Dungeons and Dragons: How to Write a Compelling Backstory for Your DnD Character?

When it comes to creating a DnD character, one of the most interesting aspects is coming up with a backstory for them. Of course, stats are also important and fun but the backstory will help you weave the character into the world the DM created.

In this article, we will examine the importance of a good backstory what it means to create lore for your character’s past, what to keep in mind, and coming up with the life of your character before he joined the current campaign. So let’s dive in.

What Is the Purpose of a Character Backstory?

A good character backstory gives you a chance to ground your character in the world and the setting your DM created. But why is that important?

When your DND character joins the party of the current campaign, they can of course be a blank slate. The trope of amnesia is very popular among dungeons and dragons players. However, in this case, popular often means played out.

But even if you decide to go in that direction, that is to say, to play a character with lost memory, it is still a good idea that you as a player know the character’s past. This gives you the option, not just to make a mystery out of your past that can be uncovered during the campaign, but also the means of psychologically grounding your character’s values and beliefs into something that is not dependent on their memory.

In short, it is a way for you to know exactly what the character is on a deeper level, beyond the stats on the character sheet.

What are the Most Important Elements of a Character Backstory?

The Player’s Handbook dedicates two pages to personality traits, ideals, bonds, and flaws as a way to direct the players’ attention to flesh out their character not just in regards to stats, but also regarding their personality.

• personality traits
• ideals
• bonds
• flaws

Although these four pillars of a character’s personality can be very helpful, they are sometimes too broad of a stroke and can seem unintuitive.

You as a player know yourself really well. Still, it can be rather difficult to determine what your own ideals are, or what bonds keep you motivated. We are not all psychologists and the terminology bonds, ideals, and flaws might not be something we can easily assess, whether for ourselves, let alone for characters we are making up.

In terms of character creation, these guidelines often fall flat and promote creating two-dimensional characters rather than grounded and believable ones.

Let us then propose an alternative approach and terminology, one that is not based on hard-to-assess moral and ethical principles, but comprehensive and intuitive personality traits, which are a result of our character’s past.

This means that instead of creating personality traits, flaws, bonds, and ideals, we first create the situations from which these character traits emerged. That way our character will have a more robust psychology that makes sense to us but also to the other players and our DM.

Character Backstory or: What Happened in the Past?

A great way to start developing the past of your character is to look at the background you’ve chosen for them. The background in Dungeons and Dragons 5E could be seen as a bridge between statistical features, that is to say, mechanics, and narrative aspects of your character’s creation.

We all are defined by that what we do. Whether we like it, or not one of the first questions everybody asks us after meeting us for the first time is: What do we do for a living? This fact tells us that your character before they became an adventure, was also probably defined by what they did for a living.

However, we are not just defined by the work we do. We also have a personal life filled with people we care about, personal interests and hobbies, and thoughts that occupy us. If we lay out these things for ourselves, it will become clear to us that it is much easier to describe who we are in these terms. And, when we can define these points for us, we can define them for our characters as well:

1. Define your character’s profession and specify it a bit
2. Establish ties to at least two people from the character’s past
3. Come up with an interest your character has outside of their profession
4. Figure out how your character deals with problems
5. Recount the event that led your character to become aware of their power
6. Describe what triggered your character to become an adventurer

So let’s tackle them one by one and see what we can come up with and whether or not this approach could be more helpful to create a character’s backstory.

1. Your Character’s Background is Not Just the Name of Their Profession

Before your character became an adventurer, they had a job. There are a ton of suggestions on the Internet and in the official books as to what these professions (also called backgrounds) could be.

However, it is simply not enough to just state the name of the profession. We need to be as specific as possible when we talk about the work and the profession of our character.

For example, instead of saying that your character was an archaeologist, we could specify it a bit more by saying that they were an archaeologist who was working on researching ancient dragon skeletons as part of the college in a big city.

EXAMPLE BACKSTORY (PART 1)

If your character was a farmer, we could say that he inherited a farm from his parents, and that an entire small village relied upon his weekly produce.

As we can see, just a simple clarification of the profession gives more context to the character. We start to see a silhouette of a possible backstory, much clearer than if we were just to name the profession and nothing more.

2. Family Ties and Character Backstories

Did your character live alone or as part of a family? If they lived alone, how come? Did they get separated from their family members, or did they grow up as orphans making their way through the world alone, maybe through the help of some good-minded strangers? Who were these strangers? Name one or two of them who made an impact on your character’s life.

If however, your character grew up as part of a family, name the closest family members: brothers, sisters, mother, and father. Where are they now?

Regardless of the situation, our character was in, they were never alone. Even if it may seem like they were a loner, one or two people can always be named that made an impact on them. Define those individuals in broad strokes with one or two sentences, describing how they tie to your character.

