One thing you’ll see that I’m not going to be talking about is backstory. I think that a good backstory can make it easier to role play, give the DM a bunch of story hooks, and give you a more rich character, but that isn’t needed for building a character for a game.

What I’m going to recommend is that you start by understanding the campaign and make a character that fits the game you’re playing. If it’s a heist game, making a paladin with AC 22 and stealth of -2 is going to cause issues. Same with a more social based game, just because you have this great half-orc barbarian idea doesn’t mean that it’s going to fit into a game with a ton of social situations when the half-orcs favorite word is supposed to be smash. This should all really be hashed out in a session zero where you come with your ideas for characters and the DM comes with their idea for games and then you figure out what game you want to play and with that, what character idea you can use.

Next, you’re playing in a game with one or five or more players, so build your character to not be Batman. I know what playing the character that can do everything, but the more people you have, the less you need the rogue who dipped into bard to get all the expertise. Make a character that is good at what they are meant to be good at. If you want to make the rogue character, focus on stealth and deception and slight of hand. You don’t need to be better at Arcana than the wizard is just because you can be.

Now, that does sound like you could end up creating a character that isn’t fun for you to play. Maybe you want to be to tools monkey who knows a bit of everything all the time. That’s fine, but then leave of combat. Which is what Batman forgot to do. But for the final piece of advice, play a character that is fun for you, but is also fun for everyone else to play with. Let’s go with the Rogue example again, just because you can steal from the paladin doesn’t mean that you should steal from the paladin. And maybe your paladin is all about being that thief, but at least make it then that he respects at least some of the members of the party enough to not steal from the party. You can certainly try and steal from shops still, but the party is off limits, because when you steal the trinket that the paladin has written a massive backstory for, they are going to be pissed.

And that’s it, it’s a bit of a shorter article. Sorry for missing yesterday, I was out sick. But those are the three things, really two, just with one split out between mechanics and role playing. But this is the simplest level of creating a character that you’re going to have fun playing, and that is going to fit into the campaign and be fun to play with in a game.

Now, this is a bit simplistic, hence the 101 added to the end. I am going to continue until we get up to a graduate level course, just remember that all the information for building a good character is going to build off of one another, so starting at the graduate level course isn’t going to do you that much good.

Have I missed anything important for the extremely basic how to create a good D&D player character?

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Freddy Krueger

This classic monster from the Nightmare on Elm Street movies has long razors on his hands and comes to people in their sleep and kills them. So if you want to avoid him, you had better stay awake.

When looking at this in D&D, we’re definitely looking at a spellcaster who can do a few things, we’re looking a psychic damage or necrotic damage, I’d say, and we’re looking for the ability to walk between planes of reality.

We’re going to start basing off of this Necromancer.

We’re going to toss out a lot of the area affect spells, but things like Vamperic Touch and Withering Touch, those will be using the claws to slash at the victim. We’re tossing out Ray of Sickness from the first level spells and adding in Disguise Self, if I remember form my movie watching, you don’t always realize that it’s Freddy right away and when you do it’s too late. At second level we’d go with Alter Self, Hold Person, and Misty Step. The Hold Person is going to be the person being so afraid that they can’t do anything, and Misty Step is how they can seemingly always be walking behind you slowly and your running, but when  you turn around, they are always there. At level 3 spells, bestow curse and vamperic touch are both good options and I’d add in Fear as the final spell at that level. Level four spells, dimension door, for when you want to walk through a wall, and hallucinatory terrain are two really strong options, then Phantasmal Killer makes them see their

worst nightmare in their head, which would be you, and deals psychic damage to them. At fifth level dream is an obvious choice, because it allows you to shape their dreams, never allowing them to be properly rested for when you attack and then Dominate Person, again using it as a fear sort of affect this spell would work well. And finally circle of death, you could attack a whole party while they sleep by using this spell.

I’d then figure out a way to give yourself a half-orc life ability where you, the first time you would hit zero hit points, come back up to some low number of hit points. This is classic horror monster where you never are really dead the first time and to ignore that ability would just be a shame.

Beyond that, I’d primarily leave it the same for the rest of the ability stats for Freddy Krueger and the necromancer.

So how would you use Freddy Krueger in a game?

I mean, I’d consider using something of the standard story from Nightmare on Elm Street.  They were horribly burned and disfigured in a fire of something that they were wrongly (or rightly) accused of. Everyone thinks that they are dead and the whole village is covering up what has happened, but really you’re alive, and you’ve been biding your time. Now you’re back for revenge. But you’re not that strong (In our build they have 66 HP, but their armor class is only 12 and can’t go higher). So you’re stalking and killing all of the children of the people who burned you when they were younger.

But if you don’t want to go with the exact Nightmare on Elm Street story, you could instead give yourself a demonic background where you are from one of the pits of hell and you’ve come to destroy a certain person who you did kill. But even once you had finished your deed, you weren’t released by the person who had called you forth. You had to do their bidding until one day you were able to get out from under them and are now free to cause terror. And you’ve been used to working in the night and in the shadows killing those while they sleep. This would give you, as the DM, a bigger bad guy to play around with, and while the players might think that your Freddy is the big bad guy, you can then find out that there was someone controlling him for a while.

How would you use Freddy Krueger in your D&D campaign? Do you think I missed anything obvious that I should have added into it?

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