creating a D&D character can be one of the most fun parts of the hobby you get to let your imagination run wild and create this persona that you're going to be playing and slaying dragons with and rescuing knights and all sorts of good stuff but it can also be pretty confusing there's a lot of rules there's a lot of terms that you might not understand especially if you're a new player or a new Dungeon Master I mean what your ability score modifiers how do you work them out what a proficiency is how the backgrounds play into it what you know what's a class feature all of these kind of things can lead people to worry about making that first character and one of the most requested things I've had both on social media and here in the channel comments as well is can you do a video on how to create a character so though that's exactly what we're going to do today I'm going to give you a step-by-step guide on how to create your first Dungeons and Dragons fifth edition character now before we begin talking about the actual hard mechanics of creating a character you should probably have a read through the players hand but just to see what kind of options are available to you particularly when it comes to race and class also speak with your dungeon master they might have custom rules for their homebrew world maybe ex race doesn't exist maybe they've made their own classes or their own races which might plank your interest once you've kind of got a vague idea you need to start thinking about just a rough layout of who this character is you don't need to get specific at this point you don't need to know if they're a wood elf or if they're a hill dwarf you just need to know roughly who they are and what their story is maybe you want to be a Thieves Guild master who's been betrayed and is now looking for revenge maybe you want to be somebody who's lost their faith in the gods and is on a pilgrimage to rediscover that faith maybe you want to play a princess who's lost her kingdom to some evil force and is now looking for allies to help her reclaim it these are all vague ideas but they'll help you later on when you come to put those mechanics into play on the character sheet okay so let's get started you're going to need a couple of things to start with ah first of all I would highly recommend you get the players Handbook this is the kind of core player book it covers all the rules on how to play but it also has all of the races and classes as options for people to make characters from you can use the basic rules which are for free on the Wizards website but they come with a very limited selection of races and classes and I would personally highly recommend you grab yourself a players handbook it also has all rules for character creation right at the start the first chapter so if there's anything you're a bit confused about from this video you can refer to here in the phb you're also going to need character sheets now I downloaded mine from the Wizards website you get a zip folder it's completely free I downloaded this one this is the three-page complete and it's the one that I personally recommend there is also form fillable versions of the PDFs as well if you're playing online if you want to have it on your iPad or your phone or something like that you're also going to need a pencil if you're using a printed out character she of course a rubber or a razor depending on where you're from just in case you make any mistakes you're also going to potentially need four six-sided dice or d6 and then somewhere to roll it I'm being fancy and using my wormwood gaming dice tray here once you've got all that stuff you're pretty much good to go and the first thing we're going to do is generate our ability scores what our ability scores and why are they important I'm glad you our ability scores are kind of one of the core mechanics of the game they really govern everything that you can do and what you can do well and what you can the six of them strength dexterity Constitution intelligence wisdom and charisma these things determine your physical mental and social skills where you're good at while you're not etcetera etc and they really do form everything I'll run through them very quickly strengths an obvious one determines how good you are running jumping climbing trees and punching stuff in the face dexterity is all about agility and grace how well how well you balance on stuff how well you pick a pocket how will you sneak through a corridor Constitution is more about your health your threshold to pain how strong a stomach you have how will you resist poisons and it also determines hit points intelligence is all about recalling information if you're very learned and educated and have a lot of law you would have a high intelligence so somebody who knows a lot of book stuff is very smart book smarts is intelligence based wisdom on the other hand is more about perception being aware of your surroundings spotting things reading body language but it's also a little bit of common sense being able to follow a track through the woods is more about wisdom than it is about intelligence likewise knowing what mushrooms you can eat in a in a forest that aren't poisonous could be a wisdom thing as well as an intelligence thing finally charisma this is one few people get wrong a lot of people think it's about physical appearance and attractiveness which isn't the case it's actually more about self-confidence and how well you portray yourself and also just your force of personality a big hulking brute covered in scars who is very sure of himself can be just as charismatic as a bard they just push right in a different way that's somebody who can intimidate with just a look what they can you know put it on and show that they're a nice person as well someone who gets up on stage and speaks in front of a large crowd that's good charisma somebody who's Shire who doesn't like the limelight who finds it difficult to speak to people that's a low charisma character now each of these abilities is going to be given a score or number that's why they call the ability scores that number will determine if your character is good something or bad at something the easiest way to think about this is think of the score of ten is your average it's neither good nor bad your average Joe citizen has a number ten in each of these six things any numbers above ten means you are much better at that specific thing than your average Joe and any numbers below 10 mean that you are worse how do you get these numbers well you're going to