How to Forge Characters

On Character Creation & Why Backstories Suck

The first part of any campaign for you the player, assuming your DM hasn’t overloaded you with lore information that you must pretend to read, is to create your character. There are two parts to character creation regardless of the system.

1. Mechanics. You roll dice or go through a flowchart or select from a list of options. At the end of the ordeal, you have a bunch of numbers or words on a sheet of paper that represent your character’s strengths and weaknesses via the mechanics of the system.

2. Character Concept. This is where it gets tricky and players and DMs alike are led astray. This is where you must determine who your character is, where they come from, why they are worthy of being a character in the campaign. In short, this is where you create your character backstory, or maybe it’s not…

Now I must note that all you actually need in order to play in a TTRPG campaign is that sheet of paper with the numbers or words on it, the character sheet. Games were normally played this way back in the good old days and plenty still are. In fact, I think that this is also the only thing that DMs should require if they want the best chance at a fun, meaningful, and truly wondrous game - but more on this in future posts.

As the TTRPG hobby developed, players and DMs alike realized that they could add significance to their games and engage everyone more readily if each PC was more than just some numbers on a piece of paper, if they had some real person-like qualities and connection to the world. This took many forms, including the common: “Write a long backstory for your character, the more the better.”, “Write a backstory for your character. It has to be at least one page.” and lastly, “Write a backstory for your character.” If you’re astute, you’ll notice that each of these common options has a similar component to them: their unknowing interest in absurdism.

Let me explain.

The backstory is one of multiple ways to forge a character concept but as it is the most common, I must address it first. We ought to start with what the purpose of the character concept is. The primary purpose of the character concept is to orient the player in their character’s shoes for the sake of easier roleplaying down the line.

You see, the backstory is the least efficient method of going about forging a character concept. Why? The backstory contains the most seeds of any method of creating a character concept. There are two things that make up character creation: seeds and drives. Seeds are facts about the character, events from their past, personality traits, and other things which flesh out the character. The character’s drive is their ambition, their motivation for taking action in any given situation.

The more seeds and drives there are in a character concept, the harder it is for the player to make in-character decisions and less likely that character is to grow and change throughout the campaign. This is because a player taking their character concept seriously must go through their list of seeds before making any decision in order to ensure that they are actually playing their character - this is quite cumbersome since there are a lot of decisions in TTRPG campaigns. To solve this cumbersomeness, the player is likely to establish shortcuts for playing their character, abstracting or combining their seeds into easier-to-handle directives. For fear of not actualizing their expansive character concept, the player becomes less likely to take risks when making decisions and this inhibits any potential for character growth. Alternatively, the player may abandon their many seeds in favor of just their favorite, whichever seed is most enjoyable for them to base their roleplaying off of. In the first case, the backstory inhibits the player from enjoying a meaningful, character-growth-filled game, and in the latter case, the player may as well have started with a much less cumbersome character concept. Thus the backstory is either superfluous or harmful to the player when they try to roleplay their character.

So, we’ve established the absurdity that is using a backstory to forge a character concept. But what now? The backstory method is so prevalent. What shall take its place? The simple answer is: nothing. Literally having nothing is a lot better than having a backstory if you want to roleplay your character and experience a lot of cool character growth. Pretty much every TTRPG system has certain mechanical character options that function as seeds on their own - D&D has races and classes, Traveller has careers and life events, Call of Cthulhu has occupations, Blades in the Dark has character archetypes, and the list goes on. The truth is though that the most important element to a good character concept is the drive. If you the player come up with a simple and evocative answer to the question: “What drives this character to act?” and then refer back to that answer whenever you face a decision in the campaign, you will find that roleplaying is very simple. At first, you will be uncertain about whether or not you are making the right decision, but you must push past this by trusting yourself. Over time, you will develop an instinctual connection to your character and roleplaying will come easily and naturally. Any character concept creation method that involves a simple and evocative drive with a limit on the number of seeds involved will set you the player up for success by giving you a solid launchpad to run your character.

Remember, the things which matter the most happen in the campaign and not before, so you will inevitably pick up seeds and drives, but let that happen as a result of playing the game rather than trying to engineer them. Try it out.

If you want my favorite character concept creation method, I recommend Angry GM’s “Two-Note Player-Character”.