Guest Author - Margaret Dorraine Baines-Turberfield
I am a passionate proponent of creating characters from a strong role-playing perspective. If I can get away with it, I’ll randomly generate my character sheet and spend all my character creation time deciding on “personality points” rather than “skill points.” While everyone else is rolling dice and flipping pages, I find my time is much more constructively spent settling on character quirks and scribing a believable backstory that I’m emotionally invested in. What will make your character really worth playing will be that he or she is someone you enjoy spending time with in your head, role-playing through adventures. This article will provide suggestions to help you really flesh out your next character, to make him or her more entertaining for you to role play (and for the rest of your party to play with!)
A Good Place to Start
Maybe you have a good idea for a simple backstory, and maybe you don’t. It can help to try to imagine what your character used to do before the first day of the campaign you’re playing him or her in. What job did s/he do? Does s/he have any living family? What on earth possessed him or her to up and leave the bustling blacksmithing business in that tight-knit community and go off galavanting across the globe on daring adventures, rather than remaining a private citizen?
Your character is something special. Out of all the other people (NPCs) who exist in the world you’ll be playing in, your character is a member of an elite group. Your character is, for whatever reasons you deem fit, an adventurer. He or she willfully ventures out into the world, risking his or her life and limb far more often than any other average individual. Your task, at this point in character creation, is to answer the question: why?
Ponder this, because it’s important. No one does anything without a motivation, even if it’s as simple as “I did it to avoid pain” or “I do it because it makes me feel good.” Of course, your reasons should be a little more in-depth than that! Perhaps your character grew up in a very insular, close-knit family, and after returning from gathering mushrooms in the woods one day you discovered your family’s compound had been raided, ransacked, and your family abducted! Your motivation to be adventuring in the world would be to discover the culprits of that heinous act, and maybe even find your missing family members.
Your character’s motivation will help guide you when challenges arise in-game, but remember that you aren’t required to stick with it forever! As your character grows, his or her motivation may change (and probably should!) and goals will re-align themselves.
