My favorite D&D character idea generators

My favorite character I’ve made is for an upcoming campaign and the character is a caveman who was considered a warrior among his tribe, who crafted weapons from the creatures he’s killed. Then the first Tarrasque showed up and killed most of his tribe and family, so in a final battle between the remaining warriors of his tribe and him, and the Tarrasque, a mysterious light washed over him bringing him to the present. Now he’s lost in a familiar but different world from the one he knew, also his name is Oog. I got the name and caveman concept from a character in my tech physics professor’s textbook from back in college named OOG the caveman😅.

I am so about to steal this for skyrim

Nervous Artificial Spy Bean … Fresh Cut Grass is that you? LOL

1. Back in the mists of prehistory (the mid-aughts), 3.5 Eberron had a "warforged scout" race (can't remember which book it was in offhand) that was basically a halfling-sized warforged. Also, if her serial number starts with "BN," her friends might address her as "Bean."
2. The "f***" word is not profanity, it's obscenity. "G*dd*mn" is profanity.
3. A haberdasher doesn't make hats, he sells men's fashion accessories. A milliner makes hats.

im the first kind of person tbh i have like 15 characters ready at any moment some are really in depth to the point when i accidently made a settings to some that are just random concept like "a knowledge cleric that worship chatgpt". all i have on him is: he is actually stupid, he is a monster race like goblin, and he somehow got a phone with infinite internet and battery and chatgpt open on it

I do not need a generator, I have already made more characters than I will ever get the chance to play

Harbardasher?

Triumphant fluffy traveler queen sounds like a moth-kin who amassed a gathering of merchants with her and now leads an entire caravan of a trading hub that acts like a mobile village or town

Try Harnlore or Cavalry and Sorcery.

Jhank having an unusual scale color could actually be a side effect of the Underdark. Lizardfolk get the pigment in their scales from the material the egg was set amongst so for example if a lizardfolk egg was set in autumn leaves you would end up with a lizardfolk that looks like autumn leaves (as far as colors go). So in the Underdark lots of mushrooms including possibly bioluminescent ones which could result in bluey/green glowing scales.

also, lizardfolk shun intelligence meaning Jhank would be hated by her tribe for being smart enough to understand majicks.

Look up Gammaworld, it’s from the 3.5e era of D&D, and your character is literally determined by the roll of the dice. The concept is you live in Gammaworld, a planet that remains in the spot where all multiverses collided. You exist as two types, as rolled on a table using 2d20. As you level, you unlock more inherent abilities based on your types. For example, my first character (who died in the first combat) was a Felinoid Gravity Controller, which meant I was immune to ALL fall damage (too bad it was getting headshotted into a radioactive pit that killed him. The one that lasted longest was Wasabi, my Pyrokinetic Mind Coercer. By the end of the campaign, I was able to fly anywhere a la Rocketeer, and I had a dragon’s breath weapon that wrecked shop.

I know this is an older video, but I wanted to say. As someone who kinda helped guide me through my beginner phase of dnd when I didn’t know anything but had to wait a week till I learned more hands on wise, thank you. I saw those turquoise pale-looking dice you said were your first at a local dnd shop and picked them up as a way to be like “hey look! Content”😂

A small warforged would be an auto gnome from spelljammer.

Battle Tech's life path system is really fun to work with

Ginny: "If you participated in textbased roleplay in the 2000s"
Me, born in 2005 and who loves it to this day: I am not that old

I want to create a Goblin Bladesinger. With their connection to the Feywild, I am trying to come up with a compelling back story wherein he recieves training from perhaps a Eladrin.. Any thoughts on how to make the connection or do I have to take a level of Warlock?

