So this thread isn't about stats or heros, just characters that were a blast to play. Tell me about yours.
Taking a rowboat out to a pirate ship and attempting to bluff our way aboard as newly recruited pirates, without having considered that the recruiters would have provided a password...
Tasked with finding elusive lizardmen, the party goes out into the swamp at night without torches (so as not to scare them off), but puts the halflings on the shoulders of the taller members so as to see over the high swamp grass and use their infravision to navigate. A group of humans, walking around a swamp in pitch dark, taking directions from halflings sitting on their shoulders. Do the math...
I played a variation of Baroque up to 3.5, whereupon I started DMing and saw to it that he continued on as an NPC , and now into 4.0 to help (hinder) a new generation of players.
Ripper, the psychotic halfling thief...
The character started out in (I think) 2nd Ed. as a pre-gen I was handed during a pickup game in the cafeteria back in college - I happened to be walking by, saw the game about to start, and asked if they minded me hanging around to watch. They handed me a character sheet and told me to join in. At that point, the character was just a halfling thief with two magical daggers and a ring of jumping - no name, no personality, and I started out playing it as just another stereotypical halfling thief.
Then we got into a fight in a tavern - a bunch of cultists came charging in swinging, blocking both exits and then breaking the windows to throw torches and oil inside. So we're stuck in a tavern that's burning down around us, and it's starting to look like we might lose the fight. Back then thieves were basically non-combatants - in order to backstab you had to literally sneak up behind somebody and surprise them so you mainly stood in the back and plinked away with a crossbow. Which is why my halfling was hiding under the tables and ankle-stabbing anybody who got close.
After awhile, though, I decided I needed to get more proactive, and climbed up onto the table. I saw a party member backed into a corner getting the snot beat out of them, so I used the ring of jumping to hurl myself across the room, landing on somebody's back and wrapping my legs around them to hold on as I slashed my daggers across their throat. The DM decided to be nice to me and let me do my SA damage, which back then for a 9th-lvl thief was pretty hardcore, something like 5x weapon damage.
It was right about then that the genesis of Ripper began, lol.
I spent the rest of the combat bouncing around the tavern like a pinball, alternating between trying to cut throats and just jumping into peoples' faces to distract them. As time went on and more and more cultists kept pouring in to replace their losses, we were starting to get desperate.Then one of the cultists outside breaks the window nearby and winds up to pitch in another torch. And suddenly, it hit me... It was at that moment that Ripper was born.
With a barbaric yell, Ripper charges down the length of the table, uses his ring of jumping to hurl himself out into the street through the broken window, and begins wildly running around amidst the cultists, jumping and slashing and roaring at the top of his lungs. That desperate, inspired move shocked everyone (including the DM) so much that it gave the party's dwarven fighter the opportunity to go out through the window after me, and the two of us managed to fight our way to the front doors, clearing enough space for the rest of the party to battle their way out of the tavern. The tide of the battle had turned, and it wasn't long before we were grabbing cultists and hurling them back into the tavern. For the rest of the adventure, I played Ripper as a wild and crazy bouncing ball of laughing death.
The next time I joined a campaign, I decided to recreate Ripper. I ended up rolling some killer scores - something like 16 Str (the max for a halfling), 19 Dex, and a 17 Int...and nothing lower than a 13 in anything else. Ripper evolved into a more well-rounded character - he often acted more like a drunken, carousing dwarf than a halfling, but he was also highly educated and well-spoken. His off-the-wall antics (such as his habit of singing tragic elven ballads at the top of his lungs in orcish and reciting classic poetry during barfights) disguised a keen and cunning intellect, and a fierce warrior spirit. He could always be counted on to do something over the top, but nearly always well-timed and with style.
I played him in quite a few campaigns before 3rd Edition came out, the highlights of which included him acquiring his trademark pair of +5 daggers and his gauntlets of ogre power (18/00 Str), using the gauntlets to beat an ogre to death with his bare hands by punching it in the kneecaps until they broke and it fell over then standing on its chest and punching it in the face, and adding an intelligent sunblade bastard sword to his arsenal.
Ripper got really fun to play in 3.5, when I added a few levels of fighter and swashbuckler and got the TWF feats - he was like some steroid-enhanced superball of bouncing, laughing death on a pogo stick, lol.
