[The Colonel]

Originally Posted by Kromm

Ditto.

Take the character that's the source of my nickname: Dr. Kromm. He has been a villain in a James Bond 007 campaign, the chief medical officer of a moon colony in a Space Opera campaign, a naturalist in a Call of Cthulhu campaign, an inventor in a GURPS campaign, an alchemist in a different GURPS campaign, a physician in an Unhallowed Metropolis campaign, and a good half-dozen other people. He has also appeared relabeled as "Dr. Schaum" a couple of times. He's always stereotypically Germanic (perhaps somewhat offensively, I'll admit), not wholly sane, and scientific-minded (skilled sometimes at medicine, sometimes at natural sciences, sometimes at engineering). Each version was tailored to the campaign: fields of expertise, backstory, and even accents changed considerably. But there's no question that the "mad Germanic scientist" archetype and "scatterbrained scientific idealist" personality were essentially the same.

Like the Michael Caine of roleplaying...