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Going across all kinds of Character creations, do you find your self recreating the same character over and over again?
Wether it be in Dark Heresy, D&D, Video RPG or anything else with a character creation.

It came to me today that ive recreated my Character Mira Corvus in pretty much every game wich has the option to do so
She will have short red hair , Green eyes with a tattoo or scar over the left eye and usually is the thief with heart of gold personality ( assuming the choice is there)
Ived even made back stories for her, tho ive never written them down.

So question to Dakka do you find yourself doing this? Is it a character that is different from you or is it a mirror for yourself?

There are two characters I tend to recreate in almost every game. The first is, essentially, an idealized version of what I wish I could be: the heroic ideal of a paladin/knight (and usually using the name Tannhauser). The second is the first character I ever made in City of Heroes (a Dark/Dark Scrapper) that I actually enjoyed (and partly because it was possibly the first time I felt I actually came up with something unique), a female character with long white hair named Aria Silvermane (and it annoys me to no end when, even after all these years, some modern game just can't seem to handle adding a SPACE to a name).

Nothing specific, but my characters (whether they are male or female, race X or race Y) are almost always douchebags.

I tend to play a reasonable range of characters. If I am with a group I am comfortable with I tend to play a female character but other than that I will play pretty much any class, race or character that either strikes my fancy, or I think might be fun to play in the campaign/group setting.

 thenoobbomb wrote:
Nothing specific, but my characters (whether they are male or female, race X or race Y) are almost always douchebags.

*bites tongue*

Not in particular...some look closer to others, but there ain't "one" specific character. Certain types look different, though, like paladin-ish characters always having blond, long hair or social chameleons always being shorter, attractive females.

The only thing my characters seem to have in common is that they're male (I'm not in touch enough with my female side to convincingly pretend to be one) and generally smarter than average.
(I'm also not very good at RP-ing stupid people.)

They also tend to be pro-active once they've gotten a handle on what's going on - to the frustration of some, and the delight of better GMs.

I have certain recurring characters in games, simply because the "origin game" of those characters (a Cthulhupunk: 2020 game) establishes them as a pair that is, like the Eternal Champion of Moorcock's fiction, reborn throughout space and time over and over again.

My MMO characters tend to follow similar themes/names, though with game-appropriate alterations (I never do the thing where the character was teleported from, say, WoW to Everquest, but talks about WoW like it's actually a thing in Everquest).

I don't tend to have fun with many table top RPGS so I usually make obnoxiously something characters.

A cavalier who refused to hurt animals including giant wolves that sprung on the party early game or huge cave spiders later, but cavalier abilities made up for that.

A witch doctor (paladin) so brain washed into his voodoo that remedies were constant blood letting and stupid things

I tend to play characters that instigate, but apart from that there aren't many common themes except maleness.

I hardly ever play the same character twice, in table top RPG's. Video game... well yeah, I tend to usually play a sword and board warrior.

But with table tops, I almost never repeat a concept. The only one you could say I have rehashed, is a dwarven fighter. I've even reused the name multiple times.

But anyways, major RPG characters.

AD&D Thief/Ranger who was a young kid, very unsure of himself at first, who grew into a confident warrior.

D&D 3.5 Half-Elf Cleric of Ilmater. Character grew to epic levels (24). A self conflicted man, who wielded great power. He had encountered the avatar of two gods of evil (Gruumsh, and Kurtulmak), and while being such a powerful cleric, he was an outlaw of the church of his land.

D&D 3.5 Dwarven Fighter, a stalwart defender of his city, he never involved himself in the politics, he was there to defend the citizenry.

Marvel - A mutant mercenary with a fast healing power, he was possessed with remarkable marksman and hand to hand combat skills. He tried to live a quiet life retired, but was thrust into the limelight again, when he encountered a group of others who were trying to stop a time war that was going to collapse reality.

