 Howdy how's it going? My name's Davy Chappy, and after running six games a week for about a half a year now, playing in three or four a week and seeing every angle of what it's like to both make and be presented with a new character joining the ranks of the fair noble party, I've decided that it's high time that I make a video discussing the process for those people who are having a hard time figuring it all out on their own. So, as always, remember that a lot of this is just my opinion, and if you have a better method for making your sixth sword warrior, feel free to generate characters however you want. Also, I want to give a real quick shout out to my new patrons this month. Dyslexic Emu, Gabriel Erickson, Miss Moon, Jonathan Ware, Christian Cooper, God of Mimics, Dietrich, Deatrish, something like that. Thank you so much for pledging your eternal dollar to my void. It is because of you that I can order Chinese takeout this week, but with that out of the way, let's begin. So, the first thing that I want to get out of the way immediately is going to crush your heart, but depending on the DM, there is an inverse correlation between the amount of work that you put into making a new character and the amount of work that the DM goes through to integrate them into the story. For instance, you can write a brilliant fucking book of a story that'll even make Lord of the Rings blush, but if you don't know that the DM is already going to be hyper-focusing on your background, then you may be setting yourself up for failure when, surprise, the DM takes one glance at that nice paragraph backstory and decides that reading is for nerds, or even worse, you put all this effort into making a new character, and then the unthinkable happens. The game is canceled. Suddenly, all of that work that you anguished over gets snapped to dust, and you're left not feeling so good and wondering if maybe you should just not care so much. I remember I first cared to that I actually put a lot of effort into. His name was Icarus, and he was a half-drow, wild magic, comic relief sorcerer who was missing one arm and had a mysterious past that could be read about in the journal that he kept on him at all times. I poured all of my effort into exactly how he got where he was, and I would think about how cool it would be once the whole party learned about him, and what his whole deal was. I was so excited to try him out, and then the campaign was canceled. But, undeterred, I just used him in a different campaign, and then that one was canceled, and then another, and another. And now Icarus is just my cursed character that will end any campaign I put him into, and he serves as a lesson that no matter how much effort I put into making a new character, there is no guarantee that the effort will be reciprocated. Now, to be fair, this is all dependent on the DM, and you should understand that talking with your DM before the game and seeing what their comfort level is with your character's backstory is the quickest way to save you from heartache. But the other solution is to err on the side of caution and make a character with bullet points instead of stories as their background. People give basic bullet points a bad rep when they're first making a character. They feel as if they don't put a lot of effort into worrying about where a character's been, then they'll be looked down upon for not taking the game seriously enough. I know, I've been there. But there's something to be said about slapping a basic concept together and running with it. Especially when, let me tell you, no one will know the difference. No one but the DM knows anything about your character or who you are besides what you present to them in-game. And there's really no tell-tale signs that any information you give to the party is carefully architected backgrounds, something you just made up on the spot, or literally just lies that your character is telling for the hell of it. The most important question that I, and I think anybody, really asks themselves when they make a new character, is what do I want to get out of this person? And I think that since new players want to completely immerse themselves in the experience of D&D for the first time, that's the reason they're so inclined to making long, elaborate backstories. Over time, that newbie excitement sort of cools down, and once a player has been playing long enough to understand the full breadth of what D&D has to offer, they start looking for ways to offer something new themselves. You might want to try a class out for the first time, but you might want to put your own spin on it. You might have just seen a cool show and you want your character to follow the same story beats. You might just want to use Xanathar's random character generator and play what comes out, no matter how impractical. Over time, these ideas start being the ones that monopolize the idea room of your brain, and less so backstories. That's not to say that you'll ever completely stop caring about backstory entirely, just that it'll go out of focus for you and become fuzzier over time, as your attention will most likely shift to the new styles of character mancy. As an example, the way that I go about formulating my own characters is usually dependent on just what I'm feeling at the moment, but the themes by which I go about setting it up are the same. My last character, Zadavius Chap, was a hill dwarf paladin that I played for over a year, all the way from level 1 to level 20, and he was a character that I wanted to play completely straight. But once I realized that Wisdom was gonna be his dump stat, I turned him into an idiot that had a love of dwarven culture, and I realized that I was either going to make an asshole dwarf or a ditzy cloud cuckoo-lander dwarf, and I felt that the second choice would gel better with a party, since no one likes having that one unrepentant ass in their party for an extended period of time. So right there, I had his basic bullet points. He was a stereotypical dwarf. He was a funny idiot. He liked dwarf things. When I started playing him in the game, that was all I knew about him. As the game went on, I added more character traits, and by the end of