| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
I suspect that most people would assume that Ifrits, being closely related to fire creatures, would not like water much.
My next character is going to be an Ifrit pearl diver.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Come to think of it: A Catfolk diver would be even more against stereotype, given the stereotype about how house cats react to being thrown into water.
| 11 people marked this as a favorite. |
I always prefer my catfolk less house cat and more feral cat or big cats. But if you go house cat that could be really funny.Come to think of it: A Catfolk diver would be even more against stereotype, given the stereotype about how house cats react to being thrown into water.
GM: "Ok, so the party starts off in a tavern and--"
CATFOLK PC: "I lock eyes with the other party members. Staring at them, I slowly knock a mug of mead off of the tavern table. For no good reason."
How about a Catfolk who seems to be completely lacking in curiosity?
An ax swinging Elf Barbarian?
A teetotaler Dwarf Wizard? (This one actually works reasonably well mechanically.)
A teetotaler Dwarf Wizard? (This one actually works reasonably well mechanically.)
This one I have done. He was awesome. He was also filthy, and anarchistic, and had the sense of honor of something without any sense of honor whatsoever (he didn't do much metaphorical thinking; that strait-laced quirk being perhaps his only dwarven cultural hold-over). And he did not speak with a Scottish accent. Ever. Not even ironically.
One of the recurring NPCs in my stories is an elf barbarian with a big falchion, who is also skilled in diplomacy/bluff and knows how to talk her way out of trouble. She tends to make some of my players confused.
Another recurring NPC is a bard who is deliberately rude and snobbish, deliberately using her high charisma score to keep people away from her. She knows how to be nice and charming, she just chooses not to.
A dwarf sorcerer who is actually kinda charming and polite even though a bit grim (abyssal bloodline) and whose main interests in life appear to be outsiders and summoned creatures.
Another dwarf who was a devoted healer and was soft spoken and calm.
A hedonistic elven cleric of noble heritage and exquisite manners who is also an archaeologist who doesn't mind to be covered in dirt, enjoys a good fight and is addicted to taking risks.
A chaotic good black dragon who is witty and talkative.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
The campaign didn't work out, but I had an android druid ready to go for Iron Gods. The basic idea was that he was a Superfund Site kind of druid, going to the blighted horrible techno-blasted areas because he could help them recover where less adapted humanoids would fail.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
This thread got me thinking, and one thing led to another, and I was mulling over the possibilities of dwarf arcane casters and then, like a bolt of lightning hitting a toad, this:
A white haired witch dwarf.
*To the tune of "Love Shack"*
Beard slap! Baby, beard slap!
I don't take crap!
Beard slap! Beard slap baby!
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Let's see...
In PFS I have:
-A tengu who is on the surface a *very* straight-laced as a follower of Irori BUT is willing to learn of any new experiences (True Neutral vs. Lawful Neutral) so has done things like had an 'inter-faith conference' with followers of the Savored Sting, Our Lord In Iron, and others. Another notable point came up in a scenario with minor fey when he offered to 'play' with them when the 'very important thing he had to do (the mission) was done'
-A half-elf 'barbarian' who was actually a 'fighter' before they began adventuring for the Society, but who had been tortured so badly by someone or something he can't remember that his 'mental' scores are not that great as a result.
His rage usually clicks on when someone either calls him a moron (when he's being pretty smart for his Int) or when things 'just plain don' make sense'.
He's willing to admit he's not the brightest candle, but when he thinks he's doing something smart and someone calls it stupid... look out.
-A half-orc follower of Brigh who was subjected to bizarre experiments by members of the Aspis Consortium and has a very... mechanical view of looking at things.
-The tengu attorney-at-law
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
My first (and currently only) Barbarian zigzagged tropes. He was an Orc with a whopping 5 Cha and 8 Int, and thought battlescars were trophies.
He was also a linguistic savant, and learned many ancient and obscure languages. One of my favorite moments is the flat "What" from the GM after we found a bunch of levers and assumed nobody could speak Ancient Thassilonian to know what they did...until I piped up that yes, Crokus was fluent in it.
He was also the trap meister of the group, using Trap Wrecker and Spell Sunder to hulk smash traps. Whether that is on stereotype or not, you decidem
I have a Dwarf Wildblooded Empyreal Sorcerer with a 5 charisma and took the "mutant eye" trait just to give her a -1 penalty on diplomacy and bluff checks. She can be a real jerk.
A halfing druid/rogue of mine with 10 Str used Intimidate skill in conjunction with entangle on a large (for her) potted fern.
