Although I rarely based my PCs on existing characters intentionally, almost every time I describe a character to my friends who care about D&D, they invariably say "oh, you mean like ?"
I based a character off of Han Solo and, in the same game, based the BBEG off of Peter Cushing's portrayal of Grand Moff Tarkin. I am far more prone to base characters off of real people, however. I based a Halfling off of Cheech Marin, a Warden off of Commodore Stephen Decatur Jr., a two-fisted Cleric off of Andrew Jackson, a Paladin off of George Washington, a biker (for Shadowrun) off of Miyamoto Musashi, and others that escape me for the moment. I do have a good stock of my own characters, but we all get influenced by something.
I may not base my barbarian directly on Conan but such characters often help to inform my PCs. Some characters are simply iconic (for lack of a better word), they stand out in my mind as exemplars of what a hero (or anti-hero) is and what they do.
Captain America (pally), Captain Kirk (man of action), Han Solo (wisecracking 'scoundrel'), Indiana Jones (adventurer), The Pretender (Jarod) (a darker paladin), The Punisher (nuff said ;)), James Bond, Spider-Man, Clark Kent (from the Smallville TV show). These are a few heroic archetypes that have helped stir my imagination, starting with characer creation and through resulting PC activity.
My personal favorite character was a half-elf 4rge/2ftr/2sor in the Eberon setting back in 3.5. He was a detective sort in Sharn. Had is own office which was little more than a apartment on a floating spire in the upper sections of sharn. He was kinda like a James Kagnee meets Indiana Jones vibe. Very smart, good with the ladies when need be, and considered one of the top detectives in Sharn. He had a penchant for getting into and out of danger A LOT. This was 3.5 though. Completely unsure how I'm going to translate him to 4th.
I based a character in a Mage game on the character of Ash from the Evil Dead/Army of Darkness franchise.
Maybe the strangest and most fun Mage game I ever played, I teamed up with a friend and we RPed Seth and Richie Gecko from From Dusk Till Dawn.
As far as D&D goes, I love fighter-y characters, and most of the ones I play are Brock Samson in my mind.
After submitting the backstory, my DM asked, "So you're basically Neo, right?"
I mean, er, I knew I tapped into a few cliches but, uh, I never really intended to, ehem... dammit.
I'm terrible with coming up with names for my characters and have often taken from books and the like. For example, I have played a dwarf named Limbeck and a Rogue who bore the nick name "The Hand" (thought his actual name was not Hugh and he was hardly a loner assassin ;) ). Both of those are from the Death Gate Cycle. I've also played a Horus, a Ra, as well as a Ramses (and other characters using the alternate spellings). The list goes on.
The two original names I've used fairly often are Balthor for dwarves and Tur'Val for elves. I come up with others from time to time, but the point is I will take liberally from other sources when failing to think of a name.
With concept I'm sure there have been cross-overs, but nothing ever intentionally taken. Quite frankly I'm sure everyone has copied a character concept at some point without knowing it. There is nothing original these days.... so "they" say.
~Bizkit
I may not base my barbarian directly on Conan but such characters often help to inform my PCs. Some characters are simply iconic (for lack of a better word), they stand out in my mind as exemplars of what a hero (or anti-hero) is and what they do.
A few years back, after getting an anniversary edition Conan the Barabarian on DVD, I made a 3E human barbarian that was heavily based on a Conan like concept (even in his name, Korar). He had the pit fighter slave background like the movie, but otherwise looked and acted more like the character as portrayed in the old Conan the Adventure cartoon series. This however was only my starting point.
While initially mostly faithless, I intend to have him undergo a divine revelation, multiclass as a cleric of Kord, and then go into the Sacred First prestige class (transforming form a greatsword sword wielding noble savage into into a divinely inspired wrestler). This transition was inspired my desire to make a character that specialized in competition domain from Complete Divine, which I acquired at about the same time. Unfortunately that campaign fizzled out shortly before reaching the levels where this transition was to occur.
I'm sure that many of my other PCs and NPCs draw inspiration from various fictional figures, however, the only ofther character I can think of where emulation was a direct design goal was an NPC concept for wyrmling brass dragon who was heavily based off of prince Tricky from Starfox Adventures.
I once played a mercenary wizard based on Raistlin, who was a mercenary wizard.
