I thought I had mono once. It ends up I was just bored.
-Michael Myers as Wayne in Wayne's World

I've been a little under the weather since Sunday. Sunday, I had a horrible sinus headache and ever since then I've felt tired, very tired.

WISH: Unconventional Characters
Do you prefer to build a character with a unique concept, or do you prefer a simple or more standard concept to start with? Do you find that your preference correlates with a preference for elaborate initial backgrounds or with background development in play? If you’re a GM, do you find unique-concept characters easy or hard to GM for? What about playing alongside them?

Back in my early days of gaming, I had a friend who always came up with the most bizarre concepts he could. The GM (usually me) would tell him what the setting was and what kind of characters would be fitting and he would immediately come up with a concept that didn't seem to fit at all.

I loved it. He would always challenge me as GM to redefine my image of the campaign and it always kept things interesting. For example, I started a GURPS: Fantasy game based off a setting I came up with. The setting had "flintlock-era" technology. My friend's reaction: "I want to play a Gunslinger." I explained to him that revolvers didn't exist and that flintlock pistols were horribly innacurate and only really good at close range. He still wanted this gunslinger.

Just when I was about to tell him to find another idea, I thought of something to add to the world, an order of magicians called runeslingers who used special guns like revolvers that fired magical bullets made out of rare "runestones." The character was made and it had a built in limitation to the usefulness of the gun because the stones were so expensive and rare AND the runeslinger would have to craft them into bullets and do an individual ritual for each bullet.

The order of runeslingers added to the world background and made the world a little more interesting.

Still, at times my friend could also be a real pain. It was a trade-off.

I like playing unconventional characters. It makes things interesting. It takes what could be a straightforward game and turns it in its ear a little. A good character can challenge genre stereotypes and add a little more flavor to the world.

In Champions, I pride myself that I have never played a traditional superhero-type. I've played an ex-supervillian trying to make good, an immortal Samurai and a teenage girl wo doesn't want anything to do with the whole "superhero nonsense." The closest I've come to playing a traditional superhero-type has been in...Amber. In JS's AFDS game, I play Griffin, a Knight of Amber that is basically Superman. His personal shadow is a superhero world and he generally sees the world in black and white. He's a big, strong guy with some pretty amazing powers who just wants to "do the right thing."

I like to think that in both games I've added an original element. Maybe, I just annoyed everyone. I don't know, but my friend always did a mixture of both.