I thought it would be fun to take a detour and talk about things from the other side of the the GM screen: what is it like to create a character for a campaign? We've all made characters--it's one of the most fun parts of a TRPG. I know folks (myself included) who create characters just for the satisfaction of having created a character who may never see the light of a game session. Everyone's got a method that works for them, and so I thought I'd share how I created a few of my characters.
I'm currently playing in a 5e campaign with the group who played in my National Treasure campaign. When originally invited to play, I had to make some choices. There's a character I've been hoping to play for a while: a wily, charisma-based rogue who can talk her way into and out of any problem. But I was concerned that she would be a bad fit for a combat-based campaign, and I knew my player group didn't have a healer. So I bit the bullet and created a cleric. I wanted to have fun with the cleric, so I started imagining ways to complicate what a cleric does. And what I settled on is both fun and meaningful as a mechanic. I thought it would be fun to mess with alignment; what if a Lawful Good character like a healing cleric had something more complicated than a drive to help all people all the time? So I wrote the cleric to have been born to be quite evil, but that a faerie had met him as a young man and cursed him. The curse stipulates that if the cleric ever did anything evil, he would get sick and die. Unbelieving of the curse, the cleric robbed a pair of travelers and grew unspeakably ill; he thought he would die. And ever since, he pursued good in order to survive.
Life as a cleric was a natural choice for this man. A life dedicated to serving good would protect him from harm. But it also allowed him to flex his evil muscles; he was able to be endlessly violent toward evildoers without suffering any ill consequences. Thus he made his life bearable, adopting good in the name of surviving and living evil where he could. I liked this concept because it meant the party would have a good-aligned healer, but it also allowed me plenty of leeway as a roleplayer to dig into the ethics of any given choice.
To fill out his background, I decided that the cleric would be a folk hero--one of the backgrounds in 5e--and that he would have saved a band of travelling performers from bandits single-handed. Tales of his deeds spread slowly across the land, and he gained a reputation for being useful in a scrape. He was ready and willing to join up with fellow adventurers to seek to right ever-greater wrongs. He had lost an eye in the fight that gained him his reputation and wore a bulky eyepatch (I attended every session of our game wearing an eyepatch in real life). He was a hardscrabble adventurer who could help his party and follow his destiny.
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| My custom mini for Asa the cleric from Hero Forge. I forgot to add his eyepatch, but he's still pretty rad. |
It's worth pausing to note that every decision I made was a strategic choice aimed at making my cleric effective within the world of the game and also enjoyable for me to play. A healer in a healer-less party was crucial; someone with the moral flexibility to ruthlessly kill in a name of good served the DM's needs; and a character who was ready and willing to cooperate with a party is necessary for basically any game. It's fun to have a renegade character who does things by their own methods, but at the end of the day, that can seriously complicate the ability of the party to cohere. I like to make my characters ready to cooperate. (I did not do this in the past, as you'll see from my second character example, and it taught me to be ready to work together.) I also made my character work for me. I need some kind of meaty roleplaying stuff to chew on, so the moral issues of the cleric I made suited me well. And the strategic challenges of healing a party while also contributing martially and magically are fun for me. It's always good to give yourself the opportunity to have fun while playing since you're the one most responsible for it.
So now I had the model and it was time to put on the details. I name 99% of my characters (both PCs and NPCs) via the site Behind the Name--I like to have the name mean something I want to be represented by the character. So I searched the meanings of name for "healer" and among the names was Asa. I liked that name, so I ran with it. For a last name, I went with "fate" to suggest his relationship with his curse, and I selected "Urd" as an option. And that was the majority of the process of coming up with Asa the cleric. In a combat-driven campaign, this is enough to go off of. A roleplay-heavy campaign has different demands, however, and now I'll explain my process for that. (It's a little involved.
This is the story of another cleric, though a very different one. Years ago, my closest friend at the time, who had played in various campaigns of mine including the early D&D podcast, ran a game about gods, community, and evil. I originally designed a combat-oriented rogue, and from a mechanic standpoint, he was a grand success. He killed the campaign's end boss in a few rounds despite being outnumbered and taken off-guard. (The DM had to operate the rest of the campaign with that character appearing as a ghost.) But I realized that our party was largely good-aligned, so I decided to scrap my lawful evil rogue in favor of something more team-oriented. I settled on a cleric, the first time I had played one, and began to draft who this cleric was.
As I've said, roleplay-heavy campaign call for a bit more work in character creation. So I set to work crafting a character with a more complete backstory. I wrote a few pages about who my cleric was: as a child/teenager, he had been good at boxing due to his large frame and quick thinking. I gave him one level of monk as a way of representing his skills with unarmed combat and beefing up his unarmed damage. As an adult, he had found his way to religion, trusting in St. Cuthbert's laws of justice and retribution. This translated into being a kind of police officer--my DM told me that clerics of St. Cuthbert function in his gameworld as officers of the law. I took this to mean that I could work with morality as a core function of my cleric's relationship with the world. (You can see that my taste as a player and even GM focuses on morality as core concepts.) I wanted the cleric to struggle with right and wrong. So I decided that he often took the law into his own hands, and violently so. By the time our first game session began, I knew that my cleric was an alcoholic with a short temper and a control complex.