I play a tactical warlord mainly because of Lelouch vi Britannia from Code Geass.
He's like an Inspiring and Tactical warlord at the same time, with an Int and Charisma of 20 but a Strength of 8! Of course, it would help DnD warlords if they had weapon proficiency with Knightmare Frames.
Of course, it would help DnD warlords if they had weapon proficiency with Knightmare Frames.
Giant robots, Falchions... what's the difference, really?
Doctor Who
The Stranger in the bar from The Big Lebowski
Mace Windu crossed with White Eyebrow (from Kill Bill and elsewhere)
Benjamin Linus from Lost
Kool Aid Man
What class/race combo was the kool-aid man?
I based him on a cross between Obi Wan Kenobi ("these aren't the droids you're looking for"), Ash the Pokemon Trainer (I summon you, Charozar), and Sir Robin of Monty Python's Quest for the Holy Grail.
I too am earger to hear about the Kool-Aid man inspired character.
In the same game, one of the PCs calls himself "The Doctor" and has a robot companion named TARDIS (Technologically Advanced Robotic Drone Interface System).
Note that both of us are otherwise fairly normal humans from near-future London.
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On a related note, several of us do have a habit of playing our favorite characters over and over.
For instance, I have a dwarf throwing axe specialist named Farga that started out as a HackMaster 4 character, then saw play in a D&D4e game, and then I got lucky and the very first HackMaster 5 character I rolled had the perfect stats to be Farga (but I haven't had a chance to play that character yet (and I expect to continue to be the primary HM GM so I may never get to)).
Minor correction, Farga REALLY started out as a character in the Icewind Dale video game but first saw table-top play in HM4.
*Rolls perception to look for traps*
"Da spirits be tellin me da room don't be trapped."
Rogue/Dungeon delver in 3.5 who was a combination of Indiana Jones and Han Solo with a bit of cowboy thrown in.
In a Vampire Game I once played a malk who was convinced he was James Bond (Connery) who eventually turned out to actually be the genesis of The Highlander. His crowning prank was convincing the world that he never existed.
On a related note, several of us do have a habit of playing our favorite characters over and over.
This is something I do as well. In a Scales of War campaign I'm currently playing a male goliath barbarian who is my 4E recreation of a goliath ranger/scout I played in 3E. Though I think he ended up with a different name, because I had forgotten the name of the original character, but he otherwise has the same personality and fighting style.
I also like to play alternate reality versions of my characters. In a Forgotten Realms campaign I'm currently playing a female half-elf paladin based off of a half-elf healer I played back in 3E. They were both born the same person, but due to differences in where and by whom they were raised they became very different kinds of heroes (should the opportunity ever present itself, I have about a half-dozen other classes I'd play her as).
Other characters I intend to revisit in the future include my old halfing warmage, dwarven defender, and possibly my gnome beguiler.
I play a tactical warlord mainly because of Lelouch vi Britannia from Code Geass.
wizard.
ummmmm....
wouldn't he be more of a fey pact warlock due to this geass?
What class/race combo was the kool-aid man?
Not a D&D character, actually. He was played in a (very silly) superhero game.
He had two superpowers: "Burst through walls" and "dispense tasty beverage". But he had the disadvantage that he could only say the words "Oh" and "Yeah". I spent the entire evening trying to see how much emotion you can express with only two words.
Kool Aid Man was not very bright, so every time the GM described a wall, he would burst through it, assuming that there were thirsty children on the other side. My memory is fuzzy now, but that might be why we ended up crashing the spaceship.
A Goliath Warden based off Apocalypse from the X-Men fiction
I was going to play a drow storm sorceress, but decided, it was too derivative
You know, kinda psycho....
"The will of Torm feel like some one is beating my head like a drumHITTING, HITTING AND HITTING MY HEAD!!!" or May Torm forgive your balsphemy, for I never will..... I NEVER WILL!
Kinda hard to role play :P
Not a D&D character, actually. He was played in a (very silly) superhero game.
He had two superpowers: "Burst through walls" and "dispense tasty beverage". But he had the disadvantage that he could only say the words "Oh" and "Yeah". I spent the entire evening trying to see how much emotion you can express with only two words.
Kool Aid Man was not very bright, so every time the GM described a wall, he would burst through it, assuming that there were thirsty children on the other side. My memory is fuzzy now, but that might be why we ended up crashing the spaceship.
