Characters You Enjoyed Playing

[Faceless]

So I'm putting this in the Mildly Constructive section because this is not intended to be a thread where people bring up their issues with someone's past character or whatever. It's just a thread for folks to talk about past characters that they enjoyed playing, made them think 'Fuck yeah, I love this character', generally made them feel good about roleplaying, and (preferably) why. So if someone posts up "I had a character once named Jim Bob Buttsniffer...", that's not an invitation for people to come in trying to harp on some thing Jim Bob Buttsniffer did or didn't do or the player for that matter. Leave animosity outside.

Additionally, you don't need to include a name if you don't want to! The whole point is to just have some pride in your own ability to roleplay because as much as we take it for granted, some people do have trouble writing a fictional character and sometimes the internal workings of a character's mind aren't shown or on the surface. If you want to comment with some positive memory of a character that someone writes up for themselves? Have at it! Positive reinforcement is a good thing, I think. It motivates people.

So I want to know about the characters that you consider some of your favorite to have played!

I'll throw up a couple of my own examples below to kick it off.

[Faceless]

My past character on Fallcoast was named Dayne. He was, in short, a blast. Dude was a Changeling (Summer) and a Gilded Aspirant of the Sacred Band of the Golden Standard(read: he was suuuper full of himself and all about building a mythology around his own name), he was my first step into that splat, and altogether he was just a really, really enjoyable character.

He once killed a... those Hedge werewolf-thinga-ma-bobs... by German suplexing it. After bear-hugging it. So really it just looked like Dayne was slow-dancing with this thing for a couple rounds, before slamming it around until it decided to stop living.

Dayne hosted a wrestling match for a title belt... which I think the 'championship' was even named after himself. The belt(think like those 'professional' wrestling belts) had a pair of balls riveted to it.

He attended some huge party in the woods once and, I took pride in his reaction when a Winter courtier rolled something like 40 successes on some power activation that was supposed to scare the shit out of people - he literally grabbed the person next to him, threw them over his shoulder, and ran screaming into the woods - activating his own abilities along the way to make him run farther, faster. I took some self-pride in that because many people have trouble allowing their characters to show weakness. So Dayne just shrilly screaming as he fled into the night? I took some pride in that reaction.

Dayne was once caught in a motel room; covered in Hershey's chocolate syrup, fucking a watermelon with a picture of Barbara Eden(circa I Dream of Jeannie) stapled to it, a picture of himself stapled to his chest, a dead squirrel somewhere abouts(because he'd done copious amounts of cocaine with it), and that's just some of the crazy that Dayne was discovered doing or was a background feature in that particular scene.

He had a theme song(generously shown to me by another player). I once sent a @mail to a bunch of people, probably 30-something characters, because Dayne ICly had a picture of himself sent to each of them, thanking them for being his 'biggest fans', of himself in a bright red Speedo, with a rose + stem clutched between his teeth. None, or at least veeeery few, of these people were actually his "fans". He just assumed since they knew him, clearly they had to be his fans.

He got in a junkyard Jell-O pool fight with one of @Royal's characters that went hilariously as three superpowered Summer's just started flying leg dropping, punching, and headbutting one another for no other reason than to let a little anger out.

He was in effect an opportunity for me to play a character that was just over the top and larger than life, uncaring of what others thought because that was just Dayne. As a roleplayer, he was really well outside my usual comfort zone. My characters don't tend to be on that scale of extremes. Dayne wasn't fit for that. He was a cocaine addict and, really, probably had a lot more addictions than his sheet really indicated; all of which were just coping mechanisms to help him handle his greatest weakness: fear. He was an exploration of a personality and behavior, because I tend to play characters who take life a bit more seriously because they would. I feel like that only scratches the surface of Dayne, but I think it gives at least a decent enough example of why I really enjoyed playing him.

[Auspice]

I loved Thorne on Fallcoast. She was my Detective who ultimately joined TFV.
She began as a Mortal who knew nothing about the supernatural (despite having a Ghost Ally; always fun having Sin Eaters around :D).

