How do you create your tabletop role-playing (herein TTRPG) characters? It’s probably different for each person and as varied as their individual approaches to TTRPGs themselves. Since I view the TTRPG experience as a fictional creation, and favour fiction first games, my approach is influenced by how the principles of characters in other forms of fiction can be transferred to the TTRPG experience.
It’s worth noting this is how I create my player characters. How I create characters as a GM is entirely different as they exist only to serve the player characters.
There Are No Rules Here
If you’ve come here expecting all sorts of build mastery you’re in the wrong place. There are literally no rules here. My process is about constructing a character who exists on the edge of stepping over a threshold into a story he or she is created to tell. How it plays out and how it ends no one knows but that is why they exist.
They’re a member of homo fictitious and like any character in fiction, you may delude yourself into thinking they’re a normal person, but they’re not.
The Four Pillars
My TTRPG characters exist on four pillars. The four pillars being premise, visuals, events and build.
It’s a bit like a stool, if any of the legs aren’t built properly then the whole stool feels wonky and it’s similar for the characters. While each pillar needs to exist some things are always true:-
- The order they are formed can be different per character
- The most important one is nailing the premise
- The least important one is the build, though it tends to be a bit more important in some games than others
Beyond that, it’s a very organic process. The character may arise from wanting to explore a specific story (the premise)? It may come from a set of visuals and then everything is wrapped around that? Possibly, I envisage a character being born out of certain events?
I then circle around developing each leg, letting one influence the other, until the stool feels stable and complete.
How The Process Has Changed
There is the time before my five-year hiatus from playing TTRPG’s and the time after. I learned a lot during a time I wasn’t playing.
In the time before there was a much bigger emphasis on the events. I’d literally write pages, sometimes pages and pages. One game my character background was over twenty pages and ended up being bound. Don’t ask. I didn’t bind it, the GM did it. He had a whole hand out production thing going which really added to the campaign but it was a bit much.
Do you know what was always true under this model? I was writing things that should have happened in actual play.
After my hiatus, my characters are a single page, two at most, and they are much better for it. They are more rounded characters without volumetric fan fiction. It wasn’t just about de-prioritising the events, it was the addition of premise and how to transfer the tools of fiction to my TTRPG experience while still allowing it to be a role-playing game.
The Premise
Why does a fictional character exist? They exist for one single purpose: to tell the story they are created to tell. It’s the only reason they exist.
It’s my view this is perfectly true of TTRPG’s as well.
Many people will see this differently, but the TTRPG world is split between those who think the narrative is something woven over events after the fact, like real life, and those who believe it’s something created intentionally as part of the play experience like in fiction.
I’m well into the latter, so the criticality of the premise makes perfect sense.
The premise encapsulates the story my protagonist exists to tell. They are a series of questions in the face of challenges. Initially, I used to articulate my premise as a single question, now after reading a few more books on storytelling I’ve taken up the model of posing three questions.
| Three Questions | Description |
| The external conflict | The external threat the character is created to confront. |
| The internal conflict | The internal threat the character must face within themselves |
| The philosophical conflict | The philosophic question the character is questing for an answer to |
If we modelled Luke Skywalker this way it could be argued his premise would look like below: –
| External | Internal | Philosophical |
| Must defeat the empire. | Am I a Jedi? | Can good defeat evil without becoming evil? |
This sums up Luke’s journey really well. His external conflict is defeating the empire and having the resistance win out, while he deals with the internal conflict of whether he can become a Jedi but the deep philosophical conflict that tortures him is can he do it without falling to the dark side himself?
Now let’s take a character from a campaign I played in recently. It was a fantasy campaign set in the High Age of Elves and an existential threat to the Elves’ existence had just entered the land at a time the Elves themselves had descended into a brutal civil war. My character was the young, deposed prince of the Sea Elf nation.
His premise is laid out below: –
| External | Internal | Philosophical |
| Must reclaim the Sea Elf throne | Am I good enough to be King? | Can I reclaim the throne without losing the war? |
His external conflict was to regain his position as the leader of the Sea Elves (yes, he did) while being internally wracked by the question of whether he would actually make a good King (he decided his sister was better at it)? The deeper philosophy was related to the campaign itself, in that could his selfish desires be attained without losing the war (apparently, yes)? This fed into the overall theme of whether the Elves could rise above their squabbles to fight the true threat.
