PDA

View Full Version : So, what's your favorite character you've played?



Jeivar
2011-01-06, 12:52 PM
Isn't it just great when you play a character that you just have so much fun with, whether by careful planning or in-game developments?
I can't say I personally have many of these, since our games tend be either badly planned, short, or both, but a couple do stand out nonetheless:

*Shadow Fox (Shadowrun 4e). A Vietnamese American ninja who learned the art of the shadow warrior from a book he bought at the airport (Adept specializing in stealth and the katana)

His habits included:
-Stealthy kills (naturally)
-Sneaking into the women's bathroom at nightclubs
-Use gecko gloves to cling to large cars rather than pay busfare
-Constantly sneaking up on his fixer, Batman-style, and startling him
-Watching animes in his apartment for inspiration while doing katana katas

What can I say, his detachment from reality and ability to sneak up on anybody made for good laughs. :smallsmile:

Shadow Fox met his end after an assassination in a high-rise apartment building. He succeeded in taking out the target, but had to escape an assault-rifle wielding bodyguard squad by diving out of hole in the window (cut during entry). He fired his grapnel gun to stop the fall but failed his strength check to hold onto it and hurt his shoulder. The gecko gloves allowed him to break the fall and he came to a nasty stop on a ledge. From there he started to climb across a wire he'd previously attached between the apartment building and a roof, but a botched check caused the wire to come lose on one end. So Shadow Fox clung to the wire as he swung Tarzan-style a very long distance and smashed into a window at terminal velocity. He entered a birthday party as a clump of shredded flesh.
A video recording of the incident went online (titled "Failed Spider Man") and became a hit.

The whole thing was so funny I didn't mind. :smallbiggrin:

*Agnarr, son of Bjorn (D&D 3.5) A Chaotic Neutral greatsword-wielding human Barbarian in the habit of eating the hearts of killed enemies to gain their strength (he carried a special knife for prying the ribs apart). I just like the loud, jolly, boisterous personality I gave him, like a blood-drenched Brian Blessed, and the neutral alignment meant he could snap the occasional neck mid-conversation if he felt that maybe possibly the person deserved it. He also joined a bareknuckle boxing association and rose to relative fame pretty quickly.
But my favorite thing about him sort of came about accidentally: His inability to die. He just had a bizarre tendency to get into certain-death situations, get torn to shreds and yet outlast his enemies by a handful of Hit Points.
It started right in the first session, when he ran ahead of his party to chase down a fleeing gobling straggler, and accidentally ran straight into the thick of a squad of elite Hobgoblins with class levels and reach weapons. Things got very hairy very quickly but Agnarr (level 6) stood his ground and hacked away (Extended Rage is a Barbarian's best friend) as the Hobgoblins kept flubbing their damage rolls and inflicting many many minor wounds. Aid arrived as the party gradually caught up, but I recall Agnarr must have ended up killing eight of the elite Hobbos by himself.
And this was just the first evening. Agnarr would go on to be mauled by a giant, a pack of homebrewed ghoul-zombie things with claws, a homebrewed giant made of blood and animated armor, and so on. The Storyteller decided that heal spells didn't prevent scars, so he eventually half-joked that Agnarr's skin should really count as Hide Armor. :smallsmile:

*Morta Salatka (Vampire: Dark Ages) A german neonate Brujah noblewoman in the 12th century. Okay . . . I'm a little hesitant to bring her up since the game hasn't actually started yet; It's taking longer than expected to get the show going. But I just really dig the concept I came up with for her personality. I decided to take a break from bloodthirstiness (ironically enough V:tm brings that out in me for some reason) and gave her a 10-year old son (the Ward disadvantage), a True Love (a bard. Female bard, because hey it's a vampire thing), an Enemy (earned by stopping a Tzimisce's abduction of peasants) high Humanity and a drive to both defy the inner Beast and have a positive influence on society.
Of course, this being World of Darkness, only time will tell how well her ideals hold up to the test of time. But we're really pushing to make this game deeper and more thought-out than most of our stuff, and all this makes for great dramatic potential.

