(crossposted to !pathfinder@ttrpg.network)
I like all sorts of characters. I’ve yet to find a class I don’t enjoy playing. That said, my absolute favorites tend to be high-charisma types and blow-stuff-up casters.
Mechanically, my favorite character was my first ever TTRPG character: A half-drow draconic sorcerer in DND 5E. I focused a lot on fire spells and damage. Like I said, I love blowing stuff up. Plus I just think the fantasy of being innately magical is cool.
Roleplay-wise, my favorites have been my tabaxi swashbuckler rogue and my aasimar celestial warlock (DND 5E and 5.5E, respectively). The former was a pretty selfish guy who gradually became a better person as he grew to care about the party, and the latter started off as a magical cop who slowly started to realize that all the authorities she’d trusted were corrupt. Sadly, both campaigns fizzled before they could complete their arcs, but they were still a blast to play.
Some of my characters are a lot like me, while others are nothing like me at all. My first character, the aforementioned sorcerer, was more or less a self-insert because I was new to roleplaying and thought I should test the waters with something easy. By contrast, the aforementioned rogue, who was my second ever character, was someone I created specifically to be extremely different from me because I wanted a challenge. Most of my other characters have been somewhere in the middle of the “nothing like me” to “me irl” spectrum. (Although I’m currently playing another self-insert, just because I hadn’t done so in Pathfinder before and thought it might be fun. She’s a kitsune grandeur champion with the draconic sorcerer archetype. Yes, I WILL make and play a fox-dragon self-insert OC and there is nothing you can do about it. I may be cringe, but I am free.) For example, my warlock had pretty similar morals to mine, but she was much more naive and less confrontational than me.
So yeah. Tell me about your characters!
When I started playing D&D (3.0) all of my characters were just me with fire powers. Sorcerer, pyrokineticist, whichever class I could find that gave me the most fire. Since then, while I play a very wide range of characters in terms of classes and ancestries, all of them are based on some part of me. Dr Hoots, Owlin Chronurgist, was based on my often deadpan demeanor and tendency to fix things behind the scenes, while Ihrannis V, Fey Paladin, had a lot of my ADHD in him. Bob Peasbody, Human Omdura, was my anxiety, and Robert Thatch, Human Swashbuckler, was my tenuous self preservation.
My favourite was probably when a DM bribed me to play Descent into Avernus by giving me an NPC to play - Lulu is a Hollyphant (small golden flying elephant) that accompanies the party on their adventure, and the DM gave me her backstory and a Hollyphant PC statblock and told me to make what I wanted. Small spoilers for DiA: most of her backstory is amnesia. I came back with the suggestion of a support focused sorcerer build to heal the party, and the DM pulled a face, so I gave him my other suggestion: I wasn’t sure of the specifics, but the backstory suggested the amnesia was down to a series of extremely traumatic events in Hell which could easily cause PTSD, and the progression of the statblock meant she started without most of the magic an NPC hollyphant has but would progress to full power over the adventure. So, the class that would most closely match that - Wild Magic Barbarian. Triggered by devils, her rages see uncontrolled bursts of her suppressed magic manifesting around her as she goes ham on them.
DM loved it and the rest of the table was delighted when they were introduced to the high pitched bundle of excitement, which turned into a mix of horror and confusion when combat started and I soundtracked it with this.