9, 19, and 29?
9.) Strategic combat or dramatic plotlines?Oh definitely dramatic plotlines. I’m pretty mediocre at combat strategy. I mean, I can make a particular encounter challenging, but largely that’s because we’re playing Star Wars right now and Storm Troopers are cheaper by the dozen. If a particular combat seems to be getting too one-sided I can just throw more Storm Troopers at them. And forget aerial combat. I’m awful at that, and one of my players primarily plays Star Wars BECAUSE of aerial combat, so he knows all the options, rules, tricks, and minutiae around it. For that I just have to hope that two more tie fighters won’t cause them to be blown out of the sky.
But dramatic plotlines? Oh I’m all over that… taking the character’s motivations and using that to assess what is really important to the player… then taking that and challenging them over it. Building up NPCs that they like and trust, then revealing them to be a traitor, or taking the PCs’ assumptions and biases, and forcing them to overcome those to be able to accomplish the group’s goals. Yeah that I can do.
19.) Your most memorable in-character moment.Previous answer
29.) The best / worst character concept you’ve ever heard.Worst: Without a doubt, when I was running my 17-player Marvel Universe Roleplaying Game (MURPG) campaign, I had one guy that wanted to play an “elementalist.” In MURPG there was a family of powers that would make you the master of some particular element…. fire, ice, water, wind, etc. Except, he really really really really wanted to play as a … Hair Elementalist. And at the time I was considering it because I was thinking prehensile hair that he could control like Madusa of the Inhumans.
No, that wasn’t it. He wanted to be able to manipulate OTHER people’s hair. He wanted to cause their eyebrows to get so bushy they couldn’t see, or call forth beards onto their faces to make it hard to breathe…. weird stuff like that. I know GMs aren’t supposed to say “no” but… I didn’t want a “Great Lakes Avengers” vibe to the campaign, so I asked him to come up with another character. I can’t remember the specifics of the character he did end up playing (again, there were 17 people in that campaign), but I do remember that his combat specialty, rather than kung-fu or boxing or something like that, was roshambo.
Best: I’m going be super egotistical and mention to of mine, because I still think they’re brilliant. Either Tanq, the Shadowrun Troll that I’ve previously mentioned, or Key another Shadowrun character I played that was a hacker. Key was a human that was obsessed with playing video games. He played any/all video games, racing games, first-person shooters, MMOs, whatever. He actually learned how to hack so he could get access to unreleased video games & alpha testing. He was so good at it however, and his addiction was so bad, that he could no longer tell what was reality and was a video game.
So he would sit in meetings with fixers and Johnsons telling the other players how he hated block text, whether he thought the voice actor for this NPC was lousy, he would ask if anyone knew what the XP rewards were like for this quest chain, etc. It was totally meta and super fun (especially because the GM and I knew what was going on, but the other players just thought I couldn’t stay in character. Eventually they figured it out). He also absolutely no sense of self-preservation since he thought everything was a video game. He actually had to take a considerable amount of damage before figuring out that he wasn’t just playing an FPS, but was ACTUALLY getting shot at. It was super fun.