Well, those are the favorites that I can think of right now. You?

Lord Vampyre
2011-01-06, 01:21 PM
I've had 2 great characters that I'll always remember.

"Rag" (Legacies)

"Rag" short for "Rag"narok was orphaned as a young child. Raised by a hermit who named him, "Rag" learned the ways of wizardry. Later he found himself apprenticed to the Arch-Mage of Death, Greymalkin, where he learned how precious life really was.

He found himself constantly disgusted with the way the villagers would constantly kill everything that came into their little hamlet. To that end he would take it upon himself to heal the fallen creatures and give them another chance at life.

Jason Knight (Vampire: the Masquerade)

Jason was embraced by a Gangrel sire and abandonned in a werewolf infested forest. He learned to survive by quickly melding with the earth. After uncountable years he found himself in Olympia.

Stronger than many of the others in his clan, he quickly rose to the rank of Primogen. Soon he found himself recruited by the Prince to serve in the capacity of Sheriff to this deadly town. He served faithfully in his capacity of Sheriff, often trying to protect each Prince as they were slain right before his eyes. It was a wonder that he had been able to outlive 5 princes. Eventually, he coterie of 5 elders came to take him out. Having gone to mist it was long and fruitless battle.

Jason Knight lies in torpor at the bottom of the Puget Sound to this day.

Skorj
2011-01-06, 01:37 PM
Molly Steel, a 600 pound crab in a far-future homebrew system. Making a melee character work in a world of laser cannons, death beams, and 50-ton combat robots was great fun, as was starting from a background with no "adventuring" training: business school and vocational training around structural engineering (a high-tech construction worker).

TheCountAlucard
2011-01-06, 01:44 PM
I've gotta say my two favorite characters are also my longest-lived PCs.

First off is "Shichirou, the Fist of Heaven." A Dawn-Caste Solar Exalt, he was headstrong and foolhardy, and loyal to a fault. An ex-guardsman, Shichirou initially was motivated to liberate Thorns and prove himself as a competent martial artist. Eventually he completed this set of goals, and realized that he had the power to inspire heroism in others. :smallsmile: The game died off before we finished, sadly, but not before our circle discovered a derelict (but repairable) Directional Titan. :smallbiggrin:

Second is "L3|\|nĄ" (pronounced as "Lenny"), my hacker/rigger character from our gaming group's run of the Denver missions. A somewhat-sarcastic dwarf, he was recruited into the group for his technical know-how. Lenny was also only sixteen, a fact that he managed to hide from most of the party for upwards of three gaming sessions. His general problem-solving method for the meat-space was, of course, "Deploy drones at it." :smallamused: The game died off before we finished, sadly, but not before we made more than enough nuyen to retire on. :smallcool:

Tvtyrant
2011-01-06, 01:45 PM
Since I only play a generic Cleric... A generic Cleric?

Cirrhosis
2011-01-06, 01:51 PM
A doppelganger chameleon i played in a 3.5 campaign from first level through 18th. I used the monster class from Races of Destiny to qualify for chameleon, so he never had a base class to speak of. I made the character because i knew i wouldn't be able to show up for every session, so the GM and i decided it would be fun to let the other players think that i was showing up with a new character every time i showed up. The one who figured it out early kept quiet about the whole thing, and the rest of the players didn't figure it out until 12th level or so.

The best part was that one of the players who was a bit of a power gamer was getting mad at me for showing up and taking a share of the loot (which he never saw again because i always sold it and bought different things between sessions to keep the appearance of being a different character each time) and actually started lobbying the GM to not let me play until a series of horribly unlucky rolls forced me to reveal the setup.

Domigorgon
2011-01-06, 02:02 PM
Githzerai Ninja level 10 (adjustment included).