the game, I had added the bullet points of likes horses, honors clan, petty, and fears scorpions. And while that might not sound like much, honestly, that is as well-rounded as you need to make a character. A backstory will help you out if you feel the need to justify your character acting a certain way, but it will eventually dawn on you that you don't need to justify your actions unless they're really out of place. And even then, you don't need to justify them that much. Just keep a cliff-note story in hand in case it's time for some serious roleplay. To give another example, when I was in a Star Wars campaign, all of the players were stuck fighting through the lower levels of Coruscant for the entire campaign, and my character was secretly there to find his daughter, to the expense of literally everything else. Along the way, there were several instances where children were involved in the plot, and I decided that my character, despite being a cutthroat politician, was overly invested in making sure that kids stay safe while all hell is breaking loose everywhere else, to the point where I would get myself into deadly situations for seemingly no reason, and the rest of the party had no idea why until we eventually found a place to rest for a moment, and I spilled the beans on what my character's driving motivation was. It was literally something that I scribbled on the back of a piece of paper once as a MacGuffin for my character to be involved in any of the nonsense that was happening, but it was enough that it had an emotional payoff for the rest of the party, and it really elevated their sense of role-playing, sort of setting a marker for exactly when we decided that we were playing in a really good campaign. And all it was, again, was a note jotted down on my sheet, and I feel confident saying that if I had written down any more than that, like what my daughter is actually like, or what my life was with her before she was captured, it wouldn't have had any more emotional impact than it already did. The point was that I had a daughter. She is somewhere now. Her connection to me made me do reckless and stupid things now. It was a problem that is happening now, and it is an ever-present reality. That's what makes a backstory interesting. The dramatic current state of it, how it affects both you and indirectly everyone else in your party, and how it's a problem that can be overcome in some way with the party's intervention, however improbable. Like, if my story was that I had a daughter who had died and my actions were still the same, it'd be understandable, but the agency would no longer be there. In that case, instead of the party thinking about how there's a problem that may come back to haunt them, and maybe one that could be persevered through, they would instead think, oh dear, how unfortunate, and then hope that the character gets over it or goes away. It's not in their hands anymore. They're just the bystanders to that character's own melodrama. The bullet point also doesn't work if it doesn't modify who your character is in some way. Like, maybe you could have an enemy that either you are hunting down or they are hunting you down, and sure, that's a plot point that exists and might come back to haunt the party, but it's also easily forgettable if you don't have some sort of meaningful reaction to it. For instance, the way that I run ASMRs in my game is that if that player uses their ASMR abilities in front of anyone who might talk about it, then soon after, a demon will interrupt the party's regularly scheduled campaign to blow some shit up and kick all their asses at what is hopefully not a bad time. Yes, demons are constantly hunting the ASMR player down, but there is an active trigger to the frequency of that happening that the player is able to control, or at least expect. It gives the party agency because it's a thing that is happening now that the party can remain aware of, not just a thing that might happen eventually, and the party can't do anything about it one way or another. And it forces the ASMR to adapt their actions accordingly. If they thought that they could just angel their way through every combat or social encounter, now they still totally have that option, but they have to weigh the risks involved in doing so. And sometimes making a character is really just coming up with a concept that you think would be interesting to play. Like, a Kenku monk that snorts fairy dust and their martial arts is just them in a drug-fueled rage, a calm, sneaky barbarian with anger issues that they actually go to any length at all to control with strength as their dumpstab, a hard-boiled chain-smoking investigator that you've seen in every crime drama under the sun, but you want to play one of your own, so who cares? A kid that finds a magic sword stuck in a rock in a cave who pulls it out and accidentally makes a pact with it, and now his soul is in the sword. A goblin. Literally just a basic-ass goblin that does goblin things. Honestly, with that last one, I found that you can really get away with cheating by picking a race no one ever plays and playing them completely straight, because most people haven't been exposed to them before. What's the auntie again? So, yeah. I hope that all of this rambling manages to catch your attention in a way that it'll help you with creating characters of your own, but remember that the best way to do it is just play D&D. Play it enough times that you can figure out for yourself what attributes work in a character and what doesn't. And don't be afraid to stop playing a character that you're not having fun with anymore. Sure, it'll be a little jarring to have a character suddenly disappear from the adventure and be replaced with this new one, but that's at the expense of making you play a prolonged game with a character that you just don't care about anymore. No matter what, if it's fun for you and the group, you will be fine. I hope this helps, leave a like if it did, drop a comment to show us other nerds who's boss, and maybe support me on Patreon if you think that throwing money at a disembodied voice will somehow make me love you more. Hope you enjoyed this video, but yeah, Davi out.