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View Full Version : What is/was your most absurd/zany character that you have played?



snacksmoto
2015-09-30, 08:03 PM
Let's face it, not every campaign or one-off will be as "typical" as others. Heck, some could be quite outlandish for reasons good or ill-conceived. So, I'd like to hear of some of these outlandish, memorable characters.

goto124
2015-09-30, 08:33 PM
Just to make this thread a bit less lonely, two of my chars are literally from a computer game (a MUD that actually exists). One is a rash murderhobo chainmail-bikini-wearing barbarian PC, the other an NPC-gained-sapience who's best friends with the aforementioned barbarian (and a paladin in skills but nothing else - living in a game where Murder Is The Best Solution doesn't help your morality much).

They're now lovers with another PC, a good blade vampire who's not quite undead, and believes in not killing until diplomancy has flopped on its face. Basically, the vampire is a lot gooder than the paladin (if you can even call that character a paladin).

Solaris
2015-09-30, 08:34 PM
I had an idea for a CG drow serving Lolth on one of the few times I get to play. Sadly, while the DM loved it the other players wanted me to the human bard/paladin who'd gotten kicked out of the Knights of the Chalice for making time with the commandant's twin daughters instead.

Name: Zerak'vyr "Zeke" Kalanagh of Elisana
Alignment: Chaotic Good
Deity: "Lolth"
Race: Drow

Build: Swordsage 1 / Martial Wizard 4 / Drow Paragon 1 / Swiftblade 1 / Swordsage +1 / Swiftblade +2 / Jade Phoenix Mage 10

Goal: Return to the Underdark and wrest drow society away from the corrupt priestesses that have perverted it, freeing his goddess from their madness and restoring the true worship of Lolth.


Appearance
Zeke is 5'2" and weighs 112 lb.; about normal height for an elven male. He has a lean and wiry build, with jet-black skin, crimson eyes, and snowy-white hair. He dresses in dark blue, violet, and black fitted garments.



Background
Zerak'vyr Kalanagh was born and raised in the Underdark as the lesser son of the noble house Elisana. He was inducted into service as a Knight of Lolth, trained almost since he could walk to handle the arachnid mounts used in the Spider Queen's service. Zeke was fanatical in his loyalty, and rose high in his matriarch's service as a battlefield commander.

Zeke's life changed when a slaving raid to the surface went horribly awry as the drow attempted to prey on a vampire coven's home grounds. The vampires ambushed the drow, tipped off by a rival house. Zeke was almost killed by the vampires' necromantic powers and left to die on the surface as the few survivors fled to the Underdark. A half-elven priestess of Pelor took him in and healed him, although the damage to Zeke's soul was too extensive to fully regenerate and he was left a shadow of his former self. Zeke repaid the priest's kindness by killing her, which earned Zeke a powerful curse from Pelor: A conscience.

Unaware of the extent and ramifications of this curse, Zeke snuck back into the Underdark before the priest's body cooled. He knew better than to hang around on the surface with the torch-and-pitchfork crowd about to run amok. With his new handicaps, however, Zeke was at a dramatic disadvantage. Not only was he nowhere near as powerful as he used to be, he actually felt bad about the horrible sorts of things a drow nobleman does as a matter of course. His curse manifested itself more and more strongly as time went on, and Zeke sought to avoid the sorts of violent and bloodthirsty pursuits he once enjoyed. Worse, he began to be haunted by dreams of the slain priestess tormenting him for all the evils he had wrought, although she appeared as a fair-skinned drider with golden hair rather than the humanoid she had been in life. Zeke began to slide into a dark depression which his fellows couldn't help but notice - and sense as a sign of weakness.

Zeke fled his homeland a half-step ahead of his former comrades-in-arms, and remains convinced that it was only through Lolth's guidance and blessing that he survived. He managed to make his way through the dangerous Underdark passages to a nearby sverfneblin stronghold, and from there to the surface world. The dreams and visions of his golden-haired goddess - for Zeke was by now convinced that the golden-haired drider haunting him was none other than Lolth herself - drove him to seek out his surface-dwelling kin for assistance and answers.



