3 Tips on Crafting a Genuine Character in DnD (2024)
They Made it Easier to Create a Character but Not a Backstory
It was hard enough navigating character creation, though. The 2024 Player’s Handbook is a lot easier to follow than the prior version. But now that you’ve lined up your character class and origin, you don’t know where to go. This is the hardest part, figuring out why your character started adventuring in the first place.
The book tells you that you should have enough to go on, but your ‘fertile soil’ isn’t so fertile. It’s more like a desert wasteland. It can’t be this hard to create a backstory, can it?
Let me tell you this friend, while Dungeons and Dragons (DnD) 2024 made it easier to build your characters to power over every obstacle, they failed when it came to the ‘why’ your character started adventuring. Take it from a fellow player and game master (GM).
Heyo, I’m Kat. I’ve been a GM of DnD and various other games over the last decade. When it comes to backstories, sometimes a little push goes a long way. Other times, writing just three sentences seems like a thousand-mile run. DnD 2024 made plenty of improvements to the setup, order, and builds for their character classes. But they have always lacked in giving their players the tools to build characters that they can relate to or become during their role play.
Let me give you my three tips to help you get into your character’s mind.
Tip #1: Follow Your Character Creation Chapters
This may seem like I’m contradicting myself when I complain above about how much of a failure their prompts are. Without knowing what you want to build and what your character started as, (their origin and species), you don’t really know where they are.
My biggest suggestion for the first tip is to read over the character species, origin, THEN the character class. This allows you to get an idea of what you’re looking for. How you want your character to start and be. If you already have a class in mind, read that over first, along with the subclasses to help you figure out what direction you want to go if you’re starting the characters at level one.
Once you’ve gone over and picked out at least one of each, you can begin to understand where your character started. Now the hard part: why did they start adventuring? There are three classes that lend themselves to leading a life of adventure. Bard, Fighter, and Paladin are the ones listed specifically to be adventurers. Monk is the next, quickly followed by Ranger and Barbarian. While the rest are obviously meant to be adventurers, they require a bit more forethought to get them moving.
Let’s move onto origins. The easy origins are Sailor, Entertainer, and Guide. Those are all actively moving about the world. The next two are Merchant and Solider. All of the origins have reason to travel, as a note. I’m just giving the easiest to build from without deep diving into why you left your start.
Here’s an example for you of species, class, and origin. Gnome–Druid–Hermit. Hold with me while I break this thought down. As a gnome, you can choose whether you’re of the forest or rock gnome group. For this (to make things a touch challenging), our character here is a rock gnome. He is used to his burrows and is apart from the other folk within those tunnels, (Hermit). The only ones he interacts with are those who he trades with.
Let’s add the druid into the mix. There are several subclasses for Druid: Land, Moon, Sea, and Stars. Our Rock Gnome will enjoy the nature of his land but ultimately lean into the Stars subclass. Stars grants a plethora of interesting bonuses and abilities down the line to help both yourself and your future adventuring party. It’s also one of my favorites out of the Druid Subclasses in DnD 2024.
Let’s pool this information all together. Our Rock Gnome Hermit has a way with the land but has always dreamed of seeing the world’s stars. One of his normal trading partners talks often of the outside world and our Rock Gnome spends many an hour listening to the tales and the descriptions from those he trades with–likely to get our gnome out of his burrows is someone who isn’t of the gnomish persuasion.
This is an example of a simple backstory. This gives us a good foundation to just have our character up and leave to see the wide sky full of constellations. He could also have other curiosities. So let’s explore that in the next tip.
Tip #2: Ask Your Character (Yourself) Some Questions
While in our example of a simple backstory, we inferred some things about his contact or his goals or interests, it’s best to start a conversation with your character. Now, I’m strange in the fact that I can speak directly to my character and they talk back. Not everyone can do that BUT I can give you a list of questions that you can think about as your character.
The biggest of which is: Why did you choose the class you did?
If you can figure out the why your character did something, it’s a good way to open up to the when did they begin their training? Who was their mentor? How did they go about seeking their mentor OR did their mentor find them? What made them take up this course? A specific event: loss of a loved one? Nature was thrown out of balance? They were betrayed? From childhood curiosity?
All of these are things you can think about for more than just the character’s class. In the case of our Rock Gnome, why did he choose the isolation from his fellow gnomes? Why was he a hermit? Was it because he thought differently about the world than those closest to him growing up?
Let’s look at it from a different angle. Instead of us wondering why he was a hermit, why did he start adventuring. He’s a hermit. Not many want to change their ways and just set off into untold danger for no reason! So why did he? What spurred it? Was it the talk from his trading companion? Was it because his fellow gnomes got sick of his isolation and told him to leave, or else?
Take your character and go through these steps with them. Think about how they started: Rock Gnome–Druid–Hermit and ask them why they would have chosen the path they did.
A quick mini tip for this if you need the inspiration. In the DnD 2024 Player’s Handbook, the creators give you a chart to create or have a trinket. This is a great tool that may lead you as to the why or how in one of the categories above for your character.
But now that you have some of these questions, what’s the final tip?
Tip #3: Pick Up a Pencil and Start Writing
Now the statement of pencil is because DnD often involves a lot in the way of writing things down. Just look at the character sheet and the whole character creation process. But you can easily sit down at your computer and write it down or record your thoughts in other available ways. Whatever works for you, be it in conversation or writing, is the best way to get the juices flowing.
