When I went through all my Dungeon Master tools, one of the big things I talked about was story arcs. I think that something similar can be done for players. There is less control as a player overall for the timeline of it. But as you role play, you create your character and grow them. So what does that look like, how do you plan out a character arc?

The Basis of a Character Arc

Let’s start out with the first one you already have built into your character. If you followed what I suggested for character creation, you have an overall character arc already planned out. Read up on that here. But this is just a starting point.

Example – Bottom-Tier Character Tomozaki

So, I want to give an example from an anime/light novel series that I love. Bottom-Tier Character Tomozaki features a protagonist who doesn’t think that he can “win” at the game of life. In fact, he believes that because of his stats (the body he was born into) there’s no way to get ahead and therefore life is a garbage game. But then he meets the #2 player of a video game in real life, he’s number one, and it turns out that it’s someone he knows. She convinces him to try playing the game of life.

So, how does she do that? Every day is a new small goal to lead towards the big end goal. In the case of Tomozaki, it is get a girlfriend for the big goal. But the smaller goals are improve his looks, get better at talking and engaging with people. And even those often get broken into smaller tasks. And I think that is how you create a character arc for your character.

The Big Arc

The first thing is the big arc. This one is already part of your character creation, like I said. But let’s recap it here because it is important. When you create your character you create two things. The first thing is pretty simple, why am I an adventurer. That is your starting point.

The second one is the thing that gives you a big character arc to go through. What is my end goal. Aka, what keeps me adventuring and when I complete it, I’ll likely be done. It makes sense, this is about the largest thing that your character can do. And that is likely going to tie in with complete the campaign as well, but it might not for all characters.

Breaking It Down

So now you know what you big character arc is going to be. But you want to get there, and you can’t just work towards a single massive goal. Your character is going to stagnate along the way if that happens because you don’t have a goal to get to in between

Your goals should affect your character as you plan them out. There are two types of character arcs that you can create for these smaller goals. The first are ones that you can do. Does your character have a specific goal, like in the example of the monk from character creation, they want to make their monastery financially stable, so they want to fund raise when they go to town, so it might be make connections with people. Or it might be something where you need the Dungeon Masters help. So you talk with them to help make it happen.

So let’s break it down even further here.

• Keep it actionable
• Work on it during downtime or in alignment with moving the story forward
• Know your end condition
• Know the end result or change

Example – The Monk

So quick recap. Our monk is adventuring because he needs to help raise money for the monastery that brought him in and raised him. Once he feels like the monastery is in a viable spot financially, he is likely going to retire and go back to train and mentor urchins like he was and give them the opportunity he had.

So let’s create a small goal with that in mind.

Find a potential benefactor and talk with them.

This is actionable as you can go around town and ask people. And it is something that is easy to do in the downtime. The end condition is also set, it is done when you talk to a potential benefactor. Not when you convince them or anything.

So the big question is what is the end result or change for the monk? Well, in this case, I suspect our urchin who lived on the streets and then went into a monastery isn’t that great at talking to people and has a low charisma stat. So the end goal is to get better at talking to people.

This is something that can even play out in your characters stats. This could be a goal until you hit level four, or level eight, or whenever you get your stat bumps. And when you do, if you’ve successfully worked at this, you increase your charisma stat so that it’s less of a negative. But that is optional to tie it in so much.

Final Thoughts on a Good Character Arc

I think that these are important for your character. I talked about it some with bonds, flaws, ideals, and personality traits last week. But it is about the character growth. And using your bonds, flaws, ideals and personality traits, it can be a great way to create more interesting story arcs for your character. You find a flaw and you want to over come it, that is a character arc. Or maybe you have a personality trait that you want to add or a bond you want to add, that is a character arc as well.

But with that said, we’re down to our last topic. And that is going to be role playing your character. Everything that we’ve done thus far leads up to that moment. Whether it be the character creation, backstory creation, or figuring out a character arc, it is all going to show up at the table and how you interact with the other players and the Dungeon Master. So join me for that next time.

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