I've yet to get around to statting him up for 4th Ed., but I'm sure he'll be just as much fun as always...
Soulfurs, Master of the grasping palm. I created him for mechanical benefits. I took improved grapple and with my large size my grapple mod was through the roof. I then took scorpion grasp allowing me to hold grappled enemies at a -20 which put me just below normal checks. With fling enemy I made the battlefield a dangerous place.
However once I started playing I become very attached to Soulfurs and my DM was very good at roleplaying the shock and surprise of NPCs when they meet a well behaved half-ogre. He often defused hostile situations much to the surprise of city guards.
. Of course, the other spellcasters in the group were less than pleased. After that, I'd occassionally throw out an anti-magic zone just to mess with them. It was quite fun actually.The thing was he obviously had his limits too, and well the rest of the party got pretty damn shocked the first time he lost his temper and summoned two troll skeletons to help sort out the mess another nercoamncer had caused. (While they were off trying to save a kid from some orcs this guy had turned an intire villege into zombies, laughed at my character and teleported out, our BBEG in other words..), Before that the rest of the group hadn't noticed anything wrong, the paladin was especially shocked.
Another wonderful moment was actually sucseeding on diplomacy checks with the local gnoll tribes leader so well that they and the neighbouring city (elven/human city mainly) ended up setting up a trade route, after having sorted out a few conspiracies.
All in all it was a pretty serious campaign, and a pretty serious character, but he was ALOT of fun to play.
THAT was fun. Took a long while for the party to notice something was askew, he did a very good job of appearing to be straight and true, but lived it up quietly. I used to mumble the words to "Junk Food Junkie" while being Mr. Nice Guy.
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Once, we were in the desert, questing for a McGuffin. We rand afoul of a gigantic sandworm that chased us for the better part of the day. We nicknamed it Shai'hulud, as it was all teeth and body. We were unable to ditch it, even though we were on my flying carpet. It had tremorsense. Then, I hit upon an idea. It had no eyes to see or ears to hear a bard performing to fascinate. So what I did was use perform (dance) to charm it through its tremorsense. Like Sheeana of Dune, Illyria pounded the sands with her bare feet in an hypnotic rhythm. Rolling a 19 on the perform check, adding 17 to the die, Illyria managed to keep it fascinated enough for my party to get away safely and it to lose interest. It was awesome.
At the height of our adventures, we were stuck in the future, trying to get back home and prevent the coming disaster. The world had fallen to gated fiends whose Blood War was being waged on the Material Plane. Our wizard had a brilliant plan to jury-rig a fiend gate into a time portal to get us home. While he was performing the ritual, the rest of us had to fend off attacks from both devils and demons. Things got real hairy when a couple of balors joined the fray. In an act of desperation, Illyria expended all of her sonic might/day usage into a rolling thunder spell on them. One balor rolled a 1 on its fortitude save, and the other saved. The balor who failed his save literally blew up. The surviving one and all the fiends stopped dead in their tracks, stupefied, which gave us that one round to jump thru the time gate.
The 4E Illyria is so much more fun, eclipsing her predecessor of another edition. We are all in a planeshopping campaign (starting in Ravenloft, escaping to Sigil, and now Spelljamming and currently in Iron Kingdoms). Our latest misadventures cost her a leg (in a fight with an Argos like giant, Illyria fell off a 200 ft cliff but I rolled a natural 20 on her Acrobatics check to minimze the damage by 1/3. Or wall walking ranger ran down the mountain side to my rescue. And now, she sports a mechanikal leg. woot
Other memorable characters were in 3.5, again. Virikhad was a human psion who lost 4 psicrystal companions through both heroic and hilariously stupid actions. The first time was when we were in a shadowy forest, encountering a "lost child". We rescued him, and I gave him my psicrystal to play with. The little bastard turned out to be an aranea which made off with the stone. It was a sagely crystal and with its loss so did a fragment of my personality. Next one was a heroic one. I lost it during a fight with a dragon turtle overseas. Half the party made it off the sinking ship, but our other half were trapped. Our ranger was a vampire stuck in his coffin, in the hold of the ship. I had my heroic psicrystal fly to the coffin, and tk it off the ship. What happened next was hilarious and horrifying. Our rogue was by then a notorious ditz. She actually wore a necklace of fireballs around her neck! ANd when the dragon turtle used its steam breath on the ship, she exploded. At least she took the dragon turtle with her. Taking almost everyone with it. Luckily, I had my psicrystal tk throw the coffin high up into the air, riding the blast wave up. The psicrystal died. And so, my psion had to use the coffin as a rowboat, and row it for weeks. Let me tell you, being stuck in a psychoportive sheltered (rope trick) coffin with a vampire is no fun (in-game). By the time we reached shore, my psion was legitly insane. His third psicrystal was a cowardly one this time, reflecting his traumatized psyche. He lost this one during imprisonment by our nemesis. The fourth one was the third one, but mindseeded by the enemy. Alas, the campaign ended before we finished the story.
