Last October, my roommate asked me to join my first real Dungeons & Dragons campaign with her, our other roommate, two of our neighbors, and some other kids from school. I say “real” because before then, Dungeons & Dragons, to me, was just an old game from the eighties that I had only once unsuccessfully attempted to play in the hopes of impressing my male friends back home who have been playing for decades — or at least to give us a common interest to converse over.
Other than sheer intimidation from the skills of my more experienced male friends, the only other thing keeping me from regularly playing the game was character creation. Character creation was and still is the hardest part of Dungeons & Dragons for me. I once created a character as a joke and hosted a silly one-shot with my two best friends before, but everything I knew about the game prior to last year came from film and television, friends’ podcasts, and the Dungeons & Dragons Players Handbook. This new campaign we were about to begin was the perfect excuse to learn how to seriously play among peers who had played before, and knew what they were doing, minus the intimidation and fear of not being good enough in the group.
When it comes to roleplaying games, I struggle with creating a brand-new character from a blank slate; it’s always easier to write about what I know. Before we began our campaign, the seven of us held what we called a “Session 0” in our living room to meet each other for the first time and create our characters. One of my roommates was a big help in guiding me step-by-step through the process.
She started out by showing me the list of races that my character could be. Many humanoid, many more animalistic, and many in between. I was attracted to one of the newer, less-common races of the game: Kalashtar.
This is where Dungeons & Dragons goes from a fun roleplaying game and turns into homework; I had to do some extensive research to figure out that a Kalashtar is the host of a being from the Realm of Dreams, a spirit called a “Quori.” I have always been a huge fan of movies and characters where psychological (and sometimes physical) issues come into play — Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Bruce Banner turns into the Hulk, split personalities — so naturally my Dungeons & Dragons character would be two characters in one. Just like every relationship in my life, it’s hard for me to play a character that I am not emotionally attached to in some way, so I definitely put a lot of me into Nashana without even realizing. Nashana is the part of me that doesn’t want to be me, that feels separate from my brain or from my body at times, the part of me that feels out of my control.
I decided to make my character’s Quori actually be the deceased spirit of their twin sister who passed in utero, to give them a close bond with them. I gave them they/them pronouns, since there are two of them, and I named them “Nashana.” I had that name in mind before I began character creation, but the Kalashtar race information also helped me with the naming process, as three syllabled names would be common for them.
After that, you choose a class for your character. Do you want them to be a fighter? A healer? A spellcaster? I have always been partial to the bard class; the most artistic and entertaining out of all the classes, but we already had a Tiefling bard in our group, so I ended up choosing the druid class for my character. A druid is somebody who is keen to all things animals and nature. Giving them the ability to understand animals, on top of the Kalashtar’s ability to see other people’s dreams, my character was beginning to take on an Eliza Thornberry persona.
From there, Dungeons & Dragons is a numbers game. The skills and abilities you are proficient in rely solely on the toss of a twenty-sided dice. Everything else is already written for you in the Handbook. What happens after character creation is up to whatever your Dungeon Master has in store for them. I believe a character is never fully complete. We’ve been playing for over six months now and Nashana is still evolving as a character. It’s okay if you don’t know everything about your character, where they came from, or what their motives are immediately at the time of character creation. The fun of Dungeons & Dragons doesn’t just come from battling big bosses, but also from telling a story, collaborating with other players, and developing your character over time. The longer I play as Nashana and the more we explore their abilities, the more complex they become.
I am forever grateful to my roommate for asking me to be a part of this ongoing campaign because being in this group has changed my life. I didn’t know anybody for miles for the longest time, and now I have six best friends who I get to play with over dinner every Tuesday night and hang out with outside of Dungeons & Dragons multiple times throughout the rest of the week.
If you are thinking about joining a Dungeons & Dragons campaign or starting one of your own, the best advice I have ever received in regards to character creation is to always remember the reason why you were attracted to whatever it is you want to achieve and play it up to tell the story, be it your character’s aesthetic, theme, race, motivation, whatever!