Proved small can be scary, sure the plant was not really going to eat that bandit, but did he know that...well...no. :)
(I have a wayang chaokineticist with the mutant eye trait, likes to call it his "truthing eye". Granted he also is a void oracle and an expert (occult scholar), and venerates Chtulhu, writes pamphlets titled "Have you heard the good news about Lord Chutlhu", and believes that madness is needed for courage and inspiration to work right in the universe, but hey)
| 7 people marked this as a favorite. |
This was back in D&D 2e, but I had grim and gruff, hard-drinking warrior who just called himself "Duke". He was lightly armored, was a crack shot with a crossbow, and wore a sombrero and poncho. (Heavily based on "The Man With No Name" from the Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns.)
I think I got him to 5th level before the other players realized he was a paladin.
This was back in D&D 2e, but I had grim and gruff warrior who just called himself "Duke". He was lightly armored, was a crack shot with a crossbow, and wore a sombrero and poncho. (Heavily based on "The Man With No Name" from the Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns.)
I think I got him to 5th level before the other players realized he was a paladin.
Awesome. Pure awesome.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
And way back in 1990, I co-wrote a tournament adventure for the brand-new second edition of AD&D. This was the first time character customization had actual rules support in the game.
The adventure used 4 pregen characters. Character selection was everyone roll a d20 to determine PC choice order. The PCs were described as, "A fighter, a cleric, a magic-user, and a thief."
Fighter: Female human lightly-armored acrobatic punching & wrestling specialist. Highest stat was Dex.
Cleric: Heavily armored male half-elf cletic of the God of Justice. His highest stat was Strength.
Magic-User: Female elf evoker with a hot temper. Highest stat was Charisma. Also the party leader.
Thief: Male dwarf locksmith. Had not allocated any thief ability to Pick Pockets, Climb Walls, or Hide in Shadows, but was amazing at Open Lock, Find/Remove Traps and Read Language. Highest stat was Intelligence.
The players were more than a little surprised when they got their sheets!
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
I've seen enough "holier-than-thou" Paladins in my time that I always try to play a Pally as "the least judgmental person around". Someone who takes the time to listen and consider other perspectives, someone who forgives freely and easily, and someone who is concerned less with punishing wrongdoing and more with helping people to be in a place where they can and will do better. I also tend to play Paladins fairly quietly, less "THE POWER OF CHRIST COMPELS YOU" and more introspective and friendly.
The "super judgemental holy person" should be an Inquisitor anyway.
I've tried to make this character both a trope and not a trope, but I don't know that I have succeeded as much as I had hoped I would
Come to think of it: A Catfolk diver would be even more against stereotype, given the stereotype about how house cats react to being thrown into water.
In Skull and shackles, played a catfolk bard from the desert who had been teleported away to escape enemies.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
In Skull and shackles, played a catfolk bard from the desert who had been teleported away to escape enemies.Come to think of it: A Catfolk diver would be even more against stereotype, given the stereotype about how house cats react to being thrown into water.
Heh, in Skull and Shackles I played a Merfolk Bloodrager who was afraid to go in the water because he ran away from his tribe as they wanted to send him as tribute to the Aboleths and feared they were still looking for him. With 25 feet of movement he was confident he could outrun them on the land though.
|
I have a lot of Pathfinder Society PC's, with an interesting mix of walking stereotypes, anti-stereotypes, and some that mix both.
For instance, my first PC (now retired at level 14) is a barbarian who introduced himself as "Me Mash! My like ta hit stuff!". His mental stats were below average, but not dumped all the way down. He was smart enough to know that everyone expected him to be stupid, so he played it up, even though he was smarter than he acted. And I gave him a trait to make diplomacy a class skill, so he often backed up the party face, or took the lead as party face when my friend's paladin wasn't there. So he looked like a walking stereotype, but was just different enough to undermine the trope.
As an anti-stereotype, I have a teenage girl with a "cute widdle bunny wabbit" who is very cheerful and friendly, and introduces herself as an arcane specialist. I call her my cheerleader PC, and when I tell people she's a buff/heal type, most people assume bard. They don't realize she's a witch until I start throwing hexes.
And then there's Varg - my walking contradiction. He's the ugliest human on Golarion, but he's a priest to the goddess of beauty (Shelyn). He's also a pacifist, despite being a warpriest. His back story is that he's an ex-thug who found religion in prison. He specializes in combat maneuvers and doesn't do lethal damage to sentient enemies, as he always wants to try and redeem them.
