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Message: <blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 7652042" data-attributes="member: 22424">I run many many more games than I play, and I've had the misfortune that most of the games I do play tend to fizzle out fairly quickly. This somewhat limits my scope to have "favourite characters"; when running the game, I'd generally hope that my NPCs play second fiddle to the PCs; when playing the character generally needs time to grow on me, and denied that time they don't get the chance.That said...Delericho was a long-standing villain in the longest campaign I've ever run - it was a "Vampire: the Masquerade" campaign called "Rivers of Time", which lasted 5 years of real-time and covered 2,300 years of game time (150 BC to 2,150 AD, when the world ended). Delericho was the sire of one of the PCs, a 6th Gen Tzimisce warlock, very much in the mould of Dracula. His 'quirk' was that he maintained a carefully cultivated garden; but whereas most such vampires would select night-blooming flowers so they could enjoy them, he deliberately did the opposite; he took some pride in creating something of beauty while also denying that same beauty to himself. Delericho was first encountered in 1st century Jerusalem when the PCs, like everyone else, was drawn there for a... significant event. (As Spike, of "Buffy" fame, said, it was like Woodstock.)For the next two years of the campaign, Delericho and the PCs proceeded to have a mixed relationship - he was frequently the villain, but he was also a powerful ally in times when they had no others. Eventually, lines were crossed, people were betrayed, and Delericho had to die. Eventually, he suffered diablerie at the hands of his own grandsire, which spawned a whole other set of adventures...So that's Delericho.Probably the other 'favourite' villain from one of my campaigns was a dwarven Fighter named Mierkul, who featured in my recently-concluded campaign, "The Eberron Code". Initially, he was just a mercenary, hired by one of the villains as additional muscle. However, he had the good fortune of crossing swords with the PCs on two occasions and somehow managing to escape alive both times. (Indeed, on one of those occasions the PCs lost!)At this point, the party Ranger decided Mierkul was his sworn enemy. Indeed, when he levelled up he selected Humanoid(Dwarf) as his next favoured enemy. And so, that being the case, I just had to expand Mierkul's role in the campaign - he became the minion of one of the Big Bads, and actually served as the end-of-volume boss when I had to put the campaign on hiatus for a few months (I was getting married at the time).(I learned a lesson there: have plenty of 'potential' bad guys, but don't declare any one to be the BBEG until he's survived for a while. It's like the old-school notion of not naming a PC until 3rd level, because until then you don't know if he's going to meet a swift and nasty end.)--I think my favourite ever PC was a character I played in a one-shot session of "Tales of the Floating Vagabond". The GM started by saying our PCs could be anything whatsoever, and so was born Captain Tyche, leader of the Jelly Baby Commandoes in their sworn war against the Chocolate Button Empire. Tyche was basically Arnold Schwarzenegger's character in "Predator", except for being a Jelly Baby.Yeah, that was fun. Odd. But fun.--And those, I think, are my favourite characters. Mostly, though, I collect favourite games - those campaigns and one-shots I'm most proud of - my "big four" campaigns being the unnamed sub-Tolkien epic I ran in high school, the aforementioned "Rivers of Time" game, "The Shackled City" adventure path, and most recently "The Eberron Code"; and my favourite one-shots being "Ultra-violet: Code-500" (nWoD, based on the old "Ultraviolet" TV show on Channel 4 over here), "Star Wars: Through a Glass Darkly" (SWSE, set in a prequel-era Mirror Universe), and "Star Wars: Imperial Fist" (SWSE again, set in the Dark Times).In each case, the games in question have something about them that makes them stand out from the rest - whether because they've taught me something, because they've allowed me to achieve something I've not managed before, or simply because they went exceptionally well.But the big lesson from all of them seems to be this: it's much less important what game you play, or the details of house rules, supplements, or whatever else, than who you play with - something like 90% of the fun to be had from RPGs seems to be a question of the people around the table.</blockquote>

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