From a mechanical perspective, I like to play humans. They’re highly flexible, such that any mechanical character concept could be done with a human. In addition, sometimes I like to play already-made characters (or characters based on already-made characters), and most of those are human.
It’s a shame, really, because I think humans are boring. In fact, a lot of “standard” fantasy races are boring – you’ve got tall, arrogant, extremely effeminate humans with pointy ears; short, stout, stubborn humans who like treasure almost as much as they like alcohol; really tiny, adventurous humans sometimes sporting big, hairy feet; you get my point. It’s gotten to the point where I find all but the most exotic of races to be pretty boring.
So I try to spice things up a little bit. One time in a DnD 4e campaign, I played a Dragonborn Infernal Hexblade and flavored his infernal powers as being that he was actually half-Dragonborn, half-Tiefling. Another time, again in a DnD 4e game, I played a human ardent who got his psionic powers from what was basically a friendly, self-sentient alien tumor (with a british accent to boot) that had consumed and replaced his right arm. In yet another DnD 4e campaign, I played a character based on a character from the setting of the game system I myself am making; he was a human mage who happened to be magically cloned from a dead god, and as a result of a botched ritual which was intended to awaken his divine powers and turn him evil, he had a crippled leg. My latest character that I’ve played in someone else’s campaign (this time, it was a 3.5 campaign) was a tauric Goblin/Wolf who, due to being beaten as a slave every time he spoke, was afraid of himself speaking. I think the most “normal” character I’ve played in the past couple of years was Jeff Andonuts (from Earthbound), flavored as having crashed into the campaign world after a malfunction in the Phase Distorter while trying to find and apprehend Porky Minch.
Actually, scratch that. My most “normal” character may have been my recurring character, Aaron Irving, a human sniper-type rogue whose biological father was a vampire who kept trying to recruit Aaron into his service.
As you can probably guess, people have tried to get me to play “normal” characters on plenty an occasion. I’ve actually considered playing a completely boring, one-dimensional human fighter named “Gene Rick” just to get them to shut up.
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