(Or your favorite/“main” character from any other TTRPG you fancy!)
What’s their class/species/etc? What are their stats? Why did you pick that class and those attributes? What do they look like, and do you have any pictures of them? What’s their personality like, and how are they similar to or different from you? What are their special interests, skills, or battlefield tactics? What equipment do they use? How long have you been using them, and what makes them your favorite/main?
This is Siel (pronounced “SILL” like “windowsill,”) she’s my longest-running and all-time fave! Art by my long-time GM, who is also a freelance graphic designer.
Siel is a forest gnome (who often have long strings of various names for various situations.) Her full name-list is Sielvu “Siel” Tielvur Brightknell Sapling Softread Odiel Nine-Named Dwiena. I’ve played Siel for over six years in a number of campaigns ranging from levels 1 to 15; in the present campaign she is a level 6 Rogue with the Thief subclass and the Charlatan background. Her profession is private investigator.
Siel’s current stat spread is:
STR 8 (-1)
DEX 18 (+4)
CON 9 (-1)
INT 18 (+4)
WIS 12 (+1)
CHA 12 (+1)
Siel takes the threat of death or bodily harm more seriously than many adventurers and would much rather evade or hide from a threat than fight. Consequently she uses a light crossbow and focuses on hit-and-run tactics. She augments her natural speed, stealth, and maneuverability with a Cloak of Elvenkind, Boots of Striding and Springing, and a Ring of Free Action. She also makes frequent creative use of an Immovable Rod.
Siel has invested substantial time and gold into learning various utility skills, she is proficient with thieves’ tools, tinker’s tools, forgery kits, and disguise kits. With a combination of gold/time expenditure and the Linguist feat, she’s wound up speaking Abyssal, Celestial, Common, Draconic, Dwarvish, Elvish, Gnomish, and Thieves’ Cant.
Siel left her rural forest gnomehold at a very young age and journeyed to a sprawling, Byzantine magical city-state called Ozmium - Siel is a city girl at heart and much prefers cobblestones and brickwork to moss and trees. She supported herself through petty crime until her extraordinary natural aptitude for stealth drew the attention of a gruff dwarven gumshoe named Solvig Drunne, who took her on as apprentice and surrogate daughter. The profession fit Siel’s unique combination of idealism and sly pragmatism much better than thievery ever did, and she quickly mastered the sleuth’s trade. Since then, Siel’s skillset has come into demand for less-conventional purposes and she’s fallen in with a number of different groups of heroes and adventurers.
Siel has a strong (if flexible) moral compass. Her notions of private property might be somewhat fluid, but her sense of fair play and justice is rigorous. She is prone to swagger and can be brash, effortlessly occupying the spotlight at taverns with her tall tales and cunning for games. She drinks like a dwarf but lacks the constitution to hold her liquor. For all her braggadocio, Siel is easily wrong-footed and flustered by romantic attention. Siel can rough it in the wilderness with the best of them, but she is a city girl at heart and feels most at home in dense urban environments.
I love playing Siel because she represents the best and most positive aspects of myself. Her personality is a lot like mine would be were I not hamstrung by self-doubt and pessimism. On the rare occasions when I forget to care what I look and sound like, when I am existing comfortably in public among others and having a good time, I often suddenly realize that I’m acting just like Siel.
“Let me tell you about my D&D character.” 
(Sorry, bad trope there.)
I’ve been playing D&D, and other RPGs, for four decades, and my favorite character has shifted over time, but right now, it’s Emma Blackthorne, the half-elven bard that I’m playing in a 5E campaign.
Since she’s a bard, Charisma is her best stat, followed by Dexterity. Wisdom is her dump stat, partially because it fits her ebullient-but-rash personality, and as it turns out, that’s probably my personal dump stat, too.
She’s charming and flirtatious, and her motivation is fame – she wants to be someone whom everyone has heard of, and knows of her exploits. She styles herself as a pirate, always introducing herself as “Emma Blackthorne, Pirate Bard of the Sea of Fallen Stars,” but her secret is that she’s not really a pirate at all (and that’s not even her real name): she was a barmaid at a tavern in a port town, and while flirting with an actual pirate one night, said pirate dropped over dead from a heart attack – she then appropriated the pirate’s gear and money, adopted a new “stage name,” and left the tavern behind to become an adventurer.
