Avoid These Dungeons and Dragons Characters Mistakes

Making a Character in Dungeons and Dragon 5e is incredibly fun... but before you do, let's look at some of the biggest and most common mistakes players make. That way you can avoid these terible dnd 5e character mistakes and taboos.

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[brondwin]

i think you missed the over achieving backstory, where a character comes to the table like john mclane at the end of die hard 5, but they are level 1

[chalkeater]

Dead parents? No siblings? Orphanage burned down and you were the only survivor? No. Big house. Parents. 14 siblings. 9 aunts/uncles live with you. If your character dies, one of these people shows up to replace/avenge them.

[davidglover]

Stay away from playing anti-social characters. You're there to play a role in a party. This doesn't work if you never talk to the party or you begrudgingly talk to them.

[mcarson]

If your a new player and having trouble coming up with a backstory for your char, pull from your own life’s backstory. You have a sibling? Give your char a sibling and change it. Always had a dream as a kid? Now your char does. It helped me in the beginning to pull from my own personal experience to help my char make decisions going forward.

[Synetik]

I like to play these kinds of characters as one shot characters that we do when players are missing.

[p-thor]

I like the idea of my character thinking his family is dead but is actually not. My DM gets full reign of what exactly happened.

[kief]

We all know the one and only rule is BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD!!!

[MrDavidKord]

Here's a tip for powergamers - every stat you have has the potential for a story behind it. Human fighter with polearm Mastery? You had a master who taught you that, trainers who helped you hone your physicality, and possibly rivals growing up. Does he have a lower Wisdom but above average Charisma? Maybe he was forced to do crazy things to prove himself when he was young and has lost a sense of consequence. Use those stats to inspire you.

[RazorBlade]

I have an idea for a dwarf character that grew up in a city. His parents were a smith and a baker, with their shops on either side of the house, open to the street. He left home because it was always so hot in there! He became a sailor and fell in love with having the cool breeze in his face.

[theearshine]

A VERY common issue I run into is players having incredible characters, but they don't know what their characters want, need, or desire. Players see all the info in the PHB and think "class, stats, background, equipment" but they never think "does my character have a goal or a dream or an aspiration?" Something as small as wanting a special magic item can REALLY improve gameplay and impact for players

[TenaciousSnail]

My regular group knows what they're doing, but I used to have another group where most didn't know what they were doing. They were great at coming up with funny characters (Donna the Dragonborn barbarian, urchin with a pet rat called Kebab) and didn't care about the stats too much, so all I asked them to give me is 'why' they were adventuring. We had answers from entire village wiped out, woke up on a mountain with no memories in the eye of a storm, to "I want to make the biggest bomb"...the 'why' makes the character

[BillAllanWorld]

Y'all need to bookmark this video. This is without a doubt one of the most insightful videos about characters that exists.

[johannvongenerico]

I've started my first "dead parents" character in my current campaign, but I made sure to make the character have anchors. Parents were devil worshippers (hence my character a tiefling) whose pacts backfired which got them killed. My character lives with my uncle and works in his bounty hunter guild, so he's got connections to the world

[shabocc]

I will say: making a "joke character" that has layers of complexity and seriousness underneath can be really fun to play. You can start revealing over time more depth and make it really fun for your party to get to know. (Example: I had a whimsical goblin circle of dreams druid who collected teeth and loved fairies and sparkles. But she over time revealed that she was shunned by the other goblins and hid out in the glad near their village to avoid the others, made friends with sprites, and got sucked into the feywild for a time, and was always searching for a way to get back to her childhood friends)

Conversely, a serious character can be made a little more lighthearted by adding some quirky hobbies or likes and dislikes or an oddball sense of humor. (My LG dwarf paladin was a total adhd space cadet and a bit of a hoarder, frequently dumping out her entire backpack to find that one item she swore she put in here somewhere...)

The juxtaposition of opposites just always seems to be the most fun to play, because it gives your character more depth. So I would say that for all of your examples of what not to do, that adding a bit of balance in the opposite direction can make each of these work well. Just takes some creativity!

[WoodenNeko]

The one time I tried to make a carbon copy character he thankfully turned into his very own character I ended up loving more.

[goofydragon]

Holy hannah the warlock cat lady is going to be my next character if my current strahd character dies

[foxoninetails_]

Powergaming is great, it's one of my favorite things to do in 5e. I get to experiment with all sorts of fun and crazy mechanical ideas, like a barbarian/druid wildshaped into a flying raging bear, or a character who can grow to Gargantuan and wrestle the Tarrasque. But there's a key element there that a lot of less experienced players miss, and fall into the trap of making a "stats > character" character - I _always_ bring the roleplay to back it up. I make sure that my characters are actual characters, and not just a list of whatever stats I thought would be cool. I'm careful to never let my powergaming impede my roleplay, but to tie my powergaming in with my roleplaying and let them complement each other. The real issue isn't focusing on making your stats good or strong; the issue is taking it too far, and letting your roleplaying take a backseat to your mechanics.

[DrPluton]

One thing I would recommend is for players to realize that "tabaxi" or "elf" is not a personality. So many people think playing a certain race makes their character interesting but give the character either the personality of cardboard or don't think about who the character is. My half-elf druid could have easily been any race, but I chose half-elf because it makes my druid more aloof from the region where he lives and imparts a kind of wanderlust into him which has caused him to end up living in Icewind Dale in the first place. Without those factors, he still cares for people and the balance of nature as taught by the nature over-deity Syvanus and is quick with a healing spell.

[calebtoles]

Why not twist the dead parents theme by having your character to be cursed to be unable to see and/or interact with their parents to such a degree that they think they died. Just imagine the party coming back to the home and seeing the parents just relaxing at home as your character just walks past them like they don’t exist, priceless

[Lycan]

When I first started out in DnD, I didn't fully know what I was doing. My first character was a tiefling Fiend warlock, Pact of the Chain with a pseudodragon familiar named Dagger. She was CG, but beyond the fact that she took the pact to try and do good things with the power and that her patron (a homebrew demon lord) occasionally uses their pact to influence her to do small bad things, there wasn't much work put into her.

Since the first two campaigns I tried her in died off, I never got to play her out fully, so I kept her in my back pocket and worked on her more. Over the years, I fully fleshed her out, and I finally got her into a long-term 1-20 campaign. My girl Skywatcher was born to a noble family in Calimport, and is the fifth generation of her family, and she has two older brothers (The eldest, Feral, a variant tiefling Barbarian with wings, and Justice, who has his own complex backstory). With the exception of her and Justice, her family uses their casino and the vices they offer within it to worship the demon lord Graz'zt, who not only makes pacts with every member of the family once they come of age, but is also blood-related to the family. One day, Sky and Justice manage to leave the casino behind and split up, Justice (who refused to make a pact) going off to become a paladin while Sky goes off to see if there's any way for her to make Graz'zt forget their names, because this family has the quirk that, should anyone use their true names, they have to make a Wisdom saving throw and if they fail it, they are compelled to follow a single order given to them by that person. So, if her grandfather doesn't know her name, he can't control her anymore.

I won't get into the whole story, but now Sky is lvl 12, has been renamed to Hope for story reasons, and Justice is now named Breaker and is a lvl 20 Oathbreaker paladin who was betrayed by his paladin order and is now working against the party to free the demon lord Xancrown.

This girl has been on such a rollercoaster during her development, but I couldn't be more proud of her.