I play cis males only, but not as a rule. I just generally will make male characters, likely in part to feeling better prepared at interpreting them, and in part that I feel like I would not play another gender correctly. I understand that it is an illusion, as I could simply play them as any other human/non-human being, especially as I’ve played other species without issue. But I feel like I would not be able to give them the nuance and characteristics they deserve, and would end up defaulting to cis male attitudes.

I also tend to want to play old characters, as I feel like young ones are too boring. They tend to have too short of a history to have an interesting identity and lore behind them, and I love the idea of facing large challenges later in life while struggling with the decisions of the past and our own will to change. I played in a one-shot where I made an old farm veterinarian that would roam the lands helping people with their animals, who had a fall-off with one of his sons for joining the army of an oppressive despot, and a merchant daughter that traded in stolen artifacts. Rumour had it my character had killed his own wife, and in reality what had happened was that she poisoned her because she was sick and suffering but the religious fanatics did not want to let her die while she suffered. Love characters with personality problems and dense pasts and a complicated family.

As an unrepentant Fate Core player / GM, I love playing weird characters with lots of flaws to harvest the sweet Fate Points.

My favorite characters will have a ridiculous backstory with lots of grudges, fueds, romances, and allies who show up all the time in play.

My favorite concept yet was a character in a superhero game that has a pinnacle skill of Contacts (and second of Resources), because he is normal human who is owed favors from nearly every superhero in the universe. He’s a wheeler and dealer of tech both medical, alien, arcane, and divine. Superheroes are always reaching out needing something extra, and he takes payments in favors. Any given time there’s a fight he can call in a favor from any superhero I can imagine (while he hides behind a wall or something). Of course if he doesn’t roll well enough, the superhero in question was busy, tied up, unconscious, didn’t have their phone, etc. And then he’s in trouble! Good times.

I play a variety of characters, all very different from each other, and mostly different than me.

My favorite character was in a game of Kult: Divinity Lost. The game took place around Detroit in the 70s, during the boom years of the auto industry. She was a housewife and church lady with an emotionally abusive husband and a son in college. Since a traumatic event in childhood, she’d had visions of things that she believed were angels, but were actually dark entities beyond the unravelling veil of what we call reality. By the end of the campaign “chapter”, with the help of the other PCs she had killed her husband (who turned out to be worshipping these entities), her son had died after a prophetic vision, and she had bargained with dark forces to make them give up her son’s soul from their tortures. Her faith is so strong, even after she abandons Christianity, that some powerful forces are vying for her, and she is trying to broker that power.

We’re going to be playing another chapter in a few months, and I have some exciting plans for her.

When I started playing D&D (3.0) all of my characters were just me with fire powers. Sorcerer, pyrokineticist, whichever class I could find that gave me the most fire. Since then, while I play a very wide range of characters in terms of classes and ancestries, all of them are based on some part of me. Dr Hoots, Owlin Chronurgist, was based on my often deadpan demeanor and tendency to fix things behind the scenes, while Ihrannis V, Fey Paladin, had a lot of my ADHD in him. Bob Peasbody, Human Omdura, was my anxiety, and Robert Thatch, Human Swashbuckler, was my tenuous self preservation.

My favourite was probably when a DM bribed me to play Descent into Avernus by giving me an NPC to play - Lulu is a Hollyphant (small golden flying elephant) that accompanies the party on their adventure, and the DM gave me her backstory and a Hollyphant PC statblock and told me to make what I wanted. Small spoilers for DiA: most of her backstory is amnesia. I came back with the suggestion of a support focused sorcerer build to heal the party, and the DM pulled a face, so I gave him my other suggestion: I wasn’t sure of the specifics, but the backstory suggested the amnesia was down to a series of extremely traumatic events in Hell which could easily cause PTSD, and the progression of the statblock meant she started without most of the magic an NPC hollyphant has but would progress to full power over the adventure. So, the class that would most closely match that - Wild Magic Barbarian. Triggered by devils, her rages see uncontrolled bursts of her suppressed magic manifesting around her as she goes ham on them.
DM loved it and the rest of the table was delighted when they were introduced to the high pitched bundle of excitement, which turned into a mix of horror and confusion when combat started and I soundtracked it with this.

Mechanically, I tend to avoid spellcaster type classes, mostly because I don’t want to keep track of spell lists and such.

As far as roleplay goes, it depends a bit on who I’m playing with. The actual players rotate a bit, but in general I have 2 main groups I play with, and the type of character I play tends to be pretty different between them.

In the one group, I tend to play sort of the straight man. The other players aren’t exactly running murder hobos, but a couple of them skew that direction, and their characters all tend to have big personalities and I tend to be the one who’s keeping things a little grounded.

One of our longest-running campaigns was a 5e game that started out as sort of a weird mix of the Rise of Tiamat and Storm Kings Thunder modules that went way off-script. We had an angsty rogue, a drunken warlock who was using some home brew stuff that was roughly like The Fathomless from Tasha’s but a few years before that was officially a thing, an elf barbarian who was absent for half the campaign, and a drow (sorcerer I think) who started off being sort of a Drizzt knock-off but shocked us with an amazing plot twist halfway through that he cooked up with the DM where he’d secretly been an agent of Tiamat the whole time… until Tiamat discarded him and we had to figure out what to do with him after that.

