Anyone played interesting, flawed characters? No, not a flaw as in "lol this flaw makes him funny/cute...

My paladin would never refuse a fight, and would never willingly retreat, no matter how outmatched.
Oddly, my paladin was the only survivor of the campaign. It was everyone else who died in the final battle.

Looks like yours is a good example for "more luck than brains"

I once played a kleptomaniac cleric with 1 level of barbarian. I secretly rolled willpower to see if he would succumb and try to steal something, even if it would put the party at a risk. He also was very ashamed of it and flagellated himself from time to time, and the barbarian rage I fluffed as his religious fanaticism taking him over.
It was quite fun to play, his unwanted passion for taking stuff that wasn't his and hating himself for it and trying to repent created a lot of situations.

Pretty much every character I've made is some degree of racist as I assume that'd be rather common in a world where some races are actually outright evil, though some were more overtly so. One elf simply couldn't accept any race not capable of living past a hundred to be anything more than perpetual, overly proud children and would even disrespect royalty if he thought they were wrong. Another was a human so disgusted by racemixing he plotted to murder the party half-elf and even secretly allied with the bad guys to do it. Their was also a more benign elf who simply patronized and doted on his human allies like they were his little siblings.

I also tried playing a manic depressive barbarian, having several sessions of impulsiveness and over-optimism then swapped to a more cynical depressed state after a timeskip. Tried to RP him having a breakdown at one point and refusing to follow the party, but it came off as more comedic than I intended.

Then there was a half-orc, half-elf character that disowned her orcish half, going so far as to use a continual glamour to appear fully elf and initially hid that fact from the party. She'd mistreat other halfbreeds and hated orcs with a burning passion. Her whole issue was just externalized self loathing born from the contempt her mother held for her.

I once wanted to play an insomniac who was kept awake by extra-dimensional entities harassing him in his sleep. Even worked out a system for dealing with the penalties and deciding which nights I'd actually manage to rest, but I never got to play that one.

I've found out rolling poor stats leads to the most interesting characters because you inevitably have to make up a backstory/reasons why your character is the way he is, and still lives.

I played the typical highly superstitious character twice actually.

Once as a Barbarian and once as a fighter with an overexagrated "WITCHCRAFT!" attitude.

Was fun as hell.
Other flaws mostly include getting realy afraid of traps after running into them.

But a character with a flaw thats actually CENTRAL to the character... not realy , unless NPCs count. I mostly DM.

>character with a flaw
>algus
yeah that's one hell of a flaw.

My current character is *exceedingly* naive and idealistic. She thinks just about anyone can be redeemed, and will spend her time in combat trying to talk the enemy down even when they're mercilessly trying to kill her party. She also tries to avoid killing anyone she thinks could be redeemed, even when it does come to combat. Her fellow party members usually don't listen and just kill the bastards.

A simpering crybaby who previously knocked over a dozen speakeasies in a single night, and while shortly fight and beat a guy using a flamethrower with just a cherry bomb?

Argumentative droid in the starwars universe. one of the other players is my master and is constantly having to either deactivate me or try and excuse my behavior to jedi, hutts, etc

>But master why do you let this slug of an organic boss you around? He isn't even armed!

>No I will not not run away from this oversized beasty you call a Rancor, I will take it down a notch!

My first tabletop character was an ugly, stupid, cowardly midget. One of the single funnest characters I've ever played.

My favourite character that I played was a hardy old Irish man that lived in the woods and was constantly covered in dirt, grime and scratches.
he hated being told what to do and insulted everyone he met.
he was fun to roleplay as but he didn't really have any main goals so he just sat twiddling his thumbs whenever we went into towns.

Algus/Argath is garbage. Fuck him. God I hated that bastard as a kid. Every subsequent playthrough I made him a chemist and spent the first few turns of every fight beating his ass into the ground.