When the party goes into a town, and stays at an inn, she usually will wind up performing in the inn’s common room, singing and playing an instrument, and telling stories about the group’s adventures (and her own starring role in those ).
In combat, her primary thing is to buff allies and hamper enemies (classic bard tactics). I like to think of her as the party’s “Swiss Army knife” – she’s got a range of spells and items that can be useful in a variety of situations. For example, she once used Dimension Door (twice) to rescue an NPC who was being threatened by a BBEG: she teleported in, grabbed the NPC, and teleported back out with him to safety. One of her favorite spells is Vicious Mockery – it doesn’t do a ton of damage, but it’s the perfect closing move to finish off a battered opponent, and it gives me the chance to make up rude insults. The party doesn’t have a full-time healer, so she also winds up filling that role in combat, as well.
Where she really shines is non-combat encounters: because she’s so good at Persuasion, Perform, and Deceive, she’s excellent at obtaining aid for herself and her friends, and at convincing NPCs to share information with her that they really shouldn’t.
She primarily uses bardic instruments: she has a Fochulcan Bandore, and recently also obtained an Anstruth Harp. She rarely goes into melee combat, but she has a Sun Blade for that purpose – a perfect weapon for her, because it’s so very flashy and impressive.
I’ve been playing her for about 4 years, though that campaign is about to wrap up. She’s my favorite because of her personality, and because she’s able to contribute in a bunch of different ways.
I use a picture for her that I’d found on a Google image search years ago:
This is exactly what I love about Siel! I think she and Emma would get on like a house on fire.
Absolutely so!
I will avoid too much detail that would drive anyone other than the players involved insane.
My most infamous character is Kenneth (Ken) FitzPatrick, a 3.0 human cleric, single classed.
Tiny bit of backstory: I’m a semi-serious powergamer. I don’t generally go for exploits, but I min-max with brutal efficiency, and plan the spending of every single skill / feat / perk / bonus stat through end game.
So depending on the game, each time I’ve carefully selected the best race / class combo with eyes to long term performance as well as weapon mix and the like.
So I was asked in this particular game to do something simple: thus a single classed human cleric of all things.
And boy did I go wild.
And 3.0, while a GREAT system, had some very interesting … oversights.
By mid game (around 12th level) the GM said this to me: “I’m torn. Anything I build to challenge Ken will obliterate the rest of the party, and anything that is a reasonable challenge to the rest of the party will be slaughtered by Ken.”
Fundamentally they were a Plate Armored behemoth with an untouchable AC, high melee damage, and as a cleric, able to counter pretty much any special attacks / penalties.
What was fun about that game in particular (rather than the character itself) is that we periodically leaned into some of the tropes of gaming itself. Several players took turns running sub-stories as a lark, and it was those that were the most fun.
The best is probably one run by my wife - she thought it would be hilarious to run our characters (at that time around 13th level or so) through a level 7-9 module, without telling us. We kept wondering WTH was going on! Is there a deep conspiracy (there was, but it we unintentionally steamrolled it)? Why is everything going so well, is it a trap (nope, just high leveled characters bumping into situations they were overqualified for)? There’s got to be more? -snicker-
Or one run by another player where we did the old Giants modules . . . and even including the listed rules for the difficulty of said attempts, burned the entire wooden fort down (flying beyond any weapon/spell reach and dumping entire bags of holdings worth of oil on it) , roasting most of them alive, and then flooded the remains, killing what little remained underground.
This is exactly how my GM and several of my other regular companions are. I wouldn’t say they min/max exactly, but they definitely study the rules to get the most possible power our of the character concepts they choose.
I am… Super the opposite, so I don’t even try to keep up! Hence my stealth and out-of-combat skill focus.
I find that it’s better for myself if I go with games that lean more into story than mechanics, such as the various World of Darkness iterations, but D&D has historically been more rules focused than many other systems.
Of course, I don’t have a group anymore since they all moved out of state. 
I will say that amusingly enough, I sympathize with your feelings. Because in my effort to find a new local gaming group, I joined for 2-3 sessions with a new crowd. And they WERE full on exploit power-gamers, picking the most broken classes and exploits from any available supplement (often written for vasty different settings) and I, who was in the ‘reasonable’ range, just figured I’d stay in the back and CC. 
