I suspect that everyone likes to design and play the occasional odd character. Of course your definition of 'odd' may vary from mine. Personally I still want to play in an Atomic Horror game where my character has the ability to summon musical sequences - he can swing his guitar off his hip and give everyone the ability to dance in a musical number of that wacky rock and roll. I'm not sure what the in-game benefit would be (it doesn't even have the get more done during time compression montage effect that a Disney Princess' 'summon musical number' power does(, but I just think it's cool in the genre.
Let see... in one fantasy game in which I was to be an intermittent player my PC was actually a personality inside an amulet that would possess whoever put it on for short periods. Whenever I wasn't there the body became a combat ineffective commoner who the GM would not feel obliged to role play or make combat decisions for. The other cool part was that anyone I explained this too took POW damage and potential insanity, which meant that I could be all strange and mysterious and say "don't ask questions you don't want the answers to" and then when someone insisted, Player Character style that I absolutely tell them I could say to the GM "I tell him" and he'd roll for damage and describe the PC collapsing into a ball of blubbering temporary insanity. I don't know why I found that ability to whack at someone who insisted on trying to remove my PCs aura of mystery so enjoyable, but I did.
There was also my character in Tom's Bureau 13 game, a Banshee who felt really bad about past actions but had attended a twelve-step program and internalized that her wail was a prediction and not something she was causing and had to feel responsible for. She also dressed like a male dandy and each session I would slowly find a use for each handkerchief, pocket watch chain, silk tie and so on until at the end she was inevitably in a state of deshabille.
Those are a couple of mine - what're yours?
Plans for 2024: Creation of an NSR setting for super-heroes; My D&D 3E campaign as an example of sandboxing via published adventure, and likely more.
Hm. I did play Rikiki, the blue squirrel god from Liavek, as a drop in PC in a fairly system light and freewheeling game. Basically, Rikiki has godlike power, but the priorities and attention span of a squirrel. There are many games where the character wouldn't be a good fit, but this wasn't one.
ReplyDeleteI also created Charles, the Malkavian Vampire. Now, this was old World of Darkness, pre-3rd edition, so the Malkavians didn't all have to be the Joker or the mental patient with bunny slippers and a knife. I had read the first version of the Malkavian clanbook, and it read like Principia Discordia.
Like all Malkavians, Charles had a derrangement. I wanted something that would affect how I played the character in a big way, but not stop the game cold. I went with the idea, from the core rulebook, that Charles had built up a huge fantasy world to live in. The overlap with the real game world was more than enough for this not to get in the way of gaming.
Charles believed Charles was the original Chevalier d'Eon, and a super spy. Picture a Bond movie where Bond's an 18th century French fop. Charles believed Charles was male, but Charles was actually female. And, I had a reasonable backstory to explain why Charles was derranged in that particular way.
Charles and her sire had been locked up, I think during the French Revolution. It could have been before that, and it really doesn't matter. The important thing is that Charles's sire wanted to feed Charles, and Charles took too much, diablerizing her sire. She escaped, but couldn't live with the person she really was, so she decided she was someone else.
Now that I think about it, the GMs of a larp I very much enjoyed did something like that for the backstory of one of the PCs. He'd decided that the wrong person had survived a horrible experience, and so, for a time, convinced himself he was the other person, the one he felt should have survived.