Build a Character Sheet for Your Real Life

Hello Adventurer,

Before you start most role-playing games, you get to create your character. In D&D, you pick your name, your race or species, your class, your background, and your stats. (Plus a variety of other things that I am omitting from this exercise.) Then the journey begins.

So this is a simplified version of my character sheet:

Name: Sierra Grandy.

Sierra Grandy, Esq., if I’m feeling fancy.

Species/Race: homo sapien. Human. Done and done. (D&D 5.5e - 2024 revised rules - renamed “race” to “species,” I don’t really have an opinion on which one I actually prefer, though, so here I am using both.)

According to D&D Beyond, class is “the primary definition of what your character can do. It’s more than a profession; it’s your character’s calling.”

This is where it gets complicated. I’m a professional public speaker. A disability advocate. A content creator (skill in progress). An attorney. And I’m building Questify Your Life into my own storytelling studio and creative guild.

So what is that if I had to pick a D&D class?

I’d say I’m a Wizard-Bard multiclass. Logical whimsy, basically.

Wizard for the heavy academic history and the written advocacy work. Bard for the storytelling, the public speaking, the goofy side quests.

D&D Beyond puts it this way: “Every story has a beginning. Your character’s background reveals where you came from, how you became an adventurer, and your place in the world.”

D&D backgrounds have labels like noble, entertainer, acolyte, folk hero, etc. So if I were to create a label, it would be something like: She’s Been Through It. But if I am going with something that already exists within D&D, I suppose Folk Hero might work.

I share my backstory openly; it’s a tool I use for perspective-shifting and education, but it can be heavy, so here are the highlights, bullet-pointed to save time.

• I grew up with a serious mental health condition, life-threatening, hospitalized many times. Therapies. Medications. Residential treatment. Electroconvulsive therapy (modern-day shock therapy). A year of my memory, gone, because of that treatment. It took many years before I could start my mental health recovery journey.

• I also live with a variety of chronic pain conditions.

• I attended four different undergraduate programs, dropped out of two, before finally finishing my psychology degree with an economics minor at the fourth.

• I was diagnosed with ADHD and autism in law school. I started identifying as neurodivergent before the formal diagnosis.

• Being openly disabled and neurodivergent changed how I move through the world entirely. It’s why I built the Questify Your Life system, and why I give so much of my time to advocacy and pro bono work.

There’s a lot more to the backstory. But that’s a different article for a different day.

Overall though, I do want to take this moment to give a reminder: we each get to determine when our backstory ends and our journey begins.

In most RPGs, after you pick your class, you assign stats: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, and so on. I think knowing your values matters more in the real world, so that’s what I’m analyzing instead.

If you’ve never done a values quest, adding language/words to your own values, you can find some unoptimized but useful directions in my first Substack article.

For what it’s worth, in order from best to worst, my D&D stats would be Intelligence, Wisdom, Charisma, Dexterity, Constitution, Strength.

My skills and proficiencies mostly trace back to my values, which I identified years ago as Courage, Contribution, and Curiosity.

We all have many many skills, but I think an example is in order. So I will analyze my skill in communication, specifically storytelling, which sits at intermediate-to-advanced.

I’ve been a professional public speaker for about two years now. Here’s how that connects:

Courage: It takes courage to share vulnerable parts of my backstory with strangers (especially other lawyers) as a way to connect with them and open the door to longer lasting change lined with more practical tips and strategies.

Contribution: I use storytelling to add to bigger conversations on mental health recovery, disability, and neurodiversity, drawing on my lived experience across several leadership and council roles to support other advocates and educate more broadly.

Curiosity: I’m always learning, growing, exploring. I know enough to know I know very little. I also know how to go learn what I need to know.

There are a lot more skills where that came from, but I think that’s enough to illustrate the point.

That’s my character. At least, a simplified version of it.

Next comes the quests, the adventure out into our open world.

But first, a quick zoom-out on why I think it’s useful to frame life like a quest or a game.

The basic idea: life is already a journey. We already have goals, obstacles, resources, skill trees, side quests, allies, main goals, and more, so why not use a flexible, fun structure for incentivizing slow and sustainable productivity by turning goals into quests.

I built this system for myself first, back when I was starting my recovery journey, reframing the wellbeing tools I needed to stay well into something that could also help me build a life I actually liked. Sometimes that looked like daily wellbeing quests. Sometimes it was a Tetris board in my bullet journal that helped me build momentum (I never did finish that board).

It’s also about giving myself permission to fail a quest without failing as a person. In D&D, rolling a Nat 1 means a critical failure, the worst outcome on the dice. And with that failure, you take it and fold it into the plot, because every unlucky roll moves the story forward, and none of us actually know where the story is going. That’s part of the fun.

I’m on a lot of quests right now. One obstacle I keep battling is my own ambition. But I’m making progress, I have incredible allies and connections in my life, and I’m grateful I never rage-quit my game.

PS, typical character creation covers more than we got to here, but I hope this gives you enough of a starting point to think about what your own character looks like.

Happy adventuring,
Sierra

If you’d prefer to watch this as a video, please watch my Youtube video!

Please note that I am aware of the sound issues/quality. This was posted as a - just stop overthinking it and get it published so you can move on to your next quest - sort of thing.