One of my favorite nWoD scenes, to this day, was her first encounter with anything supernat. Case leads her, another cop, and a CSI to this shack. They encounter a man-sized cockroach. This thing tries to get freaky with her CSI. Thorne decides, well... to kick it in the head.

Now I knew my dice for that roll would be back, but it's what Thorne would do. So I rolled it. I didn't just fail. I drama failed. So Thorne tried to curb stomp this thing while shouting "NO MEANS NO" and fell through the fucking floor into a whole swarm of cockroaches.

Best moment ever.

I mean, she had a lot of them.

She basically had perma face, even once she fully accepted the supernatural as a thing. But she was that person who would have your back, no matter what. And my shit dice meant it would generally be pretty hilariously ridiculous through the course of it. She was fun to play and the people I was playing with in Law at the time (Brodie, Tucker, Mike, Dash, Kate...) made it awesome, too.

[Faceless]

Gordon. Gordon. I don't miss playing Gordon. I do miss delving into the head of Gordon. Gordon was my first step into Mage the Awakening. He was a paranoid dude. He grew up in a family of mages, with some supposed prophecy that he was going to Awaken someday and be this great mage - he went into his teens, twenties, and late into his 30s without that happening. He felt like a failure. He did ultimately Awaken, but that didn't eliminate his feeling of being inadequate or just altogether unworthy.

That didn't mean he wasn't a valuable asset to the Awakened, he was still a Proximus. He was raised knowing that if things went south with a mage... it couldn't get to that point. He had to strike first and hard. As a result colored his views on how to handle people, situations, and more; don't play defense, play offense and play hard.

He had a B.F.F. sort in the form of another character who was essentially a millionaire playboy who was chronically irresponsible and kind of a terrible person who made terrible choices(in the eyes of Gordon, at least). Playboy made Gordon go with him to some Alice In Wonderland-themed party once. The playboy dressed up as some character. Gordon? Gordon was the caterpillar. Complete with hookah. Which he just sort of dragged around behind him without enthusiasm, as he waddled around in this massive caterpillar outfit - fun fact, he had a shotgun stuffed away in the aft section of the costume, dragging around behind himself. He was not happy to be there because El Gordo was just not an overly happy person.

Playboy's cousin came to work with Gordon once. She could light shit on fire with her mind. When Gordon first met him he basically told her, straight out the gates: "Don't worry. I have no interest in fucking you". I'm fairly sure she gave him the 'good, you wouldn't have had the chance anyway' sort of response, while also being mildly offended. Gordon dgaf. She later caught a chair in his office on fire, during a separate incident. He advised her if she did that again, he'd turn her into a pile of ashes. Despite how confrontational that relationship seemed, the player and I got along famously. 10/10 will always roleplay with again.

At the end of The Reach, Gordon had something like...1,050 XP? And he was a Mage. I, as a player, knew that I could very, very, very, very, very, very easily make things not-fun for other players. Knowing that, I pushed him to Gnosis 7 eventually. I did this because at that point... the plain ol' mortal world just isn't as interesting. There aren't mysteries to be discovered or uncovered there, at least not on the surface. I did this because as shown in one scene among a mixed-bag of other splats, I didn't want to show them up. So while everyone was trying to deduce some family secret, trying to uncover this centuries old tale with their powers and stuff... Gordon wasn't. He was too busy thinking about manipulating time, stopping it, and tying that to when he unholstered his sidearm. And, at one point, discovering a baseball glove that he hadn't seen for two decades - he was SO excited by that. It was only when everyone else's rolls failed, they couldn't make progress, and a challenge presented itself did Gordon(like the eye of Sauron) turn around like 'Ooooh, a mystery...'. I was happy that I, in my opinion, had the maturity to let other people try to drive the Cool Thing forward and only stepped in to throw my own sheet at it, when others failed.