I try to play characters with less epic or cinematic flaws (drinking, a temper, being womanizing, greed, cowardice or malice) and more everyday flaws.
The best example is probably Naomi Ramsey. A fundamentally selfish person who somewhere deep down believes that the world owes her friendship and loyalty without any effort on her part, and who constantly feels she's being betrayed by the world and everyone in it. She's not working for it, being temperamental, bossy, abrasive and entitled, but she's not an inherently malicious or evil person - that doesn't mean she's not a bad person, though.
It's a grab-bag oWoD campaign where the other characters are a Motorhead-listening biker were-grizzly, a heroin-addicted junkie asshole satyr chick and a perpetually high-looking skinny Mexican kid who's also a prophetic were-lizard with a tendency to say the exact truth at the exact worst moment, and she's the Kuei-jin (tr: weeaboo Chinese vampire) of the group.
She went to Japan for nerd cred and friendship when just hanging out with the losers failed, then drank herself into an accident when she realized she was still fucked and now in debt.
Yu Huang pocketed her soul while the Deathlords of Madness and Happenstance were bickering about it, but her P'o was surprisingly glutted on all her selfishness and resentment, so she ended up ripping herself back from Hell again - only to be given a perfunctory training and sent the fuck back to murderous San Francisco by the local Devil-Tigers.
She's a howling edgemaster who also happens to follow the Dharma of "fight fire with fire" and tries desperately to be the big, bad monster who everyone fears and hates - but at the core of it, she's trying to use that monstrous philosophy to wash away the fact she's still not good with people and doesn't know why even though she can kill three men in five seconds, kill spirits and turn into a giant winged asura.

I once played a shellshocked veteran in a really fucked-up Superheroes-meet-Lovecraft game. Backstory is that she had gone off to hunt the monsters by herself after the rest of her team had been slaughtered. When the rest of the party stumbled upon her ten years later, the trauma had worn her down to such an extent that she no longer recognized herself as herself, or even as a human. To her, she was just "there", a silent observer to her own life.

"There were five of us, in those days. Marianna, Francesca, Sofia, Amanda, and Inez. Francesca, always so self-sacrificing, was the first to die. For months afterwards, Sofia was inconsolable. With her absence, Marianna tried to take charge of the unit, but things were never the same. Now, the shadow of death loomed over our heads. Amanda was the next to die. Headstrong, charging into danger recklessly, there were days that I almost thought that she wanted to die, to follow her best friend to a place where none of us could go. She soon got her wish. One day, Inez made a foolish mistake; it could have happened to any of us. But it happened to her, and she paid the ultimate price for it. Marianna cracked under the pressure, having lost two of us under her leadership in such a short span of time. The next time we went out to fight, she walked right out onto the battlefield, and stood there motionless as the monsters ripped her to shreds. Sofia, who had lost everything she ever had in life, could do no more than to throw herself into her work, a hopeless distraction from a life otherwise devoid of meaning. She killed to lighten the weight of her burdens, until the weight of her burdens killed her for it. And then there was only me, watching, powerless to stop any of it from happening."

About a dozen sessions later the rest of the part discovered that I was playing as Sofia, and it blew their minds because the entire time my character was convinced, and had convinced the party, that her entire team, Sofia included, was dead.

I think flaws are a required part of any good character, but that those flaws should be things that can be addressed and changed over the course of the game. If not outright fixed, they should at least be toned down or given exceptions. Nobody wants a legit racist hero, but a hero that starts as someone who sees commoners as gutter trash but eventually changes his mind is better than one that started at his best.

I play a guy who is literally so old that he might peacefully die any time he falls asleep. On every long rest I roll a percentile and if I roll 100 he simply never wakes up.

I play an aristocrat that is overly snobbish and treats everyone's under him like shit. He's also a compulsive liar and likes to twits the truth to make him look good which just makes him ridiculous because he has no skills in bluffing. I'm the fighter and I play him as the kinda guy that'd rather not take any risk and avoid any troubles he can, if possible. Doesn't mean I won't fight. I'll do it because I'll have to but frankly, I'd rather not.

