#RPGaday Topic 8: Favourite character

[Agemegos]

I'm doing RPG-a-day in August, as promoted by Dave Chapman (Autocratik). This is Day 8 of 31.



Favourite character

Well, I'm going to prune the field hard by not considering any of anyone else's characters (though there have been some ripping PCs in my games and beside my characters in parties) and not considering any of my NPCs (though I remember some of them as considerable successes), and not considering any PCs that I generated for other people to play (e.g. characters for con games and other pre-gen sets).

I was long very attached to Pausanias of Lacedaemon, my second character in Tonio Loewald's Fvaldanon campaign. But really, playing him was always a struggle and not much fun. Tonio's approach to GMing did not include supporting character-players in pursuing their dramatic agendas, so everything I tried to do with Pausanias was a struggle, and usually it was frustrated. The GM seemed to think that it was dramatically appropriate that the Machiavellian Lord Pausanias should repeatedly have the fruits of his scheming snatched from his jaws at the last moment, even if fantastically bad luck or divine intervention was required. I found that frustrating. The Pausanias in my head was a favourite character, the Pausanias who came out in play is not.

I have fond memories of playing Andrew Jackson Armstrong, a 1980s pastel-suited smart-mouthed PI in Tony Purcell's New York PI campaign. He represents a recurring theme among my PCs, or rather one of the two ruts that I too often fall into. Armstrong was an early example in an overly long string of my characters who are flamboyant, cocky, technically adept, fidgety, and inclined to set up, disable, and modify gadgets, contraptions, and equipment in advance of encounters to give themselves decisive advantages in possible contingencies, or to completely circumvent stock obstacles. The most recent incarnation of this stereotype was Kawai Ichiro (Shinobi Shiro — The White Shadow), in Tony Kemp's Spirit of the Century game. Now, I manifestly do favour this character. But I'm not proud of him and his various incarnations. He is rather shallow, more of a modus operandi than a character.

My other rut (I'm versatile!) is a big, formidable, rather Saturnine guy who affects a mask of ruthlessness and cynicism, but is secretly a bit of a Scarlet Pimpernel. My favourite incarnation of him was the Earl of Rule, my character in Frank Hampshire's 17th-Century French romantic-adventure swashbuckling campaign. That is probably because of brilliant play by Tony Purcell as Rule's charmingly daffy French cousin D'Alembert and solid support from Anthony Bushell as the eminence noir bishop of Puy, and because I got to win the Thanatos Speed Chess sometimes. This eternal PC of mine has a lot more internal life than the other, and I've played him enough times for him to be recognised as "another of Brett's evil-looking good guys". That's evidence of favour, but again this character is really more of a recurrent failure mode than a triumph of character play.

After considering all the character sheets in my character morgue I have settled my favour on Shouts At The Sky, my character from a fantasy/horror pirates campaign that Andrew Smith once ran using HindSight (anticipating Pirates of the Caribbean by about twenty years). Shouts At the Sky was a half-trained Iroquois witch doctor, on the lam from a string of cuckolded husbands, who had ended up as a topman in a very odd pirate ship as the latest in a series of refuges. He was enthusiastic, curious, catastrophically gynotropic, friendly, and rather reckless, and was seriously confused by the distinctions between French and Spanish, Dutch and English. He was a blast to play.

[whswhs]

Taking that as "favorite of the characters that I've played," I think I'm going for Maria Rosa Vargas Sandoval, La Gata Encantada, my character from the GURPS Supers campaign that became a playtest for GURPS Supers. La Gata lived in a world where superpowers were acquired through being placed in fear of death after infection by a sexually transmitted virus. Unusually, she was a virgin; I heard that description and promptly asked the GM, "Could she have been infected prenatally?" and he said yes.

Before gaining her powers, La Gata was a high school student who had joined a school fencing club taught by her history teacher, a former Olympic contender who never quite reached medal level. Her powers were basically superspeed, but in the acrobatics/dexterity idiom more than the running fast idiom; probably their single most notable effect was that she had Dodge-16, boostable to -18 in the right circumstances, and DX and Per 19. She was the combat monster of the team; one of her habitual moves was to leap toward a gunman, over his line of fire, and then kick his weapon out of his hand. I also made her Impulsive and gave her a need for extra food; after a few sessions she started habitually carrying chocolate in belt pouches. . . .

La Gata was fun because she was totally not intellectual. She would see where the action was and head straight for it! A lot of her combat was unarmed, but she also had Smallsword-18; in fact I decided that she had taken up superheroism after deciding that her superpowers made it unfair for her to compete athletically. On the other hand, one of her fellow PCs eventually pointed her at a career in stunt work.

Bill Stoddard

[Phoenix_Dragon]

Being the go-to GM, the number of characters I've actually played is incredibly small. I suppose my favorite would be Kalak, a demon from a short-lived fantasy campaign. He was a big, tanky, brutish sort, who really enjoyed fighting. He was about 9 feet tall if he stood at full height, probably weighed close to half a ton, and really enjoyed anything that made him feel strong or powerful or just plain better than all the little humans around.

But at the same time, he didn't want to have anything to do with "evil". He didn't want to get involved in any good-vs-evil war or anything. He really just wanted to be left alone to live however he liked, and didn't want to be thought of as evil just because he was a demon.

Which isn't to say he was a nice guy. He was a proper ass, and he *loved* fighting and killing, and the carnage of a good battle. He just made a point of killing the right *kind* of people, and while he was pretty blunt and rude at times, he avoided outright cruelty. Not so much because he had any particular moral stance against it, so much as it caused less trouble for himself that way.

