As a player, it can sometimes be difficult to create a character with personality. Heck, most characters I encountered as a player are one dimensional. Classic examples include the kleptomaniac rogue, or the bard seducing everything and everyone.
So this blog will serve as a means of helping you make a character with personality traits!
1. Use multiple personality traits to better define your character
While the personality traits found in the Player’s Handbook are invaluable to helping make a character, I find people tend to only pick one and use that trait for the rest of the campaign.
Why not pick more than one? Perhaps that kleptomaniac rogue only steals from the rich, Robin Hood style, and would never try to steal from the poor. That same rogue might also have a soft spot for cats. Examples like these can help make better personalities for the characters around you.
2. Look at your character sheet, and build the personality off of your stats
This one might be a bit tricky to understand, but hear me out.
Building your character’s personality off of your stats on the sheet can actually do wonders to help. It helps because it seperates a character that’s basically numbers on a page to a living, breathing character
For example, I once had a Half Elf Fighter named Felix Hardgrove, a once arrogant noble who was killed by a demon, and then later resurrected. I decided that since he had a low Wisdom score, he would tend to make agreements with shady beings, or charge headfirst into a fight if demons are involved, at the risk of his own safety.
3. Build it around the theme of the campaign and your party
This one sounds a bit obvious, but it is still vitally important. There’s nothing a DM hates more than a character who, personality wise, just does not fit in with the campaign, whether it be the “unique for the sake of unique” characters, or gimmicky characters.
Instead, communicate with the DM about what the world is like, what cities or nations there are, then consider your personality. That way, it makes the DM’s job much easier to handle characters.
I am 1000% guilty of feeding into the kleptomaniac rogue in my current campaign. Every stat I have sets it up almost too well for me to ignore the potential. Thankfully it does play a role in the campaign as she has been used to primarily pick locks and sneak around guards but still, I am guilty of the trope.
I’m surprised as to how detailed these characters are able to be
I’ve never played D&D, nor do I know anything about it, so this post was interesting to me. I had no idea that you could make your characters have personalities, and I never would have guessed that it could be so in-depth.