An Actor's Guide to Dungeons and Dragons, Part 1: Why Am I Here, Again?

** TL;DR: Backstory is far less important to making compelling characters than having a clearly defined reason for them to care. **

So, most of the explanation you need is right there in the title. I'm an actor (like, the profession, not the player type), I've been playing/DMing for about 10 years now, and I thought it might be fun to lay out some of the ways that I think my training and work has caused me to look at D&D in a slightly different way than most people. If you've heard all this before, feel free to offer your own thoughts, and if this ends up being helpful to you in any way, I'd love to hear about that, too.

For this first post, I figured I'd try to tackle an issue many first-time players experience, and one that often keeps plaguing even long-time role-players: the feeling that your character isn't being motivated by anything. It's happened to me plenty of times; I've come up with a concept for a character, figured out how I'm going to make it work, class/race/stat-wise, written up a kick-ass backstory, only to get two or three sessions in and be bored to tears with the clod that I'm playing as. This isn't because the backstory has become less epic, or the mechanics aren't working as I intended, or that I'm playing with unfun people; more often than not, it's a simple matter of not knowing why my character is there.

One of the first things that budding actors learn when they start studying the craft is how to look for a character's objective. In simplest terms, that just means whatever the character wants, whether you're looking at it in terms of a single interaction with another character or looking at a script as a whole. Making those choices about what it is that a character is working towards is the cornerstone of most modern acting techniques; once you decide that (for instance) Hamlet is trying to make Ophelia stop loving him in the famous "To a nunnery" scene, then you can start doing the work about how he's going about that.

This is where a lot of characters, I feel, fall flat. You'll come up with a great backstory for your rogue, complete with all of the people you've stolen from and why you left the city of your birth because you were a wanted man, and what you're left with is a character with a complete story behind him. The backstory ends up being a full-story, and leaves your character with no reason to keep adventuring, and therefore no reason for you to care about the character.

I'm sure every one of you has seen a terrible performance at some time, whether it was on stage or screen. Odds are good, while watching it, one of the big problems was that you just couldn't figure out what the hell the character was trying for, and therefore why the hell you should care about them. The same problem comes about with D&D characters.

In turn, this is why so many old tropes really do make for good backstories. The elf who survived her tribe being wiped out and seeks revenge on the people who did it; the wizard who was exiled from his order for seeking forbidden magicks and wants back in; the old soldier out on the job and looking to get home to his family in one piece. These are old and tropey as hell, but they give you something to work towards, and give your DM a way to build encounters and adventures that appeal to your character beyond "here dragon, here treasure, go get it."

The Ideal, Bond, Flaw system that 5e introduced actually does a good job of trying to guide players into these sort of characters with goals. The Bonds, in particular, help to flesh out a character's backstory with little nuggets that hint at what they care about, and why they might be out adventuring. Most importantly, if you want to make a great character that will grow and quest and love doing it, try to make your objective as specific as possible. Instead of "I want to be rich," make it, "I need to steal the fortune of the lord that robbed my family blind." "I want revenge on my father's killer" can become "I want to bring him to justice in front of the people who mocked my accusations." Find ways to meld your backstory into the driving force in your character's mind, and you'll last a lot longer before you lose interest in what they're up to.

I hope you've enjoyed this little (or long) rant about how to improve your RPing. I'll try to post once a week or so on a new topic that I think I can be helpful on. Love y'all, keep being an awesome community.