Welcome to New Player’s Guide, the first stop on your journey to playing D&D. This series has advice for players who’ve just joined their first D&D campaign, as well as Dungeon Masters who want help taking their new campaign to the next level. To see the other articles in this series, check out the New Player’s Guide tag—and for the brass-tacks information on how to start playing D&D, click on the New Player Guide link at the top of this page!

This fifth entry in the New Player’s Guide series is for players who have just played their first session of a brand-new campaign. You’ve created a character, perhaps your very first D&D character, and you’ve started their story. If you followed the advice in New Player’s Guide: Making Your First Character, then you likely made a character with a minimal backstory. This flexible backstory allows you to make up details on the fly and improvise your character’s personality and history without constantly worrying if you’re contradicting yourself.

Now that you’ve played one game with this character, it’s time to look at all the little scraps of character-building you made in that game and use them to discover more about your character! You can do this little exercise immediately if you get home and you’re still amped up and want more D&D, or you can do it in the hour before your next game. The sooner you think about what your character did in the previous game the better, since your memory will be clearer, but this isn’t a chore—don’t force yourself to do it if you’re not feeling up to it.

Character Reflection

Sit down by yourself sometime after your D&D session. Pull up your character sheet and a blank piece of paper or a blank text document. Start by dividing your sheet into two columns (or take a two-column table in your text document), then write down what roleplaying details that you knew about your character at the beginning of your first session. The most important ones are already on your character sheet:

• Background
• Traits
• Ideal
• Bond
• Flaw
• Alignment (if you’re using it)
• Race
• Class

Once you’ve laid out what you know to be true about your character in black and white, think about what your character did in your first session. In the blank column, write out events like:

• Life-changing decisions (like joining an adventuring party)
• Relationship decisions (like making friends with a party member or becoming rivals with a goblin boss)
• Material decisions (like stealing from a duchess or giving food to an orphan)

Also, if you recall any backstory information that you made up during the session, record that in the first column, too. Even though this is backstory you didn’t have on your character sheet from the beginning, you created it on the fly because you thought it gave your character more depth, or perhaps because it gave your character a reason to join a party of adventuresome strangers.

Basic Character-Developing Questions

Now that you have the info that you knew going into session one side-by-side with the information you discovered during play, try to think like your character would. Knowing all the things that you know in the first column, think about the information in the second column and answer some of these questions from your character’s point of view. Write down your answers beneath your two columns of notes.

• How do I feel about what just happened? Did I do things that I’m proud of, or not?
• Did any of my actions have consequences? Do I care about the consequences of my actions?
• What do I want most right now? What’s stopping me from getting it?

Get Motivated

A strong want—also known as a motivation—is essential for an interesting character. Characters that don’t want anything just kind of drift through stories, which can make you feel powerless and unimportant as a player. You may accomplish your motivation many times over the campaign, in which case you should think of other goals that your character wants to accomplish, or you may strive towards one big-picture goal for the entire campaign. You may even have multiple motivations at once, if you think your character wants a lot of things.

Motivations can be powerfully and simply written as: “I want to [verb] a [noun].” Some good examples for an adventurer include:

• I want to kill the dragon that torched my village.
• I want to loot treasure from a dungeon.
• I want to discover the truth about my parentage.

Since D&D is a game about growing in power, “I want to become [something],” is a good motivation for D&D games. You can also easily include a tactic in this motivation, such as “I want to become [something] by doing [something else].” This tactic may change many times as you seek to achieve your greater motivation. For example:

• I want to [become filthy rich] by [discovering the lost treasure of Dagult Neverember].
• I want to [become the greatest warrior in Icewind Dale] by [defeating the champion of Ten-Towns].
• I want to [write an epic that will be sung by bards for centuries] by [having epic adventures across all of Faerûn].

No matter what your motivation is, keep it in the back of your mind while playing. Don’t distract yourself by comparing your every action against your motivation. Let it subtly guide you while making decisions. Also, keep in mind that you have desires as a player in addition to your character’s motivations. Don’t neglect those! If you want to fight epic tactical battles as a player, you can help make that happen by choosing a character motivation that supports your metagame want. That’s efficiency!

Optional: Party Questions

No character exists in a vacuum. Just like real people, our D&D characters are shaped by the people we spend time with. In this case, that’s your adventuring party! If you want to go deeper and think about your relationships with your party members, ask yourself some of these questions, too.

