How to Create Meaningful Characters... And How to Cope When They Die

 Whether you're an author, an avid gamer, or you really enjoy daydreaming, I'm confident in saying that character creation is one of the most important steps of any creative hobby. In stories, characters have been established as the foundation of storytelling and oral traditions for years. In TTRPGs, many spend entire sessions fleshing out their beginning characters and avatars to help propel the story in many different ways.

For myself, character creation has always been an integral part of storytelling and sharing how I view the world, whether it be the "real world" or a fantasy world like the Forgotten Realms.

In my regular Saturday-night campaign with some friends, I created my favorite D&D character to date, and I'd like to share her with you.

This is Anselde, daughter of Chains and paladin to the Suffering God, Ilmater.

You might not totally understand the Dungeons & Dragons jargon so I'm willing to break it down for you.

Anselde (Ann-suld) is a paladin, a holy knight devoted to a cause of divinity and justice. Anselde's oath is the Oath of Vengeance to the Forgotten Realms god called Ilmater. She fights the cruel and destroys evil in the name of her holy god, while looking incredibly cool while she does it.

For this particular character (and a better half of many of my decisions), Anselde is a paladin for mechanical reasons. Paladins are hard-hitters who use melee primarily and can enchant their attacks with divine magic for more damage.

I decided for Anselde's race/species, she would be a half-elf, and more specifically a half-drow (a dark elf in the Forgotten Realms lore) for more of an interesting backstory.

Anselde's character backstory is more than six (6) pages long, full of different things that felt important to me and my Dungeon Master as we move through the campaign. There are sections devoted to her motivations and notable traits, her birth and her upbringing, and her beliefs. In our games of D&D with this particular group, the Dungeon Master asks for an assigned "vice" and "virtue" for each character to encourage roleplay and conflict-building interactions.

Without spoiling too much of her story, as I'd like to write about Anselde professionally one day, she has been set on an adventure to cleanse the world of evil and also rescue other characters in the campaign.

About four or five sessions into Anselde's character and plenty of conflict involving her and other characters, our party made the decision to rest in an unsafe place rather than leave the dungeon. The decision involved lots of thought and inevitably, at the end of our rest, our party had experienced a "TPK" or "Total Party Kill".

After that session, I had felt devastated to say the least. Anselde's character was important to me and much of her background and actions had already impacted the Dungeon Master's future plot points. She was also fun to play, mechanically. To this day, almost a year later, me and the other party members reminisce in the fact that she was such a cool character.

Why was she so meaningful? Just because I put a lot of thought in? Because my background document was several pages? Because I had even designed a rosary-like object to bring to sessions with me? Maybe. But that's not always everyone's prerogative, to invest so much time and effort. And low-investment characters can still be meaningful, with the right tools.

To break it down, I've identified three things that made Anselde so magical and interesting. I'd like to share them with you:

First: She was complicated.
There are many times where we all have laughed about the typical D&D character creation tropes. You have an orphaned human character on a revenge quest, you have a wizard seeking out more power, you play a Goblin spoof-character just to bother your friends. They're all fun, and the point of Dungeons & Dragons is fun but there are ways to deepen and complicate your characters for the story.

In the last campaign with our Saturday group, my character made several decisions that lead her to be the BBEG (Big Bad Evil Guy) for our current campaign. She also started as an orphaned human with a revenge quest.

Anselde's backstory though involved a lot of conflict and contradictions, making her decisions much more difficult than what was 'wrong' or 'right' in the world. When you realize that the world is much more grey, than black and white, you see that some decisions aren't just 'good' or 'evil', but they're just decisions.

Second: Anselde wasn't just Me, as a copy.
While not a bad thing, to just insert yourself into D&D via a cool character, it's sometimes difficult to make story-altering decisions when it's just "you" playing the game. Sure, Anselde was a chaotic-good character, like myself. But she also had moments where law was important to her, and that challenged me to play decisions out that I wouldn't normally make.

In addition, I was able to explore conflicts and different moments from a different perspective because I myself, had never really seen things like that before. It was fresh, it was exciting, and it was hard.

Third: She died.
It was so difficult to watch her die, along with my party. In our unfortunate circumstance, Anselde had been killed and her soul destroyed. In Forgotten Realms and D&D lore, typically that means that there is no 'second chance' or resurrection waiting for your character. Her life was finite, along with the decisions I made to get her there. There was no re-loading a save or trying again with a different plan. She is now immortalized in my mind and this campaign exactly how she was, and there's no changing that.

I struggled to accept Anselde's fate until I was able to revisit the place of the TPK and discover more worldbuilding put down by our Dungeon Master. Her life had meant something to the campaign, and to my newer character. 

Absolutely was Anselde's death unfortunate and tragic. But, with how I'm able to build the world now around her influence, it feels worth it in some terrible morbid way.

Add some of these things to your characters, whether it be in D&D or another TTRPG. Maybe it's your own story and you've got someone you love so so much. Play around, experiment, and make the most out of your head, words, and feelings.