So I'm a lying chicken shit that consider everyone as below him. The reasons I'm not instantly killed by the rest of the party is that I'm not inherently evil and that I pull my fair share of contribution in our tasks. I'm also usually paired up with my in-game cousin : a noble from the main branches of our family whom I was tasked since birth to serve and protect. That makes it so my character stays in line and acts accordingly since he strongly believe in hierarchical orders. For example, he'll tend to be slightly more polite when he's around or he'll obey any task he's assigned to, regardless if he wants to or not.

It's pretty fun to play with and it makes a good dynamic within the group.

Any time I make a cop/militia/guard type they are always jaded by the crime they face regularly.

I've played a Monk with a deep hatred for magic users after some dark wizards bewitched one of his monkbros and destroyed his monastery. He considered it 'theft from the natural world' and acted really hostile to our party cleric until the clerics god appeared to him in a dream and told him to chill the fuck out.

my orc barbar had anger issues in addition to being cursed by an axe that also had anger issues. random murder rage at inopportune times and I'd pissed off the party multiple times by refusing to stop RPing what the frenzy did to me. fought a group and made it to a standstill and they'd walk away if we stopped fighting but barbar had to kill the guy that tried to kill him. kept swinging but missed enough times that i was able to force myself to stop raging.

All the fucking time.
Well, I think they're interesting, and they do have flaws.

I briefly played as a character who was paralyzed from the neck down. Full Steven Hawking treatment [in fact the character himself was basically an Expy]. He had a high-tech transforming wheel-chair with a little helicopter attachment he could deploy and everything.

The weakness of course is that without the chair he can do nothing and even with it he wasn't the most maneuverable. Funnest moment was when the party was dropped through an interdimensional wormhole and fell into the ocean, and the chair turned into a submersible. Sadly I dropped out of the campaign for a while and when I came back I opted for a more manageable character.

I once played a Bard as an idealistic but short-sighted pseudo-Communard rabble-rouser. Lot of fun to play as, but I quietly allowed him to be killed off when I felt his antics were causing us to spend too much time doing city intrigue over good old fashioned adventuring. Incidentally, his death also served as a handy plot hook for our next campaign.

Im currently playing an Eldritch Knight who was emotionally and physically abused by his narcissistic father and mother who were instead raising his younger brother to inherit the families barony. One of the most traumatic events of his childhood was an incident where his father threw him off a horse and left him in the woods to die. Out of desperation he cast his first spell to start a fire and save himself. After nearly starving he managed to make his way to a nearby hamlet where he was taken in by an old mercenary who built on the small amount of military training he had recieved from his fathers men. He has now set out to gather soldiers and resources to kill his father and brother and and inherit what is rightfully his.

Im trying to play him as a character who is both isolated and distrustful of others while also being terrified of being abandoned and alone. He struggles against narcissistic tendencies inherited from his parents and also a destroyed self esteem from years of torment. He has trouble interacting even with the other party members who are the closest thing he has to friends. He drinks until he passes out almost every night. But in his heart he knows that his land and his home are his birhright.

It has been interesting to be sure and I have actually really enjoyed playing a character like this as it has helped me work on some of my own issues. The GM also likes his plot and has been slowly moving our game towards taking down the father. It has been very cool.

He suffers short-term memory loss approximately every five minutes. Countless innocents and guilty, allies and enemies, have died because of his ignorance, and his party members arguably just make it worse.

He is completely obsessed with the idea of resurrecting his dead mentor and making her his immortal companion. It gets the point where it eclipses all of his other priorities the moment he sees an opportunity to further his plan and has even tricked and secretly betrayed the party a number of times (though they backstabbed him back on occasions as well).

The catch is that resurrection is impossible in the setting, so he's just pursuing a pipe dream and deluding himself into new solutions that only take him further away from the result he originally wanted. By the end he simply created what is essentially a superpowered clone with a personality recreated from his memories (with al the biases and flaws of perception and nostalgia that entails), as well as a soul that he ripped out of a child he suspected was the reincarnation of his mentor.

