When a group starts a new campaign together, one of the players’ first tasks is to create characters.

Dungeons & Dragons is a team game. It requires the players to work together to overcome the challenges posed by the Dungeon Master. If you have a group that is lacking core skills, or whose abilities don’t fit into the context of the campaign, your experiences may be less than ideal.

This is especially true if you’re playing a published adventure, either one by Wizards of the Coast or one from another publisher. If your DM is making up the challenges themselves, then they can adapt them for the capabilities of the players. If you’re in a published adventure, the encounters are written for an average party. The more your group deviates from the average, the more challenging you can find it.

However, even if your DM writes the material themselves, having a party made of, for example, only rogues can mean that large swathes of potential challenges are unusable – or would cause your party to fail.

So, when creating characters for a new campaign, it’s a very, very good idea to talk to the DM and talk to the other players about what the game is going to be, and what’s going to be needed for it. We often call this process a “Session 0”: the time when you – as a group – work out what you’ll be playing.

You’ll be playing together for weeks, months or years! Talk to people before you get started!

The simplest things to arrange is party balance. In general, I look for the following party members – although a single character can fulfil more than one role:

• Two characters who can engage in melee and protect the other party members
• A character that can heal
• A character with utility magic or abilities for solving problems (traps, puzzles, other non-combat challenges)
• A character that can make area attacks
• A character with a good Strength score (preferably two).
• A character with a good Charisma score

The first and second requirements are the most essential for most published campaign play. At some point, the party will get into melee, and without melee specialists, wizards, bards and archers tend to go down quickly. It’s also true that, without someone who can heal a character that is reduced to 0 hit points in combat, then combats will be harder to win; the shape of the game (unfortunately) requires that at present.

The next role is so you can overcome challenges that don’t have standard solutions. There are times when having a dispel magic, being able to pick a lock, or cast knock or shape change into something that can climb sheer walls can make all the difference. Rogues, Wizards, Bards, and Clerics tend to be best in these roles.

Having someone who can make area attacks (like fireball) makes a lot of combats work better. Many classes are very good at doing a large amount of damage to a single foe, with warlocks and rogues being good examples of those. Having an area attack helps when there are foes that have few hit points, but there are too many foes to take down them all individually. You can survive without having someone who can cast such spells, but it’s harder.

I’ve seen many characters sacrifice their Strength scores in place of Dexterity. It’s is a personal bugbear of mine – there are times you need to lift things out of the way! Feel free to ignore this if you like, but if you end up playing an adventure with a rock that requires two characters with a combined strength of 24 to move (and you can’t move it), see if I wrote it!

The last is because, in this day and age, we’ve discovered its occasionally useful to talk to the other characters and monsters we meet. (This has, in fact, always been the case, but when you’re young you don’t always realise that!)

Now, that’s the mechanical basics of a group. However, that isn’t the only thing to consider. What’s the theme of the campaign? What types of characters would function best in it? This is something to talk to the DM about.

I’ve just had someone suggest they want to play an archaeologist (it’s a background from Tomb of Annihilation) in Ghosts of Saltmarsh. It’s a great background, but how does it fit into the activities the characters will be performing in the Saltmarsh campaign? There’s no point in the main adventures that you’re exploring old ruins and discovering ancient secrets. It makes sense to be an archaeologist in Chult, but an expectation that it’ll be useful in Saltmarsh is unlikely to be true. This is as opposed to being a sailor, a criminal or folk hero, which are backgrounds that directly link into the themes of that campaign.

Some campaigns work best if you’re all peasants. Others work better if you’re all nobles. Your choice of race and background are probably more tied into the style of the campaign than you think. Some games don’t care about these things but check with your DM and the other players. How the characters work together and interact with the world is something to consider before you begin.

The last thing to consider, but one of the most important, is how you interact with the other members of the party. When you choose personality traits, it helps to do that together. Here’s the thing: Most of the role-playing you’ll do in the game is with the other players, not the characters the DM controls. You want personality traits that promote interaction, but not so much that they make the game unpleasant. Playing someone that never follows orders may sound fun, but some players won’t appreciate it at all. Don’t look for your own fun at the expense of others!

Once you do start the campaign, it’s likely that you’ll refine your choices over the first few sessions as you discover exactly how you work together. I allow players to change their characters early on. (In D&D Adventurers League games, you can do so for the first four levels). However, getting together and discussing what you want to play first can help make the campaign run more smoothly and enhance the experience for the participants!