Sounds like a fun super heroes game I was once in. I played Issac Newton, complete with giant foppish hat. Except the hat could slice through steal when thrown like frisbee, and I had a set of "perpetual motion balls" that, once set in motion, would mesmerize someone until I stopped the motion.
Then there's Alden. In 3.5 Alden was probably my favorite character. He was an Artificer, originally supposed to be bookish. Then, on a lightning rail I said that he was going to read a book, upon which I was challenged "Do something interesting." Mainly as a joke, I start hitting on a passenger NPC. To my surprise, I rolled high on my diplomacy check. Very high, and Alden managed to get into the girl's metaphorical pants.
After that, the character got a reputation as a womanizer, and was frequently caught in situations with his non-metaphorical pants down. I loved playing the character though, to the point where I developed his backstory around it. Eventually the character reached a crossroads where he had to decide whether to specialize in turning himself into a warforged or creating homunculi. To my surprise, both options are viable in 4th edition as well, so I ended up recreating the character, though I have yet to actually play it.
He went through some re-imagining during his transition. Mainly, I'm thinking his personality may be something similar to Carlos Ramirez from The Dresden Files, and I imagine his summoning as being akin to Agatha Heterodyne's self-replicating clanks.
When I finally told another player of my inspirations, he giggled with glee, telling me he totally saw it, now.
One series of characters in our group was actually derivative of each other. That was possibly the most amusing. My character was a play off of the name of a character from a previous campaign. A character from a completely different player in the next campaign made a character whose nick name was a play off of my character. 3 deep. We never kept up the tradition after we switched to 4th. Might be time to pick it back up. ;)
He didn't act much like the character from the Black Company books, though.
“IS THERE NO ONE ELSE!”
I play a tactical warlord mainly because of Lelouch vi Britannia from Code Geass.
I have to say that Lelouch is far more a Fey'lock|Warord/Bard who went Daring Blade and just ate up a bunch dominate powers.
*ehm*
Back on topic, no, I rarely play a character based on any other character. Similarities are coincidental.
Stating characters out as DnD PCs though? Fun past-time.
Edit: Actually, I remembered something ironic. The above statement is mostly true, save one exception where I made a minor Tiefling villain for a campaign I'm running who draws off of Lelouch as an inspiration.
I had a 2E character based on Raoul Duke from Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas.
He was an elf bard that always wore a hat of some sort and smoked a very long, thin pipe. He also had goggles of some sort (I really can't remember what kind they were).
He dabbled in alchemy quite a bit and, as such, was a bit scrambled in the head from "sampling" his different concoctions. He had a swagger that was more aking to a drunkard, and had a very odd speaking habit. I played his Duke-persona to a tee, to include the odd speaking and strange facial expressions. One of the more fun (if not long-lasting) characters I ever had.
I had a 2E character based on Raoul Duke from Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas...
Nice, very bold move. Not exactly the most contrived or gimmicky of roles like a good many of the others I've seen thus far, or an easy role to emmulate for that matter. Tricky to imitate, nj. Everyone usually picks some badass from their favorite comic or movie. Nice change of pace.
Anyway, for what it's worth, a few I remember:
-"Remy DeLacroix" (NPC guild theif). He's like Bill's gay cousin Robert on "King of the Hill" when they go to Louisiana. Think of Val Kilmer's Doc Holiday ("Tombstone"), but with a slightly longer draw, less alcoholism, but more ennui & refinement. Quite the dandy; sippin' on this a'here brandy in tha' pah'lor.
-"Hawkwind" (Male Wood Elf Warblade NPC) is essentially Magua from "Last of the Mohicans". Violent, vengeful, full of racial/cultural superiority, etc. Good villian.
-"Ch'turrgha" (Male Necropolitan Wzd NPC) is a composite of Dr. Herbert West ("Re-Animator") and The Marquis de Sade (Geoffrey Rush from "Quills"). He's not rampantly evil so much as schizophrenic from living alone for so long.
-"Balsa" (Female Human Ftr; friend's PC) pretty much a carbon copy of the lead from "Moribito" (Adult Swim) in that she is a new player and was recommended to keep it simple, no frills approach by other players.
