(crossposted to !pathfinder@ttrpg.network)
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!
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 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.
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My secret: all my characters are crazy. Sometimes it’s more obvious. (Fish-malk, best-malk!) Sometimes it’s more subtle. (What do you mean it’s not normal to pray to God so intensely you orgasm? I do it every day, privately.) None of them are sane. Don’t tell my players.
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 he poisoned her because she was sick and suffering but the religious fanatics did not want to let her die while she suffered. I love characters with personality problems, dense pasts, and a complicated family.
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)
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
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.
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 😅
