Personal Characteristics
Fleshing out your character’s personality—the array of
traits, mannerisms, habits, beliefs, and flaws that give a
person a unique identity—will help you bring him or her
to life as you play the game. Four categories of characteristics
are presented here: personality traits, ideals,
bonds, and flaws. Beyond those categories, think about
your character’s favorite words or phrases, tics and habitual
gestures, vices and pet peeves, and whatever else you
can imagine.
Each background presented later in this chapter includes
suggested characteristics that you can use to
spark your imagination. You’re not bound to those options,
but they’re a good starting point.
Personality Traits
Give your character two personality traits. Personality
traits are small, simple ways to help you set your character
apart from every other character. Your personality
traits should tell you something interesting and fun about
your character. They should be self-descriptions that are
specific about what makes your character stand out. “I’m
smart” is not a good trait, because it describes a lot of
characters. “I’ve read every book in Candlekeep” tells you
something specific about your character’s interests and
disposition.
Personality traits might describe the things your character
likes, his or her past accomplishments, things your
character dislikes or fears, your character’s self-attitude
or mannerisms, or the influence of his or her ability
scores.
A useful place to start thinking about personality traits
is to look at your highest and lowest ability scores and define
one trait related to each. Either one could be positive
or negative: you might work hard to overcome a low score,
for example, or be cocky about your high score.
Ideals
Describe one ideal that drives your character. Your ideals
are the things that you believe in most strongly, the fundamental
moral and ethical principles that compel you to
act as you do. Ideals encompass everything from your life
goals to your core belief system.
Ideals might answer any of these questions: What are
the principles that you will never betray? What would
prompt you to make sacrifices? What drives you to act
and guides your goals and ambitions? What is the single
most important thing you strive for?
You can choose any ideals you like, but your character’s
alignment is a good place to start defining them. Each
background in this chapter includes six suggested ideals.
Five of them are linked to aspects of alignment: law,
chaos, good, evil, and neutrality. The last one has more
to do with the particular background than with moral or
ethical perspectives.
Bonds
Create one bond for your character. Bonds represent a
character’s connections to people, places, and events in
the world. They tie you to things from your background.
They might inspire you to heights of heroism, or lead