Personality
Zeke has little time for rules, regulation, or bureaucratic procedure when they interfere with doing what's right. He actually hates governments and is something of an anarchist, thinking the theocratic government of the drow is what caused them to fall. He particularly dislikes an individual having too much power over another. Zeke is more than a little asocial and sometimes downright abusive, refusing to explain himself to anyone and openly contemptuous of weakness. This is a holdover from his upbringing as a drow, and is sometimes at odds with his curse-endowed conscience.

Zeke is also more than a little off his rocker. He is thoroughly convinced that Lolth is secretly a good goddess, just grossly misunderstood and driven insane by the influence of her corrupt priestesses. He interacts with an entity that he believes to be Lolth, one who presents herself in his dreams and visions as a drider with the upper body of a fair-skinned, golden-haired elven woman rather than a drow-headed spider or any of Lolth's more traditional forms.

The Glyphstone
2015-09-30, 09:06 PM
In a PFPlanescape game, I had a character that was, effectively, an exile from the Far Realms. Its class abilities (playtesting the DSP Harbinger) were all flavored as mild reality-warping as it temporarily overlaid the 'rules' of its home plane onto its surroundings, but the fun (and weirdness) came from its dialogue. It had no conceptual basis for plurals, in addition to some very fuzzy ideas on how physics worked, so I had to work out some rather convoluted rules for its speech patterns. I think the best compliment I ever got was one of the other PCs remarking, in-character, that my PC was the only being he'd ever met who spoke Uncommon as their native language.

Broken Crown
2015-09-30, 09:15 PM
I once participated in a one-shot game for which I created a dwarf cleric of the God of Lies. The chief tenet of his faith was to never tell the truth about anything. I introduced him to the party as a halfling rogue (albeit a rather tall, burly one); since I'd maxed out his Bluff and Disguise skills, nearly everyone believed him, and the one who got wise didn't spill the beans.

He was a fairly useless rogue, and not a great cleric, but it didn't much matter, since the whole game just got progressively sillier and more chaotic from there. I wasn't the only one in the group who wasn't taking it very seriously. (The DM certainly wasn't.)

BeerMug Paladin
2015-10-01, 12:25 AM
I've actually answered this in another thread (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=16580664&postcount=47).

GrayGriffin
2015-10-01, 12:53 AM
Franciscus, the rich kid whose main ability is producing gold coins out of nowhere, which is genetic and also how his family became so rich. He also has a tongue so silver that he can temporarily bend the laws of reality with his lies.

Also, Masa, the daughter of a threesome crossover ship that started out as a bad pun ship name and somehow became serious. More information about her in this post. (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?370856-Things-I-May-No-Longer-Do-While-Playing-VII-No-Not-Even-Then/page9&p=18287208#post18287208)

Sir Chuckles
2015-10-01, 01:03 AM
I have quite a few contenders from my time...

300lb Halfling Barbarian ubercharger/intimdater.
A Magus using the Two-World Magic to get Summon Instrument on his list. Follow with Catch Off-Guard for magic/trumpet beat down.
Anything I've ever made using Pathfinder's Dirty Tricks.
A Shadowrun Dwarf SimSense film star.

NRSASD
2015-10-01, 01:12 AM
I've two contestants for the weird character competition, but both of them were played by the same player in two of the campaigns I DMed.

Bobby Joe was a dwarf/gnome (dwome sweet dwome) battlerager of an unidentified gender because he/she/it never removed its spiked plate mail and never spoke besides howling in fury. It got along very well with the elven berserker in our group, who would throw Bobby as an aggressive javelin at enemies. It also had a ring of uncanny swimming which allowed it to swim as if it were unencumbered and had +15 to swimming. One hobgoblin tribe came to a horrific end trying to ford a stream when Bobby Joe was lurking in the reeds (the player actually pulled out her iphone and played the Jaws theme when I asked her what her plan was). Fittingly, Bobby met her/his end in a battle against a clan of ogre magi. Bobby Joe died as he/she lived, impaling an invisible ogre magi with her/his head as it attempted to fly away, killing it, and plunging to his/her death 200 ft below.