take your full six sided dice roll them and then you take away the lowest one if you've tied for the lowest ones you simply choose one of them to remove and you add up the remaining three that gives you one of the numbers you do that another five times so you have a total of six and then you'll later assign each of these to one of these ability scores to represent what your character is good at and what they are not good at now if you happen to roll very badly that is lots of numbers under 10 don't worry it's not all doom and gloom um the other thing as well is if you just want to get into the action you don't want to roll stats you just want to make a quick character you can use something called the standard array the standard array is just given set numbers you can use in place of rolling and that gives you a 15 a 14 a13 a12 a 10 and an 8 this means you can assign those however you like you're probably wondering well mark it tends the average why would I ever want anything to go below 10 that doesn't make sense well you're right in a way yes it means that you have a penalty in that particular area but floors and not being good at stuff is what makes D&D fun playing a character who is a bit nearsighted or just completely oblivious and doesn't realize when somebody wants them to go away or is being rude to them that can be really fun to do so giving a character low wisdom score is a way to represent that and to say well I'm sorry I've got a low wisdom you know that's just the way the cookie crumbles so it's all about playing to those flaws and that's why you having that core character concept about their personality in their history it's kind of important because it means it will dictate where you put your pie numbers where you put your low numbers we'll talk a bit more about this and the ability modifiers which is actually what you use to work out your skill bonuses and attacks and things like that later on but I want you to have an idea of what each of these abilities mean and how they work so you can think about them for your character so now you've got your ability scores it's time to get started the first thing to do is choose your race now I'm only going to be talking about the races from the players handbook in this video there are other races available to you they come in supplemental books such as Volos guide to monsters the player elemental evil players companion etc but I'm not going to talk about those if none of the races in the players handbook interest you talk to your dungeon master see if you can check out some of these other books or some things that are on home-brewed websites etc but it is up to your dungeon master they want to make sure it's fair and balanced and that fit into their world but we're just going to talk about the players habit races for now now there's number of choices you have dwarves elves halflings humans half-orcs half elves Dragonborn tiefling and gnomes I'm not going to go into detail on each one and what they all are and what their special abilities etc are you can read all about that in the players handbook but just go through and pick one that suits your core character concept make a note of which one you want to pick and then also check and see if they have a sub race some races such as elves and dwarves and halflings have what's called a sub race and this is a variant on that racial type so elfstrom our example you have high elves wood elves and drower dark elves you pick one of those again choosing the one that makes the most sense for your core character concept or whichever one interests you and then you're going to make a note of all of the traits and abilities that that race and sub race gains some of these will be little flavor things like you know what ages that they can be or what languages they speak but some of them will be mechanical in gained abilities some of them will have spells that they can cast something some of them gain certain skills as well just make a note of these for now you don't need to put them on your character sheet you can probably put them on a spare piece of paper just make a note of them for now and we'll put them into the character G a bit later on once you picture race it's time to think about your class now a class is really what you've become as an adventurer you'll call character concepts you should really think about that characters history who they were why they've decided to take up a life of adventure but your class determines that path that they're going to take it's what you're going to level up in you're going to unlock more abilities as you gain experience points you're going to get to pick specializations that let you kind of have specific roles and abilities and things that you can do that different you from other similar classes and it's you know it kind of it's your career as an adventurer so think about it as your core character concept is what you were your class is what you've become in order to fulfill whatever goal or a mission or objective that you've set as part of that core character concept classes come in a variety of options and I have to read these other lists cuz I'm never gonna remember off the top of my head but you basically have barbarian bard cleric druid fighter monk paladin Ranger rogue warlock sorcerer and wizard if you want to read more about what each of those are and what they mean do check it out in the place handbook I'm not going to go through it through individually once you had a read through pick which one you want and then don't make a note just yet we're actually going to fill this in as we go when we start filling in our character sheet however it's important to have a read through of the class have an understanding of what specializations you get to unlock make sure that those are going to match up with you know the character concept that you've got in mind think about things like you know have we through the abilities just so you've got a good understanding of them and then we're going to start filling in the actual abilities and the things that you unlock as we go that's it for part one guys do check out the next video where we're gonna start filling in our character she assigning ability scores talking about ability score modifiers as well as working out our hitpoints I hope you've enjoyed the series do make sure you subscribe so you get updated when the next parts of the video come out check out the playlist for more videos and yeah I hope this has been helpful thanks very much for watching and I will see you momentarily in part 2