My first really tangible RPG character (by which I mean a character I rolled up who I actually wanted to play long-term, as opposed to one of the many characters-of-the-week that 1st edition AD&D was so often about) was Morgan — a human fighter who was a direct lift in every way from the character Travis Morgan in Mike Grell’s comic The Warlord. I borrowed the name. I borrowed the look (though my Morgan favored chain mail over the comic character’s leotard-or-loincloth vibe). I borrowed the character’s philosophy of believing in a world where the credo wasn’t “Might make right,” but “Might for right.”
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| From The Warlord issue 7 (“The Iron Devil”), written and illustrated by Mike Grell. |
My second really tangible character — rolled up not long after Morgan, and played alongside him as inseparable friends for many years — was a human magic-user named Stormhand, whose inspiration was largely, “What would it be like if I could cast spells?” Stormhand was a self-insert character, with no external inspiration and no real sense of what he even looked like beyond “usually brooding.” Playing him was entirely about giving me a chance to act like the forthright, driven, confident problem-solver I was pretty sure I could have been in high school except for all that incapacitating social awkwardness stuff.
From these two extremes, I learned pretty early in my RPG life that there’s no single right way to build a character. And over the course of having created many characters and having watched friends and family members build many, many more through decades of campaigns, I’ve noted certain key patterns of character inspiration that all players can tap into.
Fictional Inspiration
Here’s an important tip, especially for first-time players: No one else in the game will care if you lift your character concept straight from your favorite work of fiction. You can probably even get away with playing them under their own name, as I did with Morgan all those many years ago, though coming up with a new name can be most effective at disguising the character’s origins. Your acrobatic unarmed brawler on the run from the assassins guild that trained her? No one else will care that everything you throw into the character at the table comes straight from how much you love Black Widow from the Marvel-verse. That stoic elf archer who pulls out two shortswords when the monsters get up close and personal? You can probably even take a shot at using Orlando Bloom’s accent as you Legolas your way through the campaign.
You, but Better
I say “You, but better” with the following qualifier: You are already awesome, and I can safely say that without even knowing you because the fact that you play tabletop RPGs puts you in a special class of awesome people. But all of us, no matter how awesome we are, have things we yearn for that we don’t have the opportunity to do — and letting the character you play tap into those things can be an amazing exercise in personal fulfillment. On a basic level, we live in a world bereft of fantasy magic, so that playing an arcanist, a healer, or a wielder of primal energy can tap into a deep-seated yearning to know what magic might feel like. Likewise, there are plenty of monstrous and evil people in our world — a point that’s become especially acute at this particular point in history. But most of us are never in a position to directly oppose that evil the way our fantasy RPG characters can.
With this mode of character creation, your character’s outlook, desires, and approach to life are all rooted firmly in your own life, your own philosophies and convictions. Then you get to push those philosophies and convictions to new extents by virtue of bringing who you are into the game, wrapped in the guise of the character the game lets you make.
Product of the Past
Sometimes one of the most engaging ways to create a character is to have no strong sense of who the character is — because figuring that out is the point of playing the game. This mode of character building focuses almost entirely on backstory, as you create the strongest possible sense of where your character comes from. Then, armed only with that sense of what’s brought the character to the point where the campaign begins, you let the ups and downs of the campaign determine who the character becomes over time. This approach works especially well in a sandbox-style campaign with no set narrative arc, allowing the evolution of the character to help drive the campaign story, and vice versa.
That said, be aware that GMs are always on the lookout for backstory-driven characters who use that backstory as an excuse to resist being drawn into the campaign. Usually this takes the form of players complaining that their character isn’t feeling the incentive to go into the dungeon, rescue the missing prince, or what have you — so don’t be that player. It’s up to you, not the GM, to come up with reasons why your always-in-progress character wants to engage with the campaign story as it unfolds.
Goal Oriented
The opposite approach to focusing on your character’s past is to think primarily about what your character wants for the future. A goal-oriented character zeroes in on the traditional benchmarks for a character in literary fiction. What do they want? What do they need? How do the character’s want and need differ? And at what point do they realize that what they need is more important than what they want? A character with a rock-solid set of future goals will still definitely have a past that connects to those goals. But when building a goal-oriented character, you’ll usually find yourself leaving that past sketchy, then fleshing it out as the events of the campaign produce moments connected to your goals that you want to in turn connect to the past.
Mix and Match
Naturally, none of the above modes of character creation need to be adhered to exclusively, and you can combine any of these ideas in any number of ways. You might start with fictional inspiration and decide to make that fictional character you love into an avatar of your own beliefs and desires. You might start off with a goal-oriented character who suddenly generates a much more detailed backstory than you initially had in mind. You might start out with a solid backstory and a blank slate of where the character might go and why, then realize immediately that the character embodies a favorite fantasy archetype you hadn’t been thinking about.
If you’ve been gaming for a long while and have never thought about your character creation process, you probably draw from some of the frameworks above without actually thinking about them in these terms. Building characters is an instinctive kind of fun for most players. But thinking about the specific foundations of your process can make that process even more interesting — or put you in a better position to help newer players figure out their own process.
Avoid Character-as-Features
In addition to the four modes of character creation and development presented above, there’s a fourth mode that I generally warn people against, but which becomes ever-more prevalent as games like D&D 5e become ever-more feature focused. In a class-based RPG, deciding what class to play is often the first choice a player makes, and reasonably so. But a focus on choosing a class and subclass and all the special features that extend out from those initial choices makes it way too easy to create a character exclusively from the perspective of game features and mechanics.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with loving the features and mechanics of a particular character class. If some aspect of playing a fighter or a paladin or a rogue or a warlock appeals to you, go for it. But in my experience — speaking both about the characters I’ve played and the many more characters I’ve seen other people play in the games I run — characters built primarily as a collection of class features in search of a story have a much harder time finding that story. As much as is possible, think about class features as something you build onto a character concept crafted in a more narrative-focused way, rather than hoping that the features will suggest a narrative to you. Because the story that mechanical features can tell is a lot more limited than the many other options your character-building imagination will come up with if you let it.