In the prerequisites, we’ve talked about how to make a character that fits the campaign and is fun for you and the group (101). We then went on and talked about how Dungeons and Dragons gives you tools, such as personality trait, ideals, bonds, and flaws to create some role playing experiences (201). Finally, in our last class we looked at how you can create an open backstory that the Dungeon Master will be able to tie into the game and that can tie into your role playing and character development (301).

This last bit is going to build off of creating that interesting backstory to give more options for the DM and for the player themselves with role playing. It could just be considered a continuation of the previous one, but I think that there are a few more intricacies with building a character with everything in here.

Leave Blanks in Your Backstory
This one is interesting because as a player you often want to know everything about your character. But it’s going to give you more opportunities to develop a character if you haven’t filled everything in. It also allows the DM a chance to create more character hooks for you. If your whole background is known, they only have the hooks that you were instructed to create in 301. However, if the DM has opportunity to work on your backstory and create hooks in those openings.

This is also tricky because it requires trust between players and the DM. There is at times a mindset that it’s DM vs the players. If you think it’s going to be like that, it’s hard to give a DM a chance to twist your characters backstory. But if you do allow for it, you can develop more interesting and deeper stories and stretch yourself with role playing.

Play to Your Weakness
Probably could have been mentioned earlier as I talked about flaws and looked at what D&D has baked into your character creation already. But there’s an idea of a dump stat, and no, this isn’t the stat you dump all your points into, it’s the stat that is lower than every other stat and is below the average, ten, that the commoners have. It’s easy to not want to have one of these or to not let it shine. However, the dump stat is going to provide you a lot of role playing opportunities. So give your character one, and then tie it into the backstory. Pick whatever stat that you want to dump, I wouldn’t recommend CON (constitution) though for any character, but really make it part of your story. There’s a desire to have it be the heroic things that you have done and your great moments to create your backstory, but instead consider your previous failures as to figure out why you are driven to be an adventurer. This also, again, creates more plot hooks for the DM to grab onto.

Don’t Be Afraid to Change
Finally, don’t be afraid to change your backstory. Don’t be afraid to change your character. You might think you have a concept that you love, but it might not end up being what you thought it was going to be. Figure that out early on, and if that is the case and it isn’t a character that you love, talk to your DM and change your character. Now, this can be done a couple of different ways. Maybe you don’t like the backstory that you created, so change that up. Even possibly changing out your background if need be to match your new backstory idea. Or it could be that you thought you’d love playing the Wizard, but you really want to hit things with a big pointy metal stick. Talk to your DM and change the character that you are playing. Depending on what the DM wants to do, your previous character could be magically transformed, or it could be that your previous character leaves the party and a new one comes in. My only caveat to this is that you should try and change early to find out what you want. In Dungeons and Flagons season one, Clint changed characters completely in the middle of the game, and it just happened to work that it made sense in the story, and I actually gave him the option as I knew he wanted to try new things. But that puts pressure on the DM, so if you are going to change, try and change early as the party and story are just starting.

I’m sure that there are many more things that I could talk about with character creation. However, I think for Dungeons and Dragons, that this is a very strong basis for getting character ready for a game and into a game. If you put everything together, you’re going to, most likely, have a fun time. There are certainly other things as well that can impact your game, but if you do this process, you can be fairly confident it won’t be your character.

Are there any tips that you’d like to add for character creation? If so, leave them in the comments below.

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We’ve talked previously about the simplest ways to make a character that doesn’t step on other players toes, that fits into the game, and one that is fun to play.

Next we’ve talked about how you can use the personality traits, ideals, bonds, and flaws to create some back story for your character. This allows you to really start creating a backstory for your character and your role playing. You can review 201 here.

Now we’re onto really delving into the backstory and what makes a good backstory. This will be covered in the final two posts about creating backstory and creating your player character.

When creating a backstory there are a few things that you should be writing into your backstory:

Role Playing Prompts –
This is probably the trickiest one to explain, but basically you are looking to expand upon the personality traits, ideals, bonds, and flaws that you’ve previously created or at this time create those along with your backstory to give you things to role play with. But now you get the chance to really expand upon that. If you have a flaw that you hate all goblins, well, now you can explain why you hate all goblins since they murdered your family and burned down your village. So as you develop your backstory, look to drop in those little tidbits of information to support the personality traits, ideals, bonds, and flaws. Also, look to add in more role playing elements for you. You can create little pieces of story that are going to give your character a more rich background and more depth to role play with.

A Reason to Adventure –
This one is pretty straight forward. You need a reason to be about adventuring. If you spent your whole life on a farm and you are going to inherit the farm, why are you out adventuring? Or if you are a hermit in the woods who hates people, why are you adventuring? Give yourself a reason to be adventuring, and a reason to keep adventuring. If a bunch of goblins killed off your family and burned down your village, that’s probably a reason to start adventuring to get revenge and also a reason to continue adventuring after you get revenge because you don’t have a place to go back to. It doesn’t have to be that tragic, and with elves or other longer living races, you might adventure just to leave your mark on the world. But use your backstory as your opportunity to create a reason why you are adventuring and why you will continue adventuring with the adventuring party.

