D&D 5E Character Creation Guide

in this video I give you a beginner friendly guide to creating your first D&D 5th edition character I will be creating an elven rogue but no matter what race or class you choose you can follow along in the same basic process I take you through in this video so let's get down to it hi everybody my name is Nate and you are watching WASD 20 a channel about tabletop RPGs and fantasy maps it's fitting that this video on character creation is sponsored by hero forge as they provide the best way for you to bring a D&D character to life in miniature form for your gaming table at hero forge com you'll find an amazing custom miniature designer with a whole bunch of races tons of items weapons accessories clothing the ability to fine-tune facial features hairstyle and poses seriously my kids and I have spent countless hours playing around on this website and after you've created your character just as you envisioned you can order your mini in a variety of materials that will be directly shipped to your house or you can get the STL file to 3d print them on your own they're amazing and they'll be perfect for that new character you're gonna be playing I actually ordered one for the character I created it for this video and I'm really excited to get painting this thing so anyway go check them out right now at hero forge com today's video D&D 5th edition character creation for the beginner now let me be upfront that if you're totally new to tabletop RPGs this is not an easy quick process but it is a lot of fun and I definitely think it's worth it character creation is not just something we get through in order to play the game it is actually a big part of what a lot of us enjoy about the game creating a unique character that fits with our vision it's one of the joys of fantasy getting to escape our own reality for a bit and play the role of this character that we have designed and is perhaps very different from us that said if you're totally new to it and this process is intimidating and you don't want to go through it you just want to try playing the game you don't have to create your own character there are plenty of pre generated characters out there I'll put a link to some on my website down below and there's plenty available in other places as well and there are also quick and easy character builder options there's D&D beyond for example that has a quick build option where you just kind of select your race in class and it spits out a character for you still what we're gonna be doing here is more the traditional method building one from the ground up using the players handbook now that brings us to what do you need here you actually do not need the players handbook there is a free basic rules PDF available and I'll put a link down in the video description it has a few less races and classes and other options but it still got a lot of variety so if you don't have any of the books yet definitely go check that out that does include a character sheet but I'll also put a link to a separate character sheet pdf down in the video description as well you can also fill out a character sheet digitally and I'll put a link to a video where I show you how I do that up at the top alright with that out of the way let's get going step one is totally optional thinking about a character concept perhaps you start with a concept already in mind and if you don't you want to skip the step you can just start picking a race in a class and develop that concept as you go but a lot of people do start with the character concept they know that they want to play some kind of big bruiser or they know that they want to play a sneaky thief type of character or some kind of street thug who has had a religious conversion or something like that you get the idea you can also try thinking about a fictional character that you really like one from a favorite book or movie or a video game and you can kind of build your character with them in mind whether it's the mechanics and how they act in combat or in a party or maybe it's just their personality and really you can pick some kind of off-the-wall ones like I want to play a gorge Costanzo in D&D I don't know what class or race that would be or Indiana Jones or Ellie from Last of Us you get the idea so for my character concept I am going with the idea of some kind of street ruffian who knows baldur's gate very well I'll be playing in Baldur's Gate descent into a furnace coming up soon and I want to play a character who's kind of streetwise and is from Baldur's Gate so that is my concept the next step in the process and possibly the first step is selecting your race so you can read more about the different races and the players handbook or in the basic rules PDF for me I am going to be playing an elf and I actually decide I'm gonna try something a little bit different I'm gonna go with a drow which is a dark elf in the world of D&D dark elves live in the under dark and they are far less common on the surface it does say here on page 24 of the players handbook that drow adventurers are rare so check with your dungeon master to see if you can play one and I did and he approved so here on page 21 of the players handbook we can read all about the elves and get some good background information but we're gonna skip to the part that is relevant to our stats and filling out this character sheet so if we go to elf traits here on page 23 we can see that our our dexterity score will increase by two so for now I'm just going to put a plus two here because we don't have our ability scores yet we can read about age and alignment which I'm not really going to get into in this video but do understand that a typical elf reaches adulthood around the age of 100 and can live up to 750 years old so maybe I'll