Tabletop Roleplaying
SickleYield
Posts: 7,629
I'm not going to label this OT, because it isn't - DAZ Studio gets used to render a lot of character portraits!
So tell us about your tabletop characters. Any setting - just tell us which one it is.
Please keep backstory to a short-ish paragraph. Feel free to show character portraits (including videogame stills, if you like, but DS renders are especially welcome!), but please limit yourself to two characters per post so we can get lots of responses.
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I'm playing a half-drow sorcerer right now! She's called Relli Lighterspade because she was abandoned at the surface and raised by human farmers. I specced her for crowd control in D&D Edition 3.5 but the DM switched us to 5th, and her rebuild has to be mainly for damage (they took away Hypnosis, Sleep is useless now, Crown of Madness has very limited application and Hypnotic Pattern would get all of my heavily melee-oriented party members in that 30 foot cube). It was a lengthy negotiation with the DM, but he finally agreed to let me play her if she constantly wore a hood and gloves to hide her gray skin. In-character I wouldn't say "no one" likes her; she is on terms of cordial enmity with the CN wood elf cleric (and constantly talks down to the human figher/barb tank) but gets on fine with the paladin, the rogue and the druid.
I do a high-pitched voice for her that reflects her paranoid, indignant personality ("ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR DAMN MIND??").
If he TPK's us like he did the last group, I've threatened to play a half-catfolk beholder cleric next. He won't actually let me do that, of course. It'll probably be a thri kreen warlock instead.
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Comments
...does it have to be about a character in a current campaign or can it be an old one?
Any!
...cool. Thanks.
Is the thread for all systems or only some selection? Because I have The Dark Eye PCs (my beloved system), I am creating one for Wolsung and play regularly in Burning Wheel, though I am not particularly attached to the last one. I have portraits of them too, but they are not from DnD, which most people recognise.
Sickle, I love drows, so your sorceress sounds awesome. Can you tell us more about her and your group? It is the group that tells you a lot about your PC. And the GM... Always let your player make a character that can be acted convincingly. And let them suffer the choice's consequences in the game.
PS I got HFS Orcs a few days ago, so my Bolek, a quarter-orc bard, can be finally rendered.
True beauty comes from the inside, don't let the GM bring you down! (or roleplay a roleplayer)
My last character was Ram, a human bard/pirate who discovered on his first day on the docked ship that he's really no good. Managed to fall down and pull his leg off in some mooring, nearly drowned while developing a serious fear of the water. Still a pirate, but it's much more comfy to do the pirating in a tavern with a good book and song. This was a custom high-fantasy world in Pathfinder, our most excellent GM had a "chip" gameplay element that I loved, it represented your characters hubris (everyone had some exploitable character flaw). At any time, you could play your chip, effectively using it like a wish, to pull off (pretty much) whatever you wanted, usually to keep the party from wiping due to the higher difficulty of the campaign. At that point, the chip was in the GM's control, who would eventually play it back to you, invoking an equally large negative event upon your character. I needed to use it in our very first combat to avoid getting keelhauled by giant bugs, GM used it in town afterwards to help me spend all my loot on water protection ("magic" tattoo, water wings, snorkel, etc).
Alas, I don't have the gear to give Ram a good render right now. He probably looks like Mr. Bean/Jack Sparrow.
oh edit! Gotta mention my fave character from that group, an "OCD" Cleric. Hated the sight of blood and dirt where it shouldn't be. Never had any heal spells past the third round, but we left some damn clean corpses behind us.
Damn clean corpses... Loving it.
Great idea, SY!
I haven't ever played "properly", with systems and dice and stuff. I was in elementary school (early nineties, post-Soviet Russia...) when I started tabletop RPing with my friends (and none of us, including me the homebrew GM, knew this sort of "interactive community storytelling" had a name; imagine my surprise when I later found out I was not the first person ever to come up with this thing! LOL). All the three settings we had were custom, although the first one was based on My Little Pony (but quite different to the one from the then-available toon series). I don't remember much about my pony setting or even the character I played, but I still have all the maps, stories, character portraits and other stuff from the original "campaigns".
