Your Favorite RPG Characters?

[DeusExBrockina]

One of my favorite aspects of RPGs is how they classify and suggest types of characters in specific genres, the abilities they have, the ways they can act, etc. Character options in RPGs usually give me new ideas and act as inspiration for OC (original character) creation. I spend a lot of time reading character creation sections of games even when I don’t expect to be playing them any time soon (I have a number of OCs for games I’ve never actually played, in fact…). As someone who very rarely manages to find time or a group to play most of the games I want to play with, the majority of my time spent with RPGs involves me daydreaming about my characters like this. Obviously lots of other things end up mixing in for character inspiration as well-- videogames, movies, anime, books, music, history, and so on.

What are some of y’all’s favorite OCs that originated from RPGs you’ve read or played? What did you like in particular about them? For those who tend to always end up DMing, maybe an NPC you were particularly fond of?

One of mine was a character I did actually end up playing in a D&D 5e campaign, a viking-y warrior poet type named Gunnlaugr (mechanically speaking, he was a half-elf Valor Bard, with a build that ended up being a whole mess, but that’s besides the point… >_> ).

I wanted to make a character who didn’t have any sort of tragic past or mysterious secret he was keeping from the rest of the party (which was a dynamic I had seen very frequently in D&D groups, and was often guilty of myself)-- his childhood was totally fine, he wasn’t angsty about being a half-elf and “not belonging in either world” or any of that, his relationship with his parents was pretty healthy, neither of them had been murdered by marauding orcs or anything… He was basically just there because deep down he was just a big nerd for sagas and legends and all that jazz. He had grown up on sagas and legends in a culture that emphasized big heroics and going around and slaying dragons and whatnot, and was eager to go out and become the stuff of legends himself. It was fun to play a character who was as excited to be involved in fantasy adventures as I was as a player. The character was mostly very lighthearted, very loud and boisterous and easygoing, but there was a subtext going on that he was maybe there for the wrong reasons-- he wanted to adventure because he thought getting fame and glory and wealth through adventuring was what a good viking ought to do, rather than like, because he consciously wanted to help people…

[BlakeRyan]

Back in the day we played Everquest II, which have lizardfolk called Iksar. I enjoyed playing a Druid-Fury, exploring the lands, removing undead and cultists.

So when Pathfinder rolled around we decided to use Norrath/Everquest world as a setting but I insisted we need a hook for the group so reduce the murder-hobo factor. We decided we would all be Iksar and would be dealing with a range of threats to our nation. My character was a Druid called Ack-Ack (sounds like Mars Attacks).

Our characters frequently put themselves in harms way to protect their kin, and ended up scouting out a new homeland, and escorting our people there. Along the way I role played trying new foods with the people we traded with, and teaching Iksar youth about wilderness survival.

While I only played the character for 12 sessions, it was a good story arc and we accomplished alot.

[Adrianne1976]

Presently my Favorite Character is for a Game called “Gaslight” by Battlefield Press. She’s a Bear Beast man (Think island of Dr Monroe) investigator in the 1880s. She is always wearing a pink dress of some kind with a Pink parasol and Hang bag. She is rather dainty for a lady that is 7ft tall, and doesn’t like to raise her voice. When she does she feels very embarrassed about it and apologizes because typically if she yells…She roars!

[darren]

I had a very dumb and beautiful street fighter in a Veil 2020 game who fought with a sword sometimes. He ended up losing his arm because it got infected with an AI and he felt bad about it not having it’s own, autonomous body…

Omen was a good boy :’)

[Vincent_Eaton]

So many of my favorite characters come from Masks. I played a Beacon who was the twin brother of our super emo Nova (“He got the powers, I got the good looks”). Playing direct contrasts to other characters always appeals to me.

I consistently enjoy related characters, whether siblings, parent/child, spouse, or multiverse copy or clone. As long as they don’t detract from the main plot, they can pull everyone else into more inter party role play

[DeusExBrockina]

“He got the powers, I got the good looks” is a great line XD

[inarvan]

I still enjoy my utterly clueless Doomed temporally unmoored cyborg character Overclock, whose time-warping powers caused no end of mayhem for his fellow teen heroes, even after his death. The campaign eventually involved another of my favorite characters, the Harbinger character Torrent, who was a future version of Overclock’s kid sister come back in time to stop an evil version of Overclock from invaded the present timeline. Playing with that dichotomy was great fun.

I also had a Changeling: The Lost Beast character called Humerus Pete, an anthropomorphic hyena who served as something of a den mother for his fellow motley members, and who, through the most wonderful of goblinish contracts, became the owner of the most righteous of semi-autonomous vans.

[LiamEvans210]

I’ve played the mysterious Professor Tanhauser, yes that’s how it’s spelled in the americanized version, in various Mforce games from he games which gets ran yearly at local conventions.

Professor Tanhauser is at archetypal super scientist, maybe a bit mad but determined to defend humanity from various cryptid menaces. There was an original, and years later other ones turned up, all known as professor Tanhauser.

[Nickwedig]

In our current Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish Granting Engine campaign, one PC is an iwana bozu, a creature taken directly from Japanese folklore. They’re literally just a trout that grew to enormous size, and now they dress as a Buddhist monk and walk the shores of Town giving gentle lectures on ecology and Buddhist morality to fishermen. They’re a great character, because they’re a little slow and dim, but kind and gentle. They don’t really understand human life, and often misunderstand what’s going on around them in entertaining ways while they try to help. (They are a literal “fish out of water”.) It fits the pleasant, laid back, comedic flavor of the game really well.