RPGaDay Days 12 & 5: Wildest Character Concept and Favorite Recurring NPC

I haven't made too many crazy characters (with the exception of Varden-Avag, who I mentioned in my Day 9 & 11 RPGaDay post), but in my first game I had a player make a character that was pretty hard to beat.

(questions and image from autocratik.blogspot.com)

Now, I want to point out that this character was entirely unforced. I had other characters, like Fishmalks or pretty much anything in Eclipse Phase, come up in games that were kind of crazy, but this character was from Shadowrun.

Bascially, the character was the epitome of the term "troll" in every sense. Eight foot tall, tough as nails, practically made of stone. Also prone to doing things that would tick off as many people as possible. And at one point I think he also hid under a bridge and extorted passers-by. But that's not really the whole point.

We were playing third edition, and I'd talked the player into making a physical adept.

For people who aren't familiar with Shadowrun lore, a physical adept (or PhysAd) is capable of extreme athletic feats and other martial prowess through intuitive magic.

Basically, picture Neo from the Matrix, up to the point where he starts bending spoons and flying. They can shrug off hits, move with incredible reflexes and speed, and generally cause a whole lot of angst.

Or they can take a bow and turn it into one of the deadliest weapons in the game.

Trolls are really, really strong, and a maxed out PhysAd with a bow can cause more damage than pretty much anything short of a dedicated military force.

Add in the fact that arrows in Shadowrun can carry a variety of different heads, including explosive arrowheads, and you wind up with a character who attacks more powerfully than anyone else in the party.

On their first mission after I'd gotten them used to the ropes, the troll managed to take out a wall in a warehouse to such a point that he (and the rest of the team) could walk through it without ducking. Shadowrun had rules for this, though I may not have applied them entirely properly.

However, the troll had no interest in the mission objective.

"I'm going to climb up on the roof and sit up there."

Yeah, the player was perfectly happy living up to the internet troll stereotype, and now that he'd been helpful enough to earn his keep he was finished for the day.

In the end, the warehouse wound up collapsing due to the structural damage (a phenomenon that has become known as "warehousebreaking", as similar phenomena seemed to strike the troll whenever he did things that were too antisocial or disruptive), but when the dust cleared the troll was unscathed (despite almost suffering significant damage, which was entirely mitigated by his impressive defenses).

The troll continued through the end of the campaign as one of the core characters, and was wonderful in many situations where he would simply do things that sabotaged the party (like accidentally killing a corporate kidnapping target, or passively accepting arrest by corporate security even though he could have broken through the zip-ties trivially) without getting to the point of being too annoying. This was partly thanks to the player, but generally just a product of the culture of that group.

But I also said I'd discuss my favorite recurring NPC.

The troll continued to appear in every Shadowrun game we played after his initial appearance, including later editions. Always a wildcard, you could be sure that he would be a great tool for the party, but also up to no good. While I've had other favorite NPCs, only a couple were able to rival the troll's staying power and his ability to appear in wild situations.