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Who's the best RPG character you've ever had?

Gary Yam (6 months ago)

Who was the favourite RPG character you ever had, and who was your favourite RPG character of another player's? Lastly, who was your favourite NPC?

1. I had a 1e magic-user called "The Phantom" that made it up to 14th level before being killed in Tomb of Horrors in the early 90s. He was sleazy and narrow-minded, but reasonably generous and brave when he had to be. He loved Feebleminding other spellcasters.

2.A player in one of my 1980s D&D campaigns had an elven fighter called "Elfink" who was apparently orphaned very young and brought up by humans. He was a bit messed up and basically acted completely randomly. The character was a real laugh and I just loved the name.

3. In my current D&D home campaign, I have a really minor NPC ranger called Simon Ironleaf who really really wants to be an elf. He even changed his name from Simon Thompson when he went to ranger school to make himself seem more ranger-y.

Nick Hughes (6 months ago)

Hmmm, tough choices...I'll answer question 1 first and think about the others.

Best characters of mine? I can't narrow it to just one so here are my 3 favourites.

I had a Traveller character called James Jefferson Rogers, or Jimmy Rogers to his friends. He was an Imperial Army Fifth Frontier War veteran trying to make it as a mercenary. Rogers always seemed to get double crossed by his employers but was smart enough to turn things around so he'd end up bringing his trecherous employers down. He also had an eye for the ladies and ended up, James Bond style, in a secluded place with the heroine of the adventure before the GM would cut away to another scene. He was the first character I ever played that was proactive rather than reacting to events as is the case in most RPGs.

My second favourite was a Champions superhero called Union Jack. There was nothing the GM loved more than to make his life a misery. He was hunted by The Man In The Iron Lung (yeah, how dangerous could HE be?) who had a fiendish mind and unlimited resources. Over the course of the campaign, Union Jack was framed for murder (twice), mass murder (once), drug abuse, torching a bus load of schoolchildren and being declared bankrupt. He was incarcerated in a prison (twice) and a mental institution (once) and had his wife and children stolen from him...on a number of occasions. Even his fellow team mates were half convinced that he was guilty of some of the crimes he was accused of. Every gaming session was a test of nerves as I fought to have his name cleared and seek revenge. It was nice to be cast as the "star" of the campaign but it was sure tiring!

The third favourite is my long term Call of Cthulhu character, Dick Bannister. He's a professional cricketer and all round good egg. Dick is fond of saying Bertie Wooster like homilies such as "I say, Prof, you mean to tell me that this Cthulhu thingy is responsible for those murders? Well that's a rum do and a half and if I ever catch up with the blighter, I'll give him a bunch of fives!" Amazingly, Dick has survived nearly two decades of Call of Cthulhu which include Horror on the Orient Express and Masks of Nyarlathotep. Don't ask me how, I play him purely on instinct.

Nick Hughes (6 months ago)

Again, as with my favourite characters here are three of my favourite characters of other players.

Dr. Wolfgang Schessler was a Star Trek science officer played by a great gamer called Gordon "Uncle Wilf" Rycroft when I was at Kent Uni. Gordon would lay on the cod German accent really thick for his catchphrase "Vat it iz, I do not know...vat it might be zere are numerous possibilities...it iz impossible to tell vithout more data". So it was like having Heinz Wolff in your Star Trek group and it worked brilliantly.

Joe Creedence, a Traveller merchant captain played by the late Les Hedges. He would never carry a gun, instead using his charm and wits to triumph which was a brave move in a game where other players were obsessed with getting weapons. In my book, Joe was the definitive Traveller merchant with lots of deals, wheeling and dealing and bluffing.

Lightmaster, a Champions character who also had a disdain for violence and played by my school friend Rob Dugdale. He had no attack that did damage instead, as his name suggests, he could create a brilliant burst of light that could blind you temporarily or shroud an area in total darkness. As someone who could put down the hardest supervillains, he was useless but as a role playing character he was brilliant. Rob turned what would appear to be a disadvantage into an advantage by being the perfect team player, blinding opponents whilst his beefier team mates would knock them into next week. Lightmaster was hugely unlucky, if he was crossing the road, a bus would hit him. If something dropped from a great hight, it would land on him but Rob did not mind being a bit of comedy relief one bit.