Marvel - Almost an Ironman copy cat, he was a rich man who designed his own combat suit. Spent much of his resources trying to fight off the legal predations of Stark Industries. Became a noted hero who was greatly involved in the magical side of that universe.

Pathfinder, a Human Fighter/Ranger. A young mercenary, who dreamed of rising to the ranks of nobility. He was an expert marksman with a long bow, even grew so skillful he could slay giants with but two arrows. He eventually gained his goal, gaining a significant tract of land, leadership in a branch of his countries military, and gained a seat on the noble council of the city he lived in.

I try to mix things up as much as I can. Usually I play in D&D 3.5 games, so most of my characters tend to be fantasy characters, though I did have a long-running character in a Buffy the Vampire Slayer campaign a few years back...

I've done most of the core D&D classes (except Monk and Druid & Ranger) and have come up with (I think) interesting concepts. Sometimes I let the interaction at the table determine how I play a character, which is what happened with my half-hobgoblin Bard/Fighter, who was awesome. Sometimes I go in with a fully-developed concept, with firm backstory and a solid idea of what I want to do with the character.

As far as personality goes, I try to mix it up as much as I can. I've played a humorless militant racist jerkass (Hobgoblin cleric), a snarky a-hole with a heart of gold (that Buffy character), a technical pacifist merchant, a good-natured life of the party classic hero (the half-hobgoblin bard/fighter), a reckless and greedy fighter/mage who conned the party (and one or two players) into believing she was actually the rogue...

and many, many more. If I have any "rut" that I get stuck in, it is the fact that, if I'm ever in a game with a particular friend of mine, my characters will always find his characters extremely annoying, and will end up disliking them intensely. Nothing against my friend as a person, but his characters just always seem to rub mine the wrong way...

Oh, and for whatever reason, my characters are almost never blonde. Dunno why.

I do not generally repeat characters...however looking back at my many characters, many do have something common. Many are smart, sometimes fairly cynical characters with broad knowledge of the world they're in: often they have a special skill which sets them apart from others (magic, for example) which also might mean that my character is irreplaceable for the party Often, they also have "little something going on", a private 'plotline' or secret which is partly or completely hidden from the rest of the party.
For example in current L5R campaign my character is a female Unicorn shugenja (only shugenja in the party) who has strong ties to Scorpion clan (a big no-no). She is also expert diplomat, which no-one else is, so the party is suspicious of her but can't literally function without her.

But not all of my characters conform to that mold...once in Twilight 2000 I had a character who boasted a high military rank and huge experience in Special forces. Well, in reality he had none of those- his secret thing was that he was a 'walt', a fraud, with little combat experience and mediocre combat skills. The party become suspicious very soon, it was great fun.

When making another Twilight 2000-character, I had a terrible luck with dice and the guy got awful stats. I agonized, what to make of him? It was impossible to make my staple characters out of the stats. So I came up a PFc named Violent J (yes, named after the real Violent J), a third-string gangsta rapper who had been drafted into WW3 and got a cushy staff job because of his fame. His combat skills were very bad, he wasn't too smart either and generally drag to the party. Only thing he was even average at was driving, so he was assigned to chaffeur - even though all other characters were better drivers, but he always insisted on driving and almost wrecked their cars in couple of occasions. His only 'secret' was his drug- and black market dealings, and everybody knew about it. It was just hilarious and got even better when one older character rejoined a party - he was a German Neonazi white supremacist...I advise everyone to break the mold sometimes, it can be awesome.

Pretty quiet at the moment with just a campaign game wandering mage (Elvish Evoker) and an Adventurer's League Barbarian, both of which are 5E D&D.

Since leaving my high school group, I've been the brash one/face of the party.

I am the one that will break off from the party, talk to the townsfolk, orchestrate a plan, etc...