think about my character pretty young maybe 120 150 years old now we certainly could record some of that information right here so we could say 120 this is on page 2 or the back side of your character sheet you can get into height weight eyes skin all that stuff here if you want to but I'm not gonna bother right now alright for an elf we can read that our base walking speed is 30 feet and that will be going right here that's how far we can move in one turn of movement and we do have dark vision so we will write that right here in this section for features and traits and what I like to do is just put a little page reference here this is on page 23 that way I can flip back to it if I want to know exactly what dark vision does and I don't have to write it all right here it says here we have keen senses which means we have proficiency in the perception skill so for now what we're gonna do is we're just gonna darken perception in on our skills just like that and we have Fae ancestry which means we have advantage on saving throws against being charmed and magic can't put us to sleep so I'll kind of summarize that right here it says here that we don't need sleep we have a trance instead we deeply meditate for four hours a day remaining semi-conscious so anyway that's an interesting thing just to know about elves lang we can speak read and write common and elvish okay so we can just put that in proficiencies and languages down in the bottom left here we're proficient in common and elvish and now we get to select our sub race which is high elf wood elf or dark elf which is the drow and I told you already I selected the drow so it says here we get an ability score increase +1 to charisma so we'll go ahead and put a +1 right there for now we have superior dark vision so we actually have a hundred and twenty feet of dark vision of course that's because the drow are from the Underdark and we have sunlight sensitivity you have disadvantage on attack roles and on wisdom or perception checks that rely on sight when you the target of your attack or whatever you are trying to perceive is in direct sunlight okay so that's gonna be a bit of a problem but we'll manage now it also says here that we have drow magic and that means that at first level we have access to the dancing lights cantrip which I went ahead and wrote here on page three the spell sheet now in reality I'm not gonna be playing a magic casting class so I would probably just write these on first page of my character sheets somewhere under features and traits but if you're creating a casting class you definitely want to keep track of all your spells on this page lastly here we do have drow weapon training which means we have proficiency with short swords rapiers and hand crossbows so I will write those down here in the bottom left under proficiencies all right that's gonna do it for our race you just want to make sure you're looking at the racial traits as well as any possible sub race traits so the next step in the process is figuring out our class now I mentioned I'm going to be playing some kind of street ruffian from Baldur's Gate and definitely I was thinking that that fits well with the rogue which I've actually never played in a campaign before and I'm really excited to give it a shot so on page 94 of the players handbook you can read all about the rogue the rogue is also in the D&D basic rules so you can create one without buying the book lots of flavor text here all about rogues and helping you understand them but basically they are skilled in stealth they're often thieves or assassins and they're just extremely resourceful good at picking locks and things like that so if we skip over to class features here on page 95 we can see that the rogue has hit dice of 1d8 per level since I am first level I'll just be putting one d8 right here and of course that won't go up as I level up but our hit points are going to be eight plus our Constitution modifier so I'm gonna leave that blank for now because I don't know my ability scores yet and then we go to proficiencies here proficiencies for the rogue here are light armor and for weapons we'll be adding a few to what we already have here we also have all simple weapons and crossbows we already have but we also have now long swords to add to the list here so we can kind of separate out here these are our weapons we have languages weapons and armor we are also proficient with thieves tools now a lot of people mess up and think that automatically means you get a set of thieves tool but it doesn't necessarily just means you're proficient with it for saving throws we are proficient with both dexterity and intelligence saving throws and then we have some skill proficiencies we can choose for from acrobatics athletics deception insight intimidation investigation perception performance persuasion sleight of hand and stealth now I definitely want to have stealth so there's one I'm already proficient with perception so we don't need to worry about that I think we'll also do acrobatics will do persuasion and then we get one more and I think we'll go with insight actually now there's some notes here on equipment but I'm actually gonna hold off on that for now for expertise it says here that we actually get to pick two skills that we can double our proficiency bonus with so I'm just gonna put a little star right here as a note for myself that these ones are doubled and we're gonna go ahead and go with stealth definitely I love that skill and we'll go with acrobatics too all right our next ability here on page 96 is sneak attack beginning at first level you know how to strike subtly and exploit oofos distractions once per turn you can deal an extra 1 d6 damage to one creature you hit with an attack if you have advantage on the attack role