Generally I’ll have an idea of classes or builds I’m interested in playing, not necessarily just one specific one, then I’ll possibly have a few ideas for story stuff surrounding that. As an example, two story-side ideas I had in my head were a slime man or playing just a normal farmer folk hero. For class I was waffling between monk, paladin, and warlock. My first character was a half orc paladin and I wanted to try that again so I decided to go with that and use the farner idea. They are an Oath of the Ancients paladin.

So for me it is sort of a little of both.

It depends though, because a previous character I 100% wanted to be an artificer and began with that.

I usually start with a very broad flavour concept, then figure out how to do it in mechanics, and use that to flesh out the details of the flavour.

There have been times when I’ve come up with a very detailed flavour first and then gone for mechanics later.

The only time I start with mechanics is with one-shots or other times I don’t particularly care about the character themselves.