I think our friends around the table deserve some love, so I want to know: what’s everyone’s all-time favorite character that they didn’t play, but DMed for or played alongside? (Critical Role doesn’t count, it has to be someone from one of your own games.)
Mine was Nehemiah Greenskin, a prickly and quippy goblin barbarian who was the Mr. Pink of our heist campaign. Always one step ahead of the others, but with a hair trigger temper and the squeaky voice to match, “Neh” took every chance he could to get more gold. He had a good heart, going out of his way to protect the innocent, but had no issue with stealing from anyone rich...even if that meant defrauding his party members. He was the most likely to invent each scheme, and also the most likely to throw it out the window. And when he saw a wanted poster describing him as “green,” his ensuing rant (“Gween. It says GWEEN!”) is to this day one of our table’s most quoted scenes. Boy, did I love that character.
Man it is so hard... lots of my friends made up cool characters. And as a DM, I try not to have favorites.
I think looking back, one of my favorites was a character named Praetor made up by a hilarious friend of ours, in Champions. The guy who made him up was new to Champions, so he described what he wanted to another player and that person helped him design the character. The character was a hodgepodge of powers, some no-ranged energy blasts (fist punches of energy), desolidification, dexterity, and such. The player eventually decided after learning Champions that what he really wanted was a martial artist. So the GM at the time said OK, we can give you a "Radiation Accident" at some point and you can change your powers (this is traditionally allowed in Champions). Following this the player would say things like, "Can I fill the swimming pool with radiation and swim in it?" half-joking, half seriously. Eventually he got this strange glowing rock in the mail, from an anonymous source, and decided to sleep with it under his pillow. And then he got to change his powers. (I'm not sure if we ever did find out who sent him the rock... LOL).
But this character also lived in a penthouse condo and had a doorman named Jorge and a chauffer named Raoul. He invented them on the spot, they were not DNPCs or anything statistical or mechanical, but he would bring them up and say things like, "I'll leave this with Jorge and ask him to bring it up to my condo". As GMs the other guy and I had a blast with Jorge and Raoul just as flavor characters.
I think what made this character so memorable was really the player. He only played Champions with us for maybe 6 months, but he was a super fun guy and absolutely hilarious, and he made up the most interesting RP ideas (outside of swimming in his radiation pool, LOL).
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WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
Back when Paladin's Lawful Goodness also required "Valor".
A player always tried to find ways to save himself with ridiculous excuses as to why it was valorous. (Essentially, he was trying to fit the square peg of Chaotic Evil into the round hole of Lawful Good.)
He once stated, "If discretion is the better part of valor and fear is the basis of discretion, I valiantly flee in terror."
(Sadly, he moved away for Uni before the campaign reached the end.)
Human. Male. Possibly. Don't be a divider. My characters' backgrounds are written like instruction manuals rather than stories. My opinion and preferences don't mean you're wrong. I am 99.7603% convinced that the digital dice are messing with me. I roll high when nobody's looking and low when anyone else can see.🎲 “It's a bit early to be thinking about an epitaph. No?” will be my epitaph.
For a campaign of Pathfinder’s We Be Goblins supplemented by the GM through to level 9, one fellow rolled ”John Goodgnome”. Since this player leaned toward bloodthirsty and often initiated combat, it was a pleasant surprise when, in a group of characters baselined at mischievous rascal, he introduced a gnome anthropologist passing himself as a goblin to live amongst the “fascinating creatures” subject to his research. Think along the lines of Jane Goodall and her work with primates, plus a costume. Of course it required a certain suspension of disbelief to allow a gnome to somehow fool goblins in such a way but the character was such a departure from his usual play-style that we went along with it.
John was very passive and mostly observed the party, especially our social interactions, team work and problem solving. As a result, our group decided the correct name for a gathering of goblins is a “confusion” LOL. He would not initiate combat and participated only reluctantly when it was unavoidable. Mostly he made hilarious comments, usually scholarly yet incredulous: “The varmints are so bewitched by fire that they delight in any blaze, even if they themselves are victim to the pyre!” using his best David Attenborough impression but would drop into pidgin and lose the accent if we expressed suspicion over his five dollar words and fancy diction. He kept a fake journal full of crude drawings as a decoy to show us if we ever questioned his book-writing (PF goblins are superstitious of literacy) and did an overall great job of role-playing a scientist living amongst a group of basically feral ruffians that would turn on him in a second if they sussed out his true identity. John was an absolute laugh-riot.