Sadly, that campaign lasted only a handful of sessions before dying thanks to the GM's wife.

Though if we expand "playing" to include free-form online roleplaying, then my favorite character would easily be Terika, another demon (I swear it's not... well, much of a theme with me), but rather more powerful. Even bigger (About twelve feet tall and weighing in at a ton), more powerful (Some pretty serious magic), and without any of these silly ideas about playing nice. He was utterly nasty and sadistic. He's also kind of a second online personality for me, and is the big, black, glowing-eye critter in my profile picture.

It's kind of amusing (And also kind of sad) that my favorite played characters are such combat-focused powerhouses, while if I were to list my favorite NPCs (And the kinds of characters I'd like to play), they'd probably be much less direct. But, such is the nature of the games I've gotten to play in. The closest I've gotten to the kind of campaign that would let me play that kind of more social/personality character was a short-lived oWoD Werewolf campaign, where I created the only responsible character (Of the mediator/judge auspice, of which the name escapes me; basically, something I'd never gotten to play before), and as a result, was saddled with trying to corral and rein in four others who drifted between being irresponsible and irreverent, and outright maniacal.

[simply Nathan]

I have played paladins simply named Wolf (or Wolf McClaymore if formal) with alarming frequency, looking back. Sometimes he was a wood elf, usually he was a half-elf, supposedly he was intended to be a dwarf/elf hybrid in spite of (or rather because of) D&D not supporting that mix. Sometimes he was a literal humanoid wolf-man. One time he was a ranger, and perhaps if I'd played a few more campaigns as a teenager he'd have been a Lawful Good Bard once or twice.

Not much to say about Wolf personality-wise; not only did I only play him in hack and slash pseudo-D&D, behaviorally he was basically how I (as a teenager) envisioned myself as a fantasy hero; frantic in combat, fanatical about destroying the undead, shy in social encounters, and very mellow and laidback in the company of his party members. He had a vow to never kill his enemies with bludgeoning weapons, being required to poke and/or stab them to death with blades instead; this put him at a slight disadvantage for dispatching skeletal undead.

When I was allowed a second PC, it was usually Wolf's girlfriend/fiancee, a cat-woman (or elf or half-elf depending on the race list of the campaign) cleric by the name of Zera; she displayed even less personality, but was intended to be the spunky rebellious princess type. And a literal princess if the campaign allowed for it.

Zera was only a cleric for crunch reasons; what I wanted was a scholarly wizardess focused on healing magics and proficient with some combination of maces and flexible whip-like weapons. Wolf really was supposed to be a Paladin, but I wished to be able to give him Evocation spells for smiting evil in addition to the heals and buffs he was allowed.

I know I'm listing two characters here, but to my mind the way I used them at the tabletop they'd might as well have been one.

[zorg]

That would be The Forest Warden. He was a trickster faery, a shapeshifter who could turn invisible. He also turned the whole game in a silly gigglefest - when he met the other characters, he claimed to be The Forest Warden, and promptly led them in circles for hours. The one time I really could have been useful with all my Faery background skills, I crit failed, and we seriously offended some forest spirits.

The game was relatively campy anyway, so he didn't break much, but there was little plot left after he was done impersonating the pirate king.

He's still a recurring NPC in our games, after I agreed to retired him.

[RogerBW]

Let me tell you about my character… Actually I don't do that very much. Right now probably Vajra, a Thai-built SAI in Transhuman Space which thinks it did something during the Pacific War but has had its memory edited (probably self-edited) such that attempts to think too hard about it result in null pointer exceptions. Vajra is studying Buddhism and suspects that digital intelligence is a step towards Nirvana.

[Mailanka]

I actually don't play that often. I think I can count my PCs on one hand, though it's improving.

I think my favorite character would probably be Moryandal from the House of the Serpent, in Houses of the Blooded. He was a tall, physically powerful noble with byronic good-looks (he completely lacked beauty, but this wasn't because he lacked physical beauty, just the grace and refinement to bring that beauty across), and a gleaming, crystal-white greatsword named Reaper. He was a great melding of physical power and layered cunning. He always devised these oblique, complex plans that made him out to be the villain and, in so doing, got him what he wanted. I actually had one player turn to me and say "Please don't (politically) crush my character" because he was so impressed and terrified by the depths of my machiavellian planning that he was 100% confident I could destroy his character if I wanted. That, of course, wasn't my intention. I wanted Moryandal to appear sinister and dangerous, but I didn't actually want to ruin anyone's fun. So he was sort of a "He may be a bastard, but he's our bastard" kind of character.

He had designs on one of the female PCs (discussed and agreed to OOC), and he formed a close friendship with the Other Warrior PC, so we were blood-brothers fighting side-by-side whenever combat came up (and it's a shame I wasn't there in the last session, or he would have survived it, I'm quite sure, given how ridiculously OP my blade was), and a spy-based cold-war with another PC (We were always so polite over dinner, while our spies murdered one another in back alleys).

It was a shame the system couldn't keep up with our machinations, though, and the GM finished off the campaign dramatically a few years back, and we haven't touched the game since.

I think I liked Moryandal because he's the best capture of the contrasts of physical power with intellect, darkness with compassion, and tragedy with pragmatism. Most of the time I can't make that work and my characters end up leaning too far to one side or the other (and thus I tend to avoid the "dark" because it can become too antagonistic, and if a character is ruining someone else's fun, he's a terrible character). But he hit each note quite nicely.