He had a lot under the hood that was never explored or probed by others; I've honestly forgotten so much about him because he had so much about him in terms of backstory. He took things very seriously, usually. One of the moments that always stands out the most to me with that character is when I wrote a little short story on The Reach, featuring Gordon. Gordon seemed so confident and competent, in most cases. The introduction of that little feature on TR was an opportunity for me to show that Gordon wasn't as put-together as he so often seemed. I wrote it out and it was just Gordon, sitting in Lay-Z Boy, a bottle of whiskey next to him(and not good whiskey, I'm talking 'in a plastic bottle', whiskey), watching Fox News(because of course Gordon did, even if I curl my lip at it), a gun(because the dude was always armed), and a big cupcake on a tv tray in front of himself. He grabbed his gun, stared at it for a moment, and had his own little Lethal Weapon-Martin Riggs moment where he thought about eating a bullet - it'd make things a lot easier on him or at least that was his thinking. Ultimately, of course, he put the gun down. Sighed a bit. Picked up his cupcake, started unpeeling it, and then wished himself happy birthday. I posted that up and got a couple pages about it almost immediately, one of them really stood out to me: Person pages, "I really wish I could give Gordon a hug". That, to me, felt like I had written that segment well. I was proud of that writing.

Gordon was a complex character to me and I often credit that fact to just how much I had put into his story that I knew, or suspected, no one would ever see or even attempt to delve into. Even today, a few short years later, I can't properly put my finger on what I really got out of the character or what I'd hoped to get out of him. I can just say that I put a lot into him and that in the end, I did feel satisfied with him. Even if I wouldn't play him again, because overall I think his character was complete, despite his never really having a proper ending.

[Faceless]

@auspice said in Characters You Enjoyed Playing:

Now I knew my dice for that roll would be back, but it's what Thorne would do. So I rolled it. I didn't just fail. I drama failed. So Thorne tried to curb stomp this thing while shouting "NO MEANS NO" and fell through the fucking floor into a whole swarm of cockroaches.

Best moment ever.

And rolling with the dramatic failure is what made it seem all the more rewarding! It's when they're seen as a punishment, rather than an opportunity, that I think a lot of times people fail to capitalize on. You must have played her before(most likely) or after my brief step into Hunter and TFV. Did you ever play with Sledge(Richard Sledge - because Dick Sledge needed to be a name used at some point) on that character?

[scar]

On XFS, I played a father-figure / social worker character who helped at-risk mutant youth ~while struggling with the addictive nature of his own mutations. His abilities were sort of both sides of the coin. Healing & life energy / vampiric death. It’s an overused concept and I barely ever used his powers until the very end. All of the fun came from @zz playing a cop and the two doing this ‘will they/won’t they’ dance before he ended up betraying everyone and sucking the life out of one of the younger characters he’d taken under his wing (played by @tat). It was a glorious, very satisfying story to create.

[saosmash]

@scar Most of what I remember about that storyline is all of the incoherent yelling when you guys got to the end holy shit.

[Tat]

@scar

I totally planned Mikhail for a short life, but I COULD NOT have planned a death as amazingly glorious as the one you gave me. Having a trusted mentor slip toward the dark side and actually KILL the kid he was trying to save was amazing.

[Pyrephox]

Thomas Truesdale.

Still one of the characters who had the most going on under the hood, as one might expect from a Changeling. Also one of the first male characters that I played for longer than a one-shot.

He was from an incredibly small town in the back-end of Kansas, wandered into a fae domain, and was turned in so that another Lost could escape. It's possible that he eventually did the same to some other poor bastard - he could never remember how he got out of his durance, and that killed him. Either way, he got spit back out in the same small town, where there were no other Lost and he'd never had a fetch, with next to no memory of where he'd been or why he was a nightmare to his own eyes but /no one else saw anything different/ (except that he'd aged up). It wasn't long until he went completely bugfuck, and got himself involuntarily committed to the state institution.

I didn't want to go with 'hellish asylum', so it was actually the place where he met a Winter Court mentor who was looking out for Lost who got committed. He helped get Thomas' Clarity back up, and with the help of a Duchess of the Icebound Heart, got him capable of interacting with the world and pretending to be human again (then she broke his heart, because of course she did).

