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Official Site: Rockstar Games

The three main playable characters in Grand Theft Auto V are , a retired bank robber who lives with his dysfunctional family on the proceeds of his former life; , a gang member who is working as a repo man at the start of the game for an unscrupulous Armenian car dealership; and Trevor Philips, Michael's former partner-in-crime, who lives alone in a trailer in the desert town of Sandy Shores, where his reckless and psychotic behaviours are fuelled by substance abuse. The three acquaintances are drawn into Los Santos' criminal underworld "in the pursuit of the almighty American dollar". According to Houser, each of the protagonists is unlike any primary character that has appeared in a Grand Theft Auto title to date: Michael represents a protagonist who "won" in life, and is now trying to readjust to a normal one after his story has come to an end; Trevor is a supporting psychopathic, bloodthirsty character recast as a central protagonist; and Franklin is someone who has had no real exposure to a life of crime until the events of the game, and his attempts to avoid such a life end up launching him right into the heart of it.

Grand Theft Auto V was envisioned to exceed the core mechanics of the Grand Theft Auto series by giving players three protagonists to switch between. The team's main motivation for including three protagonists was for Grand Theft Auto V to innovate game storytelling and to prevent the series from feeling stale by not evolving the core structure of the gameplay. The game's co-writer, Dan Houser said, "We didn't want to do the same thing over again". The concept of having three interconnected protagonists was devised during the development of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004), but the team felt they did not have the technical capabilities to realise it. The game's art director, Aaron Garbut said, "It didn't work from a tech point of view because the three characters need three times as much memory, three types of animation, and so on". After the release of Grand Theft Auto IV (2008), the team developed episodic content packages, The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony (both 2009), each of which introduced a new protagonist. The three interwoven stories had a positive critical reception and confirmed the team's confidence that building Grand Theft Auto V around this model was an innovative decision.

A single-player story revolving around three protagonists was one of Grand Theft Auto V s earliest design objectives. Garbut said such a radical change to the gameplay's core structure was a risk, recalling the team's concern that a departure from Grand Theft Auto s traditional, single lead character set-up "might backfire". In early conceptualisations, the game would have told three stories; each through a different protagonist. Later, the idea that story trajectories would meet throughout the game was developed from the stories of Grand Theft Auto IV. Eventually, the concept evolved into three interconnected stories that intertwined through the game missions. According to Benzies, the team made the multiple-character formula "integral to the structure of the gameplay as well as the narrative". Houser said he felt that Grand Theft Auto V is their "strongest plotted game because the characters are so intertwined" and that the "meeting points [between the characters' stories] are very exciting". In gameplay, the three characters' differing personalities and qualities are intended to appeal to a broad spectrum of players, while offering players the option to learn more about the characters throughout the game.

The central theme to the story of Grand Theft Auto V is the "pursuit of the almighty dollar". The mission content is structured around the lead characters' efforts to plan and execute complicated heists to accrue wealth for themselves. The team's decided to focus on money as the game's central theme in response to the 2007–08 financial crisis; the effects of the crisis on the main characters are the catalyst for them to conduct heist missions. Houser said, "We wanted this post-crash feeling, because it works thematically in this game about bank robbers". The team were encouraged by the positive reaction to the "Three Leaf Clover" mission in Grand Theft Auto IV in which an elaborate heist is coordinated and executed by Niko Bellic and accomplices to develop the story around the heists. Houser said that while the "Three Leaf Clover" mission was well-received, the team had not captured the thrill of the robbery sequence to the best of their capabilities and wanted to focus on achieving that in Grand Theft Auto V. He said, "We wanted to have a couple of really strong bank robberies ... It felt like that was a good device that we'd never used in the past. Repeating ourselves is a fear when we're doing games where part of the evolution is just technological".

Franklin Clinton has not been a contender in any CBUB matches.