Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 249 - Questions You Can Ask To Give Your Character Depth

Episode Date: March 16, 2025

Making 2 dimensional characters is easy.  Pick your ability scores, feats, equipment etc. but what if you want or need to make a deeper character to role play?  How do you do it?  In this episode I give your character just a few questions to add depth   #pf2e #Pathfinder #gmtips #dmtips #dnd #rpg #characterdesign #backstory

This week on The Taking Twenty Podcast. There are a lot of potential reasons why someone would take this shitty shitty job, and if I want to be controversial or provocative or maybe grossly oversimplify this, I'll say the why of adventuring can boil down to five major categories. Wherever you are, thank you for listening to The Taking Twenty Podcast, episode 249. Some questions that players can ask to give their characters more depth. I want to thank this week's sponsor, clams. I love eating clams, but I can't eat them with anything else.

I mean, they're just so shellfish. Oh yeah, obvious joke is obvious, and I will not apologize. If you're new to the podcast, welcome, and if you've returned, despite the jokes, welcome back. If you do enjoy the podcast, please consider liking, rating, and subscribing to the podcast wherever you happen to find it.

Every review and rating makes it more likely someone who would be interested in the podcast can find it There's a ton of podcasts out there and every review and rating helps this one stand out So I would greatly appreciate if you would just take a few minutes to do that. I Also want to thank David Hitt for donating to the podcast again You are so very generous my friend and I greatly appreciate your support. It's donations like yours that keep this podcast alive. Per usual, as I prepared this episode, I would discuss some of the topics with some of the brilliant people I play Pathfinder with and they had some great thoughts on the topic.

So before I go too far in the episode, I want to make sure to thank Mark, Rob, Paul, Tom, Richard, and everybody else that I talked to for their wisdom and insight. I love you guys so much and appreciate every single second of adventuring with you all. Every one of us have sat down to a physical or virtual gaming table with a character defined on a character sheet and that's about it. We haven't gone any deeper. Sure, maybe we have a brief description of our character, she's an ex-pirate going honest, or he's a bookish seeker of information, or they're an ex-soldier. In one of my games, my current character is a bear who's given sentience and has become

an awakened animal. There's nothing wrong with characters like that in a roleplay-like game, but what if you've always wanted to try a game where roleplay is a lot heavier? One where you'll be speaking in character and really getting into the head of your wizard and reacting like they would. Your DM has requested a game maybe requiring a deeper level of immersion than most of the games that you've played previously. In that case you're gonna need more about your character than just ability scores and equipment. For those of you who have never built a more in-depth character, describing the entire process could be 5-6 episodes long, easily talking about how to build a backstory, character motivation, designing plot hooks that fit with your DM's game, making connections to the DM's world, etc.

But roleplay heavy games seem to be rarer than roleplay light games so I'm not going to go as in-depth. If you're interested in more detail about this please give me some feedback. Feedback at taking20podcast.com or do a search for taking 20 podcast on the socials. Suppose you are invited to one of these heavier games. When facing down a game where you'll be roleplaying a lot, it can be daunting to design a character on a deeper level. Building them not as Desdemona the two-dimensional swashbuckler, but Desdemona, the daughter of a blacksmith in the village of Whispering Pines.

Her father had shown her a few tricks with the sword before the orc raiders came and killed most of the town, your father included. There's nothing left for her in the smoldering ruins of her home. She retrieves the flame scarred family shield and sets off to find the Grimtooth clan with a half full pack of supplies and a deep seeded hatred of orcs. That is a character you could roleplay for 20-30 sessions in a campaign and really get into them. But how do you get there? When you're trying to design a character you're staring at a completely blank page and for some of us there is little more intimidating than an empty page and all of the world to choose from. Whether you want to get ready to roleplay or even if you just want to give your

two-dimensional character a touch of depth there are a few questions you can ask about the character you're building to make them seem more real. Now, here's the challenge. When you're answering these questions, try to answer them not as you, but as your character. If I were building Desdemona when I answered these questions, I would try to think like a young woman who has lost everything. It's not her home, her family, her town. It's my home, my family, my town that will likely never recover, at least not in my lifetime. Why would I stay here with the few remaining survivors and scrabble out alive in the ashes of the past? No, no, I am angry. I am grieving, and my future of finding love

under the Harvest Moon and raising children in peace has been ripped away from me forever. The Grimtooth Clan...no, no, all orcs are going to fucking pay for what they have done to me. Get into that headspace, and now start answering some questions about your character. The first, and I think most important question when fleshing out your character is to ask, why would your character become an adventurer? Let's be honest, being an adventurer is a shitty life. Think about it, you put your life on the line