Jon Burfoot (6 months ago)

I don't think I have many favourites, as I enjoy them all to a greater or lesser degree. A few stand out, though.

Patriot is/was a character in Nick Hughes' Champions campaign. I enjoyed playing this fairly standard 'Brick' type character as he was de facto leader of our group (something I'd not done before) and has been in the campaign for ages.

Dr Blake, in Nick Hughes' 1920s Cthulhu game is another one. He's been around a while, and blatantly refuses to endanger his sanity by reading cultists books and dealing with things that man should not know about (beyond destroying them).

I am quite getting into the character of Varion Lightbringer, in Dave's D&D, here at club. He is totally not the sort of character I normally play (either big kick-ass fighters, or devious rogues) and it's fun to stretch the old gaming grey matter. He's not particularly violent, like most fighting priests, instead being a scholar and healer. It's kind of nice to take a back seat from the blood and guts of combat on the front lines.

:-)

Nick Hughes (6 months ago)

In a game of Traveller I played in many moons ago, there was this renegade scientist called Chadwick who we never actually saw or met with. He was responsible for this genetic anomoly getting loose and going on a killing spree and Chadwick, purely in it for the money, grabbed the government and research institute cash and legged it. We were hired to track him down. Despite never appearing, Chadwick's influence was always there from him leaving traps for us, leaving false clues, agreeing to turn himself in but then not showing up at the rendezvous and even leaving cryptic messages hinting that something bigger was in fact responsible for the creature and not him. Talk about an NPC making a disproportionate impact on a game to the number of actual appearances they made.

The other favourite is a villain from Champions called Beatlemania. All his crimes are Beatles related and he's fond of using Beatles related puns such as "Remember, Heroes, that happiness is a warm gun!" His goons are called the Blue Meanies and he can drug teenage girls into going on screaming rampages. I like him because to track him down, the players have to put together all the Beatles clues a la Batman TV series.

Gary Yam (6 months ago)

Did he have a psychopathic hammer wielding henchman called Maxwell?

Nick Hughes (6 months ago)

Not yet, but he will have by the time he appears again.

Russell Bannister (6 months ago)

This is a great thread as like all roleplayers there is nothing I like better than talking about my characters. I spent yesterday thinking about this while zoning out in a safety integrity level review meeting (if a chemical plant blows up in Qatar you’ll know why).

My favourite characters I’ve played are:

(1) “Joey Uptown”, in a 1920’s CoC game where all the players played members of a crime family. He started as a violent thug with a sadistic stream and changed over the campaign to an out of crontrol serial killer. Every session he got slightly worse but as the characters were locked in a struggle with another gang the (player character) godfather couldn’t get rid of him. His catchphrase was “Boss, I’ve done the bad thing again”. At the end of the campaign he got arrested and sent to the electric chair by popular demand.

(2) "Juniper Jack". An alcoholic street urchin in a CoC by gaslight game. He had high fast talk, sneak, dodge and hide and got a bonus to san rolls due to being permanently ginned. He lasted one session before he made one dodge roll too many and got eaten by an Eygptian demon.

(3) "Von Uberman", a German officer in an WWI “All Quiet on the Western Front” CoC game. He was loosely based on the historical figure Ernst Junger author of the book Storm of Steel (which should be subtitled “God, I love this war”). The game was heavily houseruled to add disadvantages and I took “Dark Fate” which effectively made him bullet proof. He lasted through the whole campaign while the other characters and NPC’s were being shot, gassed and blown-up around him, only to end up being kidnapped and used by a group of Serpent folk women to help them repopulate their underground city after we killed all the men. The GM provided graphic details which I really didn’t want to hear. This was the last time I ever took dark fate as a disadvantage.

(4) In a light hearted one session D&D 2e game with a Viking setting. Another player and I played a pair of brothers, the sons of the chief. As a house rule the GM added a “shouting” non-weapon proficiency. If you had more ranks in this than someone else’s character then they had to moderate the volume of their voice to no more than a quiet conversation. Both my character and his brother took this and we spent the entire session having trivial in-character arguments at the tops of our voices, and drowning out everyone else’s roleplaying. It was great fun to play but it sounds childish now I write it down.

