#12: On Character Creation
The moment the cowboy bursts into the saloon, doors swinging wide, conversations splitting into silence, it’s already over. His pistol dangles low and loose by his thigh, his beaten hat hanging over his creased, dust-dirtied face. His eyes don’t narrow, because that would be impossible: they’re already two fine slits in granite, rejecting any notion of a better world. He steps forward to survey the scene, his boots tapping the floor all dangerous and ready. (“This Town Ain’t Big Enough,” Scott Limbrick, Hobart.)
This week’s main set piece is advice from Jordan Sutlive about how to create a character in the game Dungeons and Dragons. (You can re-read his piece on Critical Role here.) If you’ve never played Dungeons and Dragons before, here’s what you need to know: Dungeons and Dragons is a collective storytelling game with some dice that tell you what you can and can’t do, dice which are used a little bit like a wager (i.e., “I bet my character can jump from the top of the roof of this building to the top of the roof of the other.” “Okay. Roll for it.”) That’s it. There’s obviously a lot more to it, but those are the fundamentals, and that’s enough for you to appreciate his advice below.
There’s also terrific overlap between D&D as a game and things like writing, improv, video games, and acting as well. If you’ve done or have an interest in any of these things, then what follows might be for you, too.
On Character Creation
by Jordan Sutlive
Hey there, fellow player—it’s tough as hell, isn’t it, to create a character whose follies and glory you’ll hope to follow across dozens of hours of D&D? This is a fictional so-and-so you’ll want to love, of course, or at least want to tolerate; however, oftentimes, your D&D character also contains an aspect of yourself, perhaps something you’ve kept secret or buried that you’d like to explore within the safety of gameplay, a shard of your soul you only find comfortable examining through the lens of an alter ego. (No wonder, for example, that so many queer players came out through D&D before they came out in real life.) In short, D&D can often be akin to free therapy, except there’s also a greater likelihood of Cheez-Its, as well as the occasional chance to throatstab a goblin.
For those of you who have never played D&D, this all probably sounds hyperbolic as hell, but trust me: there’s a reason why people pay hundreds of dollars for commissioned artwork of their characters, or create playlists for their characters, or tattoo themselves with their characters’ portraits. During the Curse of Strahdcampaign I DMed over the past year or so, I myself encountered moments of catharsis regarding my own personal history of addiction while playing as a preteen Goth nerd who loves (loves!) collecting teeth. I’ve since written pages and pages of fanfiction about him—my own character, mind you—and his post-campaign journeys. Even now, months removed from the campaign, as I drive home from another weary day of work, I’ll often catch myself wondering aloud: “I just hope he’s doing okay.” He’s a figment of my imagination, yes, and in essence just a collection of words on a crumpled sheet, but I often wish him the best because I want to wish myself the best, too.
But so: that’s a lot of pressure, right? To develop a character that can potentially end up impacting yourself and your party’s campaign like that? It can get to you. Plus, the inherent flexibility and potential within D&D’s game mechanics doesn’t help. I think many newbies view that blank character sheet the same way us writers view a blank page: the sheer possibilities that can exist when it comes to character creation can often induce within us a kind of “analysis paralysis,” in which we’re unsure just how to start, or if there’s a “proper” or “right” way to go about this process that seemingly everyone but us knows. There’s also the unhealthy expectations that can develop for those of us who’ve watched hours upon hours of broadcasted D&D campaigns like Critical Role or The Adventure Zone, a sort of corollary to the “Matthew Mercer” effect: when you encounter characters as thrilling, heartbreaking, and multi-dimensional as Sam Riegel’s Scanlan Shorthalt, or Justin McElroy’s Taako, it can often feel as though your character has to be just as memorable, if not more.
