Sometimes players create Dungeons and Dragons characters that… well… they suck. They may have been excitedly created… but if they fall into some common character creation pitfalls they can really be one-dimensional flops in the party. I don’t want you to make that mistake. If this is going to be a long-standing campaign, you’re going to be spending dozens of hours inside the head of this character… AND trying to solve problems with the stats, and abilities that you pick.. so… you kind of want to get it right. This guide will step you through an easy to follow process that will help you create a character that you love coming back to play again and again.
Gaming Group Activities
While a majority of this guide will focus on steps that you as a player can take to really bring a rockin’ character to your party, some of the key elements for setting yourself up for success are done at the group level. Make sure that your group considers that following two activities
The All-Important Session Zero
If the first rule of fight club is that you don’t talk about fight club, the first rule of Dungeons and Dragons is have a doggone session zero, for Pete’s sake! Your session zero can take a variety of forms, but in the end the major takeaway is alignment of expectations and coordination for who’s playing what role in the party. The Alignment comes into play with getting a common understanding of how the overall game is going to be played. Address things like… what’s the tone of the game? What kinds of characters are allowable? How are things like house rules going to work. Get the full Session Zero Checklist in our related page. The second thing that the session zero gets you is coordination with your fellow players. Not every party needs to try to fit the same cookie cutter model in terms of classes / roles… but you’re going to want to make sure you’re on the same page about who’s doing what in the party. There’s often some give and take here. In every party that I’ve been a part of I’ve typically come to the table with 2-3 character concepts that I might like to play… and often the character I go with is a deviation from even those. The main thing that you may want to consider avoiding is really avoiding specialization. For example, if a party has clumsy oaf orc fighter in full plate, a fire sneezing dragonborn cleric, and then two stealthy thieves… you might be setting yourselves up for frustration. Did both of these rogues want to be “the scout of the party?” are they both great at lock picking? Whose turn is it to shine when the room is filling with water, and there is a lock to pick on the mechanism keeping the party in the room? The one with the better stats? It can be seriously underwhelming to roll up a character that you want to have a niche value add to bring to the party, only to be trumped by another party member already doing that. Check out our Party Composition page for a more robust discussion on this.
A Character Driven Adventure
This is mores so a driving principle than a specific item on a checklist. The best stories are character driven. Think of your favorite movies… or as I like to call them your favorite stories on film. One commonality is that the best movies had fantastic characters that you could relate with and root for. These characters drove the story forward.
In Dungeons and Dragons, the player characters are the stars of the show. The DM really needs to wrap his mind around this… Players really need to run with this. For DMs, this means taking an approach to your sessions, storyline, and gaming spotlight to the characters. For players, this means make characters worth rooting for! Don’t just create a class with a stat block… make an authentic, relatable protagonist character. The rest of the blow guide will guide you through. DM’s, check out our guide to creating a character Driven Adventure
Your characters are the stars of this show. Therefore you will be able to really contribute to the quality of the game by bringing characters that have goals and motivations that you think are really cool… that you want to root for and believe in. Give your group of friends a story that contains characters that they want to root for as well.
Character Building Activities
Class and Race
Now that you have an idea of what role you’d like to play in the party, select a class that you like for filling that role. For example, let’s say you volunteered to make a tough as nails front line martial class that could deal out damage… you could select a single class, or you could narrow it down to three – let’s say barbarian, fighter, or paladin.
Musings
Now that you’ve narrowed down the classes you might like to play… think through some character concepts that you would find cool to play as, and explore which one sounds best. At this phase I like to take a cliché concept, and kind of turn it on its head. For example… what if I created a ranger that was… a chef! He stalks wild unique game to prepare it for esteemed guests. What if I was a barbarian that was… a poet? That thumps his chest and sings songs of manliness… what if I was an elven finesse weapon fighter that is… in amnesia. He’s lost his memory and is going along this journey to see if he can regain his sense of self. In this phase I like to take something known and infuse something that is not “already been done” a million times to find a unique angle to pursue. Check out our character concept generator and guide. Here is a link to character concept generators that can help with the process. Here’s our article on character Concept Generation. Now just marry up the character concept that sounds awesome to explore with the class that best represents the conceptual character in your mind.
Choose your background from the Players handbook.
Now choose the background that best fits, or augments your high level concept. Aside from this, I would advise that everyone writes a back story to their character. This back story can be a paragraph, a few bullets, or literally a book… but writing out where they have come from, what they are about, and who they are connected to will pay tremendous dividends in your game.
DM Tip – leveraging the back stories and character motivations that your characters are creating through these steps make amazing story hooks to weave into your plot. Honestly the most effective way to get a player to be super engaged is by providing content in the overall story that hooks into the back story that they care about, and brought to the table.
Get Clear on your primary motivation
What would you consider your primary motivation? Why does your character adventure? Are there secondary motivations?
What are your characters goals?
Related to their motivation, what are your characters goals? If you’re falling short here your DM may help you think of some goals that work well with the world setting
What are your characters tendencies
What is your character like in social situations? What do they think about different races and demographics?
What is your characters homeland & upbringing
How does this influence your character’s view of the world? Are they from an open-minded port city? Are they from a small town? An example of a character that I’ve had a blast playing is a dragonborn fighter that is from a monastic order that’s sole purpose was to keep a great evil dragon asleep in his dormancy under a mountain. He spent his life reading books and learning combat from his kin… never interacting with the world. In effect, he’s super book smart but also super gullible and not street smart. The world is a wonder to him because while he’s read so much in books, he’s seen nothing of the outside world in person.
A Character that is a work in progress.
Let’s go back to the “what’s your favorite book or movie” question… the stories we love most are ones where the main characters had to overcome something within themselves to succeed in their goal. Create a character that has room to grow… Dungeons and Dragons can be amazing not just because you can create characters that are amazing at level one, but because you can collaboratively tell the story of how your characters became awesome through their adventures together.
Let’s talk about Mechanics
One more perspective on why you want to create a character, not a gimmick.
If you’ve followed the advice on this page, you have a character concept that will be fun to explore, has motivations and personality quirks that you can tap into, and be present in, and that is a work in progress that you and your fellow gamers will want to see where their story goes. However you need your character to be effective as well a common pitfall is to focus too much on creating an optimized, min maxed gimmick character. For example, in previous editions of dungeons and dragons… you could take a reach weapon that made a trip attack when attacking , take feats to specialize in tripping people… then… when someone got up from prone within your reach it triggered an attack of opportunity. So in the end you create a cacophony of tripped opponents who constantly get attacked by you, and then re-tripped when they get up again. While this can be hilarious… for a while… if this is the main focus of your mental energy when you create your character… your “I’m going to create a character that is great at exploiting XYZ mechanic…” the fun of this approach gets old fast. After you have walked through enough combats to see that “yep – that build worked!” it’s easy to get fatigued, and disinterested as just rinsing and repeating the “I win card” you designed for yourself at character creation. If you’re not interested in where your character has been, where they want to go, and why… then you could be missing out on what you may find the main part of what makes D&D such an exciting hobby.