Character Creation

Little-known fact: there’s nothing that gets me quite as excited as this:

I’m the sort of person who watches video game rosters very closely during production. I watched every reveal trailer for Marvel vs. Capcom 3 the day it was released. I have the website for Super Smash Brothers 4/5 in my daily bookmarks list. I review every roster for a professional wrestling game, even though I have no intention of ever playing the game myself. Even after release, games with more playable characters have a higher appeal to me than games that don’t. It’s why I first picked up Fire Emblem, or got a pre-order of Batman: Arkham City for the DLC.

Why? Because there’s nothing that represents quite as much potential as a new character. I’m the sort of player who loves discovering new things, and playable characters are no exception. Will they be easy to learn, or powerful but difficult? How will their mannerisms translate to gameplay? Will the story be different with them, and how? Will they be terrible?

I approach D&D character creation the same way. I don’t want to come up with a great build and slot a personality into it, in the same way that I rarely want to come up with a great personality and slot a build into it. I want everything to work together. I want to iron out the kinks as I work through it. I want to take this character and see how they affect the story and how the story affects them. I want to change that potential into fun.

Most of my players look at character creation similarly. I do know players who design a build and a personality separately, either because they’re unaware that the two clash or because they simply don’t care. I also know players who design a build solely and trust the personality to come naturally during play, which is an interesting way to go about it for a strong role-player. But for the most part I think players love character creation as much as or more than actually playing the character.

When it comes to the actual work involved in creating a character, D&D and Pathfinder books do have advice. Often this comes in the form of an easy-to-follow list of steps, and often I have deep and abiding problems with that list. Here’s the list of steps for character creation in the 3.5E Player’s Handbook:

1. Check with your DM for house rules, campaign standards, and what other players have already created.
2. Roll ability scores
3. Choose your class and race
4. Assign and adjust ability scores
5. Review the starting package (if you don’t know what this is, that’s fine; most players skip it)
6. Record racial and class features
7. Select skills
8. Select a feat
9. Review description chapter (that is, the chapter in the book that covers alignment, religion, vital statistics, personality, etc. Per the book, this step is optional.)
10. Select equipment
11. Record combat numbers
12. Fill in details like name, age, gender, alignment, personality, etc.

I expect that this is for a first-time player, and it’s one of the worst ways I’ve ever seen to present it. By these steps, you don’t consider your character’s personality until step (9), unless you want to put it off until last. That is, your ability scores, job, race, training, and possibly even your equipment are more foundational than your personality. As Socrates Jones might shout, “Nonsense!” That’s an academic way of building a character, something that you might expect to give to a program or a robot that can create character quickly and efficiently. But we don’t want quick and efficient. We want meaningful and fun. We want to design our characters not with Intelligence, but with Charisma.

…meaning “in keeping with the theme of this blog”, not “with Charisma as the primary stat all the time.”

I’ve only created fifteen-odd characters for campaigns, but by my count I’ve run campaigns for seventy-odd characters. Adding in the characters I’ve helped design for other campaigns and one-shots like Delve Night, I think I have an idea of what works and what doesn’t when building a character. And what doesn’t work is waiting until the end of character creation to create the character. Things like class and race can give you some direction, but they should never be your basis. Instead I have my own list:

