Roleplaying Tics?

I have a few particular archetypes that I rarely stray from:

My paladins usually avert the whole Lawful Stupid thing for the most part, but unfortunately have a tendency to be the Heroic Sacrifice (rearguard...tends not to survive it).

My scoundrelly type is actually a long running thing, ripped from the Dread Pirate Roberts idea of same name, passed from character to character. They're usually similar enough in personality that it's not much of a stretch in-story, even when one's Human and the next is a Dwarf (managed to keep the network of contacts claiming reincarnation). Captain Edge Balfour has been around for around 200 years now, in-story.

I almost never use casters. The only exception is Bards,Psychic Warriors (if you count that as a caster), and exactly two clerics (like two ever, in the whole 23 years I've been playing).

And if it's Star Wars, there'll ALWAYS be at least a couple of Jedi levels on my characters.

I don't think I can play a character who isn't at least The Conscience, if not a full on All-Loving Hero. Chronic Hero Syndrome abounds. They also tend to be idealistic, although not naive, ranging from Silly Rabbit, Cynicism Is for Losers! to The Anti-Nihilist. Perhaps because it's a prerequisite for being able to talk people down or settle situations peacefully, my characters also tend to be very charismatic.

I've had a few players who pretty much RP often similar things:

• One plays a Lawful Stupid Paladin day in day out. If the game doesn't have Paladin, he'll go for whatever he can. Player's got childish notions of honor and such but hates being faced in any shades of grey, or made to think about what the "right" path is. H'd basically rage if you put him in front of the The Orc Baby Dilemma.

• Another always plays the simple rough and thumble warrior. I'd call it a viking without the cultural stuff? Basically all his characters are hard drinking physical fighter with little grasp of cultures. You find them either in a bar or in a battlefield. Or if lucky in a bar brawl. Weirdly enough he tends to be the voice of reason for his group.

edited 4th May '15 12:26:53 PM by CobraPrime

To my mind the Orc Baby Dilemma isn't much of a dilemma at all. Maybe because I utterly despise Always Chaotic Evil as a trope, but at that point the baby doing nothing to harm anyone. To kill him would be flat out murder. I believe the correct choice of action is to find him a home where he can be loved and taken care of. In my opinion, the reason sometimes you have to kill villains is "Self Defense or Defense of Others," never because "they're evill." Their nature is irrelevant, only that people would be hurt by their actions. If it's possible to Take a Third Option and stop them without harming them, so much the better.

Not that I mind grey situations in games, it's just that I tend to choose in favor of compassion, and with little to no hesitation.

edited 4th May '15 2:03:47 PM by VerityCandle

All my characters are faithful, from at least a moderate degree. This causes issues when the rest of the party hates my diety/god.

At least my dice like me enough to pull out all the stops.

To my mind the Orc Baby Dilemma isn't much of a dilemma at all. Maybe because I utterly despise Always Chaotic Evil as a trope, but at that point the baby doing nothing to harm anyone. To kill him would be flat out murder. I believe the correct choice of action is to find him a home where he can be loved and taken care of. In my opinion, the reason sometimes you have to kill villains is "Self Defense or Defense of Others," never because "they're evill." Their nature is irrelevant, only that people would be hurt by their actions. If it's possible to Take a Third Option and stop them without harming them, so much the better.

Yes, and that's what any GOOD Paladin player would do. He'd get pissed I put an orc he can't kill without being called out on it by the rest of the party.

Heck, I seem to recall, in 2nd Edition, one of the campaign worlds (I want to say Forgotten Realms, but I can't say for certain) had the end result of a church avoiding the Lawful Stupid choice with baby and child orcs that had been orphaned in a war. They started an orphanage, taught them in accordance to their faith, and after a few generations, there was an entire colony of lawful good orcs mostly devoted to farming. I'm fairly certain that was created specifically to refute the Orc Baby Dilemma (particularly as it even involved pre-adolescent orcs).