Mine is a cleric who spent the campaign prioritizing maxing AC above all else. Our GM let him learn misty step, weld an immovable rod to his shield, and fill a bag of holding with a small lake. Hijinks ensued.
Oh, do I have characters! (Well, I am a character, so… ;)) Most are from games that are, sadly defunct.
My first character, 30 years ago while I was in college, was a GURPS Supers character, a psionic based on me. At one point, the guy that was trying to get me registered (another PC) got me pissed because he wouldn’t stop bugging me, so I decided to send out a psionic call for any Supers in the area to come to his office, thinking I’d sneak out while he was dealing with these others. I rolled exceptionally well and started a three day long block party. Unfortunately, when I was trying to sneak out, my roll wasn’t as good and the PC saw me sneaking out and made me file all the new registration paperwork. I missed three days of classes because of it.
Then there’s my halfling rogue from 20+ years ago. She lived to bug the druid and steal anything she could. She had a knack for grabbing the wrong things - like the book that caused everything in the room to try to kill us (Ravenloft of course) or the belt pouch that happened to be on it’s way to pay the rent on an orphanage. As an orphan herself, that one hurt her, especially after she was caught by the local thieves guild and had to give over a tithe. She had to take money out of her own stores to make it up. Then met up with the dwarf in their party to get drunker than a skunk, all the while muttering, “Orphans. Why did it have to be orphans?”
My next memorable one was my dark elf assassin that I played in the “Out of the Abyss” campaign. She was locked up at the beginning because, even though she was drow, she’d pissed off some of the drow priestesses. But she was incredibly good with her daggers - sneak dice and a 20 dex does wonders.
The only one I’m still playing is actually someone I just took back up. This is from a homegrown world that I got involved in about 20 years ago. Mostly, it’s a diceless system, which helps me keep my writing up to snuff. The world closed down, but it came back to life a few years ago on Discord. Sevti was a human worshipper of Pan (primarily worshipped by the Adhiel, or elven, folk). Pan had three aspects: blood (the warriors that lost themselves in battle frenzy), art (the creatives who lost themselves in their creation) and joy (which lost themselves in… well, everything else, especially sex). Her home island was attacked and her parents’ bar burned. She found out her father had been captured and she went to rescue him along with a Bloodling she’d just met, Abeo. He became the love of her life and was promptly captured right after Sev’s father was rescued. And of course, the game shut down before they had a chance to be reunited. The reboot is starting 10 years after and Sev, after finding him, marrying him, and losing him again, became a priestess of Pan and has since gotten word of where he MIGHT be. So now she’s searching for him again, using sex to get info, and unsure whether to hope that the stories she heard WERE actually him. She’s far and away one of my favorite characters ever to play and I’m SO glad to be able to play her again.
My current D&D character is Shefa, a paladin of devotion. About 50 years ago, clerics from a temple of Chauntea (goddess of the harvest) came across the ruins of a dwarven caravan, that had been ravaged by bandits. The only survivor was a single infant, and so they took him in and raised him in the temple. Well, he’s obviously a human like the clerics who raised him, and obviously what a harvest goddess needs most is a martial champion to further her cause. His darkvision? Clearly a blessing from the gods, so he can seek out evil in the dark places where it hides. His height? Another blessing, because those dark places often have low ceilings, so he doesn’t bump his head. The thick facial hair that’s so difficult for him to shave every morning? Also sent by the gods, to teach him perseverance. And so now he’s riding out into the world astride his mighty war-ox, on a quest to find and do battle with Famine and Pestilence, Chauntea’s greatest enemies (and if you tried to explain to him about that, he probably wouldn’t understand).
My “main” character, to the extent I have one, is Colt Kiernan, an arcane trickster rogue. He was originally an archaeology student (sage background), but felt that it missed the whole point to just study relics others brought in, and wants to go out into the world to find lost antiquities and lore and bring them to light. He has the same mindset as an ideological software pirate, that information wants to be free, and continued his studies by sneaking into the restricted section of the library by night (and ended up getting himself a book of magical rituals that way). “Colt” also isn’t his original name; his parents named him “Dwayne”, but who ever heard of an action hero named “Dwayne”?