This usually works well until I walk into the dark hold of a pirate ship and take a few crits to the face >_<

I've been DMing a lot more, so no characters for me :(

My characters vaguely Earth-based settings (Pirates, Cowboys, Police, Victorian horror, etc) tend to share a surname. It's a little in-joke that somehow these poor fellas manage to survive long enough to have some kind of progeny.
My 40K characters similarly share a name, because there's what's sewing a little terror without a good family name to drop?

I can usually guess within 2 or 3 archetypes what my friends will play, given any setting. They're no power games, but they do like to play interesting female characters. Often outspoken, devious or running the show without anyone realising.
Myself, I tend to roll up one set of stats and then design a character around them, which is a little ass-backwards, but then so am I. So a mediocre sheet with a massive dex spike? Let's have a guy with a reason to look over his shoulder, a history to match, and connections that take advantage of it. My favourite character I drummed up that way, is a Victorian Irish dockworker who punches like a cannon, and moves like butter off a hot griddle, but due to the GM's decision to fire him from his job for pushing someone in the canal, now owns a dress shop with his wife, and sells fancy ladies clothing. The shop's not a front, he's good at it.

My only problem with RPGS is that because i game with two guys who have disposable income, they buy every RPG that they take fancy to, and in 4-5 years, I have 35+ character sheets in my folder. Sometimes we revisit a setting and it's years later, we can't remember what the motivations for the characters were.

It differs between video game and tabletop RPGs.

In video games, I definitely have about 2 characters I always play. The first (who I have also once played on the tabletop, as a Human Warlord) is a good character, always with the surname of Seric, always having brown hair and a beard. He is lawful good, and is best defined as a intelligent leader/fighter, who is concerned with what will do the most good in the long-term/for the most people, so is sometimes a bit callous to the little-man. The next is a thief/assassin character, who is mainly my character to mess around with, and has most often appeared as an Argonian (Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim). He mainly exists so I can loot/kill/do silly things without being concerned about compromising my character (which is a concern of mine even in single player games), but has developed somewhat, being a loner who is more focused on the challenge of a heist/kill than the actual rewards.

For tabletop games, my characters are a bit more random. I only very rarely get to play, as I am almost always the GM of any group, so I tend to go most often for something odd/exotic. In a campaign coming up (the first I will be playing in since about 3 years ago) I am playing a Kenku Assassin, who will likely be somewhat of a morbid trickster (Funnily enough, he is actually one of the least odd characters present; there is a Kobold Bard, a Minotaur Druid, and a Revenant Blackguard).

Overall, I think that both of the characters I play most often are extreme mirrors of some aspects of myself, with the first being an idealized version of myself while the second plays more on my darker aspects, specifically my sometimes hatred of humanity or disregard for others.

I'm only playing one character right now. A Wizard in D&D 4e. In a few weeks we switch to 5e with the same characters.

Wizard is by far my favorite class, thematically and mechanically (I prefer battlefield controllers types over raw damage dealers). However, in other systems it varies.

I GM far more than I play these days, I haven't been player in anything beyond a 1-shot for years now.

But yeah, when I do play I run a pretty narrow set of character types. I tend play idealistic characters that try and help people. They're generally either religiously devout or scholarly types, sometimes both. If I'm playing in a fantasy setting I'll usually be reaching for the healing/support powers, if we're playing in a modern or sci-fi setting they usually ride a motorcycle and are good with technology.

I tend to play good aligned mages or equivalent.

Mine tend to accidentally become Mary Sues. I'm working on avoiding this.

 SkavenLord wrote:
Mine tend to accidentally become Mary Sues. I'm working on avoiding this.

Yeah, I get that
I simply generally try to make a character who can take on anything - not in a fight, but get out of any situation alive and well enough (either by fleeing or negiciating) while staying at least moderately badass. This generally means playing rogues and scoundrels (preferrably with discreet magic or tech-stuff to help survive the situations he puts himself into).

When this works out, this generally means creating a highly successful magnificent bastard. This is cool, and although he'll never win in a stand-up fight, if you're doing it right it isn't one
The other players systematically hate my character - I wonder why?