And then my character- Randall, a relatively by-the-book military veteran, sword-and-board fighter, who was nominally the leader of the group, he had a grudge against dragons from a previous battle he’d been in, and a bad case of “just when I thought I was out out, they pull me back in” being pretty sick of the adventuring life and really wanted to retire to a quiet farm somewhere, but adventuring was all he had ever known and he kept bouncing from one adventure to another unsure how to make the transition.

In my other group, I have a tendency to play the wildcard. The most extreme example of that was a pirate called Lotor the All-Beard (so named because he was a raccoon, and so covered in fur, he was “all beard”)

Lotor was a filthy, chaotic idiot and the dice gods smiled upon him. He was remarkably skilled in all manner of crime, including, somehow, forgery despite being illiterate (He needed someone else to put the words together for him but with that and a handwriting sample he could masterfully forge any document needed.) He didn’t speak the common tongue, so couldn’t directly communicate with most of the party, but had a magical talking parrot (named Polly, of course) who translated for him (the bird was far more intelligent than Lotor and kind of hated him. Throughout the campaign there were many hints dropped that there was a lot more to this bird than met the eye, but Lotor was too dumb to pick up on any of it.) He stole from, cheated, swindled, and flirted with basically everyone he met, and pretty much just always let the intrusive thoughts win. If there were shenanigans afoot, it was usually his fault.

A lot of his criminal behavior stemmed from a bit of willful ignorance and childlike naivete about laws and social norms. I hadn’t seen it at the time I created Lotor, but the Guardians of the Galaxy scene where the concept of theft being illegal is explained to Rocket was pretty much Lotor in a nutshell.

It was also a bit of a running joke that he was actually a fairly formidable and well-known pirate captain who ran a very tight and orderly ship (though a fair amount of those organizational skills may have actually been Polly,) but he considered himself to be “on shore leave” and so basically on vacation for the duration of the campaign and was cutting loose.

Those are sort of the two extremes, but probably my two most beloved characters, and kind of give an overall sense of the direction my characters tend to go with either group.

Awful little creatures. Usually kobolds or similar things. I enjoy playing morally bankrupt (or downright evil) but weak-willed characters, the sort who will be the first to suggest torturing the prisoner for information, or demanding ransom money for the dignitary we’ve just rescued, or whatever’s appropriate, but who will cave quickly under criticism from the rest of the group, begrudgingly going along with group consensus out of fear of being ostracized. Sometimes it results in a redemption arc, sometimes it results in slowly corrupting the rest of the party by convincing them over time how much easier my character’s methodology would make everything, and either is fun.

This is basically a polar opposite to how I actually am, which I think is the most fun sort of character to roleplay.

I play fairly average support characters. Humans in Fantasy (Vengeance Paladin in 5e, Cleric in Midgard, Ranger with nature magic in a homebrew system). In Cyberpunk Red I’m playing a Nomad with zero cyberware, but top notch gear to compensate that disadvantage.

Basically all characters I play are loosely based on songs I like :3

I mainly played d&d 5e (not the 2024 one), so some characters I had were a halfling open palm monk, a college of spirits bard half-elf, a hunter ranger ork, and some others, though I honestly want to revisit those characters at some point, cause I didn’t get to play them a lot before

My favourite roleplay wise was the half-elf bard, who was an ex sailor traveling aimlessly unable to deal with the guilt of the death of their crew (who were the spirits they drew their power from as a college of the spirits bard)

That’s a tricky question,

While I’d love to say no my character aren’t related to me, and I try to change character type in reality things are more blurry. A different person playing the same character would play it quite differently, or may-be simply not finding that character cool. And there is some pattern in my character, I tend to play more anti-hero dragged into the adventure against their will or Techie/super-hacker profile, over some other archetype.

I have only played in 2 campaigns and usually the traits i wanted to portray have faded after a few sessions and my characters act the same as i do. But there are also some traits and experiences which shape the characters for example both of my characters developed naturally an obsession during the campaigns. My first character found a rock and was 100% convinced that this rock is special and so i always had a motivation to reach new destinations and meet new people to find someone who could help identify my rock. In my second ongoing campaign my character received a curse that he is going insane when he is not drunk. So i always try to get new alcohol and beeing always drunk and having low int gets us in funny situations.

I also think it is kinda a good thing that these traits evolved during gameplay otherwise i think the other players would not be as accepting and also into the joke and roleplay around it

@Balerion

Lots of rogues 😁

Two weapon fighting of course and sneaking around. Also mages, sometimes frontliners.

As for characters I didn’t like: Inquisitor. While the concept is cool, the character is entirely useless. One trick pony of mental debuffing against which 80% of the enemies are immune! I pivoted and made an Omdura out of them. It was the better Inquisitor 😅

#pathfinder