-"Spivy Bootblack" (1/2'ling guild theif) is the hyper, chatty wasteland scavenger w/ the makeshift heli from "The Road Warrior" that befriends Max.
Just last night, I had my PC decide what sort of NPC she would like to accompany her in a future adventure. She chose a Half-Silver Dragon Dwarf. My reply... Hmm so he'd have a mohawk fin from the silver dragon... and a beard from being a dwarf. Who has a mohawk and a beard and is totally bad-a$$?
I pity the fool who don't know who I be talkin' about!
And so my PC now has Mr. Tibious on her team. He ain't gettin' on no airship though!
It happens in other genres too, like westerns, or science fiction (star trek, Aliens, Babylon 5, etc.).
I've done my own concepts too, but it's fun to recreate our favorite characters. And often I will buy a neat miniature, paint it up, and then design a character around that -- and sometimes those miniatures are from movies and stories. There was a whole line of Eternal Champion miniatures from Ral Partha I had a good time with, as well as the Dragonlance figures, some Alien miniatures, and so on.
I'm still trying to design a D&D character around my Hawkmoon miniature, but it's challenging because he has a big Rifle.
In a Vampire: the Requiem game, I played a Malkavian based on the Baron of Santa Monica from the PC game Vampire: the Masquerade Bloodlines. Multiple personalities, one very uptight and straightlaced, the other a bimbo.
When my husband wants to try out a new character concept, we set up one-on-one dungeons with him running his concept character and me running everyone else. Yeah, 4 DMPCs. Not to worry, these test runs are rarely serious.
Anyway, one of these characters is an over-the-top, gloomy, angsty, goth elf. He was going to be a normal elf, but Professor Wingnuts advised the party that "We need an elf! This is fantasy, right? What's fantasy without an elf? We'll find one frolicking about the woods. They do like to frolic, you know." Yeah, so they found this guy glooming himself silly and listening to Cradle of Filth.
Well, the other night we watched the first season of a show called "The IT Crowd". (Why the British complain about their TV I'll never know!) The character of "Richmond" came on scene...
It was him! It was totally him! As if the show didn't have us laughing hard enough!
I based one of my characters on Beat Takeshi, taking a bit off each of his roles in every gangster movie ... wearing super expensive clothes and having his entire back covered in a large dragon tattoo.
Someone who was happy to just be an 'enforcer' who wandered around market cities beating up merchants and enemy criminal organizations for more turf and protection money.
Except instead of belonging to a single family, he was mercenarial, and just contracted his services out to the first crim who gave him an offer.
that being said, that rp sorta got in the way of adventuring like the party had wanted to do ... so I cut that rp short.
My current 3.5e character, Kohonen, is a sorcerer/fighter (3/3) who I designed as having long shoulder length hair and an owl familiar who sits on his shoulder...I swear I didn't see the front of the Book of the Righteous (Green Ronin) with the image of Maal there before I had this idea. We are using the book as the campaign pantheon so Kohonen, despite being a user of "anarchic magic" aspires to the ideal set by Maal of a justiciar even though he is a sell-sword. He does use a warhammer rather than a sword though. (The name is NOT inspired by Conan - it's the Finnish name of one of my cousin's professors on his PhD course.)
EDIT - oh yeah, he is high CHA, low WIS, and he makes up nicknames for himself like Kohonen Spellhammer, so I'm playing him a bit like Rimmer from Red Dwarf. However that too was a subconscious choice. I've also got this annoying image of him clicking an automatic car-key - totally anachronistic, but there must be something telling me to play him as a yuppie too.
In the PBP game I am playing an old 2e character I converted to 3.5e. Playing him I think I am playing out the political career of one of my RL role-models as it seems appropriate to ask What Would Mr X Do for him. Not going to go into detail as to whom because of the Code of Conduct being expressly non-political, but it's strange - the character was originally devised long before I adopted this guy as a hero and yet his background as I wrote it in 1994 seems to parallel Mr X's almost spookily correctly, as far as anything D&D throws up ever does. I would think Mr X would be a wizard in D&D, not a cleric, but everything else seems to fit.
But I am not a huge fan of sci-fi drama so I don't know whether this principle works well with published novels, books, films etc - it works for me with politics, so I guess it's that part of the hive mind that I am specifically connected to.
