Leveling Up Your Role-Playing

Published in

Phantasmagorical Adventures

3 min readAug 1, 2020

Sometimes, people get overwhelmed by all the choices available to them, then spend a lot of time trying to optimize their characters for winning: winning battles, winning loot, or winning rapid advancement to higher levels. But in our game, winning is having fun and being fun. We’re playing and we’re each other’s audience. A great character is a character that’s fun for you and fun to play with. What can you do to add drama to our games? Laughs? Empathy? Pride? Anxiety? Wonder? Excitement?

Learning from the Class 101 courses on D&D Beyond

The D&D Beyond team has posted a huge amount of content in the Posts section of their website, but it’s organized chronologically, blog style, which makes it difficult to navigate. Here, I have reorganized their wonderful “Class 101” content by class for easy navigation. You can use this series to help you decide what kind of character you want to play and to learn how to bring a character that you have made to life.

Artificers

Artificer 101: A Beginner’s Guide to Making Magical Marvels

Barbarians

Bards

Clerics

Druids

Fighters

Monks

Paladins

Rangers

Rogues

Sorcerers

Warlocks

Wizards

Advanced Role-Playing Skills

Backstory and Fronstory

How do you develop a good backstory? This Roleplaying 101 article outlines a good method. We also like the hilarious questions and examples in The Ultimate RPG Character Backstory Guide by James D’Amato.

It’s great to have a backstory, but you can also have a lot of fun with frontstory. What’s a fronstory? I’m glad you asked. Read about Character Creation and the Importance of Fronstory.

Sophisticated Roleplaying and Prep Work

James D’Amato, author of the excellent Backstory guide, has also written The Ultimate RPG Gameplay Guide. It’s filled with tools — usable techniques and examples of their use — for GMs and players to have fun with each other.