fight because they think they are too powerful to have that happen to them.

From there you could go into your third arc a couple of different ways. You could kind of mirror the first arc with the wizard regaining some confidence to a normal amount of confidence with adventuring. Or you could have their confidence shaken but them believing that there is one spell out there that they need to know. So when they are in a town, they go to the library to research, if they find a dead wizard with her book still, they read through it in hopes of finding that spell to copy into their wizarding book. And with that let your DM know what you are looking for and you might get it eventually, or maybe the DM doesn’t want to have that spell in their game, so you can then spend some time with the character wrapping up that arc by eventually realizing that they have other spells that are powerful as well, kind of going back to the other arc where it mirrors the first.

Let me also say, you don’t plan out every arc like I have done there. That is probably good enough arc wise to get your adventurer into the middle levels. But you plan out one arc at a time. Anything more than a single arc planned at a time is a bit tricky. You might have some idea as to where you want to forward, but you don’t know how the game is going to go. When you know you’re getting close to the end of one of your own personal character arcs, you can start thinking about the next one, but you certainly don’t have to.

Also, there are no hard cutoffs on several of the arcs I tossed out there, and there probably won’t be with your arcs either. In the case of my wizard, them getting to enjoy adventuring, there is no specific cutoff point where now that arc is done. How much enjoyment do they have to have for it to be considered done is completely subjective. Same with how long it would take for the wizard to realize that they don’t need the spell. Getting knocked down/out has a specific end, but you don’t know when that will happen in game, just that it most likely will, because wizards don’t have many hit points.

Finally, this is your character arc that you are using for role playing purposes. This doesn’t all of a sudden become the whiny wizard hour. It’s something that you sprinkle in sparingly to your role playing. If the wizard was kicked out of the tower to actually do something good and then they’ll be let back in, the wizard is going to go along with the adventure and the party, just grudgingly, and the spell list at the start might be pretty bad. But don’t go kicking and screaming into every new part of the adventure, toss in a line here and there about adventuring, or about how going into the woods is going to be horrible for your asthma, and things like that, but don’t derail the game and hog the spotlight for your characters arc that you are working on. The arc is supposed to be something to help make your character feel like more of a living character than just a plain old hero like you get in bad fantasy books.

With all of this now, you should have a character who you play in character, who has some ticks and quirks that you can play into, and that grows and changes throughout the campaign. Getting all of those things in place and with good balance takes practice, so if you have trouble with an arc or an accent, that’s fine and expected as you learn to role play.

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