A Thorough Guide to Creating A Roleplaying Game Character
- Leah Kurzepa
- Jul 28
- 15 min read
Updated: Jul 31
For TTRPGs & LARP
Introduction
There is no right or wrong way to approach creating a character for a roleplaying game. This is just one way that works for me, and you’re free to use it, take what you will from it or create your character in a totally different way. A lot of people just go with step 1, then wing it. That’s perfectly fine! I prefer to flesh out my characters thoroughly before the game, but there’s nothing wrong with creating them organically as you play. You’ll almost never have every aspect of a character pinned down before you play anyway, and improvisation is an important skill too.
There’s a ‘Step 1’, but not a step 2, 3 or 4 etc. That’s because all the other sections are interchangeable and optional. Do whichever ones that inspire you first, and work your way through them in whichever order you like. Don’t be afraid to revisit and change things as you go if you find you have a better idea. It does not need to be finished and set in stone before you play, but instead could be built on later.
This guide is long (it’s thorough!), so feel free to just zip along to the sections you want to read about rather than trying to cram the whole thing in one go.
As an accompaniment to this post, I've created an editable form that you can fill in as you go, then download your completed character as a PDF. You can find it here:
Please note you do have to log in to Jotform to save your character form, but logging in allows you to edit and keep track of all your completed characters, so we think it's worth it!
Contents (skip to section):
The system genre and setting will determine a lot of factors, but I’ve tried to be system neutral with this as I’ve used the same methodology for characters through many different TTRPG and LARP systems.
Your First Roleplaying Game Character
IF THIS IS YOUR FIRST EVER ROLEPLAYING CHARACTER, or it’s your first in a new system, there are some special considerations. It might be best for you to play an exaggerated version of yourself rather than coming up with a super unique roleplaying character who is very different to you. This guide might still be helpful, but i would give you the following advice:
Pick a characteristic, personality trait or flaw of yours.
Ham it up to 11.
Create the rest of the character based on the you with this new, exaggerated trait.
You might find this much easier to get into roleplaying games or learn new system styles and rules if you’re not also worried about remembering or figuring out how to play your character. It is good for them to be distinct enough from you that you don’t feel character bleed too much (where you blur the lines between out of character you and your character), but it’s also nice to be comfortable with one aspect of playing a new game or hobby and making a character who is similar to you is one way to achieve that.
Step 1: Concept - Who do you want to be?
When I come up with a unique character, my first thought is a very simple concept that can be summed up in a single sentence, and it usually points to various factors such as personality and flaws which I can expand on later.
Some examples of my previous characters are:
A righteous noblewoman who tries to fight for justice but is tormented by previous trauma.
An emotionless warforged who wants to find true friendship but struggles to understand what love means.
A feisty halfling who wants to prove themselves as a warrior but struggles with confidence.
A elderly lawkeeper who wants to stop criminals but always thinks the best of people they meet.
An inexperienced farmer wants to be a famous healer but is too selfish to put themselves in danger for others.
A freshly created holy creature of the God of Death who seeks vengeance on tomb thieves but gets constantly distracted.
“A <personality feature> <species/type of person> who enjoys/wants <passion/hobby> but <flaw holds them back>” is my standard take on this.
Having it be specific and descriptive means I can refer back to it when I’m creating the rest of the character and makes sure they’re distinct enough from my other roleplaying game characters. You’ll notice in the examples that the character class doesn’t always come into it. Sometimes it does, where the class is a calling or integral to the character’s personality, but mostly this focuses on who they are as a person rather than their job title.
Consideration: Fitting Into the System - Does your concept fit the world around them?
Before you go ahead and create the rest of your character, consider the system or setting they’re being created for. Until now, you’ve focused on who they are, and that’s pretty universal, but when you start thinking about their backgrounds, species, class etc, that’s got to fit with the world you’re putting them into.
Species/ Fantasy Race - Are you human, or something different?
Have a look at what species are available in your game and decide which of them make the most sense for your concept, or which of them add interesting challenges or complexity. Coming up with a character who is a non-human poses some different questions, such as:
What does being this species add to the character?
I.e. is it just because you want to wear a beard or play with a different accent, or does it change the dynamic of the character somehow? In my halfling warrior character concept, I chose halfling as I wanted her to have more obstacles - proving yourself as a warrior is harder when people around you just think you’re small and cute.
