D&d character biography example

A player once gave me a D&D character backstory that was a real piece of work.

First, it was devoid of all originality—I think their PC was modeled off some anime character or something—and it was full of TRAGIC OVERLOAD. You know, where excessive tragedy or trauma overshadows all other aspects of the character.

It was overly complicated with too many details, twists, and convoluted elements. It was inconsistent with the game world, and I had no idea how I could possibly integrate their backstory into the campaign. Oh, and their character was one of the dark-cloaked LONERS at the corner table in the tavern that doesn’t want to work with anyone else. Not that it mattered, because they had zero motivation to adventure, to travel, to do anything—besides brood on their dark past, I suppose.

However, HOWEVER, their character was the exemplar of perfection, possessing not only no flaws but also a level of power practically unheard of…even as a level one PC. And if that’s not enough, this backstory was dozens of pages long. They practically wrote me a novella.

And the worst part—the worst part of all of that, is that I wrote that backstory. I was that player.

So today, since I’ve learned a thing or two over the years, we’re going to deep dive into how you SHOULD write character backstories for TTRPGs, such as Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, Dungeon Crawl Classics, and the like.

If you'd like, I have a free character backstory template that you’re welcome to use if you’re not sure where to start. And if you’re a game master, you might find it useful to give to your players—modified to suit your particular campaign—to help them develop their backstories.

If you're looking for a family-friendly, D&D-adjacent board game, look no further than Dungeon Drifters. It's a competitive dungeon exploration game where opportunistic "heroes" race to defeat enemies, pocket the most loot, and escape the dungeon first! It's perfect for introducing family members an

Thanks to the wonderful readers of this blog, I’ve been able to apply machine learning to Dungeons and Dragons data of all sorts. I trained a neural network to generate new D&D spells, first on a small dataset, then on a larger one that readers had sent me (dataset here). Another reader sent me a list of D&D creatures, and I trained a neural network on that. Then readers helped me crowdsource a dataset of over 20,908 character names, and I trained a neural network on that as well (dataset here).

There’s one more dataset I crowdsourced, and that’s D&D character bios. Folks, you helped me build an amazing dataset. There are over 2,430 bios in this set, some of which were thousands of words long. Entries included dialog, songs, poems, uncounted numbers of orphans, and even a limerick.

This dataset is awesome, but it’s also difficult for a neural network to learn, which is why I’ve spent so long before trying to publish something with it. The problem is that the neural nets I work with usually have really short memories, often less than a sentence long, so they can’t keep track of what they’re doing in a recipe, let alone a story. People have managed to get around the memory problem, but usually it’s by choosing a very formulaic, predictable format that they can break down into larger building blocks. The D&D character bios, however, are anything but formulaic.

And it turns out that the neural net noticed that they tend to be very long. When I trained textgenrnn on the full set of bios, I started by asking it to produce text at a very low temperature setting of 0.2. At that setting, it tends to go with “sure bet” text rather than be daring.

It, um, produces one huge run-on sentence.

…the city and the constant the crew of the constant where her magic was a constant the constant the crew where he was and the crew of the constant and the constant the long that she was always be a long the c

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If you’re starting a new roleplay (RP) or Tabletop Roleplaying Game (TTRPG), then one of the things you will be expected to provide is a character biography. If you aren’t familiar with writing character bios, then you might be a little stumped on what exactly needs to be included, and what is better left out. 

Although there is no perfect, established way of writing a biography for a character, there are a couple of things you could do to make it more effective and useful to your fellow roleplayers and TTRPG players. But first, you should make sure you understand exactly what a character bio entails before writing your own.

This article is specifically about creating character bios for roleplays, tabletop games, and other collaborative writing settings. If you’re looking for how to create a character for a story, try checking out How to Make Characters Interesting, Complex, and Unique instead.

What is a Character Bio?

A character bio, also known as a character profile or character biography, is a brief overview of your character that you can provide to others prior to the start of a game or roleplay. It gives them an introduction to your character before the narrative actually begins, which makes it easier to create plots and interact between characters. 

Generally, a character bio includes basic information about the character, such as their name, appearance, and behavior, but it can also include topics such as backstory and motivations. Bios can look different depending on what they are being used for, the genre of the story, and the other players’ preferences. 

Why is a Character Bio Important?

Character bios make it much easier for other players or RP partners to get to know your character. By providing information on your character up front, you can allow others to get to know them, build relationships between characters, and come up with ideas for the story based around your char

So you have an awesome story and want to bring it to life with some incredible characters, but organizing all those character ideas in your head can be tough!

I know, I’ve been there. We’ve all been there (trust me, I did a very legit survey of us all).

To help, here is a very thorough list of more than 100 different character traits you can use to understand more about your character than you do about your friends and family. Fill out this template with as many or as few details as you’d like. You can even grab your fillable PDF at the bottom of this article.

Readers will sniff out a half-baked character from a mile away, and you better pray they never find a poorly written character in your book. Luckily, this template will help you avoid both of those pitfalls.

How to Use This Template

Hopefully, this template is, for the most part, straightforward. But there are some options that might give you some pause. For the sake of clarity, I’m going to quickly go over the different sections of the template.

In general, the traits get deeper and deeper into the abyss of your character’s soul the further down the list you go.

Demographics are your basics. This is the sort of information someone could likely glean from a short conversation with your character or what the government might gather from a census.

Physical appearance is what someone would notice about your character if they looked at them. This goes beyond just hair, eye, and skin color, though. Things like your character’s gait or their fashion style can add a lot of depth for your reader.

History allows you to understand a character’s past. More importantly, it allows you to understand how that past affects their actions in your story. Some of this information might never see the light of day, but it allows you to craft dynamic, complex characters.

Psychological traits are those that aren’t readily apparent to an onlooker but are c