Before getting there, though, I wanted to know more about his relationships. So I wrote documents about his parents, his twin brother, his mentor, his wife and children, his wife's best friend, and a few others. By the time I was done with writing about the network of people in his life, I had written about 80 pages of backstory and information. This is more than you'll need, and it's more than I needed at the table. But it gave me a great understanding of who my cleric really was long before I was called on to inhabit him. This is important because it allowed me to be well-acquainted with my character by the time I had to be him.
Again using Behind the Name, I selected names for my cleric. From the meaning "protection," I selected Amund. From the meaning "punishment," I selected Zigor. I decided that my cleric went by a nickname--people call him "Zig." So now Zig had an extensive past, a current problem, and a name. But I wanted to develop that current problem further. I wrote that one of Zig's daughters had died in the last few years and that he blamed himself for not being there to heal her. He had viciously tortured the man who was supposed to heal her and had lost contact with his wife and surviving daughters as a result of the guilt he felt. His problem, then, was in reuniting with his family, but not before growing past the guilt he had accumulated.
It's worth noting here that I wasn't just creating dramatic stakes. At this point in my life, I was dealing with my own guilt over my behavior--I am bipolar and schizophrenic, and my actions at that time in my life were things I often regretted. I wanted to play a character who had to overcome guilt so that I myself as a player could know how that felt and how to get there. I informed my DM of this, and he agreed to help create an arc wherein Zig would overcome his feelings of guilt.
At one point, my DM asked for a catalog of the people who Zig had hurt. It was part of preparing for a scene in which Zig was allowed to atone for his sins. I took the assignment very seriously. I created a table in which every victim of Zig was listed with their offense and treatment. It was a sobering experience. To claim that my character was violent and unfeeling was one thing, but to address the magnitude of his wrongdoings made the behavior more real to me. I highly recommend to players with violent backgrounds, especially morally flawed characters, create a list like this. It will allow you to roleplay better and give you the ability to refer back to specific things your character has done.
So Zig began as a miserable alcoholic who postured to be the leader of the party. I was told by the other players afterward that the first few sessions of the campaign were difficult because he was such a mess. They questioned whether he would be compatible with the party at all. This is what I was referring to earlier: it's a risky move to create a character who doesn't lend themselves to cooperation. Fortunately, Zig recognized that he was weighing the party down and soon worked as part of the team (but still keeping him in the realm of someone who had a lot of work to do). To all the players out there, I don't recommend doing this. It's better to have your character describe the ways that they've been dysfunctional in the past and start them out being at least minimally helpful. It's a drain to make the party tend to you in your broken state, so give everyone something to work with and play your redemption arc from a slightly progressed state.
By the time my involvement in the campaign ended, Zig was a favorite amongst everyone at the table. He had changed in meaningful ways and now contributed in serious ways to the welfare of the party. I moved away from the group of players, and so Zig too moved away with his family, ready for another shot at being a good husband and father. Zig's wife and children were well-known among the player characters. I attribute this to both my DM's skill in inhabiting characters and my work establishing them in my brainstorming. Not only was the character successful in navigating the gameworld and being a part of the party, but I had found a way to move on from my own guilt. I still attribute my skill with dealing with these kinds of issues to my practice as Zig. A player-designed portrait of Zig hangs over my computer as a reminder of his importance in my life (not pictured because I want to respect the artist's property).
You can create depth and fun with other methods, too, including ones that don't require extensive writing. Grab a few props: as I said, I play Asa with an eyepatch, but I played Zig with a faux wedding ring, a wooden amulet I carved of St. Cuthbert's holy symbol, and a "magic" rock that his youngest daughter had given to him. Or develop a character voice: Asa is gruff and short on words, where Zig is often conflicted and thoughtful with a deep voice. Or determine what your character's sense of humor is: Asa likes puns and name-calling, where Zig is all about dad humor and really dark jokes. Or do an impression of a character you like: Asa is similar to a Nick Fury-type in demeanor, right down to the eyepatch, while Zig developed to be like the heroes on detective shows. Any method that gives you a sense of your character as a complete person will help you, so shy away from things that make your character too specific a reference.
The most important thing in creating a character is that it works for your needs at the table. A combat-heavy campaign doesn't need much backstory compared to a roleplay-heavy campaign. Remember to be cooperative pretty much no matter what. Pick details that you think will be enjoyed by the other players and the GM. And remember that the stats you engineer should support the story you're telling with your character and not the other way around. Asa was designed with the intention of filling a healer role, but this is as far as that train should go. Remember that there are thousands and thousands of possible characters that could function as a healer. You want to find the exact one that works for you. Don't be afraid to scrap an idea and start over if it serves you better. And follow your heart; you'll be inhabiting this character for hours at least, so make them someone you have fun playing.
If you can do these things, you'll end up with a character who's fun for you, the other players, and the GM. It's an art, not a science, so there's no such thing as a right answer, but you can also make a lot of progress in the game just by designing your character in light of what's ahead of them. So have fun, get writing, and work with your GM to get the most out of the experience.
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