I would like to take a little time to review a critical and often overlooked part of Dungeons and Dragons. I am focusing specifically on pen and paper play, but these tips can easily carry over to your online experience depending on how deeply you care to role play. It can be difficult to get going in a role playing group or guild in online RPG games but the rewards are well worth it. Actually role playing a character can make it so much more fun. When it comes to rolling some dice and playing table top Dungeons and Dragons, I think role playing your character is vital (and is required in the games I run).
Character Creation for Role Playing Games
Developing a unique and interesting personality and identity for your character is far more important than any other aspect of your character such as stats or even class and race. You will enjoy the character and the game a lot more if you take the time and energy to focus on this aspect of the game. When you truly develop a character, you are able to immerse yourself in that persona. It allows you become a real and tangible member of the group, the world and the game. This will help you get your character into the heart of the story. This is the core and the heart of what Dungeons and Dragons is about.
Creating the most powerful character, trying to find loopholes in the rules or “sticking it to the DM” ultimately defeats the whole purpose of the game. Even the weakest, lowest HP, can’t hit anything characters far outshine those that have the highest scores when they are a real personality in the game world. We remember those characters that you really know in the game–characters that are really characters. These characters are always more powerful overall, more influencing and more importantly the most fun to play and interact with. These are the characters that become heroes of legendary campaigns we remember and love.
The job of the Dungeon Master in D&D
A Dungeon Master’s job has been and always will be to make the game fun and exciting. Most importantly, the DM’s job is to make the player win the day! Every character wants to be famous and rich in the game world. However, accomplishing this goal giving the players the feeling of true accomplishment, it makes sense that some adventures or encounters will not always go the way the group would like. Just think of the basic movie formula: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back, they live happily ever after. Or this one: hero falls in love with lady, bad guy takes lady away. Hero mad. Lady almost dies. Hero fights passionately for her. Hero barely wins. Everyone is happy. This is called story arcing. In a movie it takes two hours. In D&D it can take two, three or more adventures. In the end, my plan is that you save the lady and get the bad guy. However, you will encounter obstacles and setbacks before you get what you want. If you get everything you want in every adventure, you will actually be really bored. So keep that in mind. The story arc is meant to put some emotion into the game and ultimately makes the game so much more enjoyable. So when you “stick it to the DM” you are just sticking it to the very story that is designed to make you all successful, famous and rich heroes. The most memorable stories explain the adversity you overcame to ultimately become successful.
Trivial Characters in Pen and Paper
It is not about “I have BLA BLA BLA! I am the coolest.” Simply put, you can have 1,000,000 HP and AC of 238 or be able to run 250 miles an hour. It doesn’t matter because the Dungeon Master will always be able to counter it. So taking this approach, the min/max idea, ultimately trivializes your character because the game is always fluid. Then your character is not fun to play. No matter what you create, when focused on stats, damage or HP the game scales to whatever you make. So if you create warrior with 500 HP and an AC of 50 the Dungeon Master will create a bad guy with 550 HP and an AC of 52. If you create a warrior with 18 HPs and AC of 6, then you will fight a bad guy with 20 HPs and an AC of 7. The DM’s job is to give you a challenge, regardless of your stats.
Awesome Characters, Online and at Home
So here is your challenge as a player: create fun and interesting characters. Make a clumsy thief who refuses to give up his trade because he “will get it some day”. How about a wizard that is afraid of fire? An imposing fighter who is terrified of bugs? Maybe a fat bard who gets cranky and mean when she runs out of peanuts to snack on. What about a monk who is a pacifist with a stutter? Or a barbarian who can’t handle the sight of dead things? I hope you get the idea.
What sets you apart from the scaling numbers is the fun, good personality of a truly rich character. It is about bringing an interesting and fun identity to the group, and to the game world. Yes the examples above are silly but each of them would make fun and challenging characters to play. Expand yourself, play something with some obvious weaknesses. It gives you the opportunity to work with those and give your fellow party members a sense of being needed as they can fill in that gap. You will find that the party that has obvious weaknesses is actually stronger, since the characters not only want to work together, they need to work together.
In further articles I hope to expand on the “How” to make great characters. The best ones I have ever played had glaring weaknesses, rich back stories and quirky personalities. You know you are onto a good character when the character decides what class and race to be. When that character forces you to make decisions you normally wouldn’t make in the game. These characters are fun and interesting to play. They are also excellent characters to play with and often draw others into the same kind of experience. Build amazing characters because that is the only way you will truly ever have amazing adventures.
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