the attack must use a finesse or ranged weapon you don't need advantage on the attack role if another enemy of the target is within 5 feet of it that enemy isn't incapacitated and you don't have disadvantage on the attack role so anyway that's a little bit confusing but we're not gonna worry too much about it right now your DM can kind of help you figure out when that is but we are gonna write down here under features and traits sneak attack and we'll put one d6 and kind of summarize a little bit right now also on page 96 here it looks like we get thieves can't which is basically a secretive rogue language and there's a list of other things here that we get at higher levels like cunning action and a roguish archetype but for now here at level one we will be good all right the book also tells us that at this point we can record our proficiency bonus which at level 1 is +2 and it'll be that way for several levels all right now that's going to be it for our class information at this time next up we need to determine our ability scores and this is one my favorite part sometimes I'll actually start with this step but there are a few different ways you can do this one of them is to use the standard array you can basically select these numbers here and just put them in where you want for your ability scores another way is to use the point by system which they explain right down here and then the last way is to roll for your abilities and that's what I am gonna be doing for rolling ability scores here it says that we will be rolling a four six sided dice and then dropping the lowest just taking the highest three dice jotting that number down on a scratch piece of paper so I'm gonna switch cameras here and we'll roll the dice and see how we do all right so as I said we're gonna be using four d6 drop the lowest here we'll be rolling them in this beautiful dice tray from iron archer game craft iron archer game craft calm and let's get going here I've just got a pen and we'll be jotting them down as we go all right so we drop the lowest that's a 1 and we're left with 6 plus 5 is 11 we can assign them to specific ability scores later all right Wow a lot of twos so that one is gonna be a 9 not great on that one all right 4 plus 6 is 10 oh these are some low ability scores all right there we go now we're talking that's a 15 so that'll help and 8 plus 2 is 10 oh I could really use one more nice and high one here not bad okay so that's 11 plus 3 is 14 okay alright so those are our ability scores pretty mediocre overall but anyway let's go ahead and assign them to these specific abilities all right so with our ability scores rolled now we have to assign them to specific abilities so we've got strength dexterity Constitution intelligence and wisdom strength I think you know what that is dexterity is pretty self-explanatory it's like agility Constitution is gonna be how harder you are it generally is related to your hit points and also kind of like how much you can stomach and things like that if you want to learn more about all these ability scores and the skills I did do an entire episode of D&D rule school about it and I'll put a link right up at the top I think of intelligence is a little bit more like book smarts whereas wisdom is a little more street smarts the difference between being smart and wise really and charisma of course is your source of personality so for each class they do give suggestions on what you might want to do with your ability scores and for the rogue they definitely say you want to put your highest in dexterity you don't have to you can certainly go for a unique character concept but for me I am so that's a 15 which with my +2 I'm actually going to be putting here a 17 okay now there's some debate about whether or not I should be putting that right here or right here but the default way that Wizards of the coast has it in their pre generated characters is to put the smaller number down here so that's what I'll do cross off the 15 on my paper here and next up we've got a 14 that's our next highest now I could put that in charisma but I kind of want to have high constitutions so my hit points aren't terrible so I'm gonna put my 14 in Constitution and cross off my 14 on my paper now I've got a 9 to tens and an 11 it doesn't really matter too much at this point but I think I will put my 9 in intelligence I'm gonna put my 11 in wisdom and that means strength and charisma will be a 10 each but I have a +1 in charisma so we will make it an 11 and I'll go ahead and erase that and there we go our ability scores are placed these numbers will be the basis for a lot of other things which we'll get to shortly the next step in the players handbook is to describe your characters so you might think about their alignment that's kind of their moral compass but to do this I usually like to use the character background section in the book which is in chapter 4 personality and background so I don't use alignment too much I just try to think of my character as an actual person and do consider their moral compass for sure but there are a whole lot of backgrounds here now if you're going with a rogue there's a couple different directions that are kind of the stereotypical directions a charlatan might be a good way to go because they're kind of a swindler and that can fit well with the rogue there's also obviously the criminal that's gonna be a big one for rogues but you could go with one that's a little less logical like maybe a hermit or a guild artisan or a sage you're basically trying to think about what did they do before they became an adventurer so for me I am going to be sticking pretty close to the stereotypical rogue here with the criminal background so as we look at the criminal background here you can see we get skill