d0n1 s33 m3 warforged spy

Currently torn between characters for my next campaign. I'm a forever DM who is finally getting to play, but the catch is my daughter is DMing her first game, so I don't want to play anything too broken. I've got some ideas: the haunted plague doctor wizard; the tiefling urchin whose life the Elf Ranger in the group saved once and he followed her around for years and years, often out of sight as she clearly didn't want to be followed, sometimes she didn't see him for months at a time, during his time following her he taught himself to fight by watching her, and then he stumbled upon a mysterious sword she had overlooked when looting the bodies of some thugs, and it spoke to him (hexblade), now he's more powerful and ready to pay back his life debt; the Dwarf adventurer who keeps singing and playing the bagpipes, annoying the Elf ("what are you, a Bard?" "Maybe i am" "well i don't feel very inspired." "Ya would if ye were a dwarf! Now shut it!") (He's not actually a Bard, he just like annoying the elf); halfling chef (great old one warlock); gregarious Irish halfling arcane trickster rogue; plus there's a few very cocky Bard concepts.

I took "Triumphant Fluffy Traveller Queen" and made a Firbolg Horizon Walker.

definitely that first type of person lol. its just so fun to make characters i cant stop. even though im never gonna get to use half of them possibly 😅

Crazy the first thing it Gave me was a wizard lizard too.

Probably my favorite character I've ever played had perhaps one of the objectively least interesting backstories I've ever come up with. He was just some guy who grew up in a good home, and he just decided to be an adventurer to make his parents proud. In a TTRPG fully of tragic, deep, and/or dark backstories, he was so freakin fun to play.

Morkborg

Character generator for this game is definitely worth checking out.

I love how your hair matches your shirt.

brilliant. absolutely brilliant :D

I tried using a character quirk generator and it gave me "your character is prone to eating"
A truly unique trait 😂😂😂

go play city of mist its rolply with normal pipol in city with lagendry storyis

I love the thought of a tiefling bard haberdasher! I'd make her a kind of Mad Hatter character, whose hat changes with the spells she casts, and uses it as a casting focus. That'd be an absolute blast!

A newer really good one is Lore Genie! You put in a prompt for it, and it will run into further detail with it, along with generating a picture for the character (It only does humans, so it’s not always accurate, but still cool!

in my head the warforge spy had a built in coffee maker and that would be his special attack

i have a TTRPG character i’ve been workshopping for ages now who started from a random word generator (if you’ve ever heard of anime campaign/epithet erased, i was doing the character generation for that lol). i got the word “equinox” and spent days trying to think of how i’d build a power set around that, but once i figured it out, i couldn’t stop writing about her !! i took the root meaning of the word - “equal night” - and decided to give her a “day mode” where she mostly uses AoE healing/attacks, and a “night mode” where she’s lost a lot of health and has to prioritize which individual targets need the most healing or should be taken down first. when i tried to convert her into a more D&D-specific character, i chose what species she was based on this “equal night” concept as well (she’s Fey’ri - half sun elf, half demon). she’s such a fucked up little beast and i love her and i so desperately want to play a campaign with her !! sometimes all you need is the smallest of prompts to inspire something wonderful :)
thank u for listening to my TED talk, i have been thinking about this character nonstop lately and will take any opportunity to ramble lmao

"Well... She's an elf, I think" - Me, every time

Old school character (or any item, town, history, background or anything) generator: Roget's Thesaurus divides all English words into 1000 (1024 in editions printed after 1962) concept categories. Roll d1000 (percentile dice plus another d10 for the hundreds place with 000=1000), look up the result and note that keyword. Use one keyword for a simple theme or connection, two for a purpose or history, and three for a character concept. If the keyword doesn't tell you enough, roll d10 again to hone in on one-tenth of the words in the category. Roll again to get even more refined. With old-fashioned, uncommon, and colorful entries, you're sure to find something evoking your imagination and interest.

