Character Generation in Dungeons & Dragons

Character Generation in Dungeons & Dragons
Hi my name is Barry Osser from North Coast Role Playing in Eureka, California and today I’m going to come and talk to you about character generation in the Dungeon and Dragons universe. A character generation is what you do to build that character, that persona that you’re going to play in the game. So you have to have some thought to it when you’re beginning to try to get the feel for what direction you’re going. Now the simple numbers are character generation for Dungeons and Dragons are done one of two ways, you either roll 3 – 6 sided dice, those are the dice that you see in monopoly all of the time or you throw 4 – 6 sided dice. In the case that you throw 3, you throw the 3 and you add up those total numbers, that’s the score. In the case of throwing 4, you throw all 4 of them and then your remove the lowest dice. So if you had a 1, a 2, a 3 and a 4, you would remove the 1 and you would be left with a 9 point total, either way you’re adding up 3 dice to get your final total, now those scores are giving to the attributes which we covered earlier and each of those attributes are going to have a range of 3 to 18, 3 generally being the bottom and 18 generally being the human maximum for each of those attributes, so when building your character you have to think in terms of what do you want the character to do. If you put an 18 on strength and a 3 on intelligence, you’re not going to have a character that’s going to be figuring out all of the puzzle pieces, but you’re probably going to have a character that’s going to be ramming through every single door and knocking down just about all of the creatures to safe guard the guy who has the 18 intelligence, who’s going to figure out the puzzles for you. Something else to consider when you’re role playing, you’re taking on another persona you generally will be considered cheating if you’re doing yourself, so what you want to do is you want to be thinking about things that you could play at when you’re role playing. So for example if you’re somebody that doesn’t spend a whole lot of time breaking things and busting things up, maybe it would be fun for you to do a strength based character or a high strength character. At the same time if you just think you’re never going to be able to do it, that kind of character is never going to work for me, don’t waste your time putting that higher number on there. Once you have your character scores laid out, you will have six scores representing each of the six attributes, the strength, wisdom, intelligence, dexterity, constitution and charisma. Those 6 put together give you basic framework for the character, you know how strong you are, how fast you are, how quick you are at thinking and moving, what you don’t now have is a persona and that’s the other piece of character generation. This is one where you potentially want to speak with the game master or the person running the game to get an idea of what he might need. You may have a group of characters where every single one of them thinks they’re the leader, that’s going to be a tough group a lot of chiefs no Indians. But you want to think about that as well once you have that framework, that backbone of the 6 attributes. You also have to think of basic things, how tall are you, how fat or thin are you, what color are your eyes, what color is your hair, all of these things when you consider them and when you rank them down make for a better character, make for a more fleshed out character. And really in character generation, that’s what you’re going for; you want the fullest idea of what this character is and how he or she is going to react in every situation, so that when you’re playing him, you’re going to have a lot of fun.