almost every single day, facing down the horrors from this plane and every other, undead, huge monsters with multiple heads, oozes, werewolves, and rust monsters, oh my! And let's not forget about the environmental dangers. Heat and cold, traps, landslides, crumbling old buildings, lava flows, unfordable rivers, remote sites, lost cities, sand storms, haunted blizzards, poison gas. And if that's not enough for you,

you also just get to sleep on the ground in the wilderness or deep underground on hard cavern floors or cobblestones in this dungeon or that. It just sounds awful. And finally, by the way, the mortality rate is extraordinarily high. The number of adventurers who live

to a ripe old age of retirement is extremely small. A lot of adventurers, hell, most of of adventurers who live to a ripe old age of retirement is extremely small. A lot of adventurers, hell most of the adventurers, will end up as a corpse in some forgotten room in some dungeon to have your loot picked over by other adventurers, or creatures, or even your flesh consumed by a gelatinous cube, or lizard folk village, or ogre clan. If the adventurer is lucky, they'll be buried by their friends, of course after the friends pick over all their loot. So to sum up, courtesy of Gimli the dwarf, your character needs that really good reason why they will become an adventurer. There are a lot of potential reasons why someone would take this

shitty shitty job and if I want to be controversial or provocative or maybe grossly oversimplify this I'll say the why of adventuring can boil down to five major categories. Duty, money, desperation, boredom, and unresolved trauma of some sort. Let's take these one by one. and unresolved trauma of some sort. Let's take these one by one. Duty. So what would be a duty or requirement to become an adventurer? They are compelled in some way to take up the sword or the holy symbol or the staff or bow or whatever and go out into the great unknown. But what could that compulsion be? Their liege lord could require it. Someone has to go to the Kobolds and rescue my daughter and it's going to be you four elite town guards. Go slay the monsters, save my Tatiana.

Or it could be a religious leader who does it. You're a paladin of Sarenrae and you're compelled by your faith to rid the world of the undead, so go, go do it. I'm gonna be at the monastery brewing beer and serving our goddess that way yeah let me know when you get back and I'm sure I can find something else for you to do so someone in power decrees that you do this and your character volunteers or is voluntold or is required to go

adventuring these are reasons a character would involuntarily become an adventurer, but they could also serve dutifully voluntarily. They volunteer for the dangerous task because someone has to do it, or to save a loved one from having to do it in their stead. See, for example, I volunteer as tribute from the Hunger Games.

Or one reason I need to use for a character soon, there's a prophecy and your character believes it's about them. And to prove it, they have to do X, whatever X happens to be, and it has something to do with the adventure. They volunteer to go through this trial, test, difficult task, adventure to prove they are the chosen one. They may be compelled to do so, or they may be volunteering to do so, or they may be volunteering

to do their duty. Another possible reason to become an adventurer is simple. Money. Greed or simple need of money. I gave a hint to today's topic online and one of my DMs, Mark, quoted Indiana Jones. Why become an adventurer? Fortune and glory, kid. Fortune and glory. If you have a dungeon master's guide or your game system's equivalent, take a look at what the average laborer makes. For example, in Pathfinder 2e, an unskilled laborer can make about one silver piece per day.

But Jeremy, aren't most PCs skilled at something? Okay, you know what? Okay, fair enough. Skilled laborers make five silver pieces per day. Even so, how much money do PCs get from the first loot that they discover? Let's do some quick Pathfinder 2e math. At level one PCs should have about 15 gold pieces worth of stuff. By second level they should have about 30 gold pieces worth of stuff. So if you do 10 encounters per

level, which is kind of high, that's one and a half gold pieces per encounter on average. That's three times what a skilled laborer makes per day for just a few rounds of terrifying death-defying combat. In Dungeons and Dragons the difference is a little more striking with unskilled laborers getting two silver pieces per day and skilled laborers getting two silver pieces per day and skilled laborers getting two gold pieces per day, but the logic still holds. Being an adventurer is dangerous, but I understand the appeal of potentially getting weeks or months of your salary for a brief foray into the ruins of some forgotten temple. Sure, there's a chance of being melted by a gelatinous cube or impaled on some long lost trap, but if you beat the odds, it's one of the fastest ways to get rich.

Another reason that a person could take up the dangerous role of adventurer is desperation. Sometimes they have no other choice but to take up the sword and go adventuring. You can tie it back to money. What if your character owes a lot of money to some very dangerous people? Maybe they took out loans from an underground crime syndicate or their business is in danger of being foreclosed on Unless they come up with hundreds of gold pieces within a few weeks There is probably no legitimate way to get that money in civilized society Outside of getting a loan from someone who could provide it to you, and that could tie into all sorts of other complications. So imagine you've lost your job or your livelihood and you still have a family

to provide for. You've tried everything else but you still have mouths to feed and no good way to do it. Another great idea for a character who's desperate is one who comes from a group that is socioeconomically disadvantaged at a certain location. For example, maybe Kobolds have recently become part of civilized society, but for whatever reason they're being forced to live in slums or favelas and have no easy method of improving their station. Maybe the Kobolds aren't eligible for education or other social support or services if they're even available where they are. Or maybe you have an elf in a primarily dwarven town or a human living with the gnomes, whatever combination makes sense in your world.