That’s why I’m here. This article is not only meant to provide advice for players of all skill levels on how to craft a character that engages you, whose personal arc you actively want to see unfold throughout the campaign, but is also meant to ease that self-imposed pressure to create an immediate masterpiece. I’m not here to teach you how to “min/max,” otherwise known as turning your character into a walking harbinger of death, simply because I still don’t know enough about stat optimization and raw damage and all of D&D’s crunchier mechanics, and also because min/maxers are a bane to most story-driven D&D campaigns. What I am here to tell you, however, is that no matter how hastily or intricately you create your character, they’ll inevitably find a way to stick in your mental craw. We as humans have an enormous capacity for empathy, able to find communion with animals and trees, and this empathy extends to our character sheets. Hell, case in point: remember Scanlan Shorthalt and Taako, the two characters I just mentioned?Scanlan was created because Sam Riegel asked his best friend, an experienced D&D player, to help him create “the worst character...just, the absolute worst.” Taako was created purely as a quick joke by Justin McElroy—his one and only goal, at the start of The Adventure Zone, in this realm of dragons and magic, was to discover a recipe for tacos. Despite the fact that both of these characters were made at the last minute, with little thought given to depth or a dramatic arc, both characters made me weep by their respective stories’ end. Both are now regarded by many, including professional film critics, as some of their all-time favorite characters.
All of this is to say: don’t fret! In D&D, all roads will lead to character development. As time passes, as you grow attuned to the other players and their rhythms, as you collaborate and form a keen sense of camaraderie within your adventuring party, your character, too, will grow and mature into a complex and dynamic individual, worthy of any work of fiction.
Oftentimes, the hardest part is simply getting started.
So let’s start—together.
CHARACTER CREATION 101
If you’ve been invited to a last-minute session with friends, and it’s your first time playing, and you’ve got two hours before the game begins, and are starting to get a tad panicky because you don’t quite yet know what the hell you’re doing—in short, if the process of creating your own handmade character is just too daunting right now, no worries: store-bought is just fine. The official D&D website offers a diverse set of premade character sheets for rookies who simply want to see if this game is their potential jam. Don’t worry about tweaking stats or fussing over your spell list; all you need to do is give your character a new name and a basic physical appearance and you’re good to go.
If you do want to create a character from scratch, but care more about your characters’ stats than their backstory, or worry more about their damage output than their personality, then I’d also recommend you look elsewhere. (Often, these “gameplay-first” players will simply adopt a beloved character from fiction, like Gandalf or whatever, and simply “translate” that character through D&D’s mechanics, allowing our beloved Grey Pilgrim to become a Level 15 Bladesinger Wizard or whatever. This is a totally viable option!) That said, it’s still worthwhile to learn more about how your character’s class and skills should work; you might have created a goblin wizard with a compelling backstory, but all of that doesn’t mean much if your INT score is so low that you can barely cast a spell or two. The class and role you’ll choose for your character can also offer additional guidance on their backstory, their personality, their morality, etc.—but more on that later.
If you’re a beginner that wants to peek beneath the hood and learn more about each class’s mechanics, then you should check out Critical Role’s “Handbooker Helper” series on Youtube, which offers quick informative tutorials on each of the core classes, and suggestions on how to make your preferred class a helpful and successful companion for your party both in and out of combat. If you’re more of a veteran, and really like to get crunchy with your numbers, the RPGBot website is a massive database and compendium that really delves into the game design of it all.
Okay—are you all set with that? Because what follows is the real meat of this article: advice on how to make your own character that isn’t singularly inspired by another fictional character, who isn’t just optimized to be a mindless murder machine, and who is meant to be your guide throughout a longer, dynamic campaign. I can’t offer you a “one-size-fits-all” approach here, sadly; there’s no guaranteed formula or recipe for this. What I can do, however, is tell you what’s worked for me the past five or so years that I’ve played this game, and subsequently cross my fingers and pray that any of this is helpful to you. But as a longtime DM who’s had to create a menagerie of fully-fledged characters in approx. 30 minutes or so, this one trick has worked so well for me that I’d be remiss if I didn’t share it with you.
OK. Y’all ready for this one trick—the one simple trick to make a character that’ll save you tons of time and effort and clear your skin and drastically improve your credit score (don’t quote me on that)?
Here it is: you need to find your own keyhole.
(Bear with me here.)
