Ancestry First | Many Ways to Build a D&D Character

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There are a lot of ways to create a TTRPG character, but what if you start with their race/ancestry/species? Let’s see what that looks like, and how this might potentially lead us toward one of my favorite characters I’ve ever created for this series.
CW: Extremely minor Doctor Who spoilers (nothing more recent than 2011, I’m very behind on the show)
Chapters:
00:00 - Intro
00:55 - Look to the Books for Inspiration
04:45 - A Concept Takes Shape
06:18 - Which Class(es) Work for This Character?
11:04 - Finding a Background
16:37 - The Character Crystalizes
20:33 - A Word From Our Sponsor
23:01 - Building the Character
30:39 - Final Thoughts
32:55 - Outro
Twisting Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
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#dnd #dungeonsanddragons #ttrpg #rpg #wizardsofthecoast
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[@SupergeekMike]

What kind of character would you make starting with the half-elf? Thanks so much to OnlyCrits for sponsoring this video! Back their “Guillman’s Guide to Speed” Kickstarter! And if you back before August 18th at 8am Eastern, you’ll receive a free set of dice! www.kickstarter.com/projects/onlycrits/guillmans-guide-to-speed?ref=pbt79l

[@tahmistandish9338]

My first character I created for a campaign was half-elf but I sorta went against the norms for her. She had good parents that raised her in a small half-elf community. My character was the youngest of 11 kids. The family was generally creative: musically, artistic, writing, acting etc. and she was more into books and history. Always felt different from the family. Eventually she stumbles into innate magic ability and is a Wild Magic Sorcerer. She researches the history to discover an evil sorcerer on the elf side of her ancestry. So she leaves the community to go out and try to do good with her magic all the while not knowing what she's doing and being terrified that she'll be evil like her relative. And then we only played 3 sessions...

[@TheX2k]

I would say a rouge, a monk, or a bard as the most obvious choices. Or a sorcerer could work. Or a wizard and make them a Harry Potter type character.

[@jakeryker3751]

For the wandering diplomat I think fey wanderer ranger comes to mind. It lets you stack someone who is wise and has those survival skills with someone who also has those peace keeping face skills as well.

[@MorningDusk7734]

I would love to get a series of “how do I DM when X is at the table?”, with X being each class. There’s plenty of videos out there on PLAYING each class, but not so many on running a game catered towards each class. I feel like there’s tribal knowledge gained from experience that could be imparted!

[@kiwithekiki234]

Holy cow, yes. There are so many features that I feel like I don't give my players enough chances to use just because I don't know about them. Getting advice on how to DM different races/classes/subclasses would be brilliant

[@katz86]

+

[@Rexx8492nd]

YES!

[@Dalenthas]

The Doctor is a Wizard, and his sonic screwdriver is his arcane focus.

[@alayablack9104]

While i agree, i definitely think they multiclass into artificer just for the skills and healing abilities

[@Skip6235]

“Good men don’t need rules. Today is not a good day to find out why I have so many” is such an INCREDIBLE line. God, I miss pre-50th anniversary “turns out I didn’t actually kill anyone and I’ve been brooding for all this time for nothing” Who. . .

[@SupergeekMike]

Yeah, I enjoyed the 50th anniversary special for a lot of reasons (the “How many children” scene lives rent-free in my head and my heart), but that retcon is definitely not something I’m a fan of.

[@SingularityOrbit]

I think it turned out well. The Doctor horrified themself with the extremity of their actions, which altered their way of looking at what they've been doing in a few significant ways. The result was a cosmos without the Time Lords, which meant that things like parallel universe connections and reining in the Time Reapers was no longer possible -- and, by old Doctor Who lore, losing parallel universe portals also sped up the universe's collapse. And then, when it was undone, the Doctor when from "Oh no, I've destroyed my homeworld and all my people at the same time I committed genocide against the Daleks" to "Oh no, the Time Lords are back and they're just as awful as the day I ran away!" Besides, the Doctor will always remember the moment they were willing to push the button before the Doctor talked them into a different plan.

[@thatpoemguy2083]

Personally I really liked the 5 second pitch you gave for the Barbarian wandering diplomat, that whole "re-frame the rage" thing really inspired me. I may just steal that. I mean, if you're not gonna use it... Also worth noting, I love how all this branched out from reading the rulebook and going "Oh, *there's* an aspect of the lore that I hadn't thought about much!" Like I get that's the whole premise of the video, but it's still really cool to see how you can take that thread and see the tapestry it leads into.