In recent times, I probably have to give it to Three-Axe Johnson, an enormous half-orc barbarian who came down from the frozen north to seek his fortune in the kingdoms of Men. People underestimated his intelligence, partly because of his heritage, partly because all he ever wore was a grizzly-bear-skull jockstrap, which forced him to carry each of his two axes in his hands everywhere. But his player played his (average) intelligence as a lack of book-learning. Three-Axe himself she played as shrewd and observant and a quick judge of character, which caught a lot of enemies off-guard and ended up making him a lot of money.
Three-Axe was about to play a sort of Yojimbo/Man With No Name role in the Drow Civil War when he departed my universe for the foreseeable future. But his name has become a legend throughout the Northlands and from Thunderheim to City of Glory they make folk art and sing songs (some of them even TRUE) about the time he fought six dragons at once; or the time he robbed a bank in Hell and then fought his way out again; or his amorous adventures with Atali, the Frost Giant's Daughter (some of those songs have actually gotten back to Atali, which bodes ill for the fate of City of Glory, anyway).
I would have to say a guy named Xander or Xayden, I can't remember. He was a Tabaxi Fighter, and a self proclaimed "professional door kicker" this one time we were playing Curse of Strahd, he had a greatsword of warning and we where at the village (Spoilers ahead)
We met a pastry selling old lady who turned out to be a nighthag, his greatsword warned him about her, he already knew about nighthags so he tells us "Guys, lets not fight this thing it'll kill us instantly" and you know what he does.... HE HITS THE LADY WITH A FIRE BALL, I had to sacrifice 20 GP to get out of the battle
I wish this thread would’ve got more replies, reading these responses has been awesome! I’m honestly not surprised though, I feel like a lot of D&D players will talk about their own characters all day but never really learn to love their friends’ characters too. It’s a bit sad.
Back when D&D 3rd Edition came out I was in a group of four, the DM ran us in a custom game world. Our party of three was greatly livened up by the half-elf cleric, I can't remember his Domain/Religion, but he was a bit of a narcissist with vices for gambling and wenching. The situations he got himself and us in were very amusing.
Supporting his antics were my human wizard from the richest family in a backwoods town, think a rich boy with dellusions of granduere and a human rogue/ranger who was some sort of estranged nobility (plot was never fully explored so us other players never did find out who he REALLY was).
I missed this thread the first time. But there's one character my brother played in one and a half campaigns that would pretty much universally by the "Favorite not-you character" amongst our table. And that is Ozryk Ironbender XII, Fire-Forged Under the Mountain.
Tp put it succinctly...this was a hill dwarf who put the hill in 'Hill Dwarf'. Ozryk spoke with a very heavy Hills Hick accent, often descending into utterly incomprehensible high-speed gibberish. He played into some of the more hilarious hills boy tropes, primarily because my brother had lived with a lot of those folks for several years in an isolated Army base and knew exactly how do it so that it'd be hysterical instead of cringey. It helped that Ozryk was also actually a highly competent cleric of the Allhammer, good in a fight and a credit to the team. Ozryk was invested in the group's success...and in getting them plastered with The Grundle, a jug of supernaturally potent, literally-haunted moonshine that had a stiff Constitution DC to resist and could inflict any number of hilarious and horrifying effects on a failure. Ozryk was difficult to understand, a fast-talking hillbilly dwarf with strong tinkering skills and a tendency to bother the Allhammer day and night for trival nonsense. He's still, by far, the most well-known and well-liked character at the table.
There's been quite a few in the campaigns I've been involved with, although one stand out has to be the time I ran Rise of Tiamat - one character was played by my brother called Jax the Mighty, a Human Fighter with the Folk Hero background.
To best describe his character would be the personality and commitment to goodness of Dudley Do-Right, with a little bit of Gaston, Hercule Satan and Thor thrown in for good mixture.
His original claim to fame was defeating an entire orc force by himself; in actuality, they all fell into a ravine when, in the process of chasing a fleeing Jax, the bridge they were all on collapsed under the weight of the orcs, who were then swept away by the strong currents.
Campaign highlights include:
His refusal to wield a shield because "Shields are for wimps!".
Painting his hammer gold and his longbow silver because it 'looked cool'. He would inform anyone who asked that the weapons were in fact made of Gold and Silver.