Thinking of a cool character creation, I have two games on my mind, one already mentioned in comments earlier (Apocalypse, and all the PbtA games), and the other one is a small french indie game, that I can't remember the name of. The system of the game was broken, and despite some very nice moments, we got frustrated, so we only played it once. But the character creation was very cool ! The players are playing five sisters, daughters of the Goddess Queen, who went missing in a magical labyrinth. Each princess is a lesser goddess, there's Creation, Blade, Flame, Love and Soul. There's no DM in the game, but the sixth player is playing Malice, an entity who is imprisoned in the labyrinth and is trying to harm the characters. Players work together to decide what kind of universe they're in, what's their mising mother like as a person, what is their princess like, what kind of relationships they have, who is Malice and why is she in prison, and so on. There's a list of questions they answer to build the world, family and characters. After that, players take turns to play by scenes, starting by "you open the door to the next room of the labyrinth...", and the lead player decides what it looks like and what's happening. It was really nice to see all the creative ideas my friends had, but as the adversary is a player too, and there's no mechanics to see if an action fails, it was awkward to decide who wins and who loses. We ended up playing that setting with homemade rules as a one-shot game and this time it was fun :)

The Tiefling Haberdasher Bard gave me a super cool idea, make It so when giving inspiration they give the creature they are inspiring a cool hat, or a complement for a hat

I find them great for tapping into your creativity, I start there and start making changes that suit the character I have in mind, and partway through I'll get a new idea and completely start over 😁 helps get over that block.

Another good starting point is something I've learnt through creative writing, taking aspects from tour favourite books/TV shows/movies etc. And mix them together to create something new. My current character is loosely based off of Disney's Tangled (taken from her village by a mage, experimented on and kept locked in a tower, personality is curious and excited by the world and all the new experiences once she escaped), and her Echo Knight abilities are inspired by Peter Pan losing his shadow. And after escaping she lived as an orphan in a city for a while. You could take a character from one book, backstory from another, with a few other bits and pieces added in to make it your own :)

"Nervous Artificial Spy Bean" sounds pretty sus tbh, hit the button before somebody gets shanked in Electrical

The Cyberpunk RED rulebook has a multiple page long flow chart of tables you can roll on to get a completely random character with a completely random backstory, upbringing, skills, social ties, relationships, style, appearance, etc. It was a lot of fun stringing it all together and helps make characters that aren't so 1 dimensional. Of course sometimes you go back and manually change an answer at the end because it conflicts too much, but usually it makes a complex interesting character

Gonna write a Call of Cthulhu campaign in which all the characters have the same degree/job as the players

I think there should be a third type:
Has a plethera of character concepts and ideas zooming around in their head but none of them are fleshed out enough to be playable

Totally not me though, neeever xD

"how dAAAre you!"

Loving the Mormon parody!

You have probably heard of this, but the Fate Core RPG has a really cool collaborative setting- and character-building process, where the players build setting and characters together and relate them to each other.

There's also a worksheet/booklet called Spark In Fate - free on DriveThruRPG - that walks you through building your Fate Core game step by step, but you could really use it with any system. It's great for a Session 0.

I tried the ridiculously awesome character idea generator, and I got “grumpy cunning spy grandpa”… I’m intrigued, 11/10 recommended

Central Casting

I tried all three and accidentally got results from all three that can be one single character. XD

It's really strange but my family since about 2017 or so has only been playing tabletops in which the DM creates like twice the numbers of sheets than players and everyone can either pick one from the pile that they like or have one randomly assigned. It actually started out that my brother was DMing some particularly deadly campaigns in Call of Cthulu and Starfinder so we just wanted characters that could be easily replaced if necessary, but even now that I'm starting to DM the new tradition has kinda stuck and I made all the player characters for a Curse of Strahd campaign and threw in a bunch of fun homebrew to connect those characters to things happening inside of Barovia so its like a fun surprise when the Lost Vistani Rogue pc meets his estranged mother inside Barovia as an NPC type stuff.

How I made all the characters was mostly flipping through the campaign and the Van Richtens Guide t Ravenloft book and finding interesting backgrounds and then connecting them to a class then a race. So there was a race-equivalent thing of a hexblood and i assigned that to a background i made which inspired the rest of the character. Or the College of Spirits Bard subclass.

Ginny pretty much wondered if you could post links to create the characters

I'm late...but I hope you are playing Jhank. :3 ❤🌹

Proposal for tiefling bard to be nicknamed Jaunty