Oh, right, the topic of the thread. I typically end up playing characters with a wide breadth of knowledge that are there in small part to figure out where the plot is going. Bards, sages, researchers... figuring things out (or just having the GM tell me part of the plot on an appropriate check) seems to be my forte. It's to the point where I made a fighter in a 3.5 game that does it (I put way more points into intelligence than I really needed to, so cross-class skills were the way to go).

I tend to play mage styled characters with a inner touch for searching ruins for not powerful artifacts but the history as to the Why these are ruins instead of a thriving civilization Plus i really like kabooms.

Less a tic and more a recurring character, but I tend to play a halfling barbarian with an attitude and a magic weapon fixation. Occasionally I make him a midget drow instead, because why not.

I am always carrying something for every possible event. In D&D will carry small knives made of every possible material, with every possible alignment, so that if I happen to run into that one rare creature that can only be harmed with a +1 Chaotic Bone weapon I have it. I try to build to counter everything in the game. As a result, my characters usually end up dealing obscene amounts of damage with held actions from a great distance.

Wizard: "I cast Power Word Ki..."

Me: *BOOM* 54 points of damage "Go on, try to make that save."

edited 29th Dec '15 8:17:18 PM by AETHDH

Something I've noticed about games I'm involved in: whoever is the least religious player will always end up playing the cleric somehow.

My characters are, in games where everyone is playing relatively normal humans or things close to them, usually the oldest in the party.

My male characters are pretty much always described as good-looking.

Well, I don't know if two characters would be enough to qualify as a "tic", but my characters tend towards the socially awkward, and I usually end up playing the Straight Man, though on occasion prove to be Not So Above It All.

I tend to play rogue-type characters, even when I'm not playing a rogue. I always want to use the ladder to cross the trap-door, gather leaking hyperdrive fluid, just in case, use ropes to trip up enemies in combat, tame the baby ice dragon, tame the giant riding scorpions, tame the baby wolf-spider, etc.

Not necessarily a tic, but after a magical attack that left a recurring female npc hairless, my character took the time to help her accessorize so that the bald head looked like a choice that she could be proud of, rather than something that happenned to her.

A fair while later, yet another person asked what my character's interest in Bald Women was and I finally broke character to explain that it's not him. it's me.

I usually play a Church Militiant-type character. Sometimes even in settings where it doesn't make 100% sense (for example, a Pokemon Roleplay I have a ghost-type trainer who resembles a Catholic priest). This is partially because I find it cool when played straight, or potentially hilarious when parodied ("Feintings to the heathen Caterpries!")

Hilariously, one time I didn't do this is in my on-going 40K Rogue Trader campaign. My character (the Rogue Trader) in that game is an Objectivist of sorts, essentially a marginally nicer Andrew Ryan.

edited 28th Mar '16 5:17:30 AM by Protagonist506

I myself tend to have a habit of doing strange character concepts with each campaign. Examples of my two current ones:

• An Ifrit Disciple of Mym C'sil (homebrew class that I found, showed my friends and the DM and they loved how hilarious and awesome it is).
• A Human Wyvern Rider (using a homebrew class based on the Fire Emblem class of the same name that the DM is having me test-drive)
• An insane ratfolk rogue with a crossbow and a penchant for poison.

Additionally: If the DM says "keep it simple and make sense with the race", I usually end up going with a character who's a walking stereotype of that race, but done well. Examples:

• Thorin Cragforge. Started as Lawful Neutral, through Character Development ended up as Lawful Good. He was also essentially an Ultimate Blacksmith in training, and walked around in Mithral Mountain Plate he forged himself. He had a habit of not using any weapon or armour he himself didn't make, due to a deep-seated superstition her gave himself over his father dying in a war using a weapon/armor someone made for him. Ended the campaign as a Dwarf Paragon 3/ Fighter 2/ Deepwarden 2. The DM decreed that, with the gold from the Red Dragon we slew, Thorin went to found a new Dwarven city and become it's first king.^note Side note: That name was from a random generator, I wasn't actually meaning to be reference Tolkein
• Grimgor "Smashface" Grimskull: Chaotic Neutral Orc who wanted to start his own country, as he felt that the Orcs needed to stop being pushed to the side. He didn't succeed, but his great-grandson finished what he started. He also had a cockney accent. Ended as a Barbarian/Eye of Gruumsh/Frenzied Berserker (can't remember the levels, but Unstoppable Rage was a legit thing with him. He could rage for days).