The fact that the reason the party was because they were the best of the best of each allied faction. The leader of Jax's faction, the White Knights of Albermile, only chose him because he ensured that word of a required champion didn't spread; he wanted the glory for himself!
Being stuck fighting 1 Lizardfolk for THE ENTIRE COMBAT in the Tomb of Diderius as they both hilariously kept missing each other with their attacks, whilst the rest of the part were taking out the rest of the enemy forces as normal. Think the scene of Black Widow & Happy Hogan vs Thugs in Iron Man 2.
This exchange - (Dragonborn Ally about to threaten a Cultist for info) "Now then; you, me and my friends here are going to have a nice friendly chat...." - (Jax) "Wait, we are? I thought we were going to interrogate him??"
Taking the Lucky feat and referring to it as 'Dumb Luck'.
Defeating Rezmir the Black with a People's Elbow.
Trapping a Black Dragon by throwing a grappling hook at it and attaching the enchanted cable to a heavy wagon. Unfortunately, the wagon was attached to the cache of prisoners the party had been tipped off to rescue by the head of the Zhentarim. This resulted in a hilarious moment of Jax's celebration of his mighty prowess, which then turned into an expression of horror as the screams from inside the wagon grew louder and louder as it started to take off into the sky.
And quite possibly my favourite character flaw of all time - Jax was terrified of DUNGEONS and DRAGONS.
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A friend played Merazmus the Wizard. Very old, very flamboyant. His signature move was Grease, and he was roleplayed as being something of an "old horndog". He went missing for one session (player couldn't attend) and it was universally agreed that he was attending a... "party" with a group of Dryad. He arrived next session, ruffled and disoriented and prone to pausing with a happy look of reminiscence on his face whenever we weren't busy XD
It seemed inevitable that his grease spell caught fire whenever he used it, which also led to a chip-pan explosion, where a boss fight was finished using a waterskin :)
Hmm.. My favorite was probably a sentimental one from my first campaign. His name was Wuthgar and he was a very righteous paladin who tried to convert EVERYONE (enemies, new party members, etc) to his god Dahlia. It was a school campaign, so new people often came, and by the time we left, 80% of party members worshipped her. My character was a ranger-warlock named Irellia who had a little imp (who was actually her patron but didn’t use his full powers), and she had a little feud with Wuthgar. Wuthgars dream was to deal the final blow on a boss, but somehow Lupin would always be the one who succeeded. Our two characters eventually became friends after a very wild plan they made to ride on an Aasimar’s back and cast Eldrich blast while he smited.
I think our friends around the table deserve some love, so I want to know: what’s everyone’s all-time favorite character that they didn’t play, but DMed for or played alongside? (Critical Role doesn’t count, it has to be someone from one of your own games.)
Mine was Nehemiah Greenskin, a prickly and quippy goblin barbarian who was the Mr. Pink of our heist campaign. Always one step ahead of the others, but with a hair trigger temper and the squeaky voice to match, “Neh” took every chance he could to get more gold. He had a good heart, going out of his way to protect the innocent, but had no issue with stealing from anyone rich...even if that meant defrauding his party members. He was the most likely to invent each scheme, and also the most likely to throw it out the window. And when he saw a wanted poster describing him as “green,” his ensuing rant (“Gween. It says GWEEN!”) is to this day one of our table’s most quoted scenes. Boy, did I love that character.
Wizard (Gandalf) of the Tolkien Club
Man it is so hard... lots of my friends made up cool characters. And as a DM, I try not to have favorites.
I think looking back, one of my favorites was a character named Praetor made up by a hilarious friend of ours, in Champions. The guy who made him up was new to Champions, so he described what he wanted to another player and that person helped him design the character. The character was a hodgepodge of powers, some no-ranged energy blasts (fist punches of energy), desolidification, dexterity, and such. The player eventually decided after learning Champions that what he really wanted was a martial artist. So the GM at the time said OK, we can give you a "Radiation Accident" at some point and you can change your powers (this is traditionally allowed in Champions). Following this the player would say things like, "Can I fill the swimming pool with radiation and swim in it?" half-joking, half seriously. Eventually he got this strange glowing rock in the mail, from an anonymous source, and decided to sleep with it under his pillow. And then he got to change his powers. (I'm not sure if we ever did find out who sent him the rock... LOL).
