Whether you play D&D, Shadowdark, Old-school Essentials, or even Daggerheart — any of them — it doesn’t matter if you’re a player or a DM, what do you have in common? Everybody wants cool characters. Players want to run characters that are not just fun to play, but have a high chance of not just surviving the campaign, but to do it in an epic way. DMs actually want that, too. But the commonality goes beyond that.
It all starts at the Session 0, when the character is created. I’m not going to talk about the mechanics of how to create your characters; the rulebooks already cover that. I’m going to talk about something bigger than that: the what and the why of player character creation and how focusing a bit more on that phase of the game can make it way more fun for everyone, players and DMs alike.
Bad-Assery
I’m going to start with two questions. Why do both players and DMs want the game to have cool characters? And what actually makes a character cool in the first place?
Let’s dispel a myth right off the bat, something nearly every player intuitively thinks their character needs in order to be great: bad-assery. This implies they need to be highly effective at what they do. If they’re a melee class, they need to deal maximum damage while taking as little as possible in return. If they’re a caster, they need the most powerful spells and the biggest buffs for the party. If they’re a healer, well, you get the idea.
But is this focus on max max max everything max what makes a character cool? It can, but not always. Being a bad-ass is only one possible way to make a character cool, and sometimes it doesn’t do that at all.
Here’s an example. I DMd a 5th edition group a few years ago. The party had a human barbarian who could one-shot nearly everything that wasn’t a big bad evil guy. He was a powerfully built character on paper. But even though we ran that campaign for several months, at this point I couldn’t tell you a single thing about who he was. He hit things hard, really hard, but that’s all he did. That was the whole character, a collection of high stats but he wasn’t a character in the more metaphorical sense of the word.
DMs can intuitively understand the draw to maxed-out characters, too, because a party full of stats and gear is arguably easier to design around. Encounters become more mathematical and therefore a bit easier to create. There’s nothing wrong with that on its own. The risk is that the game turns into a stat versus stat exercise. It’s like designing a spreadsheet that can stand toe to toe against four other spreadsheets in a cage match. This can be subtle or it can become bloody obvious, especially when everyone at the table has this max max max attitude.
The Cool Kids
Not every player is chasing the biggest number, though. Some care more about who the character is and how they “play” than how effective they are in combat. They’d rather play a character that’s interesting than one that is effective but boring.
DMs like those kind of characters, too, because they’re fertile soil for inspiring adventure design. Despite this, some less experienced game masters can run the risk of overpowering a party built for their cool factor rather than their combat effectiveness. This is because monsters and encounters as written might be a bit more powerful than the “cool” character can handle. Good DMs, of course, judiciously adjust encounter strength based on the party, not on the stats as written, but that can require a bit of squinting and judgment to really nail it. It’s not that hard to do, really, if you give it a few minutes extra thought and I suspect that most DMs do this automatically.
The Backstory
A lot of players watching this, and maybe some DMs, too, might think that all you need to do to make your character cool is come up with an elaborate backstory. Here’s something I’ve said in other articles and I’ll repeat here: a backstory that runs three thousand words in length might be a great read for the player who wrote it, but it rarely translates into an actually better night at the table for everyone else, including the DM. If your group genuinely enjoys reading each other’s autobiographical fan fiction, go for it. But don’t mistake a long backstory for a good time. They’re not the same thing, especially when a paragraph or two usually accomplishes the same goal.
You want a certain amount of backstory for your character, of course, but remember that in terms of impact on the game itself, a little goes a long way.
What the DM Wants
In my personal view after more than four decades in this game, DMs shouldn’t have an agenda with the kind of characters the players choose. The game master is there to create the opportunity for everyone to have a good time, and the odds of a good time can go down when the DM has pushed a player into a choice they wouldn’t have made on their own. When this happens, it’s usually subtle, but I’ve actually seen it happen on more than one occasion in a more overt way.
However, this isn’t the same thing as the DM saying something like, “This adventure will definitely benefit from having a healer or two in the group, know what I’m saying? Nudge nudge wink wink.” That’s a totally valid and maybe even common thing for DMs to say to the group during their session 0. The difference is the players as a group will discuss that advice and figure out amongst themselves who’s going to build a healer or not.
Having said all that, DMs look for two key elements in how players create their characters. The first is investment. Are you emotionally invested in your character, and what does that investment look like? To start, it means you care enough about your character to fully flesh them out. You spend time thinking about which class and ancestry you genuinely want to play, creating a combination you’ll enjoy the most. You think about how to allocate your stats, and which gear you prefer and what spells you select. This isn’t min-maxing, it’s giving thought to your choices and taking a personal interest in them.
Second, you know your character inside and out. Players who are fully familiar with their character’s strengths and weaknesses are fun to have around the table. Great players are well-versed in the gear and abilities and spells their characters possess, and they study up to know not just how to use them, but when. It’s really cool for the DM when a player does something like using their final flask of oil to set the baddie on fire so the party can escape. Creative game-play like that makes it a more fun experience for everyone.
The Rising Tide of Fun
Table-top role-playing groups miss out when those around the table treat player characters as a collection of stats devoid of meaning and depth, or when they’re created without thought to how they can be played effectively, or without any personal motivation or investment by the player.
We can sometimes forget that Shadowdark and D&D and the others are role-playing games. This means we have real people playing the roles of invented personas. When we as people take an emotional stake in the characters we create, not just a functional or coldly intellectual one, the richness and depth of the game goes up, and that makes it more fun.
It’s also easy to forget that DMs have a stake in which characters are being run at their table. If the players are emotionally invested in their characters, odds are the DM will be, too. When the DM gets emotionally invested in the characters, the quality of the encounters and adventures and even the entire campaigns they create goes up. Everyone wins.
If you’re a player, I hope this article has inspired you to take a deeper interest in the characters you create at your next game. If you’re a DM, I’m probably preaching to the converted when I say, if your players raise the level of care they put into their characters, you’ll likely be inspired to up your game as well, pun fully intended.