Janora is a half-elf fighter. Her parents were murdered by orcs at a young age, and she was adopted by a local dwarven clan and grew up in the mines. Tragically, her foster parents were also murdered, struck down by griffons (gryphons?) as they traveled to market one day. As she watched those magnificent, fearsome beasts tear her adopted family to shreds, Janora knew what her purpose in life must be: to find the griffons who murdered her family, and to ride them.

Dire Moose
2015-10-01, 02:13 AM
Well, the infamous ranger/barbarian named "Bruce MacDoofus the Mooseslayer" would have to count.

After he returned from fighting in a war, he found that his family's house had been destroyed and his parents killed by an angry moose. He swore on their graves that he would avenge them by hunting down and destroying every last moose in existence. Every time he would see something that looked like a moose, he would stop whatever he was doing, go nuts, and attack it. He had a good-sized beard and wore nothing but a chain shirt, a kilt, and a horned helmet with moose antlers instead of horns.

...yeah, I've generally stuck to playing serious characters since then.

Quertus
2015-10-01, 10:59 AM
Hmmm... so many contenders. Depends on your PoV. Some might consider the following absurd:

The Lawful Wild Mage, whose measured, studious demeanor was quite contrary to the unpredictability of his magic
The chronomancer who wasn't interested in time travel, and tried to undo chronomantic damage caused by others
The Dwarven Berserker who always greeted everything diplomatically, with open arms - in Ravenloft
The thief reincarnated into a parrot, in a pirate game. Named him "James Bird" (queue James Bond theme)
The ghost who carried around crates full of bodies to inhabit (said bodies were permanently reduced to 0 wisdom (and curse with penalties to their will saves), so that they never woke up, and were easier to possess)
The High Priest who was actually a ley-follower of the religion (ie, no cleric levels)
The party Face, who was about as diplomatic as a raging barbarian.
The troll who actually understood computer programming and encryption/decryption
The half-celestial half-dragon troll (who always took point, and almost always took a dirt nap round 1)
The low (2nd or 3rd) level character who single-handedly won against 6 minotaurs in the arena (mostly luck, to be honest)
The low (6th?) level character who went blow-for-blow with a god of War (he got in an equal number of hits - with no (applicable) dwoemers or magical items. Sadly, he went down first, due to having fewer HP)
The Illithid Savant who stole Thrallherd repeatedly as his class feature. Because "lost thralls and believers are replaced within 24 hours", this provided an infinite supply of meals to his colony.
The character who was a level behind the party, because he was actually the cohort of the real character I was playing
The evil "loves to watch suffering" party healer, who used Vigor to heal the party in a mana-efficient way prolong the party's suffering, who would temporarily resurrect dead party members just to watch them choose to suffer more after death
The character who had "Regenerates to everything except X", where "X" was so rare that it seemed to exist nowhere in the campaign world... except in his own weapon, which was a cursed backbiter.
The Cleric of Pong, on the quest for the Holy Joystick. His holy symbol was a bouncy ball.


The most absurd party setup I can recall consisted of a paladin, an assassin, an undead hunter, an undead master, and my character, stuck in the middle. Although "morally flexible", and probably on the path to becoming undead (he was a historian - and it was difficult to chronicle all of history when you're dead), he quickly became friends with the paladin. At very low (1st?) level, he bluffed/intimidated a pack of ogres into helping us instead of attacking us. The DM, who had seen me pull off absolutely crazy tricks with this character, asked me afterwards, "what would you have done if the ogres had attacked?". I shrugged, and responded simply, "Died".