He eventually ended up as a sort of honorary uncle to a couple of urchins from Baldur’s Gate. An unscrupulous sorcerer had been pulling the old Fagin job, recruiting young urchins and training them in magic to do crimes for her, but was pushing the training on them way faster than they were ready for, without regard for the disastrous consequences for some of them. After we defeated the sorcerer, Colt took the kids aside and explained to them that magic could be dangerous, and they hadn’t been treating it carefully enough, but that if any of them still wanted to pursue it, he’d see to it that they got a responsible mentor, so they could learn properly. Two took him up for it, and it cost him his share of the treasure from that adventure and then some to get them set up properly as wizard’s apprentices, but it was money well-spent.
I’m in a Pathfinder campaign right now, playing a human wizard named Lexant Roby. He’s an older man in his early 60s who was a university professor. He had some rather unorthodox and challenging theories* about events in area’s past and that, combined with his general surly disposition, led to him losing his position and few people willing to back him. So he decided to prove himself right and took up magic as a tool towards that end which is why he’s in his 60s and currently level four. He’s perhaps less cranky than before but still has little time for nonsense and people/creatures he views as less than serious. He is very Lawful Neutral, believing that structure and law are the basis of civilization and good & evil come secondary to preserving said civilization and culture. A commitment given must be honored and permission given by the lawful ruling authorities may be freely exercised. There’s likely limits to that but we’re not playing a campaign of Nazi war crimes or anything so it hasn’t come up (plus everyone else is some flavor of NG/CG).
Gamewise, he’s a divination specialist but mainly tends towards conjuration in the field since there’s only so much aid you can lend in combat with Comprehend Languages. A lot of crowd control/debuff spells with area effects to try to maximize the value of my spell slots. I’ve fairly trivialized a number of encounters and actually asked the GM if he had an issue with it (I was going to take a second tier of conjuration focus and wanted to ask) but he says it’s cool since sometimes the save dice don’t go my way and later levels will make some current tricks less reliable. Unsurprisingly, Lexant has high intelligence, decent wisdom, okay constitution and mediocre to poor strength, dexterity and charisma. I did take a feat to use my INT mod for Diplomacy checks (I get to construct logical arguments at them, Reddit-style) but Lexant only uses it in more civilized conversation. When talking to a bunch of tittering fay or angry orcs, someone else can waste time on them.
Lexant is actually a rebuild of a 5e character I played but the campaign died out before I got my fill of the character so I used the same concept again for the Pathfinder game. Unfortunately, not knowing the Pathfinder lore, it was hard to develop anything compelling or shocking to build a controversial theory around so the GM and I shelved it as hazy until something good comes up to build around in game.
My original 5e version of Lexant had him discovering that the kobolds of today are markedly different from ones of ages past and postulating that the entire world they live in had undergone multiple sweeping changes and resets by an advanced patheon of creators and that the style of kobold acted as the strata by which you could determine these ages.
Once upon a time, I ran Lexant’s Heroforge mockup through Stable Diffusion asking for photorealism and got what is thus his definitive image (maybe with less aggressively blue eyes)
For some reason this makes me want to play an Arcane Trickster who’s whole deal is convincing people that they’re actually a wizard.
I adore kobolds and this concept makes me adore them even more.
Some of these- hell most of these- are GREAT!
Probably my oldest, longest running character (that I still have some investment in - lots of characters from high school and earlier that I barely even remember anymore) was Jedi Master Ama Sira, from a very long running Star Wars campaign. She started out as a 1st level padawan around the time Phantom Menace came out. Last time I played her, her proto-Rebel Alliance cell was sold out by one of the other PCs who had fallen to the Dark Side, and betrayed the location of their hidden base to Darth Vader.
The session where we got betrayed was properly epic. The GM who’d been running the game for years at that point was burned out and wanted to stop, so he cut a secret deal with one of the other players - his Jedi character turned to the Dark Side and betrayed us, and after that session, the old GM stepped aside, and the player who’d turned on us took over running the campaign, starting with us breaking out of Imperial prison, and then hunting down his old PC. I took the opportunity to roll a new character, however,* since we were getting to the point where having a fully-fledged Jedi Master running around working for the Rebellion was breaking canon. So instead, Ama Sira was frozen in carbonite, but the Imperials lost her body in transit, and she was never recovered by the rest of the party. She’s still out there somewhere in the Star Wars galaxy, probably an object d’art in some Hutt’s pleasure palace, waiting to be thawed out.
