-
The first, and arguably the most important, aspect of playing Dungeons & Dragons is creating your character. The decisions you make when creating your character can have tremendous impact on your enjoyment of the game and your satisfaction with the roleplaying experience as a whole. I think we all want to create that “perfect character”. The one we are excited and motivated to play each week and whose stories we look forward to seeing unfold.
Everyone defines their perfect character differently but I’ve found a few common threads amongst gamers, including; playing a character that is individually unique, interesting to the player and the group, mechanically functions the way the player envisioned, and meets the thematic concept they developed for the hero. Sometimes this can be a tall order even for seasoned gamers.
There are a lot of components that go into creating the perfect character and an infinite number of ways to go about doing it. In this series of articles I’m going to focus on the method we’ve been using in the groups I play in. In part one we will take a look at two specific techniques we use in the group I play in. In part two, I’ll take a look at specific steps in creating that perfect character.
I wish I had a cool name for the character creation method we use, like The Lewis Theorem, or the RoleplayingPro Stratagem or the Hundredfold Path of the Black Lotus. Great name aside, here’s a few of the things we’ve been doing to help us build our perfect characters.
Technique I: Build Characters as a Group
In the groups I play in I’ve found this to be a crucial element in constructing great characters. Have the DM and all the players sit down together to construct their characters. Building characters as a group accomplishes a few things:
- It allows the DM to give the players some insight into the campaign setting, theme, and other important elements that will affect who, and what the characters are.
- It gets players thinking about how the party is connected and how they interact right from the very beginning of the campaign.
- Back-story, personalities, and interesting character hooks tend to manifest easier in a group the dynamic.
- And most importantly, there is an incredible synergistic effect that materializes when performing a creative endeavor as a group rather than as an individual. Not only does the final product become greater than the sum of its parts, but each player tends to have a much stronger sense of who the other characters are.
Of course there is nothing wrong with creating characters individually and bringing them to the table. However in my experience I’ve found that the group dynamic not only builds more detailed and interesting characters but also makes a great team-building exercise for the players as well as the characters. Since roleplaying is typically a group experience, anything that helps the group “gel” is usually beneficial.
Technique II: Create the One-sentence Concept
First things first, come up with a one sentence character concept without mentioning race or class. This can be more difficult than it would initially seem, but doing this gets you to think about your character without blocking the creative process with preconceived definitions. Here are a few ideas to illustrate the idea:
- A Conan inspired, Viking style warrior from the savage north lands.
- A wandering, ill-fated outcast persecuted for his strange abilities.
- A ninja-like killer who strikes quietly from the shadows.
- A dashing swashbuckler in the tradition of Robin Hood.
- An exotic exile who finds himself a stranger in a strange land.
The reason you want to avoid race and class at this point is because it can sometimes get in the way of imagining your character as a unique concept instead of a stereotypical race/class package. Using one of the examples above, if you describe your character as a “Conan inspired barbarian” you’ll tend to start thinking in terms of what the Barbarian class is, instead of who your character is.
Experiment with these two techniques next time you create characters. Next time we will take a look at the nuts and bolts of selecting race and class in order to get the character you truly want to play.
Leave a Comment
November 5, 2009 at 5:35 am
@ John Lewis – I really like technique number two. That is something I have never done and really should think about on my next character.
November 5, 2009 at 1:41 pm
I really encouraged my players to use Technique II when creating characters for my current campaign. As a GM, I find it frustratingly… inorganic to come to the table with a completely realized and fleshed out character. It prevents cool character-related plot twists, which may be better than what was originally concepted, from being added as the game progresses.
I like Technique I as well and I think a combination of both will be what I set up for my next campaign.
November 5, 2009 at 1:49 pm
Separating Class from character is so important. It never ceases to amaze me that so many people have a problem with this basic concept. Mechanically class X is perfect for there character, but because the name and flavor of that class doesn’t match what they want to play they get frustrated and blame the system for being too restrictive.
November 9, 2009 at 6:23 pm
Really, though, Cooper…isn’t your class really just a mechanical representation of your characters abilities overall?
I mean….I’m sure we all do it but realistically you wouldn’t go around saying *looking for a fighter* for dungeon run. You would go around looking for a tough brawler that could take some damage. I think that some people try to look at some parts of the game and qualify them as mechanical concepts then take others and accept that they can break roleplaying (and immersion) just for those instances.