Scarlet-Devil
2011-01-06, 02:12 PM
Well, that's kind've hard. I guess one of my funnest was a tiefling ranger I only got to play briefly, because she was killed by a disintegrate. She frequently got herself and the party into very dangerous situations, and always survived (she quickly got a reputation in our group for this, I gave her die-hard, and she got excellent use out of it). The first one was when she went into the forest to gather food while the rest of the party was breaking camp, she was ambushed by four trolls, and held them off for about 3 rounds before the party arrived to help. The next day, the party was bunking up in a rope trick, and a patrol of trolls, who we had established the previous day were a very challenging enemy, walked under us while I was keeping watch. I woke up the half-orc barbarian and bluffed him into helping me attack them.

About two rounds later, the barbarian had withdrawn and was charging down the road at his full speed away from the trolls, my ranger used bluff to create a distraction, cast darkness (tiefling), and hid. The trolls then climbed up the rope, ambushing the sleeping spellcasters (:smallbiggrin:). Eventually everything turned out all right, but the party quickly grew to dislike me. One of my favourites was when we fought some vampires and their ogre zombie; I lost four levels, and was at -9 hitpoints when the wizard dimension doored us away. The vampires followed, but I took the healing wand from the backpack of our feebleminded cleric and snuck off into the woods, hiding myself with dirt and leaves before passing out.

The next day the party teleported to a city to find help for the cleric and the barbarian, who also had a bunch of negative levels. They couldn't take me so I wandered through the forest trying to find a witch who supposedly lived nearby. I encountered some kind of ettin, and after being reduced nearly to negative hit points again, I used darkness to hide, and managed to sneak away. She had several more close calls in her short career, before finally being critically disintegrated by the big bad (the rest of the party had already fled, and didn't even bother trying to get her ashes to revive her afterward).

Terraoblivion
2011-01-06, 02:16 PM
Though she seems to not really fit well here, i'll still put up my favorite character of all time.

Alexandra Strauss: (Homebrew steampunk setting) The youngest child of a Prussian noble family with a long history of military service, Alexandra went the expected route of going to military academy and getting a posting as an officer. In 1871 on the front of the Franco-Prussian War, which led to her being among the troops suppressing the Paris Commune.

Despite horror and disgust at what she did, she stayed on in the military after the war due to a complete lack of civilian skills and connections, as well as a desire to not disappoint her family. Of course, being bitter and disillusioned and neither taking her job or patriotic gestures very seriously put her at the very bottom of the hierarchy of officers, though not quite enough to get her dishonorably discharged. It changed when Spain was invaded by aliens and it quickly became apparent that no country could stand against them alone. Among the first German volunteers, she had been fighting for the last five years prior to the start of the game.

She just has a lot of seeming contradictions and hidden layers to her personality. While she superficially just seems to be a serious officer with quite the stick up her ass, that is far from starting to describe what she's actually like. Nor is she just the disillusioned veteran, she truly believes in what she's doing fighting the aliens, sometimes approaching genuine fanaticism on the matter. I find the mix of being highly serious and dedicated to a military job, while finding the field ultimately disgusting and morally wrong, as well as the dedication to proper discipline and military order, while hating the actual leadership interesting to explore. I just keep discovering new things about her the longer i play her, though i think that her being a pbp characters helps a lot in making her complicated and interesting.

randomhero00
2011-01-06, 02:17 PM
Homebrew. Me and my DMs version of an undead sith basically. He ended up so powerful he made deals with gods and rose to godhood eventually (as the epilogue).

edit: I like POWA!

comicshorse
2011-01-06, 02:21 PM
Grand Duke Jacob Corleone-sigmar ( Grand Duke of Nuln, Count of Bogenhaffen, Baron of Sommersland, Lord of the Shining Marches, Marshall of the Knights Crusader)
( From Warhammer: Career Progression was Gambler-Ministrel-Courtier-Duellist-Knight-Free Lance-Noble 1-Noble 2 -Templar-Noble 3)