proficiencies in deception and stealth now when I'm looking through my background here I can actually choose if I already have proficiency in these to just take different ones instead and I can just choose at will so I already have stealth but I did mark deception here so instead of stealth I think I will actually go with survival let's go for it we also get tool proficiencies we've got one type of gaming set and thieves tools for a gaming set I think I'll do something like dice I am proficient with dice but you could do cards you could do a chess set things like that what you do do get some equipment with this background we get a crowbar dark common clothes which include a hood and we get a pouch containing 15 gold pieces which I will mark right here this one is four gold pieces now I'm not gonna get into all the detail but you do probably want to read your background pretty carefully it can be very useful a lot of these things you want to work with your dungeon master on for example criminal contact you have a reliable and trustworthy contact who acts as a liaison etc etc so that can be really useful work with your DM on that there's the criminal specialty which for me I think I will probably choose a let's go with a smuggler I like that so for background here at the top I am going to write criminal and I will put in parentheses here smuggler oh and I didn't write my own name up there so I'll do that and then for all these personality traits ideals and bonds I'm not gonna go into detail on this I'm just going to pick something that I think makes sense for my character if you don't want to do that you can actually roll it shows here that some of these are d6 or D charts but you're supposed to choose two personality traits one ideal one bond and one flaw for your character and these can really help you role player character and start to think about who they are as a person alright so there we go I picked some personality traits that picked an ideal bond and a flaw and those are again are gonna help me roleplay my character I'm also just gonna write my criminal contact ability down in my features and traits here and I'll write page 129 alright next up it's time to go shopping we're gonna buy some equipment and actually we're gonna take the less shopping route there's two ways you can handle equipment here you can take the standard equipment that comes with your background which I already have right here and your class which will record very shortly here or you can forego all this and you can say actually I'm just going to roll for gold there's a chart in Chapter five for that and go shopping myself and buy everything from the ground up in my case I am going to be taking the standard equipment and that's usually what I recommend for newer players it makes it a lot easier so on page 96 we have the basic equipment for the rogue we get either a rapier or a short sword so in this case I think I'm going to take a short sword the nice thing about a short sword is that I will be able to wield it with another weapon in my other hand then we get a short bow and quiver of 20 arrows or another short sword I think in this case I'm not proficient with short bows unfortunately so I think I will probably take just another short sword at this time now I could work with my DM and maybe substitute a short bow for a hand crossbow but I think I'll stick to the two short swords at this time and then I also get a burglars pack ad engineer's pack or an explorers pack and in this case I am going to take the burglars pack which has a lot of thief specific equipment and you can read all about what these packs include in chapter 5 but they generally do include some basic adventuring equipment like a bedroll and torches and a water skin and things like that and then we get leather armor and two daggers and yes we do get thieves tools very nice and you can see a description of what's included with the thieves tools in chapter 5 as well so that's pretty much it for our equipment I could choose to take my 15 gold pieces over to chapter 5 and do a little shopping before the game and buy a few other items but I think I'll call it good for now now before we can figure out our attack bonus and our armor class and things like that it is time to determine our ability score modifiers and also our skill and saving throw bonuses so the way that this works is we take our ability score let's take our highest one here 17 and we are going to subtract 10 which leaves us with 7 and then we divide by 2 and that is going to leave us with 3.5 and we round down so 3 okay so our ability score modifier for dexterity is +3 so we subtract 10 divided by 2 and round down if needed so I'm gonna go ahead and fill out the rest of these ability score modifiers at this time all right there we have it our next step is to carry those over to our saving throws and our skills so the way that this works is that for strength for example we can just look at our strength bonus which is plus 0 so we just leave it as 0 4 dexterity it's plus 3 but I'm also proficient in dexterity saving throws that's what that darkened encircle means so now I get to add my proficiency bonus as well for a total of dexterity proficiency bonus plus 5 the same thing is true for our skills down here but remember I get double proficiency on some so acrobatics I put a star by double proficiency so I actually get plus 4 for my proficiency bonus and plus 3 so that's a total of plus 7 for acrobatics animal handling however I have a wisdom score of 0 and I'm not proficient with it so we're just gonna leave it at 0 all right so I'm gonna go ahead and fill out the rest of my saving throws and skills at this time all right so we have all these saving throws and skill bonuses filled out now it's time to record some other