Or another way someone could be desperate is because they're on the run. They could have committed a crime, and they're on the lam, running from the law, they're a fugitive of some sort. They escaped from jail or deserted from the military or even stole something from their last adventuring group and they're being hunted for it. Another reason why someone could become an adventurer is because they are bored. As I mentioned, I tend to discuss my topics with my players and fellow gamers as I'm starting to write my episodes and I want to give all the credit to one of my gaming friends

Richard who suggested this reason. Maybe this is an extraordinarily long-lived ancestry or race who has seen it all, done it all in the civilized areas of society and they're looking for something new. Imagine being a elf 450 years old or you think another noble's quinceanera is going to blow your skirt up. Or actually, since it's an elf, it's probably a ciento quinceanera, but whatever. No, you've been to 800 fancy galas in your long life and you've seen entire nations come and go. Oh look, it's another plague. Pfft, whatever.

Been there, done that. But maybe you've never been beyond the edges of the forest, past the verdant hills of your homeland. You've studied the lost Aklo writings of the fallen serpent folk, but you've never actually seen the ruins. What if your character also has lost their purpose? You know I mentioned losing their job and losing loved ones, but they have no real reason to keep going unless they do something different in their life. They need that new, that sense of adventure. I once roleplayed an older adventurer who had lost her spouse and her kids had moved

far away and they had lives of their own. So she took up the mantle of adventurer and found purpose in taking care of the other adventurers like an extended family. The final reason I'll mention for a character to become an adventurer is because of some sort of unresolved trauma. I'm going to be honest, this has a bit of a trigger warning because I'm going to be discussing physical and emotional harm. If this is concerning for you, I would recommend that you skip ahead in the podcast about three minutes. Perhaps a character has experienced some sort of physical harm. The character is fleeing from this physical trauma whatever it is. They

could have been abused or experienced some sort of harm at the hands of another. They were a mistreated orphan, an abused child, or a spouse or lover who needs to get away. Besides physical trauma, the trauma could be emotional, whether the emotional trauma was caused intentionally or by simple happenstance and bad luck. The character could be neglected or abandoned by a loved one or organization. Now it's easy to jump to the intentional versions of those, but what if the company closed through no fault of their own or their father left because he passed away, not because he abandoned his family? A character could be in an area where they experience very strong racism or sexism or

speciesism or some other type of persecution that leaves emotional scars and they cannot stand it anymore and they have to get away from that area. And adventuring is a convenient way to make that happen. Maybe the trauma comes from a desire for vengeance. Their trauma was caused by a leader or organization and the character has decided to get their revenge. Okay, another reason. Imagine your character is the fourth child in a noble family and stands to inherit absolutely nothing. They are effectively treated as nothing by their parents and they don't want to be sent off to serve in the local church or just be known as the Countess's younger sibling.

So they become an adventurer to make their own way in the world. Finally, it could be one of the character's parents driving them towards a job or activity that the parent wanted, but the character doesn't. The parent is trying to fulfill their misguided or lost dreams through the child and the child is not interested at all in that path for their life. So they flee and become an adventurer. As you're creating backstories by asking this first question, you can start combining your ideas. Desdemona, for example, became an adventurer out of desperation because the town is destroyed and out of a desire to exact revenge on those who destroyed whispering pines.

Okay, I've talked long enough about this question. Have your character ask themselves why would they become an adventurer and it will give your character depth and make them more interesting. Second question you can ask, what lie does your character believe to be true? All of us have lies that we may have believed to be true that someone from an independent point of view may not see it the same way. It certainly could be something social

like one class or one species is superior to others or that rich people are automatically better. However, what if it's a lie that's really damaging to their psyche? They believe they're not capable of being loved or worthy of love, or that they can handle anything and everything all by themselves And don't need anyone else in their life

Maybe they feel like they're too weak or powerless to change their dreams These damaging lies can help shape your character Desdemona for example thinks that all orcs are like those of the Grimtooth clan who destroyed their home Are they? Well it kind of depends on your world, but think about how she would react to a half-orc member of the adventuring party, or even a full-blooded orc who is a polite and respected member of society. Discovering that this belief is a lie, followed by the growth of the character, as they, for lack of a better way to say it, grow as a person, can be a great role-playing moment

for your campaign. Another question you can ask about your character, what is your character's greatest fear? Giving your character a fear can add depth to the character and make them more realistic. I mean, everybody I know has a fear of some sort and your character having one can humanize them and add tension to the game. A great narrative could be how your character overcomes the fear and learns to live with it. The fear could lead to natural emotions during certain interactions that they may have. They're frightened of lizards,

but they learn to overcome it by speaking to a dragon. They have a fear of drow until they meet one who is nice and they like and they learn to overcome their fear. While role playing, you can use words, you choose the actions you take and maybe even your tone of voice to be influenced by this fear. Now, as a caution, I wouldn't make something that would be disruptive at the table, like, oh, my fighter is scared of all weapons. No, no, no.