I'm most fond of my sci-fi character - a catwoman from the 51st century Earth. She was a rock star with a total mess of a personal life, and she also had an ability to create mini-wormholes. Not much in terms of combat save for quick retreat, but definitely useful when doing grocery shopping =D
...nice. cooperative storytelling is how I look at this as well.
While there have been a lot of characters of mine I liked, the most fun one came out of a free form RP setting.
She was a "Techno-fey" who developed a "knack" for fixing and jury rigging things as well as a heck of a mischievous personality. She along with a number of others were taken from her home world for "scientific experiments". When she awoke at the start of the campaign, she discovered her real wings were gone. Having assimilated knowledge about the technology of the world "fed ' to her while in the sleep chamber., she was able to design and construct suitable replacements.
While she still had the mystical powers of her kind she also adapted well to he current environment and had little difficulty using the tools of her new home.
A thread for me ;-)
I think anyone who have followed my "The adventures of Lomund son of Geirmund" knows that Lomund is a brave, loyal and nice guy from the town of Dale, but I got some other characters as well, allthough I GM/DM much more than I play.
One of my favorite characters in Hârnmaster is Angus Trapper, a guy who suffers from Megalomania, he is always best on any task at hand, which has put him in several rather embarrassing situations. One I just love was when we raided a warehouse where opponents to the king stored weapons, and he sat hidden between to crates ready to jump out at catch a guard that was walking by on the upper deck of the warehouse. He jumps out, misses the guard, falls face down into the lower deck of the warehouse.
I've done a fair bit of role-play both as a character and a DM, but we've not done anything in the past 6 or so years - two of our small group failed saving throws vs heart attack and the third fell to cancer. There are groups around I could join, but - well - our group was a tad 'abnormal'.
For instance - when the guys were pillaging (or trying to) in the chambers I ran, they kept hearing strange, loud music; Toccata and Fugue in D on a steam calliope with bagpipe accompaniment. And, as they blundered and plundered, getting to the point of checking lint under a bed to see if it was magic lint, or the dust on the floor to see if it was magic dust they would eventually find, scribbled on a door edge, carved into the lintel, or written in toothpaste or lipstick on the mirror in the small chamber with the small wall-hung font with the gleaming handle - the cryptic phrase "I have found this place! M.T." We tended to run low-level and low-income games. :-)
As a player, I actually ran Capitan-General Montmorency Torrence (he of 'M.T.' fame in my campaign), a bigger than life fighter and organizer of campaigns. I have three versions of him, all based on Ral Partha condottiere castings; longbow, hand-and-a-half broadsword, and dagger armed. I also painted up my merry little band's cleric and two other fighters.
Most of our campaigns were designed to go from paper and pencil to the gaming table with bands of miniatures - my friend and our other DM was a school-teacher and he'd put on games to try to get some of his students interested. Unfortunately, it didn't work. Miniatures, it seems, could not compete with Atari back then.
...One of those who was both a player and GM s well.
I tended to like extended campaign arcs in both roles.
When I GM'd rarely used "canned" scenarios for my campaigns save for maybe a "jumping off point" or to see see how a new group of characters worked together so I could properly gauge the difficulty level. Not one of those "Killer GM's" by no means as that is a good way to no longer have any players for your campaigns (in one such campaign where I was a player, I really frustrated the heck out of the GM through just the fate of the dice and timing, as he never managed to kill my 1st character off while the other players were going on their 4th and 5th ones).
The two campaigns I enjoyed the most was first, a Sci-Fi one (using an old system titled Space Opera by FGU) that I ran back in college for about two years (real time) which was set in a universe of a story idea I was working on. I frequently had the players asking me to run sessions more than once per week. It was set in the next am of the galaxy towards the centre (even had it mapped out) and was taken from a "non human" P.O.V. (basically "we" were the outsiders). The area of space was known as the "Protectorate" which was more of a "consortium" then "federation" of three of the of the major cultures I created for the story. It was more a "political thriller" set in space that was also ended up involving some (at the time) little known history of one of the races. I even changed the counting system to base 8 as the oldest of the founding member cultures only had 8 digits on each hand (where does one's counting system originally come from?).