The best thing that I’ve found is to list what your character is and how you can do it. Here’s the example:
Rock Gnome – Mending and Prestidigitation.
Tiny music box–crickets*
Druid – Primal Order Magician–speak with animals.
Nature and Medicine
Personality – Laconic**
Trinket – A Tooth from an unknown beast.
*Rock Gnomes have the ability to create a tinkered object of their choosing per long rest
**On Page 40 of the Player’s Handbook, you’ll find a chart that helps you determine which personality traits you could have via alignment.
One of the last things I do is find a name for my character. However, this may be the place for you to start. Our Rock Gnome can have the name Bevris Talonstone. Now we can get started. I’ve written before that there are 3 Ways to Write a Backstory for DnD. It’s based on the 2014 rules, but the same styles apply here.
You can craft your basic backstory much like we did in the example. Then there’s your Journal Entry and finally your Short Story. I’ll give you the rundown here.
Basic backstory – This is like the example we did above, where you gain a brief understanding or summary of who your character is and how they came to be. This is used by answering the simple: who, what, when, where, why, and how of your character creation.
Who is our character: Bevris Talonstone a Rock Gnome Druid who lives like a Hermit.
What is our class? – A Druid who will become a Druid, Circle of the Stars.
When did our character become that? Include origin and class – He’s always had an affinity with nature instead of the stone or tinkered items like his kin.
Where did he leave to? Or where did he learn his skills from? (class) – He learned it on his own or from a mentor that came to him while trading items for his own trinkets.
Why did he choose to leave his home and life? – He wanted to experience the stars like his mentor had explained to him. He didn’t have family holding him back, so one day he left with his mentor to learn more.
How did he take the change from living in a burrow to the open world? – He likely was a little worried at first but excited to live the way his mentor did. Seeing the stars in the open sky instead of through trees or drawings would make his heart lift.
Now you can sit here and delve deeper into these questions or the basic six questions (who, what, when, etc.), and analyze things in more of a short story. Giving the scenarios that made him who he was from this start. Or you can explore them in a journal entry.
2. Journal Entry – this is where you think as the character and write about your journey from your origin to where you are today. To do this take the information I wrote under the question and put it into Bevris’s perspective.
Who I am? – I am Bevris Talonstone. I live alone – away from my clan of fellow Rock Gnomes. While I know their trade, it doesn’t call to me, so I am an outsider. I don’t mind though. I much prefer listening than tinkering.
When did I become a druid? – After listening to one of the three others who would trade with me. An elf by the name of (insert random generated name). She would talk to me about her travels and the grove where she resided. Her favorite thing was being under the stars and being one with them as close as she could be. It called to me.
Where did I leave? – I left my home in (insert chosen location) and left with my friend. She brought me to her grove (nature) and taught me the ways of being a druid.
Why did I leave? – I never fit in with my family or my clan. There was no reason for me to stay where I was stuck beneath the earth. I yearned to find a way to be nearer the stars that my friend always spoke of.
How did I make the transition? – It was difficult. I was unaware and unaccustomed to the dangers of the world between my burrow and the grove. My friend nearly died saving me from a pack of hungry beasts. I pulled a tooth out of her wound (medicine) and have kept it since (trinket).
You can see how that could be an easy little journal entry for your character to grow from. There is also the way that I usually write my backstories. This is the final way and one that requires some forethought, especially when it comes to incorporating the initial bullet point list that we made. If you notice I highlighted via ‘()’ so you could see where I was pulling some of the information and adding to the answers so I could have a reason for the character to have those skills. Let me explain the third option for writing.
3. Short Story – This is for those of us who like to watch the character evolve and have GMs who are up to the task of reading something that can be as long as 30 pages. (Yes, I’m the guilty party for writing that much.) This can give you an in-depth look at how your character thinks and acts under the situations of living as they were and what pushed them to leave.
I would love to give you a great example and I think what I will do is give you a link to the one I created for Bevris and to a more recent character of mine for DnD 2024. Idani Halrum. It is up to you if you wish to read that story. But like how Bevris is starting to come around in his creation, I started this one much the same.
With the bulleted list:
Guide*
Druid of the Land.
Personality – Disinterested (Neutral)
Trinket: A necklace with the symbol of her god.
Aasimar – The Child of the God she follows, unwillingly.
Idani Halrum – Raised by wolves* and starts with a different name.
*I went back into the 2014 for prompts since I was struggling with her start. DnD 2014 has a much better way to create character backstories. Check out my blog on 2014 backstory creation for more information.
With just those bullets, I wrote 27 pages of backstory on how she came to be who she was at the start of the campaign. And it all stems from answering the question like I did above for Bevris.
Conclusion
Now that you know my three tips for character backstory, you get to go start on yours. My best suggestion is to keep it simple. Start with the Basic character backstory. If you struggle to write that way then by all means try it as a journal entry or a short story. Making the list of what you are, where you’re from, and why you left your home is the easiest way to start writing this thing. It takes a lot of the guesswork out of the entire process.
So what is your new character name, class, species, and origin? You can leave a comment below, but if you do, don’t forget to subscribe to the newsletter. You’ll receive tips, tricks, and a free monthly map in your inbox from me.
