I was pondering this the other day, and thought why don’t I ask the good people of the internet:
When you create a new character, how do you decide what to play?
I’m going to start the ball rolling and explain my reasoning and methods behind character generation……….
Firstly, and being brutally honest, we (the players with the nominated DM) sit around a table and discuss options, we pretty much discuss it in a MMORPG kind of way – roles to fill pretty much fit the basics of MMORPG’s perfectly, that being, Tank, DPS or healer – sure there are utility classes, but as we mostly play with 3 player characters, we tend not to have enough flexibility to fill utility roles until we have a few levels of experience behind us and can then consider multiclassing.
Once our role in the party has been identified it’s up to choosing the exact class you want to play, in my current campaign I’m the tank, so I had a good look at my options (using 4th edition D&D in the example, although it works for pretty much all RPG’s) I had the PHB2 available when I rolled this character so I chose the Warden class, which has a good selection of defensive capabilities, and some nice defence abilities.
Once I have the class, I do the same with races, I start at this point to get a feel for the character, creating a story why am I adventuring, what gain is there, where’s the meeting point, why would I be adventuring, if I can answer these questions sensibly then I change direction of the character, change class etc, I think it’s a bad character choice if the only reason you can think of for adventuring is: “I wanted to gain wealth and fame” whilst it might be an end result of adventuring, it’s not the best reason and doesn’t give ideas for hooks or plots to the DM.
Now you have the class and the race (in my case, a shifter warden) now I pick up the dice, and create the physical / mental attributes, and fill out the character sheet.
Usually I take some time to write up some bullet points with a outline story for the DM, something that will provide potential hooks and plots and something that tells the DM I’m taking his campaign seriously and intend on developing the character.
So over to you, how do you generate a new player character.
MadAsToast
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