Goals/Story Hooks for Your Character
Now, this is partially covered when you create your bonds as they can be things that is your characters goal, but work on adding in some goals and story hooks for your character that the DM is going to be able to use. It doesn’t mean that all of them will be used, but they are things that the DM can use if they want. In our example of wanting to get revenge on the goblins who killed your family, that’s a story hook that the DM can use. If you write that you’ve already taken care of the goblin in your backstory you’ve now closed off that part of your backstory and completed it already. The DM now can’t pull out your hate of goblins, give you the chance to track down the goblins and maybe have a change of heart about goblins as a whole. As a DM, I really appreciate those bits of mystery that people leave in their backstories. In the first season of Dungeons and Flagons, we had a great example of this as Ashley’s character was left somewhere as a young child and all she remembered from it was the stars in the sky. That gives me a ton to play with as a DM.

If you have, especially the first two added into your backstory, you are going to have a character that has a reason to go adventuring and a fun character to play. The last piece really allows you to be more a part of the story and have those story arcs that really focus in on you. If you are a player who wants to sit back and enjoy the story more, having less of those hooks is going to make it so you’re less involved.

Are there other backstory elements that make a good Dungeons and Dragons character? Have you done these while creating characters before?

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Those things can all be purely mechanical at that point, so you might only have an extremely simple backstory created. In 201, we’re going to create the basic backstory or more so, the basic role playing pieces you need to think about.

The fun thing, D&D already has something built in for that. In the backgrounds section, and I’ve talked about this before, they have you roll for four things, personality traits, ideals, flaws, and bonds. These are going to be your building blocks for Character Creation 201.

Personality Traits
Probably the easiest section to talk about because we all have an idea of what personality traits are. Someone can be pompous, demeaning, trusting, quick to anger, and so many more things. Pick one or two things that are your characters ticks and put them into personality traits. It can be as simple as your character is trusting and nice. And it really can be as basic as that. However, a lot of the time you’re going to want to provide a bit more context. For example if your character is easily angered, that’s going to be annoying for everyone to play with a character who gets mad at any sort of slight. Instead, you have a character who gets mad when whenever anyone talks about their family, that’s interesting.

Ideals
Another one that is pretty easy, what is it your character holds sacred. Maybe they firmly believe that all goblins are evil. It could be that an ancient religion must be revered. This is really the pillar of your character. Now, ideals might be fairly easy to come up with a good one as compared to some of the others, but you do have to ask yourself some question. What if something or someone goes against your ideal in your party or you have to ignore your ideal for a little bit in the game for the story? Going back to the goblin example, what if you have to interrogate a goblin and you’ve always just murdered them before? What if you come across a goblin village with goblin children in it who are playing a game? There’s a tendency to use the ideal as a black and white thing where you’ll act one way on one side of it and another way if you cross to the other side. With the goblin example, not a goblin, you’ll give it a chance, is a goblin it deserves to die. What happens instead if you give yourself room to role play in that, and your character struggles with what to do in the goblin village? It doesn’t mean you change your ideal, it means that your character as depth. And the goblin example is a very concrete example, but it generally shows the idea that is being shot for.

Bonds
This one is a bit trickier, who are you really connected to, or what or where you are connected to in the world. This could also be seen as a “why you are doing this” sort of thing. Maybe you have a baby sibling who you are going to protect by going out into the big world. Maybe you have a village that was kind to your in your time of need, maybe there’s a certain god or a relic. It’s interesting, because this doesn’t have to be something you’ve experienced in your life yet. For example, if you decided there’s a holy relic, it could be long lost, and your bond to the world is that religion and finding that holy relic. Bonds also don’t have to be a good thing, it could be a bond if you’re a rogue where you owe the thieves guild money. I would say out of all of the traits, the bond is what is really going to drive the character into adventuring and keep driving them forward in the campaign.

Flaws
The best for that, and I’m serious about this. This one should be the best part, like the personality traits, your flaw is going to be something that can really inform your role playing, and can create some very interesting moments. However, a lot of people look at a flaw, and they don’t really want to take one, because they want to be that near perfect hero like Superman who can save the day. You’re not, you’re probably not even the A-Team, you’d be lucky when starting out to be on a team at all. You are a messed up character who has most likely had a hard life, you’re going to have flaws. So make them real and make them something that affects you in a game. If you go with, whenever I see a demon, I curl up into a ball and can’t do anything, that’s not a good flaw. One, you might not be playing a game with demons, so it won’t ever effect your character, or it might be a game about demons and now you’re going to be worthless. Take something that you can role play into in interesting ways, and something that, if you want, your character can overcome. And once they’ve overcome it, put down another flaw, the next in line or maybe something else that has come out with how your character now copes with the previous flaw.

By adding in these four things, you now have gone from a character that is fit for the framework of a game, and is going to mechanically fit in, to a character that is starting to have reasons for doing things, and places for you to role play. And that’s what character creation is, a place for you to set-up how you’re going to role play throughout the campaign.

This is also a good time to mention that the personality traits, ideals, bonds, and flaws can all change throughout the campaign. I talked about it in the flaws, how you might overcome the flaw, or maybe your bond will shift as you dip for a couple of classes of warlock. So those are very tangible game reasons, but beyond that, the first couple of sessions it might just shift because you find yourself playing your character differently than you thought you were going to. So let these things be able to change those first couple of sessions as you lock them down, and then give yourself character arcs to go through as you complete a bond and form another.

What are your thoughts on Personality Traits, Ideals, Bonds, and Flaws? How do you use them in your games?

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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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