What came out the other end of all of that was a /deeply/ broken man who was emotionally manipulative, controlling, and even abusive, while sincerely believing it was For Their Own Good. He wasn't really capable of deep positive emotion, although he could fake it well enough for his day job, and although his dearest wish was for a boring, stable, ordinary life, he was absolutely willing to murder the hell out of someone if they were in his way. If they were Lost. He valued human life much more highly, and he was deeply opposed to magical predation on humans (aside from himself). He was a bundle of curiosity, especially about occult things that didn't come from the Fae - he had this secret dream of figuring out a way to send a bunch of human psychics into the Hedge to burn down everything and take on the Fae with telekinesis and nukes. It never quite worked out, though.

Amusingly, /nothing/ he ever did quite worked out. I'm not sure he accomplished even one of his intended goals the entire time I played him. When he failed, though, he just grabbed what he could from the situation and acted like that was the plan all the while. I would have really loved to have more fun occult adventures with him, or for his position as a reporter to have meant more, but I loved playing him.

[Caryatid]

Nora@RfK. She was a middle-aged perfumier whose fifteen minutes of fame had come and gone. Then she was dragged screaming into the ghoul life as an unwilling servant of a vampire, passed around to a few others before suffering a violent death and a postmortem Embrace. That's when the real fun happened. At slightly less than a year old, she managed to scheme well enough to land total leadership of her clan, wrangle up the appointment of 90% of the city's vampiric leadership (both clan and covenant leaders, and all of the harpies) and had pull enough even as a neonate that when the Prince and his lackies conspired to try to wipe her off of the map, half of the city rose to protect her and protest them moving on her. She got her man, quietly destroyed the careers of several big power players, and would have won the game if it hadn't been for corrupt staffers protecting their RL friends from their inevitable doom. All at an age in which most vampires are still considered a baby.

I like to picture her and Cai in some sleepy, idyllic backwater leading their own happy little blood cult and being horrible to everyone but each other.

Nox@XmenRevolution. Shadow-based mutant who, due to some experience with betrayal, kidnapping and being a lab experiment, had become a complete monster underneath the mild mannered exterior. She knew she was a monster and overcompensated for it by trying to be as June Cleaver as possible to everyone she knew. Eventually she snapped, murdered a cop responsible for an underground (non-consensual) mutant fight club, and lost everything she held dear (including her remaining sanity). She ended up working for the enemy, helping a government agency develop a mutant "cure" and acting as the spokesperson for their storefront company under an assumed name. Her story was a huge tragedy and I've never played anything as beautifully depressing before or since.

[Caryatid]

@pyrephox Aww, Thomas.

He's still the sneaky, broken yardstick I measure all other Changeling characters against.

[Pyrephox]

@caryatid said in Characters You Enjoyed Playing:

@pyrephox Aww, Thomas.

He's still the sneaky, broken yardstick I measure all other Changeling characters against.

He was very fun to play with, and I loved seeing how he bounced off of all the other great characters on Darkwater. While he never really accomplished anything, there were too many great personal conflicts and interactions to name.

[Kanye Qwest]

All of them*. All my characters are amazing. I am a great roleplayer.

*except some Firan roster characters, wow.

[tragedyjones]

My favorite all time MU characters:

Marty Bryce, The Reach 2011-2013ish

Daeva. Invictus. Harpy. Kingslayer. Troll. Proponent of Daeva Bingo. Victim of multiple IC torporings. I miss telling the praxis just how fucking stupid they were being at any given time, and also using retainers to maximum effect, both strategic and comedic. Also, he had a cool brother, a scary sister, and a waifu.

Jay Bolton, Eldritch

Jay was my first full 2E requiem character to get much play. A creep, a weirdo, a hacker and an anarchist.

Doctor Doom, Heroes Dreams

I loved being the bad guy here. Besides antagonizing everyone from the JLA to the X-Men to the Silver Surfer, I also adoptrd Tera of Markovia and founded a Legion of Doom

[Three-Eyed Crow]

I've played characters I loved more, but the one I probably had the most pure fun with was Rebekkah on the old Steel & Stone GoT MUSH. She was an 80-year-old dowager who existed only to snark at her grandchildren and complain, and was my blatant rip-off of Olenna Tyrell. Was a blast.

