How Did Your RPG Character Learn Their Skills?

March 11, 2022

Salutations, nerds! Your character sheet has a list of things you can do and after you’ve been playing your character for a while you have a pretty good idea of the skills they’re good at and the ones you really don’t want the Game Master to ask for checks. Something that might never come up at the table but will absolutely inform getting into your character’s head space and roleplaying is how you learned those skills in the first place.

Those Who Taught You

One of the great things that comes up from considering where your RPG character learned their skills is it creates background NPCs. Most people don’t figure out how to pick a lock just by tinkering with it for example. Who gave you your first lockpicks and showed you how to use them? Was it the kindly old man at the thieves’ guild whose pickpocketing days ended when he started getting the shakes? An older sibling? Did you learn by watching a mean older kid so you could break into his lockbox and take back all the lunch money he’d been bullying out of everyone else?

Maybe you studied Arcana under a crackpot wizard who was dismissed from his wizard’s tower. Or maybe you were expelled from wizarding school yourself. There are a dozen ways to generate both friends and enemies from looking at the skills on your sheet but also keep in mind you really could be self taught. Although not many people do it some do. Did you learn from a book? Or was it trial and error until you finally got it down right?

A self-taught character says something about their methods and the intelligence and patience they have to keep sorting through it until they get it right. This would be the kind of character who sits there and listens to people speak another language until they start to piece it together.

Early Exploits

Think about the first couple of times you used your skill and at least one time you failed at the attempt. Maybe you were trying to roll a landing jumping off a roof and ended up breaking your leg or thought you knew something about a certain religion and made a comment to someone who was passing by who got extremely offended by your candor. There was a lesson this failure taught you and I’m willing to bet you’re still carrying it with you today.

What about your first success? The first time you walked up to a guard and persuaded him into letting you into somewhere you weren’t supposed to be or the first meal you cooked that you could see from the surprised looks on your family’s faces they actually liked could be the impetus for striving to improve your skill.

This counts for the skills you’re terrible at as well. What about times you’ve had encounters with those before? Maybe you gave up on being athletic forever after you had to race one of the other students in your astronomy class to get your version of what happened to your professor first and lost and there were terrible consequences!

How to Use This Information

The obvious answer is when your party sits down to roleplay you’ll have a story to reach for but this isn’t the only application this exercise has.

If you think about your own past I’m sure you can think of several instances of your history shaping your current choices. You know sitting down and asking, “Hey baby, what’s your sign?” doesn’t actually get you a date so you maybe opt not to do this for example.

It’s the same with your character. The point is to get into their head so when you get to the part of the dungeon where you have a choice of whether to jump down like a showboat or use the rope you might consider using the rope even though your character tries to be flashy because of the one time you broke your leg.

Little inconsistencies are where character depth comes from and who knows — someone might even ask you about it. As always let me know if you got anything good out of this in the comments below and of course, stay nerdy!

*Featured image — Fluff like your 5E D&D character backstory is the game too. [Image courtesy Wizards of the Coast]