• Who in my party am I closest with and who am I most distant from? Do I want to be closer friends with someone? Is there anyone who I distrust, or want to know more about?
• Who in my party can help me achieve my goals? Do I see them as an asset first, or as a friend first?
• Is there someone in the party who you want to help? Why? Is it to get closer to them? Do you want them in your debt? Or is there another reason?
• Is there someone in the party whose goals conflict with mine? Will this conflict simply make my goals harder to accomplish, or are they diametrically opposed? Can we still work together?

The motivation-related questions in this section sound very selfish when stated simply, but these phrasings are just to get you thinking. They aren’t the literal thoughts running through your character’s head—these questions are here to help you, the player, guide your character’s actions in future games.

Making the Most of your Reflection

You can dive headfirst into this character reflection or just dip your toes in. Obviously, you’ll get more benefit from this reflection if you put more in, but this isn’t always the right choice. If your group isn’t very roleplay heavy, you don’t have to do Stanislavski character-work like a classically trained actor to have a good time. On the other hand, if your fellow players seem interested in roleplaying more but don’t know how, dedicating the effort to making your character deep and interesting might get them excited to do the same with their own characters.

If you’ve answered these questions and, upon reflection, find that most of your answers are vague or noncommittal, then you probably don’t have a very concrete image of your character yet. Interesting characters tend to have strong and decisive answers to these questions. It’s okay for your character to be a bit fuzzy for now, especially since it’s only the start of a campaign. If you want to make your character more specific and more detailed, consider returning to this reflection for a few minutes after each session and asking yourself if you have any new answers to the questions.

In fact, even if you do have a good idea of your character, it might be good to return to this reflection every five sessions or so. Ask yourself these questions again—your answers may change dramatically! Or they may not. Doing a character check-in like this every few sessions will give you a good impression of how your character is developing.

Why Do All This?

Dungeon Masters that think deeply about their campaign setting, dungeons, and NPCs tend to run better campaigns than DMs that don’t put any work in. Obviously, many great campaigns have been run by improv-comfortable DMs who eschew heavy preparation, but thinking deeply about your campaign and improvising the finer details of your session aren’t mutually exclusive.

Likewise, players who think deeply about their characters have richer characters than those who just show up every week. This character-building reflection isn’t homework that you need to do after every session; it’s a tool that will get you thinking about the narrative bones of your character. Knowing your character and the way they think this deeply will make it easy for you to improvise how they act during a game. You won’t have to stop and think “what would my character do?” in the heat of the moment. You’ll just know. You’ll know because you already thought “what would my character do?” while you were at home falling asleep or taking a shower. 

As you become familiar with the way your character thinks and acts, you may discover things about them while playing that you didn't know before. Something will happen in the campaign and a bit of information about your character—like a fear, a goal, or a bit of backstory—will just click into place. It may not make perfect sense, because you're only subconsciously thinking about elements like your character's backstory, but it will feel right. "Of course my character is afraid of spiders," you might think. "It just makes sense." Or, "It would make total sense if this evil duke that's been sending goblins after us is actually my character's uncle. Hey DM, can this duke be my character's uncle?" 

Finally, never forget to be a respectful roleplayer. Since you've put work into developing your character, you'll feel more comfortable playing them than a player who hasn't thought deeply about their character. Nevertheless, you don't deserve more time in the spotlight than anyone else. If you feel like you're hogging the spotlight, take a second and ask—either directly ("hey, am I hogging the spotlight?") or indirectly ("I feel like I've been talking a lot, what does your character think?"). Sometimes, it might be totally okay to dominate in the roleplaying department, especially if other players get their time to shine when initiative is rolled and combat starts. Communicate with your fellow players frequently and openly and you'll have an incredible game of D&D.

There are many more ways for you to become familiar with your character. Let the questions in this document inspire you to create new character check-in questions of your own. This check-in is best done in private, but you could create a version of this reflection that looks at the party as a whole, or even the story of the campaign as a whole.

Next time on New Player's Guide, we return to the DM's seat and see how to develop your first D&D game with a new group into a full-blown campaign. 

James Haeck is the lead writer for D&D Beyond, the co-author of Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus, and the Critical Role Explorer's Guide to Wildemount, a member of the Guild Adepts, and a freelance writer for Wizards of the Coast, the D&D Adventurers League, and other RPG companies. He lives in Seattle, Washington with his fiancée Hannah and their animal companions Mei and Marzipan. You can find him wasting time on Twitter at @jamesjhaeck.