But this character also lived in a penthouse condo and had a doorman named Jorge and a chauffer named Raoul. He invented them on the spot, they were not DNPCs or anything statistical or mechanical, but he would bring them up and say things like, "I'll leave this with Jorge and ask him to bring it up to my condo". As GMs the other guy and I had a blast with Jorge and Raoul just as flavor characters.
I think what made this character so memorable was really the player. He only played Champions with us for maybe 6 months, but he was a super fun guy and absolutely hilarious, and he made up the most interesting RP ideas (outside of swimming in his radiation pool, LOL).
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
Back when Paladin's Lawful Goodness also required "Valor".
A player always tried to find ways to save himself with ridiculous excuses as to why it was valorous. (Essentially, he was trying to fit the square peg of Chaotic Evil into the round hole of Lawful Good.)
He once stated, "If discretion is the better part of valor and fear is the basis of discretion, I valiantly flee in terror."
(Sadly, he moved away for Uni before the campaign reached the end.)
Human. Male. Possibly. Don't be a divider.
My characters' backgrounds are written like instruction manuals rather than stories. My opinion and preferences don't mean you're wrong.
I am 99.7603% convinced that the digital dice are messing with me. I roll high when nobody's looking and low when anyone else can see.🎲
“It's a bit early to be thinking about an epitaph. No?” will be my epitaph.
For a campaign of Pathfinder’s We Be Goblins supplemented by the GM through to level 9, one fellow rolled ”John Goodgnome”. Since this player leaned toward bloodthirsty and often initiated combat, it was a pleasant surprise when, in a group of characters baselined at mischievous rascal, he introduced a gnome anthropologist passing himself as a goblin to live amongst the “fascinating creatures” subject to his research. Think along the lines of Jane Goodall and her work with primates, plus a costume. Of course it required a certain suspension of disbelief to allow a gnome to somehow fool goblins in such a way but the character was such a departure from his usual play-style that we went along with it.
John was very passive and mostly observed the party, especially our social interactions, team work and problem solving. As a result, our group decided the correct name for a gathering of goblins is a “confusion” LOL. He would not initiate combat and participated only reluctantly when it was unavoidable. Mostly he made hilarious comments, usually scholarly yet incredulous: “The varmints are so bewitched by fire that they delight in any blaze, even if they themselves are victim to the pyre!” using his best David Attenborough impression but would drop into pidgin and lose the accent if we expressed suspicion over his five dollar words and fancy diction. He kept a fake journal full of crude drawings as a decoy to show us if we ever questioned his book-writing (PF goblins are superstitious of literacy) and did an overall great job of role-playing a scientist living amongst a group of basically feral ruffians that would turn on him in a second if they sussed out his true identity. John was an absolute laugh-riot.
Brave Sir Robin ran away, bravely ran away away, when danger reared its ugly head, he bravely turned his tail and fled...
Wizard (Gandalf) of the Tolkien Club
In recent times, I probably have to give it to Three-Axe Johnson, an enormous half-orc barbarian who came down from the frozen north to seek his fortune in the kingdoms of Men. People underestimated his intelligence, partly because of his heritage, partly because all he ever wore was a grizzly-bear-skull jockstrap, which forced him to carry each of his two axes in his hands everywhere. But his player played his (average) intelligence as a lack of book-learning. Three-Axe himself she played as shrewd and observant and a quick judge of character, which caught a lot of enemies off-guard and ended up making him a lot of money.
Three-Axe was about to play a sort of Yojimbo/Man With No Name role in the Drow Civil War when he departed my universe for the foreseeable future. But his name has become a legend throughout the Northlands and from Thunderheim to City of Glory they make folk art and sing songs (some of them even TRUE) about the time he fought six dragons at once; or the time he robbed a bank in Hell and then fought his way out again; or his amorous adventures with Atali, the Frost Giant's Daughter (some of those songs have actually gotten back to Atali, which bodes ill for the fate of City of Glory, anyway).
I would have to say a guy named Xander or Xayden, I can't remember. He was a Tabaxi Fighter, and a self proclaimed "professional door kicker" this one time we were playing Curse of Strahd, he had a greatsword of warning and we where at the village (Spoilers ahead)
We met a pastry selling old lady who turned out to be a nighthag, his greatsword warned him about her, he already knew about nighthags so he tells us "Guys, lets not fight this thing it'll kill us instantly" and you know what he does.... HE HITS THE LADY WITH A FIRE BALL, I had to sacrifice 20 GP to get out of the battle
I wish this thread would’ve got more replies, reading these responses has been awesome! I’m honestly not surprised though, I feel like a lot of D&D players will talk about their own characters all day but never really learn to love their friends’ characters too. It’s a bit sad.
