When have you accidentally the thing?

[Vhaidara]

When have you gotten a group together and, after a few sessions, realized you are actually a walking reference?

My best example for this was one of my favorite groups, whose longest composition (we dropped and added people at the beginning and end)
An intelligent, not-quite-human warrior with a greatsword (Illumian Hexblade, our field commander)
A dwarf fighter with an axe and an accent (Dwarf Fighter going Weapon Master)
A sylvan archer who developed a friendly rivalry with the dwarf (Satyr Swift Hunter)
A slightly more-than-human mage with a particular affinity for light and combat (Aasimar Sorcerer with Celestial Bloodline feats, planning on going Abjurant Champion and EK)
The short guy who tells the story (my gnome bard)

We didn't realize the reference until someone noticed that our Satyr's name was Arwen. He had never read Lord of the Rings, and hadn't seen the movies. We then started comparing, and realized that, yes, we had just accidentally Lord of the Ringsed.

[The Grue]

Not a D&D story but this isn't necessarily a D&D only subject. (I suggest moving it to the parent forum?)

Rolled a character for a Traveller game not long ago. Flubbed first career entry, drafted into the army for one term. Stuck around for a second, then got out into Independent Trader. Got unlucky on the survival roll, forced out and went Criminal for the final term.

Since I had more ship shares than anyone else it was decided that my character would be Captain. By that point I realized what I'd done, and so named our ship Serendipity.

[BowStreetRunner]

We played the Discworld RPG a while back and we actually ended up doing this intentionally. In the spirit of parody upon which Discworld was originally created, we all had fun with coming up with characters that humorously mimicked other characters.

This included a wizard who was born allergic to magic - any time he uses or is the target of magic there is a chance he will sneeze, and if that happens the magic is subjected to a 'wand of wonder' type effect. So when he was a baby a powerful warlock tried to cast a fatal curse on him but he sneezed and it ended up causing him to grow an extra vestigial limb instead that had to be surgically removed, leaving him with a famous scar... He was called Larry Trotter.

My own character was a Were-Saint-Bernard (like a werewolf, but more friendly) monk with a drinking problem. If you recall the Saint-Bernard from Loony Tunes that used to always pull others out of snow or ice then mix a drink for himself from the barrel on his collar, that was the inspiration.

Whether such references are intentional (as ours were) or accidental, I believe it can really help provide a useful reference when trying to decide how to role-play a situation properly.

[dascarletm]

Our group started a game once where the premise is that we would be part of a guild, in a world with many many adventuring guilds.

Player 1: male Psionic Warrior focusing on self buffing, and calling multiple types of weapons/armor
Player 2: female draconic (red) bloodline sorcerer. Going gish.
Player 3: female witch focusing on cold spells.
Myself: male Summoner.

We didn't know what the other players were going to be, and when we made the introductions on session 1 everyone went dead silent as we realized. The DM then declared that player 2 got a free blue cat familiar that could talk and fly.

We had accidentally gender-swapped Fairy Tail.

[TheTeaMustFlow]

I spent a good few sessions playing an Eternal Blade in 3.5 - for those who aren't familiar, essentially an elven master swordsman type with connections to past lives and a `blade guide` (essentially, a familiar-spirit guardian-type-thing). Then, one fateful day, the DM (as my blade guide) brightly said:

"Hey, Listen!".

And that character, who had previously been playing the comically serious straight man in a more zany party, was never taken seriously again (not that I complained).

[lytokk]

One of my first characters was a drow ranger dual wielding scimitars... Yeah, I know now, but I didn't then when people were guessing my name. At least I was neutral evil, in a good aligned party. After that game ended the DM loaned me the first Drizzt novel so I could finally get what they were talking about. Had seriously never heard of the character before.

[The Grue]

Coming back for another entry I somehow forgot.

Quinn, my last Eclipse Phase character was literally Inspector Gadget, instanced in a synthetic human-looking shell with a host of features and augments right down to the telescoping limbs and head-mounted rotor blades. Bonus points: his Muse (weak AI personal assistant, a la JARVIS) was named Maxwell.

This happened on the moon:

GM: You find boot prints in the lunar dust.
Quinn: Maxwell, cross reference these tread patterns with popular vacsuit models, see if we can figure roughly how old -
(Rolls a Critical Failure on Research test)
Maxwell: Chief, these boot patterns are from a 20th century NASA spacesuit - the actual boot prints of Neil Armstrong!
Quinn: Uh...I find that hard to believe.
Maxwell: Would you believe Buzz Aldren?
Quinn: No.
Maxwell: How about Alan Shepard?

[Tengu_temp]

With the DM's permission, I decided to play what's pretty much a female version of Frankeinstein's monster. I aimed for genderswapped Edward Scissorhands, more or less - but I decided to make her a doctor. Only when other people pointed it out I realized I pretty much made Franken Fran.

[Vhaidara]

So, I was explaining to a play-by-post group I just joined about my IRL group's "Guardians of the Galaxy" playstyle (serious setting with characters who just do not give a **** about trying to be serious). And one of them made this observation

You know, I had a long hard think about what Keledrath said about the "Gaurdians of the Galaxy" style of play, and something occurred to me. Look at the current composition of our party's characters: You have a devilish rogue who's way too excited about everything he's doing, an oddly-skin-toned woman who has an unsettlingly strong attachments to her weapons of choice, a big brutish fellow who has no time for comedy or wit, and a short hairy guy who acts primarily as comic relief.
...
...
All we need now is for someone to show up as a Treant Druid with a heavy speech impediment and we'll have the whole god-dang set!