That character later pulled off an even more impressive bluff - entirely unintentionally. There's more to it, but... we encountered a very powerful daemon (a balor, perhaps?) My character cast protection from evil (10' radius, perhaps?). The balor pressed against the ward, and began threatening us, explaining that, if we released the ward now, it would promise us a swift death, etc. As always, my character was completely unphased, and began bartering with the creature. The paladin stepped up beside me, and (somewhat uncharacteristically) began parleying as well. The longer the conversation lasted, the less aggressive the daemon became. After the fact, I realized it was "counting rounds" on my spell, and, because it never went away (thanks to the paladin's aura), the daemon concluded we were infinitely more powerful than it was. It basically agreed to do whatever we wanted (which should have been, "go back to your home plane, and spend 100 years writing down as much of history as you know. When you are done, deliver the book to <my character>.")

But, probably the one I went the craziest with was a D&D 2e Fremlin. He was a multi-classed Rogue / Channeler (custom class, stolen from based on the Dark Sword trilogy, that could power arcane spellcasters). Because he conceptualized the world based half on a different fantasy setting, and half on his own insanity, he had a difficult to understand view of the world. He spoke in a distinctive way ("Dumb dead talls no see am be useful!"), and constantly used pick pockets on everyone. This included the party, as he redistributed their goods for maximum benefit (ie, redistribute the weight so that one backpack had lots of food, plus room for him to sleep).

Eisenheim
2015-10-01, 12:31 PM
There was Torvald Hardrada, a perennial goto for canned adventures, he was a dwarven ranger, favored enemy undead, with max ranks in profession architecture and city planning. His aspiration was to provide advice to communities on anti-necromancy development schemes, rather than putting them down one at a time.

There was also Cardinal Moonflower, a paladin of freedom who talk like a stoned california hippie. If he'd ever leveled enough, I wa going for an animated surfboard as his paladin mount.

TheCountAlucard
2015-10-01, 01:10 PM
Arch Whitman was a New York vampire scientist who had an imperfect control over his vampire powers (that is to say, they worked fine when he consciously used them, but at other times they apparently would just go off on their own); this would've made him seem a very odd sort (and likely would've been perceived as dangerous and killed by his kindred), so to keep people thinking he was more or less "harmless," he pretended to suffer a number of other ailments.

He wore gloves almost everywhere he went, because he might "read" the emotional imprints left on objects he touched. (Easy to pass off as a germophobe.)

He seldom looked people in the eye, because he might inadvertently dominate them while doing so. (To be fair, vampires need eye contact to dominate deliberately as well, so someone who's not interested in being dominated is justified in avoiding eye contact.)

He sometimes would have lapses in conversation, either because he'd started accidentally reading your mind, seeing the colors of your psychic aura, or visualizing the chaotic webs surrounding you and realizing something of your nature. ("I get distracted sometimes.")

Incidentally, because of his tendency to accidentally pick up too much information about others without necessarily knowing where it came from, he tended to couch what he was saying in obscure language or metaphor to hide how much he knew.

Sometimes he was a wallflower, but other times he unintentionally drew the spotlight onto himself; the power to fade from people's minds clashed pretty interestingly at times with the ability to command the attention of others.

Incidentally folks around him could flit at any time from hyper-emotional to "dead inside," because one of his powers was essentially giving him access to the "volume" knob on your emotions radio.

Mitigating the potential for misfires on his vast array of mental powers in-character (while still playing him as a character who goes out and does things and talks to people) made roleplaying him pretty challenging, but also massively entertaining.

DigoDragon
2015-10-01, 02:16 PM
A light blue talking unicorn (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?280469-Campaign-Quotes-NO-CONTEXT-EDITION!&p=17022949&viewfull=1#post17022949) with a big funny purple hat (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?280469-Campaign-Quotes-NO-CONTEXT-EDITION!&p=17054476&viewfull=1#post17054476) and a huge ego to match (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?280469-Campaign-Quotes-NO-CONTEXT-EDITION!&p=17078603&viewfull=1#post17078603). She fought crime (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?280469-Campaign-Quotes-NO-CONTEXT-EDITION!&p=17091139&viewfull=1#post17091139).

