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I’m using D&D as a basis here, but this can be extrapolated to many TTRPGs.

Update: I went back through the original survey results and added in 20ish more answers, but the ratios didn't change so the original message still holds

What is a character? TTRPG fascinates me because it’s a game, it’s a story, and it’s a social activity, and every aspect of play involves weaving all those elements in a way that we feels surprisingly intuitive for how complex it is. But, lucky for you, my love language involves ‘taking things apart to see how they work’, so I’ve taken the initiative to turn something fun and easy into a meta-textual layer cake, complete with bar graphs.

Four Levels of Play

When you create a D&D character, you are creating a character at 4 levels:

• 1. At the table - you are creating a role for you, a real person, to play in a game of Dungeons and Dragons
• 2. Mechanical - you are creating a character sheet, complete with race, class, stats, abilities, inventory
• 3. Narrative - you are creating the protagonist to a story
• 4. In fiction - you are creating a person who exists in a fictional world, and has relationships to that world, its institutions, history, and people

  D&D has a lot of guidance for how to create a character at level 2, mechanically, and a tiny bit of guidance on how to create a character at level 4, in fiction, but almost no guidance on how to create a character at level 1 or 3.

  Let’s illustrate.

  My friend Dana is playing a dwarven wizard named Fartbox.

  1. At the table - Dana is here to have a good time and make jokes. She made Fartbox, because that’s fucking hilarious. She knows that playing a silly character will lead to a lot of fun times with friends.
  2. Mechanical - Dana is still a nerd, and couldn’t resist trying to create an effective build. She made Intelligence her highest stat and is carefully choosing Fartbox’s spells to have him serve the party as a utility caster.
  3. Narrative - Dana created Fartbox as a narrative foil to our buddy Jeremy’s paladin, Sir Rolant the Brave. Rolant is a straight-laced knight from a noble house who values honour and tradition, and Fartbox is a little gremlin of a nerd who learned his spells from bathroom stall graffiti. These characters contrast in a way that will help us explore the core themes of the story as it unfolds.
  4. In fiction - Fartbox is a magic school dropout, and is shunned from the magical orders. He’s been partying across Neverwinter, and has seedy allies and enemies. He is connected to the world before the story starts.

  What do y’all think makes a good character?

  Having a large social media following has been a thoroughly mixed experience for me, but by far the best part is being able to survey large amounts of nerds quickly and put their responses in a colour-coded spreadsheet.

  I asked people on 4 platforms (twitch, bluesky, threads, reddit) “what makes a good D&D character?” and coded 77 responses (there were more, but I discarded a lot of them for failing to answer the question, git gud). I specifically asked people to speak only for themselves and not try to make broad statements about good characters in general (most people failed at this) and to avoid replying in the negative (saying what makes a BAD character) and many people failed at that too, but I was still able to use a lot of those responses.

  Results

  

  52% of people expressed NARRATIVE considerations, like core motivations and connection with theme and tone. There was a lot of overlap with “in fiction”.

  40% of people expressed AT THE TABLE considerations, primarily having fun. There were also many comments talking about making the game go smoother and avoiding interpersonal tension at the table.

  36% of people expressed IN FICTION considerations. Some of these are complicated, because they might actually people “at the table” or “narrative” considerations described in fictional terms (e.g. “the character is friendly” but the person is actually concerned about interpersonal friction at the table). I wish I could have asked follow up questions for all of them, but I simply haven’t the time. Most common considerations were about backstory and connection to the fictional world. Two people answered that they valued 'realism' in characters, which is wild, and kinda anti-fiction, but I still coded that as an "in-fiction" consideration.

  Only 14% of people expressed MECHANICAL considerations, and often these were lumped in with other considerations (e.g. “the character has abilities that balance out the party to avoid stepping on other people’s toes and make everyone feel like their character matters”, which is a mechanical consideration to further an “at the table” goal).

  So what?

  This fascinates me because the Player’s Handbook offers a ton of mechanical advice but very little advice in the other areas – except people seem to care MUCH MORE about literally EVERY OTHER AREA.

  How do you create a character that’s fun for everyone at the table? How do you design your character to have ties to theme, depth, core motivations? How do you anchor your character in the fiction of the world?

  I’ll continue publishing guidance on all those aspects, because I think it’s neat, but I also think this reflects the chasm between D&D as a game system and D&D as an experience. The rules of the game offer almost no narrative support (although the modules do) and the Player’s Handbook gives little guidance on creating good characters, according to what the sample of players I surveyed think makes good characters.

  The rules of the game are not the rules of a storytelling game, and yet most people play D&D like a storytelling game. Game design and play culture have drifted so far apart, there’s this chasm in the middle.

  But nature abhors a vacuum.

  Filling the Chasm

  If you look up “How to DM” on YouTube, you will dive into an ocean of advice, theory, models and systems for how to run a game of D&D. Most of this advice is focussed on the “at the table” level (managing the interpersonal stakes of the people playing the game) and narrative level (how to tell a compelling story), with some guidance on how to manage the fiction and mechanics. Us content creators are happy to fill the gap between the game’s mechanics and how people actually want to play the game, to the extent that this kind of supplemental support for the game has become one of the game’s greatest assets.

  You’re welcome, Hasbro.