As happens from time to time, as I alternate between running Dungeons & Dragons games as the Dungeon Master and experiencing the story as a player, I have lately been itching to switch sides. After DMing two campaigns simultaneously for a few months, I want to get back behind the controls of a PC. I find myself dreaming up way that my character might get herself into trouble and back out again. But this musing scarcely escapes fantasy (in more ways than the obvious), even once I’ve returned with her to the table, because though I might have this image or concept of my character, they are only revealed or explored through the situations she ends up in, over which I have little control.

One of the very first things I learned in a formal way about storytelling came from my seventh grade English and History teacher, who was (perhaps not by coincidence) the second person to DM for me, igniting the RPG journey that I’m still on now. That teacher, Rob, set out the structure of a story as a series of conflicts—he called them “gaps”—keeping the protagonist from what they want—I think he called them “goals,” which I’m going to stick with if only because it alliterates nicely with “gaps.” This is pretty obvious, really, but these revelations of the obvious always seem to stick with me, especially when I’m twelve and impressionable and thirsting for knowledge. Even though it was a story structure meant for the consumption of middle school students, it holds up well, especially when he included the wrinkle that these gaps can frequently reveal, both to the audience and to the protagonist, a character’s secret goal. It’s through the goals and gaps that we learn about the characters of a story, both what they want and what they’re willing to do (or not) to get it.

Dungeons & Dragons fundamentally, troublingly divorces the crafting of a character from the creation of the conflicts that the character face by putting the former in the hands of the player and the latter in the hands of the DM. At best, this forces greater collaborative storytelling, but at worst it leads to characters fleshed out fully in one aspect of their psyche that never sees the light of day. By way of a simple illustration, if your character is intensely afraid of butterflies, but no butterflies ever show up in the campaign, then that detail is pretty well lost. Or if your character loves romance, but your adventure involves scarce social interaction with viable targets of affection, you’ll never get to explore or display that. And if all your character wants, more than anything else in the world, is to become the next great intellect of his time, what does that matter when there’s a dragon destroying the town? You can get find places for these traits in your games regardless, but sometimes you’ll really have to shoehorn them in for anyone but yourself to know that they exist at all, and chances are they won’t change much the way you play your character. It’s a little bit of a pet peeve of mine when players push the bounds of plausibility and narrative flow to remind us yet again how much their character loves/hates this thing or the other that has no bearing on the action at hand.

I find two solutions to this problem. The first, which I already try my best to practice, is to collaborate with the other side of the screen during character creation and story development so that they feed each other. During character creation, this means giving the character roots in the world and in the adventure on which she’s about to embark. The 5th Edition character background framework, while mechanically mostly inconsequential, serves as a decent starting point for this conversation. During story development, the DM needs to pay attention to where the players want to take their characters, and likewise the onus is on the players to (constructively) communicate their wishes with the DM. Players should also, as I’ve ranted many times, be flexible with their characters enough that they can slip into the adventure without too much friction.

The second solution, which I’ve not yet tried, is to focus more of the character development process on answering adventure-centered questions. I’m not yet sure how this looks, but perhaps it starts with prompts like these:

• What would your character fight for?
• What would your character die for?
• What scares your character?
• How does your character prefer to resolve conflicts?
• How does your character react when being attacked?

Some (maybe most) of these types of questions are typically answered at least partially by the character’s mechanics and the player’s sense of self-preservation. A sorcerer, for example, probably won’t react to being attacked by pulling out his greatsword. But atypical answers, which might make your character less effective when acted on, might lead to much more interesting and active character traits, and set your character apart, if standing apart is something you want to do.

As I get ready to return to my character with my friend Erik as the DM, I’ll try asking and answering some of these questions for my character, perhaps revising or reinventing her along the way. I’ll have to see how these new pieces of my character feel, especially compared with my usual character-building features.