I've always favored Fighters and other Warrior types (Barbarians, Paladins, Rangers, ect.), but, now that I'm getting a little older and have played a long time, I am a little more focused on versatility and actual role-playing than on seeing how much damage I can dish out.
My past few characters have been DPR monsters: the hand crossbow fighter and warlock 3/sorcerer X Eldritch Blaster. My character before that was a tank with an amazing AC. He was a hill dwarf wearing plate mail and a shield. He was an Eldritch Knight and had the Defense fighting style too. His AC was 21 at 5th level, 26 if you triggered Shield.
These guys are all one trick ponies (I know as I gain more sorcerer levels that will change with the sorcerer most of all).
I play in Adventurers League games. I want to start over with a character who can hold his own in combat, but is more of a character who has options to do other things.
I find myself leaning towards the Monk, Cleric, Druid, Sorcerer, and Arcane Trickster.
What do you guys have the most fun with?
Lore bard. 
Vengeance Paladin with a two-hander. Yeah, I'm so original. It's a fun Oath to play, though, RP-wise, and being the strongest against the enemies that matter most is great.
Also Assassin Rogue, with decent INT (for poison extraction and disguise-making) and CHA (for Deception), and Expertise in Stealth and Deception (and at Lv. 6, Sleight of Hand and Perception).
My take: the simplest classes are the most fun, because you can impovise more cool stuff in play without worrying about playing to the mechanics. Letting the mechanics define your character is unfun because it is closed and totally prescribed by the book after you have chosen a few options.
Character A has 23 hit points and knows 14 spells
Character B has a cloak that folds up into a bucket and once rode a buffalo through town
Which is more fun: A or B?
Lore Bard or Land Druid for me.
If you want melee; Swashbuckler (if DM's OK with it)
Diviner Wizard for sure. A million tricks up his sleeve.
I've enjoyed the Warlock class (for its background/flavor) in every edition in which it appeared. Currently liking the BladeLock.
I historically preferred magic users, then in 4th Edition, I fell for the Warlock.
Now In 5th, the Warlock is even more filled with flavour.
But truth be told I like more things, my 3rd level Eldritch Knight with an AC of 21, in my friends home brewed campaign where we are getting our first planescape contact.
My Warlock 5, Bard 1 character is my favourite for pure versatility.
I have created a Rogue 1, Warlock 3 character who I hope to play soon.
I love this edition of D&D, characters come through really effortlessly.
Hmmm..... I have played a 1/2 orc vengeance Pally... had a blast
Played a Ranger/Rogue archer...had a blast
Played a Wizard/Warlock sociopath....had a blast.
So far....so good...
FunkySpunk wrote:
Great, imaginative stuff, @MechaPilot! I mostly come to these forums for inspiration, and your post provides that in spades!
Leugren wrote:
My first 5E character was made for AL, and he's now 5th level.
Lord FlashHeart, 'Flash' to his friends, is a Ftr5 (battle master) who I designed as a pure swashbuckler.
As a variant human, he took Magic Initiate to get mage armour so he didn't have to spend money on actual armour and still have a better AC than any other light armour, allowing him to afford a silvered rapier from the start, which I fluffed as a 'Fabergé Blade', and made it my bond. I also took ray of frost so I didn't need a ranged weapon, and prestidigitation to stay clean and looking good!
To be the ultimate swashbuckler, the first three things I took from battle master were parry, riposte and precision strike.
I love the way that I can be a swashbuckler right out of the box with just being a single class fighter. I love that I can afford to have Dex and Cha as my two best scores, despite not having any abilities key off Cha. I'm charismatic just because I want to be, without compromising my effectiveness as a fighter. I feel really cool at the same time as being a great duelist, and I didn't feel the need to optimise to the Nth degree.
Above all else, I enjoy casting spells.
So if I had to choose just one I'd have to choose the Wizard above the other casters because;
- They can learn every spell on their spell list that uses a slot.
- They gain slots on short rests
- They can learn spells between levels.
- And finally they use intelligence which passively boosts my favorite skill in the game, Investigation
Ath-kethin wrote:
Great kid, started out as a sembian thief. He, along with a group of likeminded rogues (in the general sense, not the class name), played merry hob with the various power groups accross Sembia and The Dales for a half dozen years, before a careless moment lead to most of them, including Finnan, meeting a Bad End, exactly as his mother always said he would.
The Shades caught up with them, and Finnan and 4 others met their fate at the end of a Sembian rope. But Finnan had a greater fate, and he woke in a landscape of shadows, where a strange man he knew instinctively was his god made him a deal he didn't understand, and didn't question.
