Over the past few months, I discussed the steps of building a character. But let’s actually do one using the new online Character Builder available to DDI subscribers on the Wizards of the Coast website. For this article, I’ll build a minotaur druid named Daisy.

So, just who is Daisy? No one knows where she comes from but elves discovered her alone, in the woods, as an infant. Rather than let nature take its course, the elves adopted the baby and raised her. She has a natural affinity to nature and loves to learn new stories.

Select Class
Now that we know a little about her, how do we bring her to life? First, let’s start up the character builder and choose build “custom” character. We need to pick our campaign setting, in this case, D&D Home Campaign. Next, choose the controller play style or all styles so we can pick the druid class which we’ll do on the next screen. Once we choose our class, we get the build options available. She grew up feeling very protective of her elven friends, a feeling that continues to this day. So we’ll pick the guardian build for her and the primal guardian aspect.

Select Race and Details

After selecting class, we pick our race. Easy choice there. Minotaur it is. Then we enter some basic information about our character: name, age, alignment, etc. We don’t have to choose one, but let’s give her a deity. Avandra sounds like a good pick for her. Then we’re onto background choices. Let’s give her the “Birth among another race” background with the specific bonus of elf.

Assign Abiliities
Next, ability scores. To be honest, I often just pick one of the standard arrays, in this case the top one (16, 14,14,11,10, 10) because I like my characters to be more general than specialized. The program automatically assigns the scores for us, but we can change them. I’ll also use her racial adjustment to bump up her wisdom, in part because I find her just to be a wise character, but also because it will help her attacks. Yeah, I can’t help but consider making a character that is at least somewhat optimal. Constitution is a good choice too since it would help with her AC due to the primal guardian aspect. As we level, we’ll have other opportunities to raise that stat.

Train Skills
Now that we have the basic stats for the character, we get to the interesting stuff. First up are skills. What is she good at? She’s pretty good at spotting things, so perception gets trained. Insight would be a good choice here too. She also has the healing touch. For the third one, I decided to go a little crazy and chose history. I’m sure she heard a lot of stories growing up from the elves which gives her some knowledge of the world.

Select Powers
With abilities assigned and skills trained, it’s time to pick her powers. First, let’s pick her beast power. Since she’s a minotaur, she has an affinity towards charging. So we choose the Pounce power. I might re-flavor it a bit given her race, but it still works. In addition, I imagine her as someone who is well attuned with nature. Perhaps that’s why she was able to survive in the woods before the elves found her. Thorn Whip sounds like an awesome power for her to have. I also like the Swarming Locusts power although I’d ask my DM if I could re-skin it as swarming birds, something akin to Snow White’s ability to call small woodland creatures to her. Keeping with the summoning theme, I’ll choose Twisting Vines and Earth Roots as my encounter and daily powers respectively.

Select Feats
Finally, time to pick feats. I’ll admit it’s a bit of meta-gaming, but I know I can’t resist putting my character in the middle of the action. So the extra five hit points from Toughness would be nice.

Get Equipment
Time to add some equipment. Since we don’t have a particular campaign in mind, we’ll keep this pretty light. I can’t imagine her with anything other than a staff implement so that gets added. And she could use some hide armor so let’s add that along with an adventurer’s kit. Just remember to equip them.

Manage Character
This page contains the additional information about you and your character, current XP total, adventuring party name, and your RPGA number. If we need to level your character in the future, we do that from this page. For now, we’ll just save our character and we’re done. To get a printable character sheet, just click on the character sheet button in the upper right.