I also played down "psionics" (which in my view was just another name for "magic" but in a futuristic setting) and instead had a more low key ability called perception which was more empathic in nature. Everyone pretty much had it at a certain level (I simply used the system's "Psi" attribute) but it was much more subtle, nothing like "The Force" in Star Wars where one could lift and throw objects or make lightning bolts come out of one's fingertips.
[soapbox]
I always considered magic and psionics, the way it was (and still is) presented in many systems (particularly in Shadowrun) to be "game breakers" especially in the hands of "Power Players" and "MIn-Maxers".
[/soapbox]
The second is the one where Leela's story comes from. which used the Shdowrun 3rd edition rules and setting. It was somewhat a bittersweet experience as I was intending to submit the scenario for publication and was in contact with one of their editors at the time. While they were readying their European source book for print, the hard drive which contained all the information on the Balkans died just before the work went to press. Rather than delay release to rewrite the missing section they went ahead adding couple paragraphs which mentioned the Balkans were basically a war zone. When I initially approached them with my idea I was told I had "Carte blanche" as to detailing the region and they were looking forward to seeing what I did with it.
As I was finishing up a few details and getting ready for the first playtest, the publisher announced the release of a new edition of the game which radically changed the rule mechanics (making it play more like an MMO in paper format) and moved the time frame of the setting up by nearly decade. They also announced they would no longer take any "unsolicited" submissions. A few months later, the franchise was sold to another game company. Ended up rolling a "critical miss" as a game scenario author.
After 18 months of work (which included study of the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s and history of the region) I had a complete campaign arc but no where to go with it as I could not afford to publish it on my own. After all the work I put into it I still went ahead with running the campaign and it was a big success with the group I assembled. During and afterwards, several of the players (as well as members of the Shadowrun forums) mentioned that I had the foundation for what could be a really nice story arc and I advised I should look into pursuing that route.
...which is what I ended up doing and why I am now so heavily involved in this 3D thing as I would like it to be an illustrated story.
Hmmm, role-played for 35 or so years so many to choose from!
I think my 'recent' favourite would be my Salubri elder, Kristina, from World of Darkness Vampire: the Masquerade, starting back with the Dark Ages setting and ending up in modern times. Various notable and fun events, including meeting Vlad Drakul and hving him demand that we go and find the sword that he'd lost and us going, "oh, this one?" and handing it over. Causing many vampire elders to have hissy fits by dancing at the Council of Thorns (I think that is what it was called) where the charter for the Masquerade was drawn up.
...played in a Changeling the Lost campaign which I found very enjoyable. Had a Darkling Antiquarian of the Autumn Court named Lili. She was once very promising musician at the Eastman School of Music where she was taken from by a Fairie Prince who seeing her keen interest in historical things enslaved her his librarian and personal musician. After escaping though the help of a kindly Tunnelgrub she was able to make it back to the wold she once knew, though forever changed. She eventually met others of he kind who were also in hiding and learned quickly to not reveal her true self to the mundanes she walked among.
As with most of her kind, Lili found solace in the night's darkness and shadows well as a hunger for the energy fear could give. She often haunted the dreams of mundanes turning them into nightmares or would induce fear in people to feed off of. She also had an hedgebeast companion which usually took the form of a common cat in the "real" world . Lili was probably the most sinister character I ever played but also a tragic one as she was torn between her new life, and the life she originally had which she longed dearly for again.
Thanks, KK, you reminded me I had done a render of Kristina:
...nice, wouldn't want to cross her fiends there that's for sure.
Did a second pic of Lili on from the "other side of the hedge" but it's on the other system.
Having a copy of Daz at a tabletop game would be pretty cool! (and maybe distracting)
Give all the players the chance to create their characters during downtime, set up some cool renders...
Funny enough, my very nickname came from a roleplaying campaign.