Since we're all wizards, I have suggested we get an awakened bonsai for our room. For reference, this is a PF campaign and we have
Elf Generalist going dispel focus (Starlord)
Tiefling Spellslinger (Gamora)
Half-Giant Transmuter going gish (Drax) [Me]
Dwarf Illusionist who slept through our first class (Rocket)

[Capt. Infinity]

Hello from a member of said party! (The Elf Generalist) For those of you finding Keledrath's statement hard to swallow, here are a few examples to support the argument after not even a week of posting:
-The Tiefling pulled a tantrum about how utterly incompetent the rest of the party is and how she's far too overqualified to babysit us.
-The first words out of the dwarf were a joke about how nobody respects the authority of his pointy wizard hat.
-There was an actual scene where my character attempted to high-five Keledrath's brutish Half-giant, and he didn't understand what my character was doing and ignored it.

The resemblance is rather uncanny.

[Terraoblivion]

With the DM's permission, I decided to play what's pretty much a female version of Frankeinstein's monster. I aimed for genderswapped Edward Scissorhands, more or less - but I decided to make her a doctor. Only when other people pointed it out I realized I pretty much made Franken Fran.

At least she didn't perform mad science on people that universally ended up making them worse off than before. She was really sweet and ultimately pretty sensible.

[Dire Moose]

I created a scruffy-looking human ranger who primarily used a greatsword, was a natural leader, and had a lot of social, knowledge and wilderness skills at his disposal.

I didn't realize what I'd unconsciously done until a week later, but it was lucky for me that I had stated he wasn't from a noble family and that his hair was red instead of black.

[Tengu_temp]

At least she didn't perform mad science on people that universally ended up making them worse off than before. She was really sweet and ultimately pretty sensible.

Still you and everyone else called her Franken Fran until the actual game started and it turned out her personality is quite different, though!

[Prime32]

There was a PbP Pathfinder game a while back, set in a wizard college. Everyone played a wizard with a different specialisation, and I decided to go for a Lawful Evil female necromancer with a powerful skeleton companion...

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Race was going to be either human, dhampir or tiefling, and I ended up going for tiefling with the alternate racial trait that grants continuous deathwatch. Remembering that outsiders are auto-proficient with martial weapons, I decided it would be cool if her infernal heritage was part of some noble bloodline and she carried around a sword. Since she still has poor BAB, that means she was trained in an impractical style designed for aesthetics rather than actual combat. I decide that she looks down on people who fight to survive, treating swordfighting as just a tool - they should be using magic for all their needs, and studying swordplay as the artform it was meant to be. Not an entirely fair perspective, but it seems a Lawful Evil one - maybe she can grow out of it in-game.

Because this is an evil-aligned noble family who use weird ACFs and willingly breed with devils, I decide that her childhood was pretty messed up - she was driven to be the best at any cost, takes great pride in her family's secretive magical techniques, and won't tolerate anyone implying that she's weak or lazy. In terms of appearance she's more otherworldly-looking than monstrous - long white hair, red eyes, etc. - the family does have freakishly-deformed kids, but due to their obsession with aesthetics they're slain at birth and maybe turned into undead. I decide that to survive in such an environment she needs better social skills, so I pick some traits to buff them - one of which is "Extremely Fashionable", so to meet its requirements she ends up wearing expensive frilly dresses all the time. I rolled randomly for height and she ended up pretty short, though I didn't think anything of it until it was pointed out.

Now, one of the other PCs accepted to this game is a bit of an oddball. In a school otherwise filled with Wizards, he's a Magus exchange student from not-Japan who fights with katanas. The player describes how due to him only attending a subset of the course he's developed something of an air of mystery, and he's handsome but ridiculously awkward with women. Given this, his appreciation for swordplay and self-improvement, and a family background which is similar enough to my character's that she could relate to it, I make a mental note that she is probably attracted to him. For that matter, he gets along with everyone in the party pretty well for one reason or another.

The first combat is a class test - it's the party against a bunch of summoned sprites who spam color spray, and the magus fails his Will save. Since I'm a low-level caster without bonus spell slots, I decide to pick up his Primal Iron katana (basically Cold Iron on steroids) and start swinging it at the fey two-handed.
When he comes to, it turns out he has a Drawback that makes him extremely possessive of his katana - he yanks it from my character and chastises her, saying she could have damaged it and doesn't know how to handle it properly. This in turn sets off my character's perfectionism (it doesn't help that he's technically correct), and it turns into a shouting match. A shouting match that lasts so long in-game that the rest of the class leave. At which point another teacher walks by, sees a boy and girl alone in a room together saying things like "You lack the proper training to use my sword" "Well that's no reason to get rough", and tells them to stop flirting. Cue both characters running off, mortally embarassed.

It's at this point I look back at everything that's happened, and realise that if the game goes on much longer my character is contractually obligated to shout

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URUSAI URUSAI URUSAI!