NPCs and other peoples characters to follow.

Gary Yam (6 months ago)

Since everyone's doing more than one of each, I'll add some of my other faves:

Own PCs:
I also had a 1e thief called Copias Duckthief, who retired after The Phantom got killed in Tomb of Horrors. He had a partnership going with this deadly fighter called "Axe Murderer" and the two of them were the classic Big Dumb Tough guy and Quick Smart Little guy combination - except that the Quick Little guy was just as dumb as the big dumb guy. As with most 1e thieves, he was pretty combat-ineffective, but he did take risks.

Other people's PCs:
In my current CoC Delta Green campaign, one of the detectives is called Vincent Massi, who despite having a very high SAN score has been roleplayed into being a complete nutcase. He is a through and through conspiracy theorist and wears a metal colander on his head at home to ground his brain against radio intercepts from the NRO. He was also responsible for one of the best CoC interrogation/torture scenes I've witnessed, despite using no violence whatsoever.

There were also a series of characters, all bearing the name Nathan Jones (You've been gone too long)

NPCs:
In the old days, I did used to have a recurring NPC called Zombie Master, who started out as a gypsy boss in Barovia from the original Ravenloft module. He annoyed the characters so much, that I kept him in successive campaigns, even making the interplanar jump to Krynn. He would constantly dispense idiotic advice, then in a moment of apparent brevity take the characters aside to come clean with some critical information - which always turned out to be another pack of lies. Despite being called Zombie Master, he had nothing at all to do with the undead. It was the name of a character I saw on an episode of Scooby-Doo.

Nick Coult (6 months ago)

2nd ed. ADnD: Fomar, the greatest hero of them all. In no way had I watched conan the barbarian for the first time the night i roled up the character but he was a barbarian in a nappy with a big sword. He stood for eleven rounds against a hoard of lizardmen with only one hit point allowing his party and assorted captives to escape the dungeon. Of course round number twelve didn't go that well for him.

Russell Bannister (6 months ago)

My favourite other peoples characters are:

1) Vincent Massi that Gary mentioned. That interrogation scene he mentions was a classic, but some of his other interrogation suggestions were great too. I stole the one about "Let's see how many coins he can eat" for my serial killer character mentioned above.

2) Sebastian the dentist. In a 1920's gangster campaign he was the godfathers torturer. If someone pissed the boss off they got "a dental appointment". The player had a fantastic creepy soft monotone voice for him. With the skills Medical 30% & Dentistry 70% he was easily the most frightening PC or NPC even though the campaign included hitmen, sadistic thugs, in-bred hillbilly moonshiners, cultists of Nyarlathotep and child sacrificing satanic priests.

3) Piers Fletcher Dervish. He was a character in a very old (Mega)Traveller campaign. The name should tell you how old in the unlikely event anyone remembers the TV show it was stolen from. The campaign followed a gang of ex-military types pulling a string of high profile robberies in a Spinward Marches spanning crime spree, the only purpose of which was "to get money to buy more guns". This character though was a totally laid back bartender whose only skill was Steward - 1 (he might have trained Gun-Combat-0 half way through). He was a perfect comic relief character, with feeble get rich quick schemes, like selling illegal copies of "Frankie goes to Yorbund" merchandise (this might also date the campaign). He was also really useful for the other characters as they used to get him a job behind the bar at wherever they were going to rob, and then used him as an inside man. I have ripped off this character several times myself, and I think he got his own spin-off campaign.

4) Shooter. He was a combination of every possible off-the-rails cop cliche in a Protect and Serve (Police) Cyberpunk campaign. He lived on coffee and snacks from the station vending machine, slept in his car and wore a Columbo style mac. Every session used to start with the Captain bawling out for what he had done the week before instead of a conventional recap. It was the little things that made the character, like how he always used to take the pen from the Captains top pocket to stir his coffee with. One time when there were no unmarked cars available he borrowed the impounded clown car of a recently arrested serial killer and started a city wide panic. If I remember correctly he had saved the life of the Mayor's daughter in the first adventure and consequently had a free pass from Internal Affairs.

NPCs to follow.