Creating new characters is one of my favourite aspects of D&D. Usually, though, you don’t do it all too much. If you’re lucky, you’ll get to play a nice, long campaign where your character doesn’t die, so you won’t have to make a new one for some time. Sometimes, however, your character dies, and you have to introduce a new one. So that’s what I want to talk about today. My process of coming up with a character, using Makepeace as an example.
Usually, I start by setting myself parameters. Makepeace only being my fifth ever player character, I have yet to sample all of the classes, so I decided to immediately discount the ones I had played before. That removed Fighter, Blood Hunter, Sorcerer, Wizard, Bard, and Monk. Likewise, I prefer not to play the same class as someone else in my party, more for variety than anything else, but it also helps narrow down my options (which, let’s be honest, there are a wealth of). That removed Warlock and Barbarian on top of the others.
To a lesser degree, I decided I didn’t want to repeat a race, specifically the sub-race option which I had been before. That removed my options for playing a Human, Goblin, Yuan-Ti Pureblood, or Sea Elf.
I then took stock and looked at my options. The classes I fancied the most were Paladin and Rogue, though I also considered Ranger and Cleric. For the races, there were a few I liked the look of, but the main ones were Aasimar, Kalashtar, Changeling, Half-Orc, and Elf, either a Shadar-Kai or an Eladrin. I do remain conscious of which races optimise best with which classes when I’m character-creating, but I try not to let that affect my decision too much.
There were a couple of other factors that were affecting my decisions at this point. When I first created Spoon, I had considered making a Paladin, so I knew this was an option I liked the idea of. At the same time, towards the end of Spoon’s tenure, I had very much enjoyed sneaking around in the dark, so I also fancied a sneaky character, ideally with darkvision. That led me toward Rogue, or Gloom Stalker Ranger. For a while, I even considered a multiclass of the two, which I may do for a future character.
The other thing I did to help influence my decision, and it’s the one piece of advice I would give to anyone making a character, was that I rolled my stats before I’d made any choices. If you roll your stats, they may or may not affect how your character plays, and that can in turn affect who your character is. This won’t apply so much if you roll well, but if you roll a low stat or two, they can heavily influence your character. For example, when I created my second character, Linnie, a Goblin Sorcerer, I rolled a 3, the lowest stat you can possibly roll (seriously, the average is 10, and the highest is 18). Knowing I was going to be incredibly bad at one particular set of skills massively affected how I ended up building him, because I had to ask not only what he would be bad at, but also why he was bad at it.
At the same time, every class has at least one stat that is used in all of their particular features, and most have two. You don’t have to optimised for your class – this is D&D, you can do what you want – but if you want to be at all effective at what your class specialises in, this is something to consider. When I rolled up stats for Makepeace, I rolled quite well, getting several decently high stats, but I also rolled a 6. That meant I knew that any class I chose, I could be good at, but I would also struggle with a certain skill set.
Don’t be afraid of low stats, though. Coming up with the character traits that cause them is half the fun. For example, going back to Linnie, I ended up putting his 3 in Wisdom. Wisdom determines a character’s more instinctive, empathetic skills, such as Animal Handling, Perception, and Insight. It determines a character’s ability to interact with the world on a non-physical, non-intellectual, and non-charismatic level. I decided it meant that Linnie made terrible decisions. On top of that, he wore coke-bottle glasses, explaining his physical lack in terms of the Perception skill, and I played him as generally being oblivious to the world around him. And, honestly, he was so much fun to play that way.
Back to Makepeace, at this point I had ideas of what I wanted to do but no character was speaking to me yet, so I began to reexamine my race and class options. Something I was conscious of was that our party didn’t have much healing capability, so I had a look at the Druid class, at the Circle of Dreams subclass (which has built-in healing) and inspiration struck. The Circle of Dreams is very much aligned with the fey, and the Summer Court in particular, something I liked the idea of because I’m a big fan of Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series, and the two fey courts are a significant part of that. Throw in being an Eladrin Elf, a native to the Feywild, and I had my character.
I built my Eladrin Druid, coming up with some ideas surrounding him, but a couple of things didn’t quite sit right for me. First, Druid has never been a class that I’m super eager to play. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it, it just doesn’t appeal to me as much as some of the others. Second, I knew one of the other players already had a backup Circle of Dreams Druid planned, should their first character die, so I didn’t really want to butt in and steal that option.
I reconsidered my character, and realised I could still make the same character work quite well as a Paladin. I’ve always fancied the Oath of Redemption, and I decided that an Autumn Eladrin matched that quite well (Eladrin have different personalities based on the seasons, and Autumn tends towards peace and generosity). Also, I figured making a ‘nice’ character would bring some much-needed morality to our group.
Still liking the idea of a sneaky character, I decided to make my character a Dexterity-based Paladin. Paladins tend to be Strength-based, standing in plate armour as the front line of a party, but with two Barbarians I decided we didn’t need more of the same, so I actually put my 6 in Strength. Backstory-wise, I decided my character had been ill when he was younger, and had never quite regained his full strength.
The last thing I had to do was come up with a name, and a more in-depth backstory, explaining how he found his god, got his abilities, et cetera. I’m not going to explain that, since it’ll be more interesting coming out in the story of the campaign, but as a creative writer, that was the easy part for me. I pulled a few ideas together, a spot of research, a dab of imagination, and ended up with a fairly simple, yet easily expandable, backstory.
Back to the name, though, I was initially thinking very Shakespearean for it. I tossed up Mercutio as an option, but felt it was a little too blatant, so I did a quick internet search for Old English names. I liked the feel of an ‘M’ name, so started there, and the moment I saw ‘Makepeace’ I knew that was it.
Thus, Makepeace the Eladrin Paladin of Redemption was born. I’m very happy with how he turned out, and really enjoyed bringing him into the campaign last weekend. Tune in for the next instalment of his and the others’ story on Sunday.