A elven con-man who convinced the nobility of Nuln he was an elven noble. Married into one of the Noble families, politiced the family into position behind the ruler and then when he died seized power and lead an alliance of the city-states into a civil war with Altdorf. Eventually helped choose the next Emperor and was appointed as his Champion and married his sister-in-law to the new Emperor.
Currently rooting out various political opponents at home, working out how to stop a Slannesh cult that has gone respectable ( without anyone ever figuring out what it is) and trying to save his soul due to an unfortunate swearing an Oath to Sigmar he damn well knew to be a lie

Amador
2011-01-06, 02:53 PM
Brian, The Untouchable Friar. He ran away from home at a young age and joined up with the Church of St. Cuthbert after a while. His home village was leveled by some sort of magical blast when he went back, so he began adventuring and rose quickly in esteem if not actual rank in the church. Currently he is the Baron Farlight of Farlight Keep in the Kingdom of Everstar. In our next session he'll be marrying the princess of the neighboring kingdom. But he is pretty much an adventurer who gained noble status in three kingdoms; Everstar, where he owns a lot of land, all of which was abandoned 400 years earlier when a horde closed off the trade routes through the area. Dal'durin the great Dwarven city, where Brian is an honorary dwarf and member of nobility. And the neighboring kingdom where Brian and the party averted war.

Essentially this campaign has lots of loot and the party has saved the world once already. So Brian and company have a ridiculous amount of stuff. Brian will be retiring in a few levels to turn Farlight Keep into the greatest defensible fortress-city ever.

mucat
2011-01-06, 03:10 PM
I think my favorites are a couple of characters that I've played in PbP games on this site. One who I really like, although the game didn't last long, is Johan the druid. Absolutely mediocre rolls at character creation -- I think his best stat was a single 13; everything else was lower. The DM offered a reroll, of course, but I decided to go with those stats and make them integral to his story: he had left home and trained as a druid when he was young, but he wasn't really that good at it. Young and impatient, he had given up in frustration, returned to his parents' farm, eventually married, and lived a good life as a farmer and family man.

When the campaign opened, it had been almost thirty years since Johan gave up his druidical training. His wife had died last year (of a fever, not the inevitable orc raid), their children had all grown and left the farm to seek their fortunes, and for the first time in decades, Johan had no pressing commitments. He was satisfied with the life he'd lived, proud of the family he'd raised, but he still wondered where the path he abandoned would have taken him. So he sold the farm, returned to the woods, and took up his training where he left off.

He's still not a phenomenally talented druid, but he's at peace with that; anything he accomplishes from here on is simply a bonus to a life already well lived. He still maintains ties to his friends in town -- most of whom think he's lost his mind -- so he gets drawn into trying to protect a group of young adventurers, some of whom are sons and daughters of old friends of his, and/or acquaintances of his own grown kids.

I liked playing this guy because he simply felt so real. He could live the "heavily armed hobo" life of an adventurer, with no ambition other than to see where each day took him, simply because he had already accomplished everything essential to him in life. But he never lacked focus, because as Malack put it, he had five near-suicidal tomb robbers to keep alive. Johan had already lived a full life, but they hadn't, and all his parental instincts were now focused on the reckless adventuring team. One of the worst moments of his life was when a party member was killed by a trap, and Johan had to tell the dead man's family the news.

(There's no good way to say "Hey Isarina. I know, it's been a while; I've been camping out in the woods with twigs in my hair talking to wolves. So listen, your son and his friends wanted to crawl around an abandoned tomb, and instead of talking them out of it, I went along with them. But don't worry; I was supervising them carefully when he was knocked off that 60-foot ledge to his death.")

I'm sorry the campaign ended early. I might try to repeat the concept in another campaign sometime, but it would be hard to recreate the chemistry of that adventuring party.