things a lot of the stats on our sheet are going to be based on these numbers so let's start with armor class you can look up your specific armor type in chapter 5 in the equipment section I think it's on page 145 I noticed that leather armor has 11 + dexterity modifier as your armor class so for me that external modifiers 3 so we're gonna go 14 for my armor class 11 + 3 we can also determine our initiative bonus that's just based on your dexterity bonus and so that is also going to be +3 and that helps us determine how quickly we can get into combat hit points we can do those while we're up here - that is based on our Constitution and our hit dice so you can see that my hit die is 1 d8 at first level +2 so that is going to be a hit point maximum of 10 using your Constitution modifier moving on down the sheet we can go to our attacks and spell casting so for our weapons short sword you can look up the stats for your weapons in chapter 5 as well for a short sword it is going to be 1 d6 damage but we have to figure out our attack bonus attack bonus is how likely we are to hit it's the number we get to add to our D 20 role when we make an attack to see if we hit now the way that you determine your attack bonus and damage type is you are going to be basing it on the relevant ability score modifier in most cases with a melee weapon that is going to be strength my strength is not very high so that would be a problem which is why I want to look for weapons as a rogue that have the finesse property you can read about those there on page 149 of the players handbook where they have the full list of weapons short swords do have the finesse property which means I can choose to use my dexterity instead of my strength for my attack bonus and damage so that's really handy because my dexterity is plus 3 so what I do is for my attack bonus I take that plus 3 and I also add my proficient see bonus because I am proficient with short swords so I will have a total attack bonus of +5 for my damage type I do not get to add the proficiency bonus I just add the relevant modifier which is still dexterity so it's 1 d6 plus 3 and the type of damage for a short sword is piercing so I just put a P here for my dagger it is also a finesse weapons all basically be putting the same attack bonus there but instead of 1 d6 a dagger is just 1 D 4 plus 3 also piercing if I had any ranged weapons or like a canned trip spell that is really useful for attacks I would probably put those here as well but for now we'll move on to the next part and that is passive wisdom you can see right here for passive wisdom it says perception so this is basically just going to be your perception bonus plus 10 so for me it is going to be 12 because my perception is +2 well everybody I think that pretty much does it for our character here you can absolutely go ahead and fill out parts of page 2 if you'd like to you know draw character portrait or find one online get into the character backstory stuff those are all good things to do but for us here I think the only thing we have left to do is name this character and when I was trying to think of names I wanted something like short and easy to remember something that kind of fit with a street persona where you're just gonna have a quick short nickname I'm not exactly sure what his full name would be yet but I decided that his character name his first name would be Zed which is actually a nickname that I was given at one point so there you go and I think perhaps his real name is something a little bit more like Zed elasaur I don't know something like that but he just goes by Zed and the family name is Argus so there we go Zed Argus a drow rogue from Baldur's Gate let me know if you have any questions about this down in the comments below if you feel like I didn't explain something well or I missed something absolutely let me know down there I'd like to thank my sponsor once again for this video thank you to hero forge they're amazing go check out their character builder I actually had the chance to build my own character here for Zed so the miniature came in the mail the other day I have it primed and ready to go turned out so great and I can't wait to paint this thing and I hope to do that sometime on the channel in the next month so definitely stay tuned for a new mini painting tutorial where I will be painting up our rogue Zed and I also want to give a huge thank you to my patrons patrons our people who support this channel on a monthly basis these people are amazing they're making it happen for me here at WASD 20 so thank you so much patrons now if you appreciate my content if you find it valuable I would love to have you become the newest member of the patron army as well just head over to patreon calm there are some pretty cool rewards such as weekly live streams with me and a bunch of other stuff so go check it out I do hope to do another tutorials sometime in the near future with one of the casting classes so we can get into the basics of magic so let me know if you have any suggestions for what that should be down below whether it should be a wizard a warlock a sorcerer a cleric a paladin a druid bard I'm probably missing one but anyway let me know what you would like to see down below and yeah that's all for this one everybody take care you'll see me again very soon [Music] [Music]

Channel: WASD20

Views: 596,412

Rating: 4.9597926 out of 5

Keywords: d&d, dungeons and dragons, dnd, dungeons & dragons, 5th edition, dnd5e, character creation, basics, tutorial, dnd character creation, 5e character creation, tabletop rpg, ttrpg, role-playing, wizards of the coast, wasd20, beginner, guide to character creation, dnd basics

Id: ZcNgj0KPYuA

Length: 30min 10sec (1810 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 01 2019