"Aleurs, you are undone, no? You were not expecting - - ze Magnificent Voltaire! Haha!"
Probably one of my favorite PCs was a halfling druid.
I had a halfling druid...Milo the lazy. He had the substitution at level 1 that made him good at riding his dog. I always refered to the dog as unimportant, which annoyed the dm. He was Milo's legs and I never valued him above the pcs(It's a dog, if it dies I'll get another). Milo was lazy, and didn't want to have to walk.
The inspiration is the picture of the halfling druid in the species book. He just looks lazy to me.
favorite move, shared spider climb. stick me in the saddle, and dog runs up the wall. Spiderman, eat your heart out.
Then there was Grog, the half-orc fighter...
He had rolled an 18 Intelligence, which got knocked down to 16 due to the racial penalty. I decided, for comedic value, to roleplay that he was extremely smart but just didn't speak common very well. He got a lot of mileage from playing the "stupid half-orc" card.
Like the time in the tavern where the bartender yells at Grog, pointing to a hand-drawn sign over the bar and shouting, "Hey, moron, can't you read? The sign says No Orcs Allowed!"...
(so I asked the DM if it really said that, but the DM said he was just pointing to a soup menu.)
Grog reaches over the bar, lifts the bartender up by the shirt and leans into his face, then says, "Grog half orc, not half stupid. Grog speak Orc. Grog speak Elf. Grog speak Dwarf and Grog speak Gnoll. Grog not speak Common so good, but Grog read just fine. Sign say "Bowl of Mutton Stew: 2 coppers". < holds up two fingers> Grog will take two, please."....
I also had an elf/orc crossbreed fighter/swashbuckler/rogue/duelist named Lothar (a shortening of his long elvish name). He was 6 ft 6 in. tall, built like a bodybuilder, and dressed like a total fop. The elvish blood smoothed out his orcish features, leaving him roughly handsome. He was a serious ladies' man with a 16 charisma, cultured, well-spoken and charming, who fought with a rapier.
Yes, a very large half-orc with a rapier, backflipping over tables and fencing like Erol Flynn. It sounds funny, until you realize that due to my Strength and insightful strike I was doing greatsword damage with my little toothpick, lol. A Keen rapier, six attacks from TWF and sneak attack dice were just icing on the cake...
Have you ever seen anybody decapitated with a rapier before?
He gets to the black market and finds an information broker. He purchases information on safe access to the city vaults. After another purchase of a disenchanting scroll, he heads off through the city sewers to the vaults. He enters, casts a disenchant over the area, and proceeds to take small amounts of everything -- things that wouldn't be missed, or things there were a lot of. He took maybe one thing that was rare. While hidden there, he also catches sight of another thief -- the thief doesn't notice Bekhter, and it is later discovered that the theif was plot-essential. Finished, he headed back to the black market, sold off most of what he stole for a total of around 700 gold. He quickly leaves the area and rejoins the party.
OOC, the entire party was distracted most of the time, so it was just myself and the DM going through this. Much later, everyone was wondering where on earth I had gotten all the equipment I was giving them for a dangerous fight we were about to go into. The reply was, "I found it."
As a DM, however, I have to note an NPC that I loved using. He was a goblin named "Mad" Marogh Thek. Thek was a bounty hunter, and he liked explosions. In fact, he had about twenty vials of alchemist's fire strapped around his armour at all times. He also had a little pack of weaker goblins he ran around with.