Bard1cKnowledge
2015-10-01, 05:23 PM
I have two, one I have already built and one I'm about to

The first is a Dwarf "Luchador" (monk) he never shows his real face. Former it is under his mask. Long story short just imagine a dwarf in a speedo putting an orc in a full nelson and repeatedly headbutting him.

The unmade one is going to be a monkey human druid fighting things off with a quarterstaff. Sure I'll dip in monk with him. No I won't teach him the kamehameha.

Jay R
2015-10-01, 09:10 PM
I once ran two dwarves, Doli and Felix, who were out for revenge on the tribe who had killed their five brothers.

You have to think in other languages than English to recognize "Doli" and "Felix" as "Grumpy" and "Happy", and thus realize who the five brothers are.

snacksmoto
2015-10-01, 09:22 PM
I'm loving these characters. As to what I or anyone else considers absurd enough, well, it's open to interpretation. Let's just say that if the character is atypical enough and entertaining, why not?

My most absurd character needs a bit of set up I think.
This was back in my early teenage years, 2nd edition AD&D. We had decided to run an all-fighter or fighter multiclass group, character level one. The DM was extremely lax about the character creation so some of the players went overboard. Stupidly overboard as in seven foot tall half Barbarian half Vampire overboard, min/max Hill Giant heritage, you get the idea. These characters were being made to be only good at combat and absolutely nothing else. The DM allowed them as characters.

I thought to myself, "These are the kind of characters being allowed. Screw this, I'm here for some fun." So I made a Fighter/Thief multiclass... Halfling... with a Strength of 9... and a case of Dwarfism. He ended up being 2 1/2 feet tall. Since he couldn't continually run along side of these lummoxes, I gave him Animal Handling as a proficiency and mounted him on a large pet war dog. I wasn't done with that either. I also made him psychotically protective of his pet, to the point that he would go berserk on anyone or anything that harmed his pet.

What's that you say? He's a Fighter/Thief, not a Barbarian/Thief? You're quite correct, but I did say psychotically protective. Insanely, ragingly, murderously protective with absolutely no game bonuses. He would charge at the offender, right past anyone in the way without notice, and keep hammering on the offender until one them is dead.

He was so short that he used a shortsword in the same fashion as others would wield a two-handed sword due to size comparisons. Also due to the size comparison, he used a dagger as others would use a longsword.

These characters lasted only the one session, but I will leave you with this tidbit. After the first major encounter, the one who saved the party and was the last one conscious was my Halfling. That story is for another time.

illyahr
2015-10-06, 02:34 PM
Random, the Mad God of Atrophy and Avatar of Chaos Unending (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=16543073&postcount=38)

ImNotTrevor
2015-10-06, 03:07 PM
Allow me to tell this tale somewhat narratively.

It was several generations after the apocalypse that ended mankind's dominion over earth. From the wreckage came the survivors, and society began to claw its way back with bloodied fingernails and scraped knuckles.

It was in this world that a man descended into a building left over from the end. A building once known as a "museum." Within its depths he found a new face: the helm of what had once been called a "Knight Templar."

With his limited reading and comprehension skills, this goliath of a man donned his new helm and and new "christian" faith, and embarked into the wasteland as the worst missionary/knight of all time.

His name was Errant.

Errant had some basic inaccuracies in his beliefs.
He worships the God known as Chris. He is symbolised by a big "t" and that is why sometimes the "bibble" has a T at the end of Chris' name.

The proper term for a woman is "Nun." Such as, "That Nun over there is a prostitute" or "Your daughter is a beautiful nun."

The proper term for the leader/owner of a thing is "Pope." Such as, the Pope of a town or gang. The Pope of a restaurant. You are the Pope of your own house.

He carries around a copy of the bible translated into street slang. Leading to him sharing such truths as, "And look, playah, them isrelights was cray."

He hopes to found a town called Jerusalem Jr.

System was Apocalypse World, playing The Faceless.

(I also have plans to play the same class but themed after a Luchador)

LibraryOgre
2015-10-07, 11:45 AM
A dragon hatchling in Rifts. This wasn't so bad... it is a core character option in the game... but I decided, on the spur of the moment, that my character was about 2 hours old when they met him, so I played him as a combination of a cat and a hyperactive toddler. I read people's minds without restraint, tended to turn into whatever I saw there if it was a convenient form for the moment, and found everything extremely hilarious, while utterly failing to understand that other people couldn't do these things.

Reathin
2015-10-07, 06:38 PM
I once created an Old World of Darkness Malkavian that I wanted to have a more persistent, thought provoking madness than just "slap them in the face with a fish". So he wasn't really zany. He WAS absurd though. He was a failed children's author and his particular brand of madness manifested in his inability to speak, save in verse. And that had to be provided OOC, so if I couldn't come up with a way to express something, quickly, with a rhyme, too bad so sad. I named him Seuss.

Braininthejar2
2015-10-07, 07:47 PM
From my own:

1 An American student transported into a fantasy world where he got tricked into becoming the high priest of the local goddess of death. The position of representing "the ultimate truth" of death came with a geas that would kill him if he ever told a lie - he mercilessly exploited being implicitly trustworthy.

2 A wizard in Dragonlance who, upon witnessing a vision of the cataclysm, decided that the world needs to be saved from the return of the divine tyrants. A batman schemer, he maxed out medical skills just to be able to get by without a priest, and in the end managed to get himself a noble title and a head medic of the realm position for his efforts during an epidemic of jaundice, turning his story into a mix of political intrigue and medical drama.

From my players and their stories:

1 A malkavian girl from the late medieval, playing the "childish optimist" crazy. The combination of her malkavian wacky behaviour and some bloodline-changing shenanigans (spending centuries on searching for Golkonda, or trying to turn into a human, getting ghouled and re-vamped when the DM insisted on keeping her a vampire, adding to horrible levels of power at the end of the campaign) resulted in such scenes as her walking into an audience with a local prince, noticing a local elder's hidden weapon and calling him out on it because she hadn't been allowed any, then disarming him and spanking him with his own sword when he tried to attack her. Or making a bunch of monster-form tzimitzi dance in tutus.

2 In one of her old campaigns there was a malkavian player who made three separate character sheets for his multiple personality disorder, and would draw one at random whenever a trigger condition occured. This more often then not disadventaged the party by giving him just the wrong build for the situation - but he was also a diagnosed sociopath in real life, so he didn't care.

3 A dmpc that was a female satyr, baleful polymorphed into a skunk, made into a familiar by an elven mage after her intelligence fell to animal levels, then after a century or so, freed by his death and ultimately polymorphed into a human. This resulted in a beautiful, but perpetually unkept girl who spoke in two word sentences, only wore clothes when reminded to, stole food whenever not explicitly told not to, and generally got the party into adventures (following some pretty bauble and getting ambushed by slavers, beating the crap out of some guy she saw hitting a child, telling a noble who was hitting on her that he was not healthy enough for a mate, and then breaking his bodyguard's arm when he tried to hit her, and so on) The combination of her heritage and her animal instincts (barbarian/ranger/early entry into fist of the forest through disadvantages) made her a surprisingly vicious combatant, capable of taking on gangs of highwaymen, or even groups of city guards with just hands and teeth.

Raimun
2015-10-08, 03:18 PM
I once played a policeman who had a habit of shooting a ton of crooks with high caliber pistols and automatic weapons... without killing them because he aimed at non-vital spots. Policemen aren't supposed to kill, if they can avoid it, you know. That was both in and out of character explanation.

... I mean seriously. His normal modus operandi was: "I avoided your vitals. You'll live."

He only killed one or two plot important major bad guys because: 1) It was during a heated battle, 2) they had a history of avoiding capture and 3) disregard for civilian casualties... so he felt they deserved it. Oh, and 4) they were major villains.