Building Character

When you make a character in D&D, you can decide almost everything about them. You choose their ancestry, background, class, skills, abilities, height, weight, appearance, personality traits, ideals, bonds, and flaws. And that's just the stuff I could think of off the top of my head.

In our own lives, we don't have quite that much control over who we are, but we do have more control over ourselves than we might think. We can't choose our ancestry, background, or starting class, but we can increase our skills and abilities and perhaps even our class. We can't choose our height, but we have some control over our weight. And we can't control everything about our appearance, but there are some aspects of our appearance we can control, depending on how much time, energy, and money we put into looking that way.

But the one area in which we have most control is our "personal characteristics," meaning our personality traits, ideals, bonds, and flaws. Through effort, we can change and control our personality traits. We can choose what ideals we uphold. We can form bonds with the people and places we choose to be close to. And while we can't choose what flaws we start off with, we can learn to overcome them and carefully prevent ourselves from developing new ones.

Through careful and diligent effort, we can control a lot about ourselves, and we can make ourselves into more or less whatever kinds of people we really want to be. We can't choose much, if anything, about how we start, but we can choose how we build our character from there.