Your “keyhole,” as it were, is the one specific aspect or detail that will offer you a brief “glimpse” into the full breadth and dynamism of your eventual character. This “keyhole” could be anything: a fashion accessory, a weapon, a home, or any other brushstroke of a character’s entire portrait. It could also be a character’s class, or multiclass: a wisecracking Bard who multiclasses into a holy Paladin, for example, automatically offers a ton of inspiration for a character’s potential backstory and growth. It’s entirely up to you to choose your “keyhole.” But over time, if you choose to create more and more characters, you’ll start to recognize your own preferred keyhole(s): the one synecdochal element of your imagined character that carries a heavy amount of associative energy for you, that immediately sets your mind aflame with possibility. You’ll soon find that this first spark of inspiration creates a kind of cascade effect: with that initial detail, the other elements of this character will often, simply, “fall into place.” A character that wields a butcher’s knife, for example, can prompt further questions for exploration: why a butcher’s knife? Were they at first a cook, or did they steal it from a fancy stranger’s kitchen? Is the knife bloodstained, or pristine? Is the knife cursed? If so, did the character know about this curse before they wielded it, or not?
So, let me reiterate: you need to find your own keyhole. If you’re an animal lover, maybe this “keyhole,” this well of inspiration you continually return to, is the kind of animal familiar that will accompany your character. For DMs like Matthew Mercer and Brennan Lee Mulligan, who have extensive history in voice acting and improv, their keyhole might be an odd vocal tic or linguistic quirk (like being unable to pronounce the names of everyday items). For me, however, it’s fashion. Part of this is just personal interest—I’ve always been fascinated, in a gawky and amateur way, with haute couture, etc.—but I’m also one of those people who think the clothes you choose to wear can say a lot about you. If a character I’ve created is someone who exclusively wears J.Crew, or Lululemon, or Hot Topic, I can instantly begin to think about the kind of person they are, what they value, the kind of people they hope to attract, and the kind of cultivated persona they hope to beam out into the world. I can also think of ways to subvert these instinctive expectations, rather than reinforce them. Maybe the gruff barbarian that wears a cuirass made out of a dragon’s ribcage, for example, risks it all to protect the harmless kitten he found abandoned in a nearby gutter. Or maybe the mom who only wears athleisure is secretly a serial killer that murders people by contorting them into impossible yogic poses.
If you have no idea how to identify this keyhole within yourself, here’s a simple metacognitive exercise: what’s the first thing you notice when you encounter someone for the first time? When you observe people on the street, or in a restaurant, or meandering the aisles of a grocery store, what’s the first aspect of their being that your mind latches onto? Is it their ramshackle smile? Is it their booming laugh? Is it the kind of comfort food they eat (or want to eat)? Is it the presence or absence of others in their vicinity?
Afterwards, upon observing this particular detail, what does your mind tend to do? Does it tend to fill in this stranger’s story? (“Oh, he keeps glancing back and forth between his phone and the window—he must be waiting for someone. No, wait: he must’ve been stood up. He had this date planned for weeks, the first date he’s had in quite some time, and now the other person is nowhere to be found…maybe he pissed them off, somehow? I wonder what he did to make them so angry?” ) Who knows: maybe you’re not at all like me and you tend to leave the business of strangers alone. But I tend to find that this is a common impulse, a symptom of our boundless empathy: for better or worse, we tend to construct the internal lives of those we’ve never met based on their external traits.
That brings me to my last tip. Take a look at this blank character sheet. Note the right-hand margin: it prompts you to describe your character’s “Personality Traits,” “Ideals,” “Bonds,” and “Flaws.” In short, they are character qualities that aren’t immediately externalized, visualized or tangible, and are otherwise difficult to properly identify after a first encounter with someone. I’ll label these as abstractions.
Next: take a look at the second page. You’ll see, across the top, a series of quick prompts for physical elements such as “Height,” “Hair,” “Eyes,” etc. There’s also space for “Character Appearance,” in case you want to draw a hasty sketch of your character for reference, as well as “Additional Features & Traits.” All of this I’ll summarily describe as aesthetics.