The discrepancies born from his flawed work eventually became too obvious to ignore and he ended his life after linking his soul with that of the clone, hoping that next time he'd reincarnate as someone intrinsically connected to his mentor by karma.

Most of the time, my character's flaws are integral to their personality. But they aren't really massive handicaps that make them useless when it comes up, that's stupid.

Savage Worlds?

Maybe for you. I have seen a lot of people use this kind of reasoning for low stats.
str, lazy
dex, klutz
con, lazy
int, stupid
wis, oblivious
cha, ugly

Damn.

My female bezerker was born in a tribe where woman are not born equal to men. When woman come of age in the tribe it is tradition for them to fight a male of equal age for the rights they were not given at birth.

If the female loses, she is forced to marry the male. If the female wins, she may choose to marry the male or not but will be the dominant spouse and the male the lesser.

When she came of age to fight, the fight was very much one sided at first, all the years she had spent training for the fight were seeming for naught as she was being bested by her opponent seemingly easily. The fight continued on and on as her wounds started adding up but she kept fighting and refused to yield. With every hit taken she felt less and less sane. She at first thought she was passing out from blood loss. She was wrong. To all the Elders and tribesman watching they looked on in horror as she was overcome by bloodlust, she charged at her opponent and floored them. While he was on the floor he yielded but she did not give any sense of comprehending, she raised her weapon and finished him off. Violating all tradition. When she came to, she was exiled from her tribe.

She is well functioning except in the presence of men. She won't speak to them or will try to ignore their existence as they are a constant reminder of her exile and sin.

Besides that usual barbarian shenanigans like culture shock and "in my country we do stuff like this" and getting into arguments with female party members and calling them weak(they just nod their heads and ignore as it's assumed it's a culture thing)

There is only 1 male party member so it's no problem. But she will act timid(body language) in the presence of non hostile males and act normally to hostile ones. It's just she's afraid of losing control and hurting them out of fear. She's working on it though.

>str, lazy
>con, lazy
nice redundancy there, rather make one "wimp"

Add positive qualities to have a sound mechanical advantage.

Add negative qualities to have an sound and realistic character.

Once played an drug addicted war veteran in the need for money, to buy more drugs and hookers.
Good times.

It further shows how little effort people will put into justifying a characters stats.

>Playing a fighter with a dip in ranger
>Is the party's only front liner besides the barbarian

>Is a 70+ year old man

>Because of this he never goes on the offensive, making himself useful with his high as shit wisdom and intelligence proficiencies, always having the right item for the job

Players hate that instead of getting in the monsters face and attacking, he chooses to play body guard and block/assist the more fragile damage dealers

Played an aging witch who used to be the shit back in the day before she was defeated by a council of wizards who assumed they had killed her. She lost most of her power since she had been "sealed away" by the council.

She couldn't stand for disrespect. Not even when it was horribly inconvenient. If someone gave offence, they had to pay for it. And she took offence at a lot.

This was played largely straight with some occasional laughs. On one hand, having to fight powerful enemies the party almost bluffed themselves past because one called her an "old hag" is a pretty severe detriment.

On the other hand, watching a powerless "Voldemort" dealing with the indignities of poverty and old age is kind of hilarious.

I once played a character who tried to be honorable and brave, but failed time and again due to cowardice and lack of forethought.

He died fighting an opponent that was far above his level of skill to protect his allies, but in the end, it was his death that allowed the party to slip into the enemy's innermost sanctum and destroy them with a plan my character had devised weeks prior.

That character was evermore hailed as a hero in that region, and he is remembered for his courage and forthrightness, just as he wanted all along.

Once played a fighter that was a war veteran from the losing side of a war. As punishment for his crimes he was forces to battle a wyvern alone. He survived but lost his sword arm below the elbow. It was interesting relearning how to fight with his left hand, especially since he was heavily focused in two handed weapons.

Are you an HK model?