I’m sure there are MANY more examples of this that really just slip through the cracks where it’s just more convenient than coming up with more RPish sounding names….Paladins would probably not be called that but more likely Warriors of the Light….
November 9, 2009 at 8:15 pm
Nice post John. I’m looking forward to more.
I like Tech I, except for one thing. I find that when a group gets together to create their party, I hear a lot of “Who’s going to be the ____?” In 4e, it’s even worse with Roles taken into consideration. I try to encourage each player to focus on playing a character that they will enjoy playing, rather than choosing a character that “fits” with the party’s make-up.
I really like Tech II. I think you have really hit the nail on the head with ignoring the race or class and focusing on the personality and nature of the character. Excellent point indeed.
November 9, 2009 at 11:56 pm
@Rook: I agree with your comment on Tech I to an extent, but I ask you to consider one thing. Many games have roles/classes that fit similar breakdowns and are designed with that in mind. Shadowrun (street sams, deckers, mages, etc) and D&D pre 4E (warrior, rogue, arcane, divine) are just two examples. These games are playable without all of the roles being covered but force a couple things to happen. If we don’t have anyone arcane in the party to deal with arcane obstacles, the DM has to adjust his creativity and make decisions he otherwise would not have to: “Do I not put in these arcane wards that I find cool and can’t wait to describe or do I have to design some other way for the PCs to bypass them?” or the party with 4 wizards: “Well I can’t put in an umber hulk because it will just tear through the mages. Oh and beholders are completely out, too. Oh no dragons, huh, looks like the party will be taking on goblins and kobolds, again…” I know these are overly-simplified and can be more adroitly handled by a good DM, but I think you have to intentionally change the focus of the game away from what the designers intended and in so doing, you miss out on some of the rich fullness that could otherwise be had…
We’ve used both techniques with differing results, but I really enjoyed a little experiment we did with some Eberron characters that I hope we get back to soon… We started out with a technique that asked the players questions of their characters and how they related to the world without ever asking what their class was. At the end, it became obvious what each persons role and power source should be which immediately pointed us to appropriate classes. We ended up by quite organically with 2 strikers, a defender, and a controller. Every one helped contribute suggestions to the backgrounds of the other PCs and completely changed where I as the DM plan to take paragon and epic tier. Fantastic experience totally described in John’s Tech I, bullet point 4.
November 10, 2009 at 11:28 am
I prefer Technique I, and I have used it many times in the past.
The characters are connected to one another from the very beginning with reasons to work together.
I have called it “Story Storming” (kind of like brain storming but its specifically about building the better party and story)
November 20, 2009 at 10:30 am
My group has reached the point where we start with tech 2, then move to tech 1. By this, I mean we come up with a 1-2 sentence description of the character before we meet, then we get together and discuss how these characters defined by the description would interact, have met, how they fit in the world, etc.
That way, nobody is forcing themselves to play a character based exclusively on another person’s choice(oh, Joe’s gonna be a fighter, so I should be a thief, wizard, etc) since they already have an idea of the character.
Personally, I’ve found that this works better in 4e than in previous editions of D&D, since they’ve divorced the class from the character more clearly in the new edition than in previous ones. This allows the class to be one of the last things picked, since the class mostly just covers the combat ability, making it possible to play a “wizard”(in the sense of a ritual caster with some minor abilities out of combat) who fights with sword and armor. Out of combat abilities can easily be adjusted by the DM, since it really isn’t unbalancing for the DM to switch out skill lists, so long as number of skills are kept constant.
I would say that I don’t entirely agree with the idea that race should be kept out of the one sentence description, though. Race can be very defining for a character. I would envision an elven character, regardless of what he does, quite differently than a dwarf, human or halfling. However, I would say that it should only be done if, given the setting, the race is an integral part of the character. In some games, I have played a half-elf solely because I wanted to play the character pulled between two worlds. In another game, all elves had been enslaved and were looked at as a lesser race. While I do agree that Race can add to stereotypical behavior/character concept, I don’t think it has to, and god world planing and conversation between characters can make it a central and important enough part of the character that it would be justified to put it in the short description..
December 7, 2009 at 7:16 am
I DM, and I find the only class my Players always have is Rogue, because else they cannot do much vs traps but throw themselves into them or turn around. They usually have a Cleric, but that is more because one of them plays it almost exclusively.
We currently have a Monk with AC 15 and a CON score of 12 trying to tank at level 5. Most of the spells that are cast are buffs to him.
BTW, We don’t play 4E, we decided to play Pathfinder instead.