All in all: the D&D character sheet places abstractions in the forefront, on the first page, while relegating aesthetics to the background. This, I think, is counterintuitive to creating a character. (It is definitively counterintuitive to that ol’ creative writing maxim, “Show, don’t tell.”) While I’d ultimately agree that an emphasis on a character’s interior values is overall more important than solely fixating on their aesthetics, at least in terms of providing your character with a dramatic arc and opportunities for growth, it can be far too difficult to kickstart the creative process when you first choose to develop the formless, abstracted qualities of your character. Think about my earlier examples, about the ways in which we observe and assess the people around us: you’re not going to know about a stranger’s strained relationship with their mother when they’re deciding between Cap’n Crunch or Frosted Flakes. (At best, that’d be something you’d learn through an eavesdropped conversation the stranger angrily whispers through their cell phone.) You don’t go up to strangers on the street and ask them ASAP: “Hey there—what’s your trauma?” No: you observe their actions, then determine their values. Why should your character be any different?
The other major reason to avoid fixating on bonds and backstories first is that, for most players, you’ll be depriving yourself of an important opportunity to embed yourself within the DM’s world. Usually, nowadays, character creation is done alone, and the players “unveil” their characters at the start of their campaign. Your bonds, thus, are usually with unseen NPCs, like a mother or brother, who may or may not ever appear in the actual campaign, according to your DM’s whims. But by waiting to develop your backstory later—maybe during a Session Zero, which your DM should definitely do, or at least 2-3 sessions after you begin the campaign—you can find ways to allow your character to foster ties with the NPCs in your DM’s world, or claim allegiance to one of your DM’s towns. If you wait, and gain a better sense of your DM’s world and its inhabitants, as well as the personalities of the other players’ characters, you can form bonds and backstories with the people around you, the people who walk and talk in the vicinity of your character, and thus increase your characters’ motivations for defending them from inevitable peril. In short, it’s better to wait until you find a barkeep, shop owner, or orphan child that your character meets in-game as a potential “bond,” rather than write alone of an estranged brother that the other players may never actually meet.
So: don’t stress. Save your backstory for later. Your character is a blank slab now, asleep on the table. Give them time to blink awake, stand up, explore their surroundings, talk to fellow adventurers, stumble in and out of awkward love, eat lots of mutton and drink lots of ale, and fight and fight for the world they’ll grow to want to protect with all of their life. And you’ll grow too: you’ll shock yourself, often, by the words that come out of your mouth as you attempt to speak in your character’s voice. This mimicry, you’ll find, this casual roleplaying, is often a kind of drag: often, a hidden aspect of yourself—untapped reservoirs of confidence, say, or a quick and acrid wit—will burst out of you through this alter ego, this person that both is and isn’t you. They will teach you things about yourself that no other experience can provide. And you will continue to think of them, as I’ve mentioned, long after the session is over, and will wish them well as you’re driving home from work.
But for now? All you can do is observe them through this keyhole. Don’t fret. Don’t rush. Don’t worry. With time, and a bit of patience, they’ll walk towards you, open the door, and invite you into their world.
We get a hose.
Wet it all down.
Smash it all together.
Turns into this sludge, this breadsludge.
Roll it into a huge gray ball.
Big as a rhino. (“Third Shift, Motherfucker,” Kyle Seibel, HAD)
CLIMATE CORNER: Harvard will stop investing in fossil fuels / “To achieve that growth, the country would have to double the amount of solar energy installed every year over the next four years and then double it again by 2030.” / “Dutch politicians are considering plans to force hundreds of farmers to sell up and cut livestock numbers, to reduce damaging ammonia pollution.” / World’s largest carbon capture plant opens in Iceland / “Brussels is to issue its first Covid-19 green bond as part of its efforts to become the world’s biggest issuer of sustainable debt.” /
ZINE(S) OF THE WEEK: The Complete Manual of Pirate Radio / living in trees / Learn To Make: Art for Fish /
OF NOTE/UPCOMING:
Copper Canyon Press is seeking a publicist and a financial manager.
“What role can story play in conflict & repair? How does the encounter with the other differ with poetry? Borders, refugees, crossing, wrestling, art-making, belonging.” — David Naimon introducing a new episode of Between the Covers.
“The English Department at Clemson University invites applications for a tenure-track Assistant Professor position in Creative Writing, with specialization in Poetry, beginning Fall 2022.” (Deadline October 15th.)
Have a good week.