It was back in the late 80's, and the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying Game had come out. In the character booklet that came with the pack of character sheets there was a table of random syllables for Elven names, and when I rolled up an Elven Fighter/Mage for a game of AD&D (1st edition, y'all!), I used that chart, and ended up with "Val" and "Andar" - or "Valandar"! I played him for something like four years.
Three editions have come and gone (2nd, 3rd, 4th), and now I find myself deciding to re-create Valandar the Red of the Empty Tankard in 5th edition. Because of how the system works, and how I played him, I created him as a Mystic Knight style Fighter, meaning he'll primarily be a fighter who can toss out combat spells as needed. Guess i really should create his swords (Thunder's Edge and Dragon's Tail) in 3DS Max and get around to rendering him, shouldn't I?
By the way, for those who are familiar with "Things I am no longer allowed to do in Roleplaying games", here are some of mine:
1 ) In a Fantasy campaign, I'm not allowed to completely overthrow the government of the primary city of the campaign world with a few choice words in the right ears... on the first night of gameplay as a first level character.
2 ) In a Star Trek campaign, I'm not allowed to reprogram the sonic showers to play the Mr Clean theme instead of cleansing vibrations just as the Klingon security chief enters to clean up after a rousing holodeck training simulation.
3 ) In a superhero game, I'm not allowed to use a collapsible dagger, fake blood, and Dr Doom's time machine to completely change the religious history of the Western World.
4 ) In AD&D, I'm no longer allowed to play characters who think they're a different class than what they really are - the stupid Dwarven Claric who thought he was a Barbarian, f'rex, or the Halfling Barbarian who thought he was just a Fighter with a bad temper.
5 ) No more Kender, Malkavians, Ragabash Garou, Tinker Gnomes, or any AD%D monster race under 3'6" average height.
6 ) No more dump-statting into Wisdom if it leaves me with a Wisdom of less than 8.
7 ) And I am no longer allowed to play a character of evil alignment, as my fellow players still occasionally have nightmares of the ending of that campaign - when they found out my character's alignment, and all the fragments of my long-term plans fell into place. Heh, I even took the GM by surprise on that one, and he KNEW my character was evil.
...my name here also comes form an RPG character (Shadowrun), who is one of my longest surviving character from any RPG world.
She was a physical Adept who I started in First Edition and finally retired in Fourth Edition after achieving 'Prime Runner" Status. karma wise. It got to the point we would come up against a horde of ghouls, I'd roll initiative, and the GM would wave his hand and say say you "slice through them all". Her backstory is 110 page novella I composed partially as writing exercise based on the question in the character generation section, "why is this person a shadowrunner?"
Never was totally banned from plying a specific type of character or taking a specific kind of action, however, one GM really got annoyed that my "little girls" (my decker Violet and demo expert Leela) were going around taking out his well armed minions with things like a DMSO/drug squirt gun (Violet) or a blowing big holes in them with a Gyro Jet (Leela). After a few missions even his thugs began wearing security and in the case of Leela, military grade armour.
...and attribute/archetype wise, neither of them were the most powerful characters on their teams, just cute, cunning, and devious.
I guess he really didn't like it when Leela set a trap for a bunch of Yakuza assassins that were sent after us which employed fuel-air explosive. Took out our entire junkyard hideout and a few surrounding abandoned buildings along with the assassins while cleansing the area of our DNA traces at the same time.
As for that DMSO/Drug squirt gun...
It's FAR more effective to take the DMSO/drug mixture, inject it into empty paintball shells, and use a paintball gun. MUCH better range and rate of fire, more precise dosages, and you don't take valuable time pumping the pressure back up (for supersoakers) or reloading (for other watergun types). :D
That sounds hilarious. I've heard Shadowrun is very broken mechanically but the setting itself always sounds so fun!
Shadowrun mechanics have changed DRASTICALLY in the latest version, such that I don't acknowledge it as Shadowrun anymore. And the mechanics weren't broken, weapons just did FAR too little damage. It was entirely possible to shoot an unarmored, unresisting normal human target with the equivalent of a .50 magnum revolver at point blank range, and get only a Moderate wound. A starting Troll character could often even pass the PAC test - taking a hit from a Panther Assault Cannon, or basically a 20mm anti-material rifle - and take only a Light wound.