How would their world-view differ from a human character?
I.e. You will naturally have a human, modern-day world-view and sense of morality. How does this non-human species see the world differently? This is, in my opinion, the most interesting and fun reason to play a different species. My feline holy creature did not see death as normal mortal characters do, and I loved the roleplay I got from being excited about people dying.
Does playing a non-human mean you need to consider how to physrep (physically represent) them in a LARP setting? Or for TTRPGs, are there any ways you can show through your voice that this character is different?
I.e. Can you physically make yourself look or talk like this species? If they’re 9ft tall, do you have the capabilities to make an appropriate costume? If they sound robotic, will you make a voice when you speak as them?
In most of my TTRPG and LARP games, I’ve played a great deal of humans for a number of reasons. However, when I have chosen to go with another playable species, it’s been a completely unique challenge and added intrigue and complexity to my experience. I have, however, quit many non-human characters because I struggled to identify with them enough to get immersed, or in LARP because I didn’t enjoy the laborious physrepping after a while.
Background - What made you how you are?
When I write character backgrounds, I've written some that were a paragraph I built on after I’d been playing them a while, and some that were pages and pages before the first game. It really depends on whatever you want to do, how complex their history is and what the game you’re playing requires from you.
Most game runners won’t want to spend hours reading a multiple page backstory, especially if it’s in a block of text. But they generally do want you to submit one, because it’s much more immersive and fun to poke your backstory with plot than have your character exist in isolation in the setting.
Consider bullet points for the important details, rather than descriptive or storytelling language. Things you might want to include are:
Key NPCs your character knows and your relationship to them, including family, friends and enemies.
Where and when they were born/ grew up.
What the significant events have been throughout their life and how these affected them.
What drives them to get involved with the game you’re going to be playing i.e. what makes them leave home to be an adventurer, or what’s their call to action if they need one? This is pretty game dependent.
You may want to also include a small section about the type of roleplay you’re eager to engage in with them. If you don’t want them to give you a traumatic scene where your NPC mother is horribly killed because that would be triggering for you, say that! If you do want to explore their potential nobility due to being born in secret to a noble, let them know! It doesn’t mean they’ll use it, that depends on the game and the game runner, but it can’t hurt to know what sort of direction people envision their roleplay going in.
One other consideration is this: Can your starting-level charater really have done all of that? If you're saying you fought a dragon and won... How? Consider your character's level of experience up until now and think about whether it's feasible that someone who's just starting out on their journey in the game can have already done extraordinary things. Also, where do you go from there? How does your character improve and chase bigger dreams if they've already experienced fighting a dragon?
Also, try and work in details about the existing setting, rather than making up all new places and religions and NPCs. The more you engage with the setting rather than existing in isolation, the more immersive the whole game becomes in my opinion. This will probably require help from your game runners if you aren’t super familiar with the setting, but it's worth it.
Flaws - What holds you back?
This is my favourite bit of creating a character, and I would argue until I'm blue in the face that it's one of the most important things to consider.
Nobody is perfect. Even superheroes and all-powerful beings have flaws of some kind. What having flaws does is make our characters more unique, and gives them conflict (internal or external) that drives roleplay and character development. A truly good character who has no flaws will never question themselves or act irrationally. Giving a character a few flaws or one big one is vital in my opinion to making them feel realistic.
Flaw types
Mental
i.e. Honest, Angry, Amnesia, Cowardly, Arrogant, Phobia, Paranoia, Hallucinations, Other mental health issues etc (be careful with this to deal with mental health sensitively).
Physical
i.e. Limp, Can’t run, Scarred, Allergy/Vulnerability, Mutation, Blindness etc (again, be sensible when giving a character physical disabilities dealt with by real people.)
Social
i.e. Enemy, Rival, Bad reputation, Religious/Cultural restrictions etc
Magical
i.e. Cursed, Magic Dead, Bound to Another, Bound to a Cursed Item, Vampirism, Lycanthropy etc
Technological
i.e. Anachronistic, Technophobe, Limiting Control chip, Emotionless/AI, etc
Playing Your Flaws
One thing I would recommend is thinking about specific situations that your desired flaw might come up. If you want it to be mild, think of something that’s unlikely to come up in your particular game very often and if you want something more debilitating, have it come up more regularly, or be more intense.