[@thunderflare59]

In an actual play show, one player framed his rage as the character going into a panic and being so clumsy that he was accidentally awesome. The campaign was Lost Mines of Phandelver Hardcore, for anyone curious.

[@cylver3593]

My favourite idea for barbarian is the silent rage character. Have yet to play it, but I think it would be fun.

[@jarsqui]

You just described the Knight Rider, a wanderer finding non violent solutions to people's problems. I really hope this will lead to an artificer build with a supercar as a Battle Master Construct

[@frog7226]

Ooh, the dead identity thing. I played a necromancer who's whole thing was that as a level 1 wizard she, a changeling, joined a party to go kill 'evil necromancers in a near by cave'. The party kills them, it's a TPK on both sides, by my character succeeds her death saves so eventually wakes up as the only survivor. Trying to get something from her now ruined life, she starts looking through the bodies. She finds a young girl and a diary on her. Through reading she learns the necromancers weren't evil, just practicing their heritage with the corpses of their ancestors. They live in secret because the world refuses to even give them a chance. She's so overcome with guilt that she lived and this young girl with a family and home didn't, that she decides to live for her. She takes the form of the girl, usues the journal to find her home, then tells the truth about the situation just through the girl's point of view. She lives as the little girl. Any gaps in memory are easily dismissed due to the trauma of the event. When she's a adult in this girl's years (I gave them like a 5 year age gap so not much), now a level 5 necromancer, she goes out into the world to make necromancy more accepted so nothing like that would ever happen again.

[@frog7226]

It's funny to say gunslinger tropes are inspired by samurai films because it's a HUGE circle. Kurosawa was a huge john wayne fan and made most of his films with inspiration from old cowboy stories. Then most samurai movies looked to Kurosawa for inspiration. Then cowboy movies saw samurai films and took inspiration from that. Modern cowboy stories are just old cowboy stories through a japanese lense.

[@Treebohr]

I saw Advocate, and you saw Advocate, and we had opposite thoughts. Devil's Advocate is right there, it's a great pun, but my first thought was that Advocate is one of the titles of Christ. Perhaps the original character you replaced was a Celestial warlock?

[@SupergeekMike]

Oooh that’s a great idea 😁

[@SLorraineE]

Hello! I'm always happy when I get this notification. Seeing it pop up makes me smile

[@ByteMe619]

when you mentioned a warlock patron for this character, my mind went straight to the Shadow of War DLC where you play as Eltariel working as an agent of Galadriel. I think it would be super interesting to play this sort of wandering diplomat with a patron who isn’t evil, but whose morals don’t 100% align. (your Doctor idea was way more interesting to me though)

[@manueltorresart2345]

So you decided to play as the last of the Time Warlocks. Jokes aside, I love how you process your characters ideas starting with a single sentence and ending doing Superior Doctor Who....and the worst, all these characters from this series are so drawable!!

[@DavidB-tm5et]

I see rogue working for this character as a kind of Oliver Queen or Matt Murdock style of vigilante. They have their day cover in which they help people as themselves, but stuff in their past (being “of two worlds” - maybe from a Lian Yu type of place?) has given them drive to seek out justice in more violent and secretive ways under a mask when the daytime diplomacy doesn’t work. This secret identity would be where the folk hero background comes in.

[@Nohawkkid008]

The rules at my table for stat rolling is you can’t get lower than an 8, and you need at least one 15 or above. It basically ends up as standard array with the chance to be better overall. If my characters have 6’s in stuff, that puts them at such an incredible disadvantage. If you want to have your characters have flaws that put them at disadvantages, I’m way more on board for that than having such poor stats you suck in almost everything you do. I’m far more interested in flaws like “Oh my character has a bum leg, so their base speed is lower.” Or to borrow from CR, “something terrible happened in my past and when I kill someone in a certain way, I have to make a roll or get stunned for a turn.” Those are far more interesting ways to play out your character having disadvantages in certain aspects than having to waste ASI’s to get your character to the base commoner level. Edit: Also, I don’t have every character roll individually. We roll 6 numbers as a group and those are the 6 everyone uses. That way no character has the chance to start either too far ahead or to far behind anyone else. I’d rather have my players choose fun feats as opposed to wasting them all on ASI’s.

[@flagertshkurti7249]

I am glad to see that starting with the Race hasn't changed that much lol. Sorry I have seen so many Half-Elven Warlocks.