You don't consider everyone being nearly bulletproof a broken mechanic?
...effectively, that is what the Ares "SuperSquirt" is. It uses a "cocktail' of DMSO and the drug of your choice in as small packet that bursts on impact. any cloth armour that is not treated for chem resistance does little to help the victim. The tradeoff is the weapon is more expensive, both to purchase, to smartlink, and for it's "ammo" (price of which is based on DMSO + the compound used). Violet usually liked GammaS as it was fast acting, had a high resistance factor, and when the target came to, they were more agreeable to interrogation. Each shot was 310¥. but pretty much guaranteed to take down most metahumans (save maybe a troll due to the natural hardened dermal armour - that may require 2 shots ).
I currently have 9 active characters (and 1 semi-retired), in 8 campaigns, in 2 groups, using 2 game systems - (AD&D 3.5 and Hero).
I have actually done a "basic" design of most of my characters, I will just to relocate (and finish) them so I can try to post something. One of our campaigns, I have actually done a base creation of all of the PCs, since I WAS going to post them in a contest. I just never got the concept firm enough to run with.
...hmmm, KK was able to "ace" targets (unless they were armoured) with one shot of her Ruger Super Warhawk. Smartlink of course made it easier to make "called" (specifically targeted) shots as it reduced the targeting number by -2. Someone with smartlinked .50 cal sniper rifle also taking aim was very deadly as it was usually both a surprise attack and called shot to the head against the target who could not use combat pool to add to defence.
I'll agree, there were some really ridiculous things though, like a troll adept with strength augmentation being able to take down a helicopter with a Ranger-X Bow and dikote tipped arrows with a fair mount of successes (aircraft had little if any vehicle armour and low body values compared to ground vehicles).
Then again what RPG doesn't play down damage so the characters don't die on their fist adventure/mission. I'm sure if a person in RL was say, hit with a longsword, it would be pretty debilitating. Heck, in Champions, a "John Q. Normal" could walk off the roof of a 3 story building, get up, brush heimself off and go on his merry way.
I do agree about the rewrite of Shadowrun, particularly 4th ed which, as I mentioned, played too much like an MMO with that ridiculous "Edge" (read "Luck") attribute. Spellcasters, which were already pretty rude, became even more powerful while adepts pretty much got shafted, particularly by the cost of initiation (which was the only way an adept could improve and learn new abilities while a spellcaster could just go out and learn new spells without initiating). The skill caps were also ridiculous as they took away the incentive to become "the best of the best" in one's chosen field. The game effectively came down to plying one of two archetypes, mage or "street sam" as anyone with a commlink could hack the matrix or, with a decent reaction attribute, successfully operate a vehicle in a high threat situation.
..and technomancers (formerly Otaku) as presented, were a poor concept as like with awakened characters, they suffered ability loss from implants (under the old rules Otaku were encouraged to get cyber and bio implants).
Meanwhile, work has begun on making Valandar the Red's two swords. :D
Dragon's Tail, carved from the tailspike of a Wyrm (not great Wyrm) Red Dragon the party defeated...
In 2nd ed, it was +2 longsword, +3 against flammable targets, +4 against cold or ice wielding targets AND Dragons (still only +4 against White Dragons, tho). It also glowed like a torch on command, and could light campfires. :D
Haven't made it for 5th ed, yet...
That looks really cool, Val!
That's his offhand sword. His primary hand is Thunder's Edge, a +4 Defender longsword, that also can shoot a 1d6 electrical attack once per round up to 20 feet away. The look of that one has changed, but it's always been marginally longer than Dragon's Tail. :D I have to settle on a design for that one before I make it, then it's texturing time on outfit bits that would work for him. :D
Needless to say, Valandar the Red (the character) made it to 17/17 level in 2nd edition before that campaign ended (even though it started in 1st) - we didn't use level caps. :D