*a Tradoshan explosives expert. Tradoshans are lizard people who could regrow lost limbs. At the beginning of every game, I’d roll 2d6 to see how many fingers I had for that session.
More recently, I’ve been playing in a Pathfinder campaign run by my wife (protip: marrying a GM is a great way to make sure you can always get a game). Dwalin Deepdweller was training to be a paladin of Abadar, but a tragic error in judgement involving alcohol led to the deaths of several of his compatriots. Feeling that he was now unworthy of being a paladin, he left his homeland for the wilds of Varisia. So, when the campaign started, I was playing a lawful good dwarf fighter, whose second-best stat was charisma (keep in mind, Pathfinder dwarves start with a -2 to charisma, and we were doing point buy) who still followed the paladin code, but got none of the paladin abilities. It’s paid off since then - he eventually redeemed himself, and multi-classed into paladin. His meteor hammer has the merciful enchantment, which allows it to deal a lot of extra damage, so long as it’s all non-lethal. He calls it Gentle Persuasion. He’s got a pretty good track record (we’re only ~7th level atm) of turning enemies into allies, including a goblin tribe he convinced to trade with the human settlement instead of raiding it (Abadar is the God of civilization and commerce, and this was a big part of him getting his paladin levels) and a necromancer who he befriended after breaking into his home and beating him unconscious.
Another friend’s been running a couple of games in the Rifts setting, using the Savage Worlds conversion (which I highly recommend). We’ve done one short campaign where I got to play Zeus, a mutant Doberman/gentleman thief. He’s a deadly shot with that particle rifle, and likes to teach the local street urchins how to pick locks as his way of giving back to the community. We’re currently in the middle of a second campaign, where my character, Arcturus Rex - seen here with his impact hammer, the Stella Malleum - is a rising star on the cyborg fighting circuit. Rex’s personality draws heavily on the Tick - endlessly optimistic, hopelessly naive, notably stupid, functionally indestructible.
Lastly, I only ever got to play this guy once, in a one-off adventure where representatives of three warring kingdoms (human, dwarf, and hobgoblin) had to work together to defeat a winter demon that was threatening them all. Flight Captain Einrist Chok (not pictured: his dire bat, Betty) didn’t get too much backstory, but he made up for it in style.
That is top-shelf hilarious.
I have two estranged elf brothers, Hannan and Lant Colanderel. In their youth they were the terror of their village along with their little sister Olanna. One day, when they were exploring an old cursed ruin together a mysterious monster attacked them and turned Olanna to stone. The monster escaped, and no one they could find was able to lift Olanna’s curse. They each vowed to go out into the world and find a way to cure their sister.
Lant chose to travel to the great cities of the world, so he became a bard and sought out powerful wizards and clerics in hope of finding a cure or learning the identity of the monster. Hannan chose to travel the wilds, so he became a ranger and sought dungeons and ruins to explore in hope of finding a cure or learning the identity of the monster. Lant thinks Hannan is wasting his time punishing himself in the wilderness rather than finding a cure. Hannan thinks Lant is wasting his time living the high life of a popular bard rather than finding a cure.
They are both right and both wrong. A cure is out there but to get it will require them to put aside their differences and work together.
Do you play both characters?
I played Hannan in a campaign a long time ago, and I dusted them off and played Lant more recently. Unfortunately, both times the group I was in fell apart before we could get to a resolution. The quest to save Olanna continues.
This was a looooog time ago but one I fondly remember I had a fighter who failed miserably at an easy dex role and fell into a fountain of youth and emerged as a ‘about a’ 7 yr old child and almost drowning in my now oversized armor. DM didn’t provide a way to reverse this but allowed me to multiclass a magic user with later allowed rouge abilities as my fighting stats were trashed by this. I was also given special protection armor by a kind wizard traveler that allowed other party members to voluntarily take a portion of my damage as my HP was also very low and death was very expensive to reverse.