You don’t want to ruin other people’s game with your flaws, which could happen if your flaw is something that impacts on other people. I have a pet peeve of flaws which make people in collaborative games paranoid or antisocial because it’s against the ethos of the game and makes me personally feel less connected to my party. But equally, sometimes helping characters overcome flaws like that can be very rewarding.
Do you want your character to eventually overcome their flaws? This can be some of the best roleplay, when you finally see that your character has evolved and that their previous hangups are lessened or gone. In this circumstance, maybe they have some new issues to overcome as a result?
Making it Make Sense
Taking my halfling wannabe warrior as an example, her flaws were that she was very shy (to begin with) and self-deprecating due to having an abusive family. Your flaws shouldn’t exist in isolation most of the time, but have a to-and-fro impact on everything from your concept to your background and more. If you take a flaw because it sounds fun, have a think about how it would have impacted your character whilst you write their background. And similarly, when you write their background, think about how their experiences might have shaped them to gain different flaws.
Attitude & Mannerisms - What makes you you?
Attitude to me is how you react to the world around you, and mannerisms are how I would represent myself as the character to be more unique.
For attitude, I usually just look at what flaws I’ve chosen and work out a few personality traits for them. This could just be things like ‘hot-headed’ or ‘reserved’. It helps me to roleplay if I have some idea of their general personality before I start. However, like real people, these personality traits change and evolve over time and that’s great!
And mannerisms don’t have to be complicated. I usually think of an accent that they’d have as I usually need an accent to get properly immersed. But you don’t have to do a whole different accent for every character. Simply enunciating your words differently, looking at word choice and tone is a great way to make your character’s voice stand out from your own. Or you could have a simple catch-phrase that you say often.
Other than voice, do they walk a certain way, or hold their body hunched over? A proud, confident character might walk around with their chest puffed out, where a shy, less confident one might be hunched over, or never make eye contact. Don’t overthink it, but it’s good to come up with a few ways that your character differs from you. I find people roleplay better with me when it’s obvious I’m in character, and by varying my accent, people always know when I’m in or out of character.
Class - What do you want to do?
Now, a lot of people will have an idea of class right from when they start designing their character and that’s fine. Others will create the character and then ask, ‘what class would they want to be?’ And that’s also fine.
Class will also be very system dependent, so I won’t go into this section too much. It’s much better in my opinion to fit the class to a well-rounded character than to try and design a character to fit into a class, but both ways are perfectly acceptable. I usually ask myself these questions:
What classes are available to my character?
Combat or no combat?
Do I understand the complexity of rules & advancement?
How stressful the role might be and how confident am I in it?
Can I meet the physrepping requirements? (LARP only)
Thinking about what action you’re interested in getting out of the game. Do you want people to rely on you for protection/fighting the baddies? Play a combat oriented character. Or do you want to be involved with healing the sick and injured? A physican or magical healer character might suit, and people are normally friendly towards those who help them. Or do you want to be more nonchalant, doing whatever you want to do without being stressed? This might suit a support role rather than a combat or healer character. Do you like complicated rules, or something more simple? Often magic rules will be more complicated than simple fighting rules, for example. Take a look at your options and consider what you will have fun doing, and match that up to what makes the most sense for your character.
There’s a big difference between a fighter character in LARP and TTRPGs, and physical fitness to fight might be a consideration if you want to get involved in LARP. I don’t mean you need to be a ripped, muscular athlete to partake in LARP combat, but you do need to be able to fight safely and enjoy the challenge, where there’s the potential for you to get a bit bruised if someone’s not pulling their blows well.
Overall, I sometimes go into my character generation with a class picked out and sometimes I don’t. The main thing about class is that (most of the time in my experience, with game-runner permission) you can change it! It’s sort of your character’s job, and in a lot of systems that can be altered as you advance, either changing it, or adding a multiclass option depending on the system. Some systems let you re-spec your character after the first game too, so if you decide you aren’t happy with their class, talk to your game runners about your options.
Costume - What do you want to look like? (LARP only)
Costuming is my favourite bit of character creation for LARP, and I have seen myself creating new characters just so I can have the chance to make some new kit! (Terrible reason to swap characters, maybe, but… I can’t help it!)
When putting together a costume, I consider the following:
What’s my budget?
Design ideas. What’s the colour scheme? Does my class or species have costuming requirements? What sort of fabrics do I have available to use?
