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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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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I would say that the ideas I’ve been giving in posts have been medium levels of backstory. It has been more than just suggesting playing a rogue who likes to stab stuff. But it also hasn’t been creating a lot of very depth heavy backstories. I leave stuff generally vague like what deity it is that the cleric is following, what town or area you grew up in that something horrible happened in. It is very possible to set-up a very in depth backstory where you list out your friends, you family members, everyone who has wronged you, what your life was like growing up, what all of your hopes and dreams had been.

There are multiple reasons for me doing that, the first being, if you want to use it, some of those things are things you’ll have to work through with your DM, because I don’t know your game, and some of them are stuff that you don’t need to know. Knowing too much about your character does a few things, it can limit what the DM can do around your character, because there will be a lack of mystery. It can force you into playing a character in a certain way and finding out that you don’t enjoy it. It can limit your character in how they can develop.

The one that I want to focus on for this topic is the fact that it can force you into playing your character a certain way.

The point of this topic was to cover two things, the first being, what’s my motivation for adventuring, the other other being, what’s my motivation for role playing. These two topics are fairly closely held together. Most likely the reason you have for adventuring is also the reason that you’re going to have for some of your characters motivations and interactions in role playing. If goblins murdered your family, you’re probably adventuring to get revenge on the goblins, it’s also probably going to mean that when you run across an injured goblin that poses no threat to you, you’re still going to want to kill it.

With motivation for adventuring, there can be a lot of different reasons. A bard might be in it to see the world, be able to travel and perform on different stages that they wouldn’t have access to otherwise. You could also have a Barbarian who is just in need of and bad with money, so they don’t care too much about the adventuring, but they always need money and the adventuring party always gives them a little money. Or you could be out looking for a lost holy artifact as a cleric, getting revenge on a ruler who slaughtered your village as a fighter, or out to protect your grove against a blight that is on the land as a druid. There are a lot of reasons otherwise that you could be looking into adventuring. But one of your jobs as a player when creating your character is to make sure you have this answered.

Along with having that answered, a lot of DM’s will put your party together, but if you and fellow players can come up with a reason for putting together, or better yet come up with a reason for keeping your party together, that is huge. Whether it’s because your party has similar goals or needs or because you actually like each other, it’s important to have some reason. This motivation with help inform some of your interactions and will help it make sense when the story of the game isn’t focused on your character to keep them as part of the group. Now, this isn’t all on you as a player, the DM has to keep all the characters involved in the story as well, but if you’re creating the loner Druid who cares only about her part of the forest, when the characters aren’t focused on that, that druid is probably going to leave the party to either go off on their own or to find another adventuring party to help them.

But also with motivation, we want to talk about the idea of role playing your character. I talked some earlier about having a medium depth background story. Some of the reason was that it doesn’t lock you into a single specific way of playing your character, but also because it doesn’t lock you into a single path going forward. It’s too easy to lock your self into a single purpose and single goal while role playing and then finding out that you really don’t enjoy it.

Now, I realize that sometimes it’s fun coming up with a ton of backstory and all of these different plot hooks, but often times it’s going to be too much to actually work into a game and there is a chance to feel disappointment because it wasn’t fully touched upon. As a DM, personally I don’t try and avoid using peoples backstories and generally I’ll try and tie them into the campaign as I go. However, if something doesn’t fit in with the overall story, or if I feel like the story is leaning too heavily on a single person, I am going to try and change it up which might keep it from using all of your backstory. If there are too many plot hooks as well for your character, I might not touch on all of them, instead just focusing on one of them to really add into the main story with a nod or two thrown to others of them.

Beyond having too many plot hooks, having too few is bad as well. If, as a DM, I don’t get much to work with, I’m not going to put as much effort into keeping your character engaged story wise. My assumption is that you’re going to like combat more so and I’ll make sure to sprinkle enough of those in as well. But it also doesn’t give you much framework to role play, if you want to role play a lot, a consistent character. They might end up being consistent because you’re just playing your own personality, but it might be that they are very chaotic in how they respond to everything presented to them. Being a little chaotic isn’t bad, and a lot of people play chaotic characters, in fact, the Total Party Thrill podcast has an episode (linked here) about how Chaotic Good is probably where most adventurers should be playing out of.

So there is chaos in a good way and in a bad way. A chaotic character can at times be used as an excuse to do whatever you want, but chaos means less that you just do whatever sounds the most fun in the moment, it more means that you’re willing to do what it takes in situations laws be damned, and you’re willing to be flexible for the greater good, again, I think that Total Party Thrill with their episode does a really good job of explaining it, so I’ll leave that as a listen for people.

There is one major exception for having much of a backstory, or any of one really, and that’s at a Convention or while playing a one-shot. When playing those shorter games, focus in on a single thing for your characters. When I was playing Dungeons and Dinosaurs game at AcadeCon the first year I was there, one person made their T-Rex very impulsive, I had an herbivore and I made him into a researcher who was watching and documenting everything. We didn’t have more backstory or direction for character than what we gave them, in fact about the only thing we knew about the dinosaurs came on a dinosaur fact sheet. In that case, having that one thing you role play to is important as it’s going to allow you to have a focused character for that short time without slowing down the game because you’re trying to pick out or build more depth into your character.

What are some things you’ve used as motivation for either being part of a party or role playing a character in Dungeons and Dragons or any role playing system?

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