Whether the premise is the first fleshed out area or the last, without it my characters flail around like a fish out of water and the play experience is sub-optimal. Not bad, terrible or not worth my time, as I do get other things out of the experience, but it’s like a meal where the ingredients just didn’t come together as you hoped.
The Visuals
For some people, this isn’t very important. It’s everything for me. I think that’s because of my fascination with visual media such as film and TV. I like to know and understand in my head how my character looks, moves and acts.
Funnily enough, despite the current trend of voice actor performances on streams, this is rarely to do with how they talk. I try and get emotion and feeling across but characters just talk like me, maybe a slightly different pattern of speech I eventually forget about.
I tend to see it as a sort of superhero aesthetic, a genre where the characters largely exist visually.
Characters will have a set visual look, almost like a super-suit, even if it’s a modern game. Since we tend to run with campaigns with an action component I’ll have their weapons and fighting style pinned down. I tend to find an actor or an image to associate with the character or other elements introduced in the events. Role-playing is not just speaking as the character as an actor, but also writing and directing the character so all these things are essential.
While I’ve not done this yet, for the right cost and the right artist and the right campaign I’d really consider moving my approach to commissioning artwork for my character as that would be really cool.
The Events
Typically, all I include here now is the minimum that is necessary to establish the premise. Nothing more. Nothing less. Lean and mean.
Why? Because you can always add more events later and the chances are they’ll be better for it. Characters are like quantum physics, nothing is real until it’s observed or played out, so even significant events can be added after the fact.
This tends to mean massive events are written almost as bullet points. No need to write pages of fan fiction. I don’t do this for the same reason, how these events eventually get related will undoubtedly be better later, having experienced the game so they can be retold within the context of the campaign, the other player characters, relationships the character has formed, etc.
The only reason the events may take a slightly longer form, growing to the mighty length of a paragraph, is if I also want to establish places and people. As an example, my Sea Elf character’s events also established a location, a couple of important non-player characters and the sea dragon tribe that brought him up in exile. Still only a page in total though.
The Build
I don’t go deep into build mastery, primarily because I find it boring beyond a certain point, and we really don’t play that many games that demand it. I guess I find it interesting while it remains me painting a picture of who the character is? Once it moves into mastering the game I get bored with it fast.
This is why I like fiction first games as they tend to do two things:-
- Focus on painting a picture of your character as a fictional entity where who he is matters as much as what he can do (often more so)
- They use abstract rules rather than very specific rules for very specific actions
A combination of these two things means the rules don’t get in the way of how I imagine my character coming across in the game.
Where I have to engage with the build I will, such as in games like Dungeons and Dragons and Pathfinder where you need to build something sufficiently otherwise the rules get in the way of the character in your imagination as it’s not the fiction first. It’s only when playing these types of games that the rules might inspire the character, for example wanting to play a Warlock or a Paladin and forming all the other things around that.
Genius For Pre-Generated Characters
I’ll admit, I’d love all my players to lay out their characters like I do for my campaigns as what I’m constantly looking for is that premise to drive their character’s story from. I’ve used a few approaches to ‘prompt them’, primarily via aspects in Fate. In truth, many of them do articulate it; they just don’t write it the same way or it manifests in play as the signals play out.
Sometimes it’s a very embryonic one but they don’t mind me fleshing it out via events and antagonists in play. It’s a bit more work, but that’s fine.
Where I do think this approach is maybe genius is for one-shots that use pre-generated characters and I’m going to literally use my approach to lay out the pre-generated characters for my Superhero ‘one-shot’ for our yearly mini-convention at a cottage.
I think laying out a pre-generated character’s premise and relationships will give every pre-generated character the information the player needs to hit the ground running as that character steps over the threshold at the start and enters the story? The other great thing is it allows the whole ‘one-shot’ to be envisaged out in terms of themes and conflicts without actually building any characters in the rules.
Everyone wins.
And, Finally…
I’m aware this article makes it sounds like a sit-down and architect a character in some sort of hours long creative process. That really isn’t how it happens. An idea comes up and then over an extended period of time new bits are added to the skeleton often during walks or while in the shower.
This tends to happen even if I have no campaign on the horizon. Oddly, it tends to happen more for genres of games we don’t tend to play consistently.
Hell, whole campaigns form in the shower never mind snippets of protagonists.
It’s a good process though and the campaigns I remember most are uniquely tied to when all these things have slotted in place better.