What story can I convey with this costume? (i.e. are they poor, rich, eccentric, conservative, religious, from a hot/cold climate, etc)
Budget -
How much do you have to spend on this first iteration of your character kit? I wouldn’t recommend spending a lot on your first character (you might hate the game!) or your first character in a new system, (it might not suit you!) Your newbie starting kit does not need to be perfect right off the bat. It just has to be thematic and suit your character with room to improve.
Design -
Design your costume to suit the class and character that you’re playing. Layering is key! Layering costume pieces is the easiest way to make your costume look authentic and interesting. Make sure that your design fits your character’s background and personality. A conservative, highly religious character isn’t going to be likely to wear a very short skirt or shorts, and a bar wench might be more likely to wear a corset than a boiler suit (obviously). You can tell a story with your costume, through dirtying it down or adding on gemstones.
Costumes can and should evolve over time. I have a huge issue with wanting my costumes to be perfect at event 1, but because I make all my own costumes, that isn’t a huge budget consideration. Charity shops are amazing for base kit; get an oversized black, brown or green top and some dark trousers and a belt and you’re good to go for monstering (playing the baddies, if your system has monstering requirements). Charity shops are also great for getting character costume pieces. I’ve made whole costumes from purely charity shop finds before (despite being able to sew my own) because it’s sometimes cheaper than buying fabric to make it.
Headgear is a personal preference, I don’t usually feel like my costume is complete without something on my head. Hat, bonnet, hairband, wig… It rounds out any costume in my opinion.
Complexity -
You can make your own costume (yes, you!) as there are lots of tutorials for simple costume pieces on youtube. You can also buy as I’ve said from charity shops or retail stores. However, if you design a costume that you can’t find from a charity shop or make yourself, you can always have it commissioned by a costume maker. This will be far more expensive, but you can get some really cool costumes this way. For armour, most people will want to buy this, but second hand facebook groups are a great way to go for this when you’re just starting out as a new character.
I recommend having at least one unique item that is key to your character’s aesthetic. For my halfling, that was her bonnet. For my noblewoman, it was her wig and her tabard. This makes you easily identifiable even if you expand or change your costume over time.
Props -
Costume is one part of your character’s aesthetic, but so are props and weapons. What warrior would be seen without their prized longsword? What magician would go out without their pointy wizard hat or wand? You can get second hand LARP weapons online, but there’s no guarantee they’ll pass the weapons-check at your LARP. I recommend asking to borrow from others if it’s your first game, because LARP weapons are expensive new and you want to make sure that the system, game and character suit you before spending that sort of money.
I make props, feel free to browse my portfolio HERE if you’d like to commission that perfect character-defining prop to go with your costume!
Makeup -
Makeup is another key feature you can use to make your character feel authentic and unique. Do they have scars? Colourful eye makeup, dark undereye circles? If you’re playing a specific non-human character you might have some requirements for this too.
Naming Your Character - What do people call you?
The last part for me of character creation (but maybe it’s something you think about earlier) is naming them.
Names are highly personal and everyone comes up with character names in different ways. I usually think of these factors:
Their culture
Their age
Their parents
Do they go by a nickname?
…Then I throw that out and just look at a random name generator for the setting, picking something that sounds fun. I really don’t place a lot of stakes in my character names which isn’t very sensible given if they last a while you’re kinda stuck with whatever you choose.
I hated my first character’s name and she lasted 3 years.
Some people delve right into the historically accurate names for their setting (if it’s medieval fantasy based in Scotland, etc) and some people just go with names that sound fun. Personally, overly comical names jar me out of immersion, and I prefer to go with names that seem more realistic. Of course, for halflings or gnomes for example, ‘silly’ is subjective. But just think about what it’ll sound like for someone to shout at you across a battlefield, and make sure you aren’t going to hate being referred to by a shortened form of it either…
I also, if my character’s culture is anything other than Scottish, will sometimes use google translate to take words that identify my character into a foreign language and make names out of those words. Or sometimes, I’ll have based a character off a famous character from literature and will make an anagram of the famous character’s name. It is really quite open, but be sure to check your system for any requirements before you settle on something!
And that’s it!
Now, obviously I don’t sit and write all this down for every character I’ve ever played. I do think about each of these points, however, to varying degrees. I have sat and written a 10 page character description, history etc for some characters and have stopped at Step 1 with others.
Take what you want from this, and go create some fun characters! Let me know if you found this useful!
Leah
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