It was like playing a crack-addicted pimp crossed with a cowboy with an understanding of explosives.
In life, he was an avant garde dancer who was drafted into the military. He hated military life, and was teased about his dancing, which people found atrocious.
However, after dying in an acid blast, and awakening to undeath with the rest of his battalion, he found that his newly undead brethren now appreciated his dancing... but that it sickened the living (which it pretty much always did, anyway.)
He positioned himself as the artistic voice of the undead revolution and tried to garner favor with whoever seemed to be in charge at the moment. (There were considerable power struggles amongst the undead).
I used to shake my dice bag to create the horrid sound of his dancing. He was insane, sycophantic, egotistical... and lots of fun.
Yes, he sung U2 songs.
Ever destroyed a lich to "Peace on Earth"?
Fang was a barbarian-druid going for bear warrior. In fact Fang a human who was 7'2" and raised by orcs who considered himself an orc by extention.
It began with me being one of the most seasoned players in a group of new players. My job quickly became just pushing the players along. Mostly it came to situations like this:
DM: You come to a locked door, it radiates magic (which he did for the benefit of the wizard who never let his detect magic fail)
Player1: Well I think I should try and dispell the door.
Player2: The door is probably trapped.
Player3: I can try and disarm the door and avoid the trap, if it is trapped.
Player4: DM, is the door trapped?
DM: Maybe, you'll need to do some checks to find out.
Player1: I think I'm just going to dispell it instead.
Me: I pull out my club and yell "Fang smash!" and wind up to hit the door.
*All other players*: WAIT!
Me: Fang no smash? I put away my club.
Player2: I still think the door is trapped, I try and search for traps.
DM: You find the door is trapped.
Me: Fang SMASH! (really high damage)
DM: The door disintigrates away from the frame.
Me: See?
And this party was quite large, probably 8 or so. Which meant every time we encountered anything we would repeat the process. Fang smash became my catchphrase which meant the barbarian who can pull your arms off was getting bored and that you should probably decide and do something.
Funny side notes: (1) Fang had the second highest intelligence in the party, behind the party wizard. (2) Fang ascended to a god in that same campaign. (3) Fang hated elves. (4) Fang is one of the most beloved, or perhaps just plain feared, characters anyone in our group has ever played.
Writing that journal was probably some of the most fun I have ever had role-playing ever. It was actually fairly difficult writing as a person who didn't really know how to write. His language was pretty coherent (he could speak the language after all) but I would write things as phonetically as I could. Also he didn't know how to track dates. Each day he would write "today" as the date, then cross out the previous days and write yesterday, or the day before yesterday. This went on for almost a week before he got tired of editing each day, so he just wrote today for the date each day.
Not so much a character as more of a collection of characters: the adventuring company "little Hearse of Horrors". We are all undertakers and ride around with 4 black horses and a black carriage to carry the coffins. Everywhere we go we offer standard salvage and disposal contracts to people and if we have to look for people we request to do their funeral if we find them dead. Carriage combat is great fun and to an ADCP we have even all gone dressed as if we went to a funeral. My character is a druid who is an albino in human form, all black in beast form (red eyes in both forms). The fluff of being an undertaker is great and I can recommend it to all people to try it out.
My dm allowed us to use items in a different spot than is usual, such as a cloak for a blet and so on, without costing more.
So i bought a few belt of battles, and used the belts to get more actions using shadow pounce.
I ended up using the deeper darkness spell on myself, creating shadows everywhere, and shadow jumping/ teleporting all around the room sneak attacking things. it was awsome and fun. my dm hated me when in one round i got something like 7 full round attacks on the bbeg and killing him in one round.
It was fun playing him though.
my 4e rogue, kairon. he was chaotic evil pretending to be unaligned in order to adventure with his company and, ultimately, kill things. the funny thing is that much of his personality came from jokes i made at the table that the DM forced me to stick with and play out as if i had been doing/saying them in character. for instance, there was the time we fought a succubus. kairon was a total kleptomaniac, stealing everything in sight. the succubus' clothes were high quality, so he took them. then someone made a joke about how i just wanted to crossdress, and i went with it. he wound up, ultimately, developing a second personality: karen, the unaligned promiscuous alcoholic tiefling female who occasionally hit on the party. he was always a ton of fun to roleplay, because the only other party member he got along with was the idiot savant fighter who was too stupid to do multiplication but always managed to notice whenever kairon was stealing from the party and loudly mention it.