I was kidnapped 2x, once I was quickly rescued by our party, the second time I was placed in an apprenticeship school where I leaned the rouge skills. That second kidnaping happened at the end of that day’s campaign, and the next time we met, I knew the DM was working on something, time had passed and everyone was a year older (woo-hoo ‘about a’ 8 year old now) with various reasons for what the party did for a year, during which I escaped with the help of the kidnapper’s own kids and managed to get back to the town that the others were staying, reuniting our party. This was also the time I realized that the DM made up their mind that I was to stay a child, which by now was OK with me as it was quite fun and different. I think the DM realized I was OK with this and why he allowed me to gain another skill set which I really needed to be useful and valuable to the party as till now I was a drain on them and felt it and they did too, particularly in combat where they had to take hits transfered to their own characters though that special armor, which only had the defense of that of a weakly armored child. The DM also admitted it was fun for him to have a child in the campaign, this was the first time he had this, and that allowed him to try some new things. That year also advanced my magic stats, and did gain some HP and strength with age but nowhere near any fighting ability worth anything.
I had charisma off the charts with a bonus and sometimes managed to break into places to steal things (I often broke into places), got caught and in the end sometimes even have the owner end up giving me the items anyway or in one case have the lord imprison the owner for harming me, such a dear innocent child. I did occasionally get caught and punished but as a child with such high charisma the punishment was often light and basically inconsequential, sometime just being handed over to my ‘parents’ (other party members) to teach me a lesson, but I didn’t get the items then. I also got the party better deals just for being part of the group (my bonus was added to group rolls during negotiations). That bonus was added 2x when I was handed over to my parents for punishment, first was when it was added to me alone when caught, then when they confronted my parents as I was with them, giving me 2x the chances of getting out of it. There was a little discussion if I was in custody at the time, if that would be added, or was I separated from them while in custody, but it was decided if they could see or hear me and me them it would count as I could influence decisions by that.
I was also obviously able to get through tight spaces which helped greatly at times as well. Having a child changed how the group acted in unusual ways and positive ways including posing as a family traveling, or sometimes being refugees. This sometimes gave us favor and entrance and assistance which just made things easier and cheaper (free sometimes). This also allowed me to do things like offered poisoned food and drinks to people without it seeming suspicious. This also made us tempting targets for bandits and the like but we were very well equipped to deal with that, far more than they realized. In general the party enjoyed this too. Much of this was thanks to the DM who did this so well. Well except for one member who IRL doesn’t like children. It didn’t bother him that much but I could tell that he didn’t like the protection I received in combat and would often ignore it nor the solutions someone of my size offered some of the puzzles. That puzzle solving part was a part he really enjoyed, but I often solved them just by being able to access things due to my size (also with some magic help I could be thrown a great distance, and fall damage transfered - due to my small mass fall damage was one damage that was more minor when transferring to others). But with all that said when it came down to it he did take the damage that would have killed me, and no one else could take.
It also changed combat, as they, except for that one, became very protective of me and though my armor would allow transfer of damage, it was generally better for them to not having me be hit in the first place then to have a full damage to a minimally shielded child transfer to them in full (bypassing their much stronger armor which would tank most of the hit). This allowed me the concentration I needed to use some area effect magic in very creative ways, not always to our benefit, but mostly helpful and the DM was very creative at what such a spell would do in ways I didn’t expect and captured the child nature of my character in them with certain ‘errors’ in casting that sometimes produced unusual results (and much laughter), this was often when I pushed the limit of the spell beyond what the ‘text book’ use for it was. The DM was great that way anyway but the unintended effect was must more in line with a mischievous missed harry potter type spell with unintended consequences which fit my character very well. The party often scrambled to continue fighting in game changing conditions.
Like all good things this came to an end, the campaign was for a set time and the DM kept to it. In the end he gave us each our own ending, mine was that I was put in service to the king, who was pretty darn evil and I leaned from his ways. I was raised with his family and he would often take me on negotiations and often kept me near. After some time I arranged that his heirs come to ‘mysterious deaths’ after I mentioned and convinced the king that a curse was on the royal family. I did manage to kill all his heirs, but in the end I got caught, my plan exposed, and given a crown and a throne by that king while being entombed alive in a 9 ft by 9 ft cell to rule over my small ‘kingdom’ till I perished, so I would be king for life over my very small kingdom. Yes the DM was great and all but did have a dark streak. Other members met like fates all perishing except for one who can not die, but would really like to. That was the way with this DM, basically there is no sequel with him, the ending is exactly that.