[saosmash]

It's hard to pick from among my babies. I love them all.

I miss my paladin telepath asshole Tom Sikorski most, though, from XMM XF. He was a character whose struggles with identity and morality and anger control took me through a lot of great rp, and iterations of him keep appearing in new characters I write. And his rage fueled some of the best drama of my rp career.

[Ganymede]

@caryatid said in Characters You Enjoyed Playing:

I like to picture her and Cai in some sleepy, idyllic backwater leading their own happy little blood cult and being horrible to everyone but each other.

I liked playing a lot of characters, but Cai is near the top of the list.

He was Embraced late, after spending 20+ years fighting in various wars for the British Empire and being responsible for the death of his daughter. His Sire was a Bron, and he passed on all of the attendant problems, which sabotaged each and every attempt Cai made to start a family again. And he did try, over and over, resulting in the unfortunate deaths of more than a few women and children.

He entered RfK in media res, having "adopted" a daughter of his own. He was made to help bolster the Circle (under David), but, to keep his mask up, he tried to play the role of the blue-collar worker. He bowled; he went to bars; and he tried to take care of this mortal teen. There was much fun to be had, and it happened for many months.

And then, there was him meeting Nora. That's when he became a real vampire. He forgot about wanting a family; he wanted power. Sweet, sweet power. His "daughter," Sarah, fell by the wayside.

She ran away. Wandered to New York. Awakened during the tumultuous period that began Fallen World.

And she was the Shrike.

You haven't really lived until you've tried to inject British slang into everything your PC says, to the point that she becomes vaguely incomprehensible.

Good times.

[Arkandel]

My Warder on a Moment on Tyme. I played him for something like... four years? That's an insane amount of time for someone like me who doesn't have alts, so that fact alone makes him my favorite.

It was also because when he started out I barely knew how to roleplay at all, let alone do so online, so as the character grew so did I; he started from scratch (an unguilded nobody) who became a trainee, went through the paces, became a Warder, then rose to instructor... and as much as I hate the style of gaming back then - forcing everyone to follow a strict syllabus and going through processes that took a very, very long RL time to earn things, it did mean more at the end.

In retrospect the character himself was only mildly interesting. He was a healer turned into a killing machine, so that part was fun to play out, and the moral choices he had to make on the way did give me some memorable scenes, but I can definitely look back and see he was too good at too much; these days I wouldn't play that kind of concept, at least not without some heavy tweaks.

The PC himself was such a product of his time though. Hell his name was Narsil Grimm - I literally stole his name from Tolkien (don't squint, his first Aes Sedai was Ororo Monroe, and yes she had weather powers) then added some cool-sounding surname for additional effect.

I have lots of logs saved and the trajectory of my writing style, not to mention my partners', really shows there; at the beginning our poses were collectively craptastic, barely one or two liners, then a couple of years down the line we were tossing walls of text at each other during emote fights. That's kind of neat to catch.

Anyway, yeah.

[saosmash]

Oh, I want to shout out to the whole House Ellis clan from F&L. @Caryatid, @tat, @scar, @OldFrightful, @zz, etc.; we built this really fun interconnected thing and I loved Sasha. Too bad about what actually happened with it, y'know, but the character building? That was amazing.

[SG]

Salvae on Battlestar Unification was a lot of fun, but people stopped playing on the grid. It's silly, but I just couldn't get into the teleporting into people's temp room scenes that were already in progress, even if they were marked pub.

Igrel on Tenebrae. A witch with a grump cat familiar. My schedule didn't jive with the other players on that game, and there was this pressure to grind xp rather than explore the setting and rp casually. I think people also dismissed material components on that game, when I tried to incorporate them into poses when casting spells, people treated me like I was from mars.

Blackheart on Denver. Mullets, Mirror Shades, Magic, Motorcycles and Machineguns. How is that not fun?

Thatcher on Lost Generation was also fun. Snipping wire under the germans' noses was kind of terrifying. Eating the apple at someone's funeral was also fun. Thatch was an asshole.