(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!
I play cis males only, but not as a rule. I just generally will make male characters, likely in part to feeling better prepared at interpreting them, and in part that I feel like I would not play another gender correctly. I understand that it is an illusion, as I could simply play them as any other human/non-human being, especially as I’ve played other species without issue. But I feel like I would not be able to give them the nuance and characteristics they deserve, and would end up defaulting to cis male attitudes.
I also tend to want to play old characters, as I feel like young ones are too boring. They tend to have too short of a history to have an interesting identity and lore behind them, and I love the idea of facing large challenges later in life while struggling with the decisions of the past and our own will to change. I played in a one-shot where I made an old farm veterinarian that would roam the lands helping people with their animals, who had a fall-off with one of his sons for joining the army of an oppressive despot, and a merchant daughter that traded in stolen artifacts. Rumour had it my character had killed his own wife, and in reality what had happened was that he poisoned her because she was sick and suffering but the religious fanatics did not want to let her die while she suffered. I love characters with personality problems, dense pasts, and a complicated family.