When you create characters, how cleanly do they fit in archetypes, personality or other-wise...

When you create characters, how cleanly do they fit in archetypes, personality or other-wise? Is it on purpose or unconscious? Do you go out of your way to avoid it or embrace it?

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As far as character creation goes, I'm looking for an escape not a challenge or a precious snowflake, so predictably clean.

I actually really like archetypes and gimmicks, so most of my characters are like that at the beginning, though I do my best to mix them up. Some work out well, some don't work out great, but they're all fun.

Don't think I'll ever be able to make a Crab-man barbarian though.

interested in your attempt to make a character that doesn't fit an archetype and isn't just a chaotic jumble of traits. archetypes exist because traits have synergy with certain other traits.

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. If it's freeform, I often trend towards breaking the archetype (she's a mage, BUT WHAT'S THIS? She's more about excavating dig sites to help the local uni retrieve magic artifacts and spellbooks Tomb Raider-style and dual-wields ranged weapons?)

If they do fall in archetypes, they're usually given some speshul snowflake backstory to put a twist on it (such as a beserker deliberately being torn from the race of evil thug beserkers, brainwashed and psychosurgeon'd into not being hostile, and turned against said race of berserkers) or a non-standard background (political radical and that's why she's good at throwing shit and political tensions among the city states, etc.)

I have two modes: Complete subversion or mostly archetype with a twist.

That twist often varies in degrees though from the low being a drunken necromancer who only started the game world's equivalent to The Scourge on a bar bet (bastard didn't even pay up) to "he's a wizard that lifts".

>tfw you literally have all the archetypes of the bottom tier in your party minus the steam knight

I find that it can be best to let racial stereotypes exist but then play around within those parameters, but not so much as to break them entirely.

Making characters is fun.

I tend to design them like if they were pro wrestlers. They can be as deep or as shallow as the plot requires and I don't have to think about acting. So, yeah, they fit over exagerated archetypes.

>all those unnecessary apostrophes in the names

Fucking why do people come up with names/words like that? Do they think is sounds cool or original that way?

>KO
Hell yeah, good taste!

I want to marry Villainous Vixen!

Usually pretty archetype-y

Last 3:
>paranoid wizard
>rustic bumpkin Sword-cleric
>arrogant fascist-cleric

And I don't really do it on purpose; it just flows like that

orc, drunken dwarf, vixen = DREAM TEAM

Wasn't that the whole point of broquest?

better than double barrels and dashes like in real life.
>Daisy-Mae Westham-Smith
>Angel-Marie Sprott-Winters
>Kerry-Jane Jostein-Lowitsci

>No one will ever write the lore for the others.

I consider archetypes for a couple of reasons.

The first is a personal rule of thumb. I try to never play the same archetype twice in the last five or so characters I play. Sometimes there are exceptions, like reusing a character if a game they were meant for died before starting/too early, but I generally stick to it to make sure I keep playing a variety of characters instead of getting stuck in a rut.

Beyond that, I consider the archetypes of characters lightly while making them and thinking about them. Comparing them to the default, archetypal examples of their various traits is always interesting in terms of analysing them, noticing ways in which they're the same and ways in which they're different.

I tend to always end up doing a soft subversion of some sort. Nothing big or disruptive, just little twists that change the nature of the character in interesting ways.

An example is, on the surface, an extremely vanilla seeming Dragonborn Bravura Warlord. Hot blooded, heroic, fighting for the glory of Bahamut with good friends at her side.

The twist? Her affection for her friends is somewhat different to the human default. She considers them allies and comrades but also, in a very real way, her hoard. Some Dragons covet riches or gems, she assembled a hoard of heroes, and gets very angry at those who would hurt what is hers.

Despite being a moral center of the party, I've also tuned her morality to be very distinctly draconic. She sees no problems with autocratic governments- After all, the Dragon King always knows best, and if he eats a dissenter then they must have deserved it. This has minor effects elsewhere, but I always find it interesting when the more human characters end up being surprised by her reaction to something due to a different basis for her morality.

I usually try to run characters that are fairly plain in terms of story and competence/abilities, and just ramp up their snowflake-factor as the campaigns move up.

For example right now im playing a tiefling cleric whose notable features are: being orphaned, then losing his tail during a mugging and working at a bar from childhood on. Like it's fairly generic and nothing that stands out. In terms of personality, he's just kind of a bro who helps people out to try and pay back the kindness of the barkeeper that pretty much raised him. He's all about goodwill and trying to be cheery but will start being an arrogant dick at nearly any provocation.

My usual default beyond that is "Big tank", though I usually try to avoid the "dumb bruiser" cliché.

What I'm trying to say is that I play nothing characters because I'm a GM and I save all of my good ones for ny campaigns.

Shame, isn't it?
There's a wiki that has some lore on a few of these, but not all.
broquest-2014-revival.wikia.com/wiki/Characters