Not the best build mechanically but it was still fun to play a full platemail wizard with Staff of Defense.
Storyline wise as the only son of a Duke who'd had 5 girls already and "Damnit boy wizard or not no son of mine it going to be caught up in a dress!"
So we have a man that casts spells from a large staff at distances incredibly far away in blasts or bursts of 15 feet or greater Hence the nickname "Sherman"
He's a highly-intelligent old man, with a long, flowing beard, wearing blue wizard's robes, carrying his walking staff. His high Knowledge skills, particularly in the Arcane, allow him to enlighten the people of villages he's passed through, and he's revered as a wise wizard.
Thing is, he's insane. And he isn't actually a wizard.
Once it comes to fighting a battle, he convinces himself that he's cast a spell to make himself super strong. He throws off his robe to reveal bulging muscles, and then charge into battle, swinging his Quarterstaff and destroying his enemies. Turns out, he's a monk. His strength is natural, but he's so insane that he believes it's just the magic.
When asked to cast spells in towns, he makes bad excuses as to why he can't, or he finds a way to accomplish the task without magic. He doesn't have an ounce of magical powers, but the magnitude of his knowledge is extremely convincing.
I think this would be a ton of fun to play.
Since Optimizing for power detracted from roleplaying.(i don't know how it does this but) then optimizing for lack of power gave you awesome roleplaying skills.
3.5 ed convince your DM for point buy the higher the better.
The plan is the ultimate elven wizard.
Don't put any points into any ability scores you're reserving them for roleplaying. So straight 10s in everything.
Choose as your race 1/2 Orc. (for more roleplaying skill in elven wizard)
Put all your skill points into sleight of hand and spend every session roleplaying your extreme magic skills by pulling eggs from peoples ears etc.
He had a very interesting relationship with the party's invoker of Pelor...heh.
A gnoll melee infernalock.
Pact Blade Claws? That would be awesome.
I had come up with a few character concepts, but found myself over-obsessiong about optimizing them, so I decided to go the other way and make a decidedly sub-optimal character. I started by picking the worst race I could find, which as it turns out is Bullywug. Perfect.
Then I tried to find a class that made sense from an RP standpoint, but that used none of the Bullywug's stat bonuses. I chose Stalker Shaman.
For his background, I decided that he was a medicine man in the swamp who had been expelled from his clan at some time in the past for reasons unknown. He is a skilled healer, however, and has lived in the swamp as a hermit ever since, offering his healing services to any who need them. It was not even unheard of for Humans on the island to seek his services when they contracted some swamp-related illnesses.
He had noticed the recent change in the Bullywugs around him (The PCs had learned that the tribes were infested with some sort of a demonic taint) and had left the swamp seeking answers. He was picked up as a prisoner by a scouting party and delivered to the mercenary captain, which just happened to be the PCs contact point. He entrusted the PCs to watch after him since he claimed to have the same goal he had entrusted them with, and he was afraid that if left around the other soldiers, he'd be killed.
I play him as an old crotchety frog-man. (He claims to be 137 years old, but has no way of proving this) He squats when he walks and wears a giant backpack. Hanging down under the pack is a T-shaped piece of wood that he uses as a stool. Every time he ends a move action, he plops himself down on his little stool and usually yells something at the nearest PC or monster. I gave him the Claws of the Eagle power, even though he's not a Watcher Shaman, which he uses to scold the other primal characters (Barbarian and Druid) in the party when they miss with their attacks. A lot of the time, I'll just have him delay and wait for a miss, only to yell at the missing character to shape up and "channel the spirits correctly this time" (and make a melee basic attack). Sometimes I'll also use it to give the rogue a second shot at his sneak attack damage if he misses in a round.
My personality concept for him is equal parts Yoda, Mr. Miyagi, the landlady from Kung Fu Hustle, and The Sphinx from Mystery Men.
(3.5)
Take a half-orc barbarian, give him one level of sorcerer and make sure he let's everyone know he's the world's strongest mage. For extra credit summon a familiar called ''Mr. Kitty'' that is neither a mister, nor a kitty.