Then something went wrong. Mask was dead, and the world went insane. The spark of divinity Mask had given him returned him to life, but it wasn't sustainable. And so, amidst a landscape of madness and death, he sought out The Lady. The child of a Fey Lord and a Shadow Knight of great power, and bound to her crystal pool by a cruel curse, The Lady had been the patron of one of Finnan's closest friends, now dead because of Finnan's mistake. Barely clinging to life after months of travel, escaping blue horrors when he could, and battling them when he couldn't, Finnan finally collapsed at the shores of an impossibly reflective lake in an untouched valley in the Sunrise Mountains. The Lady agreed to a pact with the dying thief, confirming that such a pact would give him life, as long as he continued to serve her, and so long as he swore to pay the price for the lives he had taken with his carelessness.
SO, he swore her oath, and she took him to the bottom of her motionless lake, where he died his second death, and woke in an oasis in near Calimport, over 100 years later. (4e, Hexblade White Well Fey Pact, with somewhat different flavor)
Eventually, he found new friends, including my other favorite character, who I'll talk about in a second post, and my wife's favorite character, her Gnomish Artificer, who is the niece of one of Finnan's old companions who survived the ending of their little company.
He also finally learned the full price his oath demanded. He had been cursed to die once for each death he had caused.
Later in the campaign, he was found by Riven (another Chosen of Mask who became a minor god) as his body was inexplicably failing him, (which he still hasn't figured out the reason for) and forged him a new body out of shadow, and also severing his tie to The Lady, replacing it with something forged of shadow, and the spark given to him by Mask, 100 years ago. He woke transformed into a revenant, and still hasn't forgiven Riven for it. Third death.
Later still, while sleeping too close to a portal between Toril and Abeir which was being forged with barely control magic, he and his companions were touched by that planar power, and Finnan was reborn, mortal again, and free of all magical ties, except the demands of his oath, and the curse that comes with it. Fourth death.
Only one death remains before his debt is paid, and one way or another, he can rest.
I love this character so much because all this weirdness evolved out of just making characters and playing the game. We're lvl 16 now, and have just flung ourselves into the alien world of Abeir (which in our campaign is a world of endless oceans punctuated by archipelagoes, ruled by dragons under a steel sky, except for a few regions where the flame of freedom flickers bravely in the darkness, as it were.) And the thing about Finnan, that keeps me so strongly immersed in this campaign, is that he doesn't have big dreams, he doesn't want to be a legend or become a demi-god or have bards sing of his great deeds. He wants to marry Nemain, have half breed babies, and grow old on a small plot of land somewhere on the Dragon Coast. He needs to find out if The Lady survived the Spellplague, and solve the mysteries surround Mask that keep popping up around him, and survive this trek into another world, to rescue Torkan's old friend Willem*, but once he's done those, he just wants to rest. Hopefully alive, but he knows he has one more death to repay.
Currently Bard with 2 levels of warlock for at will disguise self. + high deception
Having a blast with that one. It helps big time when the cleric in my party casts enhance ability charisma on me. (thankyou).
MechaPilot wrote:
FunkySpunk wrote:
FarBeyondC wrote:
I've always had great fun with my recurring character, Ponzi Lustig the Gnomish Bastard. In 3.5 he was a Beguiler, in 4th he was a fey-pact warlock, and now in 5th he's an Arcane Trickster.
The mechanics, class or backstory never matter as much as the core concept: heavy on the Int and Cha, light on Str and Wis, he's a lying, thieving, greedy coward and I love him so much!
Part of the fun is that even with his bumped stats, Ponzi's never half as smart or charming as he thinks he is so his schemes fail just as often as they succeed, if not more so.
Clutchbone wrote:
So far I've had the most fun with my Drow Rogue(Swashbuckler) and a fighter splash for BM. Just the flavor of the rapier/hand crossbow combo combined with swashbuckler/BM attacks has been crazy fun. He's also been the 'face' of the party focusing on a secondary Cha score and every social skill. The 5e background traits also add so much character. Like he always has a plan, but his flaw is that he can never remember the plan when it matters.
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Historically, I usually play rogues or rangers since they have a nice balance of combat ability and out-of-combat utility. Narratively it's also fairly easy for a wide variety of charactrs of all personalities, social classes and backgrounds to have reason to have acquired those skill sets, so they offer a lot of space to work with.
MechaPilot wrote: