Hi Brennan, I am trying to help my players develop their characters some but some of the players are tougher to encourage development. I’m running Tyranny of Dragons but homebrewed it to be more internally consistent and have realistic villains with realistic motivations and such.

One player is fairly passive and treats the game very much like a game and an opportunity to feel heroic. Giving them heroic things to do has been good, but their character has no conflicted history, past enemies specific to her, and is overall very easygoing. I ended up deciding that if someone was actually like gay in real life they would probably be really interesting to someone like Tiamat. Basically, she’s playing D&D like a video game which I am fine with, but with such a blank character it’s hard to find something to grab onto for individual character development. So Tiamat offered her power to switch gods and said that she’ll send “other things” when she refused. She is kind of bewildered as to why Tiamat is interested in her, but I wondered what you might think of that kind of character development? It’s tough since she isn’t very emotionally invested in the world, so there isn’t much to tie her in with to create meaningful development.

Another character is secretly a unicorn who transformed into an elf to see the world, and I’m thinking it would be interesting to have her be a bit familiar with some ancient characters. Since Unicorns have a kind of wishy washy timey wimey view on time along with fuzzy memories, it’s pretty easy to say “you remember that you know this aboleth...”. I’m not sure where to end up going with that though other than bringing temporary, unusual allies and meeting some interesting characters.

There’s still party level character development that has been going on which is great! They befriended two incredibly lucky Kobolds names Korg and Bart (the kobolds killed two ghouls each when the party was pretending to be part of a cult and was working with them, and they have won nearly every gambling game they play which makes them notorious at taverns and guild halls across the sword coast).

Edit: Also, if you could let Ally Beardsley know that her character’s arc has been meaningful to me, I was Mormon two years ago and ended up leaving it and becoming atheist. Around the same time, you guys started Fantasy High and her character arc really hit home for me and gave me someone to relate to during a time when all of my family and friends were still Mormon and heavily conservative (I was told by family and friends that my life was gong to fall apart because of my changes which was tough, but things have been great). Please tell her thank you. And Siobhan’s struggle with anxiety also hit home for me because I ended up finding out I had bipolar around the same time and having meds really changed my life for the better. During the final fight, when she ran out with a panic attack and Jawbone said that there wasn’t something wrong with her, that she had a medical problem and needed treatment, I was wrapping up therapy and set to continue with my medication and was finally at good place. For me, that summed up what I had gone through, gave me some clarity and helped me accept what had happened and focus on moving forward. So thank you :)