The RPG a Day Blog 2016 Day 25

August 25: What makes for a good character?

First and foremost a good character is one that you will enjoy playing for the long haul of the campaign. For whatever reason I usually find myself  playing as small female characters (gnomes, halflings, pixies..) when I'm playing fantasy which is to say most of the time. I lean more toward male characters for the other genres that I play, but we don't play those very often. I find it interesting that throughout the years my gaming groups have been made up of males almost exclusively. I've had the occasional game when a girl does play and they rarely if ever play as male characters. On the other hand, several of the male players at the table and online will choose to play as female. I'm not sure why it turns out that way. In my case, I'm pretending to be someone else for roughly 3-4 hrs a week, so I think it's more interesting to play as someone very different than the person I am in real life.

As to classes...I choose the easiest one to play. Outside of playing bards, I've never strayed too far from the original classes as far as D&D and other fantasy settings go, and usually it's either fighter or thief (rogue) then. I definitely suggest that beginners take a less complex character type to start with. It's hard to remember all of the things that a character can do. For instance, all of the characters in my party were put to sleep...including my elf character...later on I remember that elves can't be put to sleep. If I really was that elf, I wouldn't have forgotten, and there are a dozen other little things that I might forget about over the course of a session. In short, I don't like to be bogged down by the mechanics of playing my characters. You can probably guess that I don't play any of the super-complex games like RIFTs very often.

I do give my characters elaborate backstories. I know that some players are the exact opposite, and sometimes even I will go with a prebuild. But, for the most part I like to know what motivates my character to do the things that she is doing. Where did she come from? Why does she want to become an adventurer? How did she come to join the party? What are her short and long term goals? You know the things that I should be asking myself in real life. Keeping these things in mind makes the role play portion more interesting.

So for me good characters are the ones that are simple to play, that have a detailed backstory, and that allow me to explore parts of my personality that I wouldn't normally get to in real life.