Wizard (Gandalf) of the Tolkien Club
Back when D&D 3rd Edition came out I was in a group of four, the DM ran us in a custom game world. Our party of three was greatly livened up by the half-elf cleric, I can't remember his Domain/Religion, but he was a bit of a narcissist with vices for gambling and wenching. The situations he got himself and us in were very amusing.
Supporting his antics were my human wizard from the richest family in a backwoods town, think a rich boy with dellusions of granduere and a human rogue/ranger who was some sort of estranged nobility (plot was never fully explored so us other players never did find out who he REALLY was).
I missed this thread the first time. But there's one character my brother played in one and a half campaigns that would pretty much universally by the "Favorite not-you character" amongst our table. And that is Ozryk Ironbender XII, Fire-Forged Under the Mountain.
Tp put it succinctly...this was a hill dwarf who put the hill in 'Hill Dwarf'. Ozryk spoke with a very heavy Hills Hick accent, often descending into utterly incomprehensible high-speed gibberish. He played into some of the more hilarious hills boy tropes, primarily because my brother had lived with a lot of those folks for several years in an isolated Army base and knew exactly how do it so that it'd be hysterical instead of cringey. It helped that Ozryk was also actually a highly competent cleric of the Allhammer, good in a fight and a credit to the team. Ozryk was invested in the group's success...and in getting them plastered with The Grundle, a jug of supernaturally potent, literally-haunted moonshine that had a stiff Constitution DC to resist and could inflict any number of hilarious and horrifying effects on a failure. Ozryk was difficult to understand, a fast-talking hillbilly dwarf with strong tinkering skills and a tendency to bother the Allhammer day and night for trival nonsense. He's still, by far, the most well-known and well-liked character at the table.
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I played with a wizard once. Killed over 130 kobolds on a low-level fireball. Just one.
WIZARDS!
Frequent Eladrin || They/Them, but accept all pronouns
Luz Noceda would like to remind you that you're worth loving!
There's been quite a few in the campaigns I've been involved with, although one stand out has to be the time I ran Rise of Tiamat - one character was played by my brother called Jax the Mighty, a Human Fighter with the Folk Hero background.
To best describe his character would be the personality and commitment to goodness of Dudley Do-Right, with a little bit of Gaston, Hercule Satan and Thor thrown in for good mixture.
His original claim to fame was defeating an entire orc force by himself; in actuality, they all fell into a ravine when, in the process of chasing a fleeing Jax, the bridge they were all on collapsed under the weight of the orcs, who were then swept away by the strong currents.
Campaign highlights include:
#Open D&D
Have the Physical Books? Confused as to why you're not allowed to redeem them for free on D&D Beyond? Questions answered here at the Hardcover Books, D&D Beyond and You FAQ
Looking to add mouse-over triggered tooltips to such things like magic items, monsters or combat actions? Then dash over to the How to Add Tooltips thread.
A friend played Merazmus the Wizard. Very old, very flamboyant. His signature move was Grease, and he was roleplayed as being something of an "old horndog". He went missing for one session (player couldn't attend) and it was universally agreed that he was attending a... "party" with a group of Dryad. He arrived next session, ruffled and disoriented and prone to pausing with a happy look of reminiscence on his face whenever we weren't busy XD
It seemed inevitable that his grease spell caught fire whenever he used it, which also led to a chip-pan explosion, where a boss fight was finished using a waterskin :)
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Hmm.. My favorite was probably a sentimental one from my first campaign. His name was Wuthgar and he was a very righteous paladin who tried to convert EVERYONE (enemies, new party members, etc) to his god Dahlia. It was a school campaign, so new people often came, and by the time we left, 80% of party members worshipped her. My character was a ranger-warlock named Irellia who had a little imp (who was actually her patron but didn’t use his full powers), and she had a little feud with Wuthgar. Wuthgars dream was to deal the final blow on a boss, but somehow Lupin would always be the one who succeeded. Our two characters eventually became friends after a very wild plan they made to ride on an Aasimar’s back and cast Eldrich blast while he smited.
One of the players in my group used to play as Big Chungus, It was quite a strange experience.