I've also got a paladin who literally doesn't know the word "paladin". She has the Chosen One archetype from the Familiar Folio, so a little bird (thrush familiar) literally came to her one day and told her that Shizuru, Empress of Heavens in the Tien pantheon, wants her to be a warrior for good. So she introduces herself as a warrior, and sometimes prays to Shizuru to give her the power to overcome particularly evil enemies or heal people (smite, lay on hands). But with her dumped wisdom and average intelligence, she doesn't know what a paladin is, and hasn't quite put it all together yet. It doesn't help that she became an adventurer in the Inner Sea, where she had to learn a new language (Common) that she didn't know growing up in Tian Xia. I play her as young and naive, so it works. And her familiar is a smart-ass who can speak Common, and is actually smarter than her if you look at combined int + wis.
And for pure walking stereotypes, there's Dundar Hammerhelm. You can probably guess his race and class just from the last name. Yes, he's a dwarven fighter. With a Scottish accent. And a dumped charisma. And he's a blacksmith, who constantly rambles about fine dwarven craftsmanship. "If it's not dwarven, it's crap!!!"
I also have two druids, neither of which is very druid-like. One's a sylph Sky Druid with the Weather domain, so she's focused on being out in the open sky, and doesn't really care much about plants or animals. The other's a Nature's Fang, which is the "I wanna be a slayer" archetype from ACG. He's actually an urban type who doesn't care that much about nature, but accidentally stumbled into some magic power tied to the natural world. Both have domains instead of animal companions, which is also pretty odd.
Long before the RotL movies were out (back in the 80s) my brother played Dwarves with a Scottish accent. Now it's old hack. We were
unknown innovators... lol
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
When I build settings I like to subvert a least a couple expectations.
In one setting, Orcs were a disciplined honour based warrior-scholar culture, with a bushido like self-imposed code.
In another setting, Elves took on the traditional human role as the rulers of the known world, having founded and maintained a massive empire long since given to wicked decadence. They also took on the human job of cross breeding with everything. Humans in the setting were a minor slave race, kept ignorant by law, and considered too short lived to be trained for any useful purpose. Dwarves were reclusive scholars studying the theory and nature of magic.
On a character level, I think my best non-traditional combination was a dress wearing princess with a rapier... Who was a Barbarian. She'd lose her temper, and then apologize afterward for such a dreadful display.
I've played Hobgoblins as a very Klingon-like race since I first began GMing in 1985. Proud warriors with a strict and complicated code of honor. In my PF campaign I carried this over and refuse to make them the bowlegged and blue skinned creatures shown in the Bestiary.
Good pics, especially the second one. And you're right, they're grey. The 1e book had them dressed in Samurai like armor and using swords that looked like katanas. My GM played them as looking like that, but when I started my own campaign I changed the way they looked and added the Klingon aspect to them. I didn't have a problem with the original look, but I just wanted to try out my first houserule.
And now that I think about it, they sort of replace any Far Eastern civilizations in my setting. The armor I envision them wearing is certainly influenced by Chinese and Japanese types (but only a little) but their location on the map of my homebrew is about where China would be (I use a map of the Oligocene Epoch from Earth's prehistory as my world map) and the weapons they use are very Asian in style. They are also the foremost practitioners of most of the Path of War martial styles, only teaching them to a few outsiders they consider worthy.
This fellow is a Kitsune Swashbuckler/Paladin (okay he hasn't taken the paladin level yet but he's going to). Quick with a joke, quick to smile, he'd much rather have a good laugh with you and somehow sneak in a bit of a moral to the story than preach to you. But if true evil shows up, he's quick with his sword, too.
In my personal world, 'high' elves are the decadent aristocracy who lord over the peasant elves and spend centuries scheming against each other to bypass the long years of waiting to inherit a new position (because when you're that long-lived what else are all the king's descendants going to be doing?). They have extensive rules about how to politely assassinate other high elves, but don't care one bit about clear-cutting forest to build themselves a bigger mansion.
(Wood elves are basically Robin Hood and his merry band--escaped peasants who rob the high elves and give to the peasants. And sometimes wage guerrilla wars with the aim of overthrowing the aristocracy. The one elven nation where they've succeeded is well on its way to becoming my version of Galt.)
|
I've started playing a kitsune oracle named Penny with the spellscar mystery. I am taking only the tail feat as I go up in level, and maxing my UMD, so my character can proudly claim to be a wizard who specializes in using wands. I carefully seek out society scenarios that have wands as boons to run Penny through. Between her spell like abilities and her excellent reservoir of wands, Penny makes a pretty convincing enchantress.