I loved that series (Guardians of the Flame) - as was said in the first post, light but very enjoyable reading.
The main character in the series, at least for the first 5 books, was Karl Cullinane - he played a human warrior basically. The one-handed thief was Einar Lightfingers I believe - he was killed in the first city they encountered after crossing over. Basically, the series had the game world and our world as two seperate universes ... you could cross over if you could get your mind to accept it - and with some help. The Gamemaster was a mighty wizard from the "game" world - he started the game to prepare Karl and Andy-Andy (his love interest) to go over since he foresaw Karl's son (Jason) as being the one to kill the Grandmaster of the wizard's guild ...
Anyways ... it was interesting because each person who crossed over had 2 personalities - the one was the "real-world" and the other was their "game-world". Einar died because his real world personality realized that it was wrong to steal - problem was he was in the middle of pick-pocketing a lordling - who then killed him.
Walter had these great rules he called Slovosky's laws ...anyways - sorry for the long post about the series ...
As far as the main question of this post, I think I would have to go with some sort of Loremaster I believe - I always liked the class :) Maybe with one or two levels of bard - I suck musically but am in law school (trying to get the college idea in?)
schreier
Ultradan... Walter Slovotsky was the main rogue in that story. He was the charismatic football hero who only played D&D (or whatever game they were playing in the novels) because an attractive female was in the gaming group.
I don't remember him being one-armed. The other rogue in the party got killed very quickly upon arrival in the fantasy world because he greatly overestimated his own abilities (meta-gaming) and greatly underestimated the striking power of the city watch's crossbows.
The characters in this book were very well developed. There was a dwarf fighter who was wheelchair bound on "Earth" and who stated that he would never try to go back to the real world. There was also a female wizard who suffered from PTSD really bad and the main hero--Karl Cullinane.
For light fantasy, it was a good read and ties in pretty well to this thread, so I don't feel bad about mentioning more about it.