My DM played a Tieffling paliden of the raven queen and everyone she told her concept to said "oh Dexter"
Who have you based characters on? I try to be original for the most part but sometimes there are characters that will inspire you. For instance I had a Human Fighter based off of the Comedian from Watchmen.
yes I base my characters off characters from things, and then wait for someone to realize where I am getting my ideas from, so far no one has figured anything out.
Reverend Vryce from The Coldfire Trilogy
Tiger from the Jennifer Roberson novels
Alaric Morgan from the Deryni books
One or two others I can't think of right now
Runeic would use peoples full names (even when asked not to), tended to speak plainly and right to the point, an would often nod in greetings with a little head bow. Oddly enough I quickly got in the habit of addressing every intelligent creature we encountered, no matter how obvious it was that NPC might be opposed to us. It quickly made me the leader of the party (I never intended to be anything but the 'side man'), and in several situations it mad the bad guys not attack us at all.
Fun times!
Anime characters have personalities?
Yea, it was news to me too.
Not a D&D character, actually. He was played in a (very silly) superhero game.
He had two superpowers: "Burst through walls" and "dispense tasty beverage". But he had the disadvantage that he could only say the words "Oh" and "Yeah". I spent the entire evening trying to see how much emotion you can express with only two words.
Kool Aid Man was not very bright, so every time the GM described a wall, he would burst through it, assuming that there were thirsty children on the other side. My memory is fuzzy now, but that might be why we ended up crashing the spaceship.
OMG. It's not often I find myself laughing at stuff on these boards.
I do however have an alarming tendency to mix-n-match smaller facets of multiple other characters into my peeps. And I don't always know from where or how much until after the fact. It's rarely ever intentional. It's fun, though, to be playing a character and suddenly realize, holy ****, I'm channelling ... :-)
In Shadowrun, I once made a troll street samurai named Hacker, but not because of his big-ass sword. (His sword was actually a katana and he really was a samurai-styled swordsman.) He was called Hacker because of his computer skills. Musashi Myamoto, Bruce Banner, and James Bond all contributed bits of his personality.
On the other hand, it's somewhat obvious that my 3.5 rogue, Mephistopheles Foolsdark, is pretty much both Hannibal Lecter and the Cardassian tailor/spy Garak from DS9, as filtered through my particular warped mind.
He's urbane, polite, witty, and intellectually gifted (18 Int). And an utter smiling bastard. He's much more likely to kill you for insulting a barmaid than for trying to kill him for his coin pouch. He has Garak's near-compulsion to play head games with people, although with the party, (and the more innocent npcs and those that others might consider his "friends"), it tends to be more like the relationship between Lecter and Agent Starling in the movies. I generally play him more on the darker, edgier side of unaligned (he was CN in 3.5 terms) like Garak rather than outright evil like Lecter. He does have his moments, however.
Here's something just for laughs - Not too sure what it says about me, lol, but I started out writing up Mephistopheles Foolsdark as a "me" character, with my personality traits, etc, but then quickly realized that he kept sliding into the Garak/Lecter personality because my own was so damn similar, hehehe...
:evillaughI have an NPC that randomly shows up in various towns who I base on The Abominable Snowman from the classic Bugs Bunny cartoons.
...who is himself based off of another fictional character (Lennie from Of Mice and Men).
You'd be surprised how many of the druids powers mirror stuff Malfurion did in those books.
she's very fun to play.
->Character Art.<-
I'm tempted to steal some of the characters I've heard on the Gamers Haven game podcasts for NPCs. The one that comes to mind is the character of "Little Bear" an indian in their Deadlands compaign, who always speaks in the third person about his actions. Their gunslinger "John" has some feat called "Grim Servant of Death" which evidently causes him to shoot his friends whenever he rolls a 1, so it's almost become a cliche of Little Bear's player saying "Do not shoot Little Bear!" So you can steal not only from books and movies, but from other games too!
:D
I currently have a swordmage that sometimes acts like Kenshin, though he is insanely paranoid of demons/devils.
Other than that, I try not to base my characters off anyone, though sometimes I'll get an idea to do so.
Most players (or DMs) aren't writer/actors so it only makes sense to steal. It would be interesting to know what gamers who ARE actors in real life do. I'll bet they steal too. Heck Hollywood writers certainly do.
Writers all steal from each other. There is nothing new under the sun, just different configurations of existing things.