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Character Development: Personality Matters

Let’s face it; for most of you, character race, class and background are the easy parts. It’s personality that you hate creating and roleplaying.

I say this because out of all of the characters that I’ve seen over the past year and a half or so (easily one hundred or more), the only consistently vacant spot on a character sheet are those reserved for personality traits, etc..

Building a character can be difficult. To begin with, there’s more to it than just picking from a list in the PHB. Actually…that’s not true, since the PHB has a list to accompany each background and there are resources in other books (i.e. Xanathar’s Guide) to further help with character development.
But this is your personality, right? So you don’t want to pick everything from a list, you want it to be unique, which also rules out Reddit posts (presumably), and other online resources.

There are many different theories on how to build personality, and I personally use several, depending on circumstances. Here’s one “system” that I use sometimes. I call it “Building Backwards”, and here’s an example:

I was in a group that was about to start a new campaign. The group so far consisted of: a half-orc ranger, a human fighter, a high elf rogue, a druid ( I don’t remember his race, the player re-rolled after a couple sessions) and I was trying to decide what I wanted to play.
I knew the group was going to need healing, which can be accomplished in a number of ways (which I won’t get into here), and would also want someone who could identify magic items. In the end I opted for a half-elf knowledge domain cleric. The class is fairly utilitarian, but the group was otherwise pretty well balanced for combat and I figured this would help everyone not die from wounds and all the other things that dungeons are full of.

So I had a class, race and background (sage, obviously!), but how did it all work together?
He was a half elf, so I figured there was probably some drama in his past about his heritage, and I thought that it likely had something to do with his background studying at Candlekeep, so I began backstorying to that point. He was a scholar, but also an adventurer, so probably a bit of an attitude floating beneath the surface. He was patient, but still had moments where he spoke slowly for the benefit of everyone in the room. He could fight, but typically preferred to solve things without violence, unless of course someone did something rash like damage a book. Then there would be blood…

One of my favourite moments in game with him happened when our party walked into a room and found ourselves faced with several (nine, I think) vampires. He panicked. Then another character noticed that one of them was wearing face paint. My character went on a tirade: belittling them for such ridiculous and childish behaviour; deploring them for what they had allowed themselves to sink to; encouraging them to get an education and better themselves for he good of not only themselves, but their families and everyone else around them.
DM called for a Persuasion check: natural 20, total 23.
The entire group of “vampires” looks at their feet and begins shuffling out of the room…

I think that (almost) every character should have a quirk of some sort; something that makes them a little odd at least once in a while. I know a lot of players who make their characters very odd, and if done well and in the right group, this can work well. I do, however, off the following advice to many players who tell me that they are attempting this path:

Don’t make your character so obnoxious that the rest of the party doesn’t want to travel with them!

Remember that you’re playing a role playing game. So when you meet with a merchant or a peasant or an aristocrat or a dragon, you should be making decisions based on what your character would do. Likewise, when you meet a random adventurer in the tavern, in the prison or on the road (aka new potential party member), your decision to travel with them or not should be based on what your character would do. This goes for the rest of your party.

So, if you roll a toon who is so obnoxious that any sane person would run from them in terror and most adventurers I know would realistically use you as bait for the next monster they encounter, remember that the group may decide to treat your character in a way that you may not appreciate. I know one person whose character in a different RPG sold off another player’s toon into slavery.

Not every character needs to be likeable. Not every character needs to be min-maxed for damage. Every character should fit into the group for a reason though. If you’re going to be obnoxious, you’d better be really, really good at everything else that you do…

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