Character creation workshop how to#
Character creation workshop full#

Lists parents, siblings, friends, romantic partners, and so on. Also, make sure to chart out basic relationship.

Character creation workshop full#

Write down your character's full name and physical details like height, weight, eye color, hair color, and so on. You can create your own character profile worksheets, or find a framework to follow online.It also describes how they fit into the story and what their relationships with other characters are. A character profile worksheet has all the information about each character including their basic background, physical description, personality attributes, and emotional characteristics. If you wanted to have a dead family, OK, but I needed a friend or a teacher or someone still kicking to connect to.Create character profile worksheets to flesh out your characters. *the closest relationship could be anyone, but they had to be alive and they had to be in or live in the starting town. Although I'll admit I've only used it to generate NPCs thus far. This creates a tension within the character and stops them from becoming just one thing. Or one of my NPCs at the moment, a talking guinea pig (mask) with the mind of a ruthless revolutionary (countermask).

So for instance, we had one character who was outwardly a sweet tween girl (mask) who could fly into barbarian rages at any moment (countermask). It's mostly used for Commedia Dell'Arte training, but the basic idea is that every character type (mask) contains its own opposite (or countermask). Figuring out motivation is like 90% of acting theory, and I use my theatre training all the time in character creation.Īnother useful concept that I think originated with Jacques LeCoq is Mask-Countermask. I think these tools were effective because they gave the characters motivation.

What is your lifelong dream? This gave me the tools I needed to motivate the players to adventure.

Who is your closest relationship*? This gave me my cast of NPCs and gave the players stakes.

Character creation workshop how to#

What is your most important value? This helped the player decide how to respond to the sticky situations I put them in.

It also gave me tonnes to work with as a DM: I asked my players for three things in the creation process and it led to some beautiful roleplaying from my powergameryest players.

I got the idea to do this from Adventuring Academy episode 7 We would not have had anywhere near enough to run all the workshops if we’d only included people who’d DM’d or had a lot of experience. Also, not everyone in the team has a lot of experience.

Essentially, it’ll be like running a session 0 for character creation.ĭo you guys have any advice for us? What kinds of methods can we use to help them get into it and make characters they’d find fun to play? Anything we should avoid? Any useful resources out there we could use?įor the record, we expect most people to have a good understanding of how to fill out the character sheet, so we’re focusing on backstory, personality, coming up with character concepts, etc. The professor will run optional one-shots that people can use their characters in. As a major project, I and a team of people I’ve put together are going to run workshops where there’s the person running it helping 3 or 4 people make fun characters (90ish % of the class has never played D&D). One of the things we’ll have to do in the class is make a 5e character. I’m in a college course that is essentially using D&D to introduce us to various social science topics (race/gender theory, storytelling, psychology & sociology, etc.).