EXAMPLE BACKSTORY (PART 2)

For example, our farmer who inherited the farm from his parents grew up with his grandfather, who taught him how to be a farmer. He never met his parents, but he knew that they were simple folk living off their land. They died when he was five years old. When his grandfather died, he put to use everything he had learned from him and continued to make a living for himself by producing goods for the village.

3. Your Character’s Personal Interests and Hobbies

Although they are people who define themselves solely by what they do for a living, even they have from time to time a shut-off button. Be it socializing with friends in their free time or writing poems and novels about their daily life and struggles, everyone has a personal interest and hobby they attend to in their free time.

Ask yourself what your character did when they were not working. These interests can be creative ones like painting or playing music or they can be as simple as hanging out in the local tavern or reading books on a specific subject.

EXAMPLE BACKSTORY (PART 3)

To go back to farmer. Although he never played in public, he found an interest in playing and composing music on his lute. Once a day’s worth of work was done on the farm, he would light a candle in his cottage, pour himself a glass of wine and quill out a verse or two, although never having a formal education as a singer, nor as a musician. It was just a way for him to unwind.

4. How Does Your Character Deal with Life’s Problems?

Besides work, personal interests, and family, every one of us has quiet moments of reflection about our lives. Some deal with them by ignoring them others by overanalyzing them.

Every obstacle we face in life has to be dealt with somehow. Is your character prone to examining every facet of the problem or are they a happy-go-lucky person who doesn’t hold a grudge?

EXAMPLE BACKSTORY (PART 4)

Our farmer keeps everything buried inside. When a merchant from a big city stumbled across the village and started offering farm produce for a much cheaper rate than our farmer could, he was angry, but everybody who would ask him about it would only hear from him that everyone makes their own fortune in life. Deep inside, however, he was furious.

5. Triggering Your Character’s Real Potential

Every backstory has to come to an end in order for the main story to start. When our characters ascend from commoners to a first-level class, there has to be a reason for it. A trigger, if you will.

Maybe your character was always striving towards that potential and trained hard to become a first-level fighter, or they studied immensely to become an arcane master and be a first-level wizard. Maybe the blood in the sorcerer’s veins started boiling up after or your character had to make a deal with an entity and regretfully received warlock powers. Whatever it is, something occurred that led your character to leave their previous life and profession behind.

EXAMPLE BACKSTORY (PART 5)

In our example, when the merchant from the big city noticed that the villagers were mostly loyal to our farmer, even though they had to pay more, he decided to sabotage the farmer’s operation. He hired a few members of the thieves’ guild to pay him a visit and raid his farm.

While trying to fight the intruders off, our farmer was badly beaten up. The intruders mocked him for his weakness and jokingly asked him to play them a tune, since they saw his lute hanging on the wall.

Unable to defend himself against them, he picked up his lute and started playing a song he wrote a few days earlier. As he was strumming the chords, he sensed a strange power emitting from the strings.

The intruders were delighted by the song and were moved to tears. Unbeknownst to the farmer, he has charmed them, not with his music but rather with a spell cast through his song.

6. The Call to Adventure

Once your character realizes that they have reached a power greater than that of a common person, they decide to become an adventurer. Your character has always to decide to become an adventurer, or they would have never been a character for an adventuring party in a DnD campaign, which seems obvious.

What moved your character to go out adventuring into the world after they discovered their new powers? Was it to make a better living for themselves than with their old profession or was it to protect something they think needs protection? Do they have sympathy for like-minded people who deal with their problems in a similar fashion as they do. Or is it simply a greater purpose in life they seek?

EXAMPLE BACKSTORY (PART 6)

Our farmer, after successfully defeating the intruders, became aware of the fact that the merchant who sent them will not give up. When he told the villagers about the attack on his farm, everybody was afraid what the merchant would do next.

Our farmer then volunteered and decided that he would find the merchant and investigate his motivations for targeting the village.

*And who knows maybe discovering in the process that the merchant wasn’t just after a share in the village’s farming market. Maybe there was more to his motivations in targeting the village.

Final Thoughts on a Character’s Backstory

To summarize, creating a character’s backstory requires us to use tools with which we could easily describe ourselves. Personality traits, bonds, ideals, and flaws can be helpful, but they are not as intuitive as one would hope they would be.

You can, of course, go even deeper with the backstory for your character. However, through our experience of playing DnD and DM-ing in a lot of games, it is recommendable to keep your backstory to one page.

And you don’t have to worry if you have more ideas for your character or if there are parts of their backstory that you really wanted to include but simply don’t have the space for it. The campaign can be that space.

By traveling with your character, interacting with the other players’ characters and the DM’s NPCs and events he put into motion in his world, you will be able to flesh out your character in a more immersive way, than by just writing it down beforehand.

Let the most interesting parts of your character’s development happen during the sessions and not on the pages of a too-convoluted backstory that has already happened.