(crossposted to [email protected])
I like all sorts of characters. I’ve yet to find a class I don’t enjoy playing. That said, my absolute favorites tend to be high-charisma types and blow-stuff-up casters.
Mechanically, my favorite character was my first ever TTRPG character: A half-drow draconic sorcerer in DND 5E. I focused a lot on fire spells and damage. Like I said, I love blowing stuff up. Plus I just think the fantasy of being innately magical is cool.
Roleplay-wise, my favorites have been my tabaxi swashbuckler rogue and my aasimar celestial warlock (DND 5E and 5.5E, respectively). The former was a pretty selfish guy who gradually became a better person as he grew to care about the party, and the latter started off as a magical cop who slowly started to realize that all the authorities she’d trusted were corrupt. Sadly, both campaigns fizzled before they could complete their arcs, but they were still a blast to play.
Some of my characters are a lot like me, while others are nothing like me at all. My first character, the aforementioned sorcerer, was more or less a self-insert because I was new to roleplaying and thought I should test the waters with something easy. By contrast, the aforementioned rogue, who was my second ever character, was someone I created specifically to be extremely different from me because I wanted a challenge. Most of my other characters have been somewhere in the middle of the “nothing like me” to “me irl” spectrum. (Although I’m currently playing another self-insert, just because I hadn’t done so in Pathfinder before and thought it might be fun. She’s a kitsune grandeur champion with the draconic sorcerer archetype. Yes, I WILL make and play a fox-dragon self-insert OC and there is nothing you can do about it. I may be cringe, but I am free.) For example, my warlock had pretty similar morals to mine, but she was much more naive and less confrontational than me.
So yeah. Tell me about your characters!
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.