Favorite Character You Have Played

[Aegis]

[QUOTE=Raumoheru]i never said a big brawny dolt throwing a wee little halfling man through a door wasnt funny, i just said that because a person is a barb or w/e that doesnt mean that they are stupid...[/QUOTE]
Generally, in the conventions of RPG's, it does. It's not so much a stereotype, it's just as was already said: People play to the strengths of the class. Many people, when they make characters, don't bother putting more than 10 points into a stat, so they break even on the modifier's, and focus more on the key abilities of the class (in this case, str and con).

Not only that, but by default, the barbarian class, in DnD, is illiterate, which denotes some lesser focus on intelligence, and more on durability and survivability.

[jopperm2]

I love barbarians in certain circumstances. I like a Dwarven one, however uncommon that may be. Then I max out CON, that way I have huge amounts of HP; plus he rages a lot longer, usually longer than a combat would last.

[Rob-hin]

I really dislike Half orc barbarians though.
It's such a cliché. Plus, there are to many half orc's. It's almost a true race, which it isn't.

I dislike to play barbarians anyway. I like the witty way instead of brute force.

[jopperm2]

I once had a DM that had so many player abuse minority races that we had like 2 half-elves, a Half-orc, a drow, and two svirneblin in our party(we were evil). When that campaign fell apart and we started a new one we had to roll d% to see if we could have a certain race. So I would say "These are my choices:
1> Elf
2> Half-Elf
3> Drow
4>Half-Drow
5>Human"
ANd he would say "Okay, this land's population is 20% Elven so roll d% and if you get less than 20 you can have elf, if not we'll move on to the next choice." All of the half races were <5%, I think half-orc and half-drow were like 1% each. You could play a full Orc or Drow with like a 10% chance. I think It was something like this:

Half-Orc 1%
Half-Drow 1%
Half-Elf 3%
Half-Dragon 5% (Not the real Half-Dragon, this was a made up race he did, they were the ruling class)
Orc 10%
Drow 10%
Aasimar 1%
Tiefling 1%
Svirneblin 1%
Duergar 2%
Elf 20%
Dwarf 5%(Weird huh? This was a strange world)
Gnome 1%
Halfling 5%
Human 33%
He slanted it so that races that he thought were too powerful or that he didn't like were HARD to get, with the example priority list above there is still like a 45% chance I'll have to keep trying more races.. When I look back on it, it looks pretty stupid, but we were really abusing the system.

[melancolly]

in the game i run i have made the point from the start that any race is allowed as long as the lvl adjustment allows it , and most of the players seem to stick to the main races , one player made an bugbear but he got killed after 2 games as no one botherd to give him a hand when he went down .

[Rob-hin]

Out of the ordinary races can give you a new experience. It keeps the game new and fresh.
One of my players plays a Drow for the first time. It's hard for him but it's new and he enjoys it. No harm there as long as the characters have a binding factor that keeps them from harming eachother.

[jopperm2]

Different races can be great fun. We were just abusing the same races over and over though.. I think we had a Svirneblin rogue who started with 20 DEX, 4 ranks of hide, and skill focus Hide. that's +13 to all hide checks or +15 if in the dark underground. That's for a ECL 4 character. We would constantly find good min/max things like that and use them over and over ad nausium.

[boo's daddy]

1st Edition (AD&D): a female Dwarf assassin who took out 16 player characters (including the same one 3 times). Har har har.

[Demortis]

My lvl 6 fighter with gloves of storing, 4 extra chain and daggers, excluding the one in his shield and the one he uses for normal combat so 6 altogether. hes got quick draw and rapid shot. a claw bracer thats keen, and the longbow he uses. Him, a barb, a rouge/assassin, and a monk/sorcer took out 4 minitaurs. the first showed up, he was 12ft tall, twice the size of my char. i grabed his wrist with a chain and held him while the barb and rouge kept him busy so the monk could pierce the minitaurs shoulder with a +1 quarterstaff and use warp-wood to remove the arm. the second was the short miniatuars older bro. nearly the same statige but without removing the shoulder.we knocked kim uncounsious and let the barb remove his head. the last to head us making jokes about their fallen friends. a 2vs4 fight that we nearly didnt make. the rouge managed to be able to hit one with purple worm posion. which helped alot. man nothings better then watching a minataur trying to pick up his battle axe that he just dropped. we walked away with well over 1500gp from hugh pp. we then cut the horns and hoofs off and sell them to a city of kobolds. good time, good times

[Math Mannaman]

My favorite character was from a forgotten realms campaign where the majority of the party was Drow from Menzoberranzan itself. In the early stages of the game, my character who was druid, living in the outlying tunnels near Menzoberranzan, got involved with a Cleric of Loth, and a Guard from one of the more mid-scale houses. Our first adventure ended in disaster, and we found our self’s exiled from Menzoberranzan. Our party alignment was mainly neutral to neutral-evil, although over the long run the group shifted to almost neutral good. My alignment always remained true neutral.

Needless to say our group had lots of adventures, and playing a Druid from the under dark was a fun idea to role play, as well as a challenge (especially when above ground)!

Sri Vasudeva
12 lvl Druid
Drow, of Quertus A’Daragon
W 17 D 16

[Mosy]

That would probably have to Dundar, the lvl5 fighter dwarf, with his dead brother's great-axe+1. He was killed by a baby wyrm, sob.

I also had much fun with a friend of mine, whos character hang himself in a tree, using his friends belt .

[AarronIkarus]

Old school...

My favorite character went by the name of Randolf Flambard. He was a middle-aged male half-elf. He was a lvl 4/4 fighter/magic-user created with the first edition rules. The neat thing about this guy was the DM's random physical characteristics tables. Randolf ended upo being both ambidextrous and double jointed. This helped him get out of more than one sticky situation....

[AarronIkarus]

Another character...

I enjoy playing unorthodox characters. Not unethical, just unorthodox. I don't break the rules, I just bend them. I got my hands on the rules for archers in the Best of the Dragon, vol. 3, and created a background for a juvenile character. This boy was an orphaned human raised by Elves until he was twelve. At that time the tribe was wiped out by orcs. This boy was out hunting at the time and survived the slaughter and went on a veangence hunt. Just the sight of any orc caused him to fly into a killing rage, and he didn't really care for half-orcs wither. The last time I played him he was seventeen and a 7th level archer. There is more to the story, but time is limited.

[Xandax]

Must have been when I played NwN in Argyle Online.
I made an evil-aligned mute sorcerer.... now that was a challenge, but very fun to play.
Tobad I didn't get to play him in a more "tabletop" setting.

But I like to break the mold so to speak, so my characters almost never have any sort of cookiecutter statistic asignment and when creating bios my characters parents are rarely dead, and at least not slain by <insert random monster race> so my character dosen't have strong bias against that <random monster race>

[Rob-hin]

It can, once in a while, be fun to play a stereotype.
Right now I'm playing a Human Paladin of Tyr; he's kind of an extremist. Evil must change it ways or perish. One can do that as a level 8 character...

[AarronIkarus]

Paladins....

...ick. I could never play a paladin. My personality is just a bit too chaotic. I could do a good thief, though. I had a thief one time that was anything but stereotypical. He was a 15th level NG Grey Elf thief. He was a short little bugger, being only 4'9", if I remember correctly, but he never let that get him down. He only stole from the party twice. Once as a practical joke (he stole a coil of rope off another player and cut a piece off so the player he stole it from could use it for his horse), and another because he saw something he wanted (a 3000gp sapphire necklace, that was all the treasure he took from that adventure). Like I said, atypical.

[Demortis]

right now im playing a sorcerer, to get a feel for the class. his family is one of the more well renounded and wealthy in town. and his half-elf witch friend, that is from a well renounded family, but isnt as forunate. both went to the same school, we both have high Cha. so trying hit on her isnt the easiest thing to do. but he tries.

[Aramant]

I have a few. I much prefer roleplaying highlights over statistical power. I'd rather do something impressive that doesn't require a roll than rely on high stats to get good damage. Anyway...