One character I played way back in the day was a character who refused to use a weapon with a sharp edge or blade. The idea actually came from rules of the original Dungeons and Dragons where clerics were not allowed to use bladed weapons. So I roleplayed a character with that limitation by flavoring it as a phobia of blood. The reason they healed people was to stop seeing their blood. He wielded a mace, a sap, and a staff, all blunt weapons that would not draw blood when they used it. It's an example of a fear that could be role played without hampering the party.

Desdemona's greatest fear may be loss of loved ones again. It happened once, and maybe her fear is that she will lose the members of the adventuring party she's grown close to. It could manifest as a shield-focused fighter who puts herself at risk to take the damage intended for her adventuring friends. Another question that can give your character some depth is to ask what memento does your character carry to remind them of home, a loved one, or a belief? It could be something to remind them of what they've lost. For example, Cable in Deadpool 2 carries a teddy bear to remind him of his daughter, and Deadpool carries a skee-ball token to remind him of Vanessa.

The character has a picture of a lost loved one, or a locket with their picture in it. The loved one doesn't have to even be dead, sure it's entirely possible, but think about the people who went to war and they carried photos of their family or loved ones who were safe back home. Or you could go unconventional like a reminder of the past trauma they overcame. In one of my favorite movies ever, called Snatch, one of the characters was shot multiple times and had the bullets coated in gold and turned into jewelry and tooth ornamentation. The memento could also be a promise, like a payment

note or marriage promise, like a favor or a ring? What if they wear it or carry it to remind them of their beliefs and promises? Desdemona carries her family's kite shield. She keeps it polished and well maintained, even enhancing its abilities when the opportunity presents itself, paying to have it enchanted, reinforced, and resistant to the damage with magical runes engraved along the edge. The straps are reinforced and on the back etched into the firm but supple leather are the names of the people of Whispering Pines who would not see another sunrise after that fateful night. Having a memento can be a great role-playing tool.

They can spark role-playing conversations or even represent the loss of that belief when they discard the memento if appropriate. The last question that you could ask about your character is what foibles or habits do they have? The habit could be a way they eat or walk, speech affectations, other things that would be unique to your character. They always sleep on the floor even when beds are available because they feel safer there. They tend to withdraw into themselves when scared or angry. When walking along, they're always practicing spells or sword thrusts. Giving your character a tick or a habit will help them stand out and help you roleplay that character. Desdemona, for example, likes to pick her teeth

with a dagger after a meal. She knows it's uncouth, but so is shoving a sword elbow deep into that grim-toothed clan lieutenant a few nights ago. Being genteel and polite, died that night along with her father. No matter what questions you ask during character creation, the final question you need to think about before finishing your character is to ask yourself, how do the answers to these questions affect how your character sees the world or how you roleplay them? If it's something that they would never mention or would never come up in the game, then pick something else. If your character

would never mention it or never would ever know it or see it, then it's not really influencing the game all that much and you might want to consider a different choice. In the Desdemona example, her hatred of orcs would certainly manifest in a number of ways. Ferocity when she fights them, thinly veiled bigotry when having to socially interact with them, a lack of trust of half-orcs. All of these are ways that you could roleplay her tragic past in a way that gives her depth and makes her a more interesting character. Giving your character depth can be as easy as asking your character a few questions, like why do they want to be an adventurer, what lies do they believe, what fears and

foibles do they have. By getting into your character's headspace and giving your character's answers to even one or two questions, you can make the character feel more real, give yourself a foundation for speaking and acting as that character, and you do these things I'd be willing to bet that you and your players would have fun doing it. Hey do you have any topic ideas for me? I'd love to hear them. Reach out to me on Facebook, Instagram or Blue Sky. Search for Taking20podcast on any of those. In two weeks I'm going to give a review of the new Paizo book the the NPC core, and give

you some tips for designing and running those big important NPCs for your campaign. But before I go, I want to thank this week's sponsor, Clams. I took my pet Clam to the gym, but he won't use any of the weight machines. I guess he has a pulled muscle. This has been episode 249, questions to give your character some depth. a pulled muscle.