1. Get together with the rest of your party and the DM. I skipped this step the last time I touched on character creation, but that’s not to say I’ve never said it.
2. Decide what character you want to play. This includes personality, general role in the group, some backstory, and so forth. Try to avoid deliberately stepping on other players’ toes during this step, unless that’s what you and your group want.
3. If the description from step (2) contains any in-game terms like the character’s class, feats, skills, etc., repeat step (2) until it doesn’t. This is to make sure that you’re building a concept first and numbers second, and to keep your blinders off. If you decide “I’m playing a paladin”, you won’t consider a fighter even if it’s closer to what you want. If you decide “I wear lots of armor, ride a horse, and protect the weak”, you have more options.
4. Jot down a few phrases about who your character is and how they act. These don’t have to be as long as a sentence or as pithy as in the FATE system, but they can be. Whatever makes sense to you. Some players like doing this as part of their character’s past: “Raised in a cane break by an ol’ mama lion” reminds them of their history in a way that pervades their other choices. Some do it as future: “I want to become a top-ranked assassin” suggests that skill and recognition are the character’s driving motivations, and the build should reflect that. Some do it as present: “When in danger, hide behind the robot” shows a defensive character who shouldn’t be built for front-line combat.
5. Start rolling stats and building the character. The above list puts this as a number of steps, as though “record racial and class features” is as important as everything else. It’s not. The build itself is only one part of the character and only one step in the process.
   • If the stats you roll don’t mesh with your character concept, talk to the DM. Technically, 14 / 13 / 13 / 13 / 13 / 8 is a valid stat array, but I don’t know many players who would enjoy it (I’m looking at you, Leaf Faraldrson).
   • You can design the build in largely the order stated above: ability scores, class, race, skills, feats, equipment. But it’s not a hard-and-fast order. Some players have strong opinions about how certain races should act and choose race early in their design. I do not. Some players also have certain equipment in mind (whip, lightsaber, or even something Lucasfilm didn’t do) and build with that in mind. Whatever works for you.

6. When you’re finished with the footwork, start writing things down. Feats and equipment may change your core numbers like ability scores and AC, so I tend to put things on my character sheet last. It also makes a number more real to put it on a character sheet, which makes it harder to change. At this point the character is still in flux, and you should feel free to dump anything that you don’t like and rework it.
7. Play the character. A lot of official books seem to think that character creation is complete once the sheet is done. That’s not even a little true. You need actual play to make sure your character is working like you want. Keep an eye on the traits you wrote in step (3); if you’re not playing to those traits, either the traits aren’t accurate or you’ve forgotten what sort of character you want to play. The latter in particular is a great way to lose interest in a character fast.
8. Change the character. Very few characters are perfect right out of the gate. Many need tweaks to trade out features that aren’t working the way their players expected or that aren’t entertaining in practice. Sometimes the whole character needs to be scrapped and replaced with something more fun; this happened twice in the beginning of The Great Tower of Oldechi alone. I consider a character to still be fluid for at least their first three sessions, and after that I allow use of retraining mechanics to adjust a build.
9. Repeat steps (7) and (8) until the campaign ends. No character is completely static as long as they’re being played. Maybe you died and that changed your world outlook. Maybe you found an heirloom sword and got inspired by its history. Maybe you slew a dragon (or a king) and the eye of the public is now upon you. Even if you have no singular defining moment, you still adventure, age, meet people, kill people, and gain experience and rewards. A character that stays exactly the same is a boring, insufferable character. In the same way that D&D players mutiny when they’ve played weekly for a year without gaining a level, you should take a good long look at a character that hasn’t changed in a year.

The analytical or captious reader may note that each of these steps is a more significant undertaking than the list in the PHB. That’s intentional. Character growth can’t be boiled down to a GameFAQs walkthrough, where if you follow certain bite-sized discrete steps you’ll have fun. Character creation is an ongoing process, often but not always something that happens organically without an explicit focus.

I can’t guarantee that you’ll have a perfect character if you go through this list, in the same way I can’t guarantee that you’ll always roll a 20 if you flick your wrist a certain way. There are elements in play beyond your character, including your personality, other characters, the other players’ personalities, your DM, and simple luck. But I can say that this way I’m happier with my characters, and I see more players happy with their own characters. Meaningful characters take meaningful effort to reach the potential you saw when you first pictured them in their head.

When a campaign ends, I want to think “My character was as fun to play as I thought it would be when I came up with it, and a big part of that fun was the journey as I explored their possibilities.” I want to be satisfied enough that I can get excited about the next approaching challenger, because I know I’ll have fun with that too.

Unless it’s Toon Link.