What's your hottest character idea that you didn't get to play (long enough)?
Mine was a Wild Magic Sorcerer that vehemently believed he was a regular city guardsman and explained every bit of magic he produced away as pure happenstance.
For a short adventure / one-shot, I played an intelligence-based tome warlock (using some of the play test materials). His patron was… himself, in the past. He was a terrible evil wizard who realized the error of his ways, wiped his own memory, and restarted. His tome was just his old spell book, most of which was pretty gnarly stuff. Slowly finding that out would have been a fun journey if he was a long-term character.
A stereotypical, run-of-the-mill wizard.
You know the type: Academic, aloof, bookworm, a bit naive, likes to use long Latin words, …
Only he wasn’t a wizard. His parents couldn’t afford tuition at the academy, so he applied for a job as janitor to get access to the buildings. Spent several years mingling with the students and teachers so he could fake the lingo. And he pinched the odd magical item that let him “cast” some cantrips.
Now he’s faking being a wizard to rise up in society.
Got to love a Fake Wizard. I wanted to play one who was a wizarding student who was grandfathered into a wizard school (literally his grandfather founded the school) who got expelled for messing up so bad he almost destroyed the entire school. The accident would have bound him to a celestial somehow which is why he is a scourge Aassimar and Zealot barbarian. He has these powers he doesn't know where they are coming from and are slowly changing him into something less human and more divine.
He would of course still have a quarterstaff, wearing school robes, have a arcane sigil on his shield and be convinced he is a new type of wizard. He would have cantrips and some magic but doesn't understand how or why.
Now I want to play the reverse…a fake barbarian. A really intelligent wizard that realized people don’t ask him to work as much if he pretends to be illiterate and dumb. Quickened True Strike when he rages, etc.
A gnoll taken as a cub and raised by good clerics as a test of nature vs nurture. He was all about freeing slaves and offering redemption to evildoers, but was also bloodthirsty in battle with the truly evil.
A Gnome Artificer who was mute. It was interesting to use only visual langauge to communicate with people. I had a “system” where I could use the magic items / features you get from Gnome and Artificer to talk if I decided I really needed to, but I tried to limit that both for in universe reasons, and meta reasons. Kinda defeats the purpose if you can just magic your way out of it. The idea was that she was cursed by a fey creature, and could cheat a little bit with magic, but eventually the curse would hurt too much to talk more than a little. Eventually I started to feel like the trope of Nynaeve from The Wheel of Time, only replace hair pulling with glares and knowing smiles etc.
I wanted to play a necromancer of no particular class, whose skeletal grandmother followed him around under his thrall. His village practiced a kind of ancestor worship where on holidays they animate the skeletons of their family and dress them up in clothes and jewelry and try to (symbolically) show them a good time as a gesture of appreciation. The tribe’s forest was burned down or village destroyed and PC had to run for it, taking only his most prized possession - the bones of his matriarch. Over the course of the campaign I’d like to add nicer clothes and jewelry to the skeleton, maybe give it magic items.
Ultimately it’s just not feasible to play a non-evil necromancer, and my table doesn’t play evil anyway either.
Throwaway idea: A Loxodon (elephant) bard named Harry Elefánte.
I had a quite literally hottest character I ever came up with: A wizard that liked fire a bit too much for his own good. He was a master of flames, the best from the Monastery he spent decades on. But the more power he gained through the fire, the more and more he lost his own mind. At the time of the campaign, he was in a sort of Limbo. He couldn't remember most of his life, and he couldn't shake off the insatiable desire to spread the flames he encountered. If he spent too long besides a fire, he would start to hear It louder and louder, to the point where he would lose control and be possessed by his flaming desire, which had full memory and access to the spells he no longer remembered, which often resulted in the complete destruction of everything around.
I actually got to play this character, and was a ton of fun with the party I had, but unfortunately the campaign was put on hold indefinitely due to personal matters of the DM.
A warforged that escaped the war, met another defector, and together tried to start a new life. Unfortunately, the kingdom sent assassins after them in order to silence them and make sure that they would not switch sides. The human died, but the warforged lived on, carrying with it the remorse of not being able to save them. To honor its friend, it kept the nickname that the human gave it - Hector, which was a pun based on its model name (Tactical Heavy Operations Robot, model H -> H, T.H.O.R. -> Hector).