edited 30th Mar '16 7:40:38 PM by BlackSunNocturne

I've noticed that, of the three characters I'm currently playing, two of them are pink-haired animal-themed queer cyborg women who like causing lots of destruction. One's a gay teenaged bull-themed superhero with enhanced strength who loves breaking shit down, the other's an adult pansexual poodle-themed runner who is an expert in building weapons and explosives — VERY different characters, but similar in some superficial ways. My other current character lacks many of those features but IS also another queer woman (probably also pansexual but I haven't given it much thought, I just know she likes women and also men).

All three of the D&D characters I've ever played, however, have been big hairy strong dudes who smash stuff. This probably tells you how I treat D&D versus how I treat other games.

edited 21st Sep '16 7:48:05 AM by Zarek

All of my characters have a weird obsession with some type of monster. Sometimes I decide them myself beforehand, or I'll open up a random number generator, and find the monster on the page number that the generator spits out.

The two most famous examples are:

Ricard, Chaotic Good Fighter: Living Armors. The closest he ever came to dying came from an incident where he tried to wear one while it was still alive.

And Leif, my Chaotic Neutral Rogue who had a thing for scorpion women. The closest he ever came to dying was when he propositioned one and she didn't take too kindly to his advances.

In my current campaign, Lizbeth has an intense hatred... for Dire Sharks.

All my characters are clueless, absent-minded, or just a straight-up Cloudcuckoolander: even if I didnt plan to play one (and I usually do), those tendencies will sneak in. Also a lot of my characters have traditionally edgy, dark, or sinister powers or aesthetics but without the personalities to match, such as a clueless Bloodhunter in D&D who doesnt realize hemocraft is a Dangerous Forbidden Technique, or a Circle of Spores druid (also D&D) who is carefree, optimistic, and not in the least bit sinister, or a mad scientist (Genius: The Transgression) whose creations look like the works of H. R. Giger but who is a sincerely altruistic Genki Guy. And almost all my characters are good. (If I ever play an evil character, though, expect Good Powers, Bad People.)

Both my characters so far have been asexual (Because I am myself and it saves me having to act out things that would make me melt into a puddle of embarrassment), female, non-human, and broke to breaking rules they don't like.

Both also get super mouthy to bad guys they find personally offensive.

...Considering that Beau was designed specifically to be the complete opposite of Das, this was very much unintentional.

Edited by Murataku on Aug 31st 2021 at 6:38:15 PM

I've realized that all my characters, regardless of what their convictions and personality are otherwise and regardless of the setting, turn out to be feminists.

And since the system I've played in the most is Wo D, that means that I've played a lot of monsters who were for some reason really into women's lib.

I tend to end up going against stereotypes of my class or race; my dwarf was a druid, my paladin was a Guile Hero who'd lie through his teeth to avoid a fight, my cleric was chaotic neutral- actually neutral, not evil- my Great Old One Pact Warlock was a good man - his main goal was actually to make sure his patron never woke up - and I had an idea for a wannabe edgelord warlock, except his pact is celestial, his patron is a unicorn, he has to do good deeds on a regular basis to maintain his pact, and he's made so many enemies that he can't afford to lose his magic...

My characters tend to have connections to the politics of the world they're in if I'm doing a typical tabletop campaign, even if the connections are incidental. E.g., a character who was involved in the slave trade, a noble from a once-great house, a druid trying to put her religion back on the rise as others start to gain converts among her people, etc.

Other than that I'm pretty varied I think? I have an above-average tendency to play evil characters I guess, but I play good-aligned as well.

Actually, that's another thing—a lot of my characters tend to be motivated by trying to overcome some social stigma.

Edited by Privilege on Jan 30th 2022 at 6:12:22 AM