[@SupergeekMike]

Lol it is funny whenever we wind up at a well-worn result despite taking a weird, winding road to get there :)

[@aficklefangirl2566]

It's always a good day when SupergeekMike uploads :)

[@lefterismplanas4977]

You could also continue with levels of warlock and just say that the dog who saved you made a pact with you/is your new patron :D

[@jlhitz35]

Love the Kvothe reference! Halfway through Wise Man's Fear at the moment, it's given me a lot of character ideas.

[@stephenmanak6024]

Will say love that you used warlock, but i was shocked that you said didnt think anything of Rogue. This was my class I thought right away with the Mastermind.

[@simonboyle4459]

stat rolling like this is why i have my players use point buy.

[@SupergeekMike]

Haha fair enough :)

[@user-fe2ne7qx9z]

I always start chargen with picking my ancestry. Human gang let's goooo

[@thatpoemguy2083]

I used to be part of Human gang, but then I discovered the majesty of the Dwarves.

[@SupergeekMike]

Oh my gosh, I don't know anybody who plays dwarves, so I'm glad to hear that folks like you are really out there and enjoying the dwarves :) (I don't play them much myself, but that's besides the point lol)

[@ilmari1452]

Oooh the Undying Patron! My favourite (and sadly, rarely seen) patron option. Though I have tended to theme it away from the undead and have the patron as an ascended mortal demigod rather than a lich, even though most of the suggested patrons are in that niche. With the later undead patron squatting on the lich territory, I feel the undying needs something to differentiate it.

[@ilmari1452]

Aaah and just as I write that the undying patron was scrapped 😭 but top marks for the pun. 👌

[@thunderflare59]

If you're interested in seeing sci-fi DND, I'd suggest looking into World of Io. It has some of the best actual play I've seen and has been a major inspiration for me.

[@Stephen-Fox]

While I know you randomly select the specific starting point for each of these, it might be interesting to see what you come up with from a tool designed to be a random prompt - Maybe building a PC based on one of the various NPC randomizers you find in tools designed for solo play might be interesting, such as Mythic Game Master Emulator 2e's Character element table, UNE (Universal NPC Emulator), etc.

[@SupergeekMike]

I think one of the next ones is going to be based on a randomizer for D&D characters that I really like… look forward to that video in October I think 😁

[@m.maschler8883]

i would love to see a full video dealing with Sci-Fi vs Fantasy refering people stating "the doctor should be an artificer". In 5e I personaly believe that a wizard is like a scientist in sci-fi and a ranger with misty step works seemingly quite like a space marine wiht short-range teleportation. Overall i see many options for using 5e in a dune, wh40k or mass effect setting. Adepts functioning much like sorcerer and the spectre saren arterius could be a warlock or paladin making a pact / worshipping the reaper. Seeing Star Trek as a high magic setting with limited ressources.

[@TheX2k]

You could multiclass into rouge and go with mastermind as well I think.

[@CooperAATE]

This is why rolling for stats is a bad idea lol

[@KSRKiller]

Could you filter out the automatic subtitles? They are very distracting. Maybe just a white box over them is enough.

[@SupergeekMike]

Good note! I'll figure out a way to make them less distracting next time :)

[@Skip6235]

Those really bad stat rolls could lend itself to a session 0 where you play out the morality switch and that leads to a “Metroid”ing where you start as a level 13 badass and then it all gets stripped away

[@ilmari1452]

Amused when you mentioned Kung Fu (the show), because as soon as you mentioned the lone ranger but without a gun, that's exactly where my mind went. That's exactly what it is, a western with a wandering do-gooder who is a pacifist. 😅 Though its casting of a white man as the chinese protagonist is problematic (sadly very expected in its time), it is still a very good show I think.

[@intrusiveshadows724]

Notification crew!

[@angelusdemorte3]

Is it acceptable that I call these: Heritage (race) and Culture (subrace)...

[@AGrumpyPanda]

Depends on the system and specific details; subraces sometimes include physical inherited traits that you can't just pick up by being part of a culture.

[@markberghel275]

Look, I get not wanting to call it "race"... but "ancestry" is such a terrible term to use instead. Why not something like "heritage"?

[@SupergeekMike]

Heritage is the other word I’ve heard that I like, but I also know some folks or systems use the term for their version of background. Ultimately we just don’t have a definitive answer, but I think just about every alternative is still better than “race” lol