Survivor’s guilt was the main idea behind the build: It was a Fighter Rune Knight built to tank damage and protect its allies as better as it could (Heavy armor master, Interception fighting style, Cloud rune).
Tanking damage is not optimal in DnD (killing the damage dealer is always the best choice) but it was meant to be a low-level one shot, so it was fine. Unfortunately work, family and other real life issues got in the way and the party wasn’t able to convene on a date where everyone could gather and play for four hours straight.
Reborn tabaxi artificer armorer with a mechanically different though RP similar “living armor”. The living armor is the reason i was “reborn” as its keeping me alive longer but the curse of the living armor is of divine nature as i stole it from an evil cult, so removing it required a monumental effort (high level NPCs basically didnt exist).
The character reached an actual satisfying conclusion as there was an “enlightenment” challenge we managed to find that was heavily skill based and artificers are obscenely good at skill challenges (dm also liked tool checks where relevant, and was lenient with the skill training rules, reborn helped too, resulted in being able to roll d20+stat+prof*expertise+int+guidance(d4)+reborn(d6) on checks i needed to push). The enlightenment ultimately lead to access to enough divine power to break both the curse of the armor and of my undeath.
Ultimately though, despite how fun the RP around it was, it was one of my more OP characters considering how much it trivialized skill checks which that DM really loved.
I tried and failed to tone it down with my next character, which thanks to party dynamic became the single most OP BS i ever made even if it wasnt crazy good alone. Wanted to make a magic infiltrator and went with changeling + aberrant mind sorcerer. Ended up getting a shadowfell shard too. Mindsliver leading to a subtle quickened shadowfell shard boosted CC spell (fav was psychic lance since it wasnt concentration and almost nothing is immune to incapacitated, though hold person, and hypnotic pattern, and the like were also thrown frequently too) was an obscenely powerful combo, and since another new player made a DPS rogue+gloomstalker build, the only way for anything to have any chance of living is lots of legendary resistance and an obscene health pool. This was also a crazy fun build, that the power of it ended up being its downfall as everything we fought ended up being several CR higher than anyone of our level had any right to tangle with. (also yes, i know you can’t normally subtle + quicken, read the Psionic Sorcery power of aberrant sorcerers)
Low wis warlock who is convinced he’s actually a Paladin, and is confused why his oath keeps seeming to change arbitrarily. Thought that signing the contract was making his oath.
Big beefy warrior with a heart of gold and a peanut brain that could crush anyone easily but she would rather be friends with everyone and have everyone play along. It's a heartbreaking character to play in games that just assume all you're gonna be doing is killing, but it could be pretty cute as the muscle of more diplomatic sorts of campigns.
A tiefling divine soul sorcerer with the Criminal background. He was born to two pious tiefling clerics of Lathander who saw their fiendish blood as a curse, and prayed to cleanse their unborn child of devilish influence. When he was born a Divine Soul, his parents tried to raise him as their perfect priestess. He had to be a model tiefling, a representative of his entire race as well as Lathander himself. He chafed under the obligation and ran away from home, living on the streets and stealing to get by, all while trying to hide his divine soul powers out of a combination of rejecting them and just trying not to draw attention.
Slinking around in the shadows eventually led to him wandering into the Mists of Ravenloft, and he found himself in Barovia. He found his way into a party and essentially just acted like the party rogue for a bit until combat came and he got backed into a corner and he suddenly started throwing around guiding bolts.
I was really looking forward to doing a whole arc with him reclaiming his powers and figuring out what it meant to be himself, but OOC stuff led to me leaving that group before he had a chance to leave his edgy rogue phase :c
I’ll preface this by noting that the sin of sloth has traditionally been understood to be a sin of omission, not just commission, i.e., you are insufficiently devoted to the things you ought to be.
Which means you could, in theory, have a (reflavored tiefling) devil paladin so devoted to sloth he works against evil causes. He’s not interested in good per se, it’s just that advancing the interests of good and traveling with a good adventuring party has the best ROI for failing to carry out his evil responsibilities.
Naturally, this has caused a fair amount of controversy among sloth devils, and there is a multi-century trial going on in the Hells about whether this ought to be allowed. This is not expected to be resolved in the foreseeable future because the advocates for both parties keep filing their responses well after petition deadlines expire.
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