A 16 year old human sorceress named Leigh DeCoeur. She was just tiny, standing 4'5" or something like that, and had something like a 7 Str. She had been raised in a community that hated and feared magic, and they had tried to burn her at the stake. She was secretly freed, and ran away. Due to her background and whatnot, she was terribly shy, nervous, and reclusive, only really talking to her raven familiar.

In the initial "PCs meet each other in the tavern/inn" scene, she had gone to her room early, not wanting to hang out in the common room. Some assassins or something after one of the PCs were in the common room, disguised, and another one tried to sneak in through Leigh's room. Being only first level, she couldn't do a whole lot... but the room was dark, and she could cast a lot of 0-level spells. So, she flashed off a rapid succession of Flare spells right in front of the guy's face, startling him backwards and eventually making him fall back out the window.

When she and her raven went out to the common room, the rest of the assassins hadn't attacked yet. But the party's barbarian, being a moron, started bugging Leigh, and her raven attacked him. Then the barbarian killed the raven, and this cued the assassins to attack. In the encounter, the barbarian was tripped over a chair... and Leigh promptly flew over the table on top of him, and stabbed him in the neck with a dart, killing him.

That was one of my crowning achievements, my 7 Str sorceress killing a barbarian with an improvised melee weapon.

Another crowning moment was when I quite literally won a campaign with a tiefling rogue. The DM was controlling, petty, and generally stupid, so I felt inclined to screw with his whole campaign. It ended up that my tiefling, Harlyn, became both the lord of the town and the master of the thieves' guild by fourth level, through a combination of seduction, bribes, blatant lies, and occasional gruesome sadism (eg. The party paladin, a female, had tried to kill Harlyn for bribing guards to arrest her, and so on. Having failed, and eventually losing her paladin abilities for general stupidity, she became a sort of concubine for the lord. Having ingratiated himself to the lord, he asked to "borrow" the paladin. The player thought this was funny, and went along with it. Harlyn hung the paladin upside down from the ceiling in a bondage-type room. Everyone was expecting me to do some kind of funny kinky thing... but instead I had my character flay the paladin. Evil!)

At one point, the DM tried to kill my character with a 20th level sorceror NPC and his apprentice. The encounter began with the sorceror chucking a scarab of death at Harlyn, who dodged. I'm pretty familiar with that item, and the DM was not. Having dodged the item, I told the DM I wanted to do that dramatic circling that you see in movies, where two characters sidestep in a circle while conversing before a fight. I did this and carried on the conversation for 30 seconds, watching the clock... after which the scarab came to life again, and being closest to the 20th level sorceror, attacked and killed him. I went from 4th to 10th level, because of a combination of there not being an entry on the XP table for such an encounter, and because the DM just didn't want me to level up any more than that.

Finally, there was Fergus MacLeda, a Scottish-based cleric of St. Cuthbert. He was bald, had a short, full beard, and was loud, humourless, and unforgiving. His helmet had a raised crest of St. Cuthbert on the brow, and Fergus had a habit of headbutting enemies.

One one occasion, a troglodyte stabbed up at Fergus from the bottom of a shallow pool with a longspear, embedding the weapon in his shoulder. Unfazed, Fergus yanked the spearhead out of his body, pulled the spear up hand over hand until the monster was high enough, and punched it in the face. It was a timely critical hit I rolled there, knocking the now-dead beast back into the pool.

So... yeah. I like to play characters such that I can tell stories about them in terms of some kind of dramatic narration, not just "and then I rolled a 30!"

[Rob-hin]

Those are some interesting stories, a very fun read.

[Aramant]

Thanks. My female human transmuter was really fun, too, but there aren't any particularly spectacular stories about her. She was interesting because she used transmutation spells almost exclusively, and her prohibited school was evocation. And surprisingly she wasn't useless. Soften Earth and Stone on stalactites (or whichever one it is that hangs from the ceiling) over enemies, Enlarge on enemy bowstrings and helmets, or the clothing of enemy casters... One time we were fighting enemies with massive two-handed mauls, and she enlarged those so they couldn't be lifted.