Talk about your D&D characters here!

I loved D&D3.5. At the end of that run, I had three characters.

My very last character was a Starmetal Adept- basically a fighter that had multiclassed late in life as a wizard and then prestige-classed carefully into a special class that would turn her skin slowly to adamantine and give her damage reduction. She was mostly fighter I guess, but had a very high intelligence, and her feat tree focused on Combat Expertise, with the eventual goal of Whirlwind attack. I got razzed a lot by the guys I played with for inefficiency, but it was a cool idea in my mind. That was the most playable of the three characters I played, but the 12 strength she ended up with meant her attacks weren't quite as high multipliers if I had a 16, 18 or 20 strength. I think I got her a pair of gauntlets of Ogre Power at one point to try and boost her up a bit. The DM was a bit amateur and would go on and on about his storyline, none of which was ever truly revealed to us or made sense.
I actually worked on this build for like, days, and I was very proud of it. She was fairly cool- I had her with a bastard sword (which I envisioned as a katana) and wearing a kimono. I have several sketches of her I may be sharing soon. Her backstory was, she was created as a guardian to a wizard, and then somehow stone-to-fleshed, but she didn't want to become human, and was trying to return to life as a construct. The DM tried to incorporate this but was really focused on this secret story he was running. Her name was Galatea, after the mythological character. Her personality was a combo of Dorothy Wayneright from the Big O and Major Kusanagi from Ghost in the Shell.

My other two characters: One I developed here at theRPGsite somewhere in the design forum. It was a half-orc sorcerer (again, not the most efficient build) that focused on strength boosting spells, fist of stone and enlarge. The trick for this character, is he could enlarge, fist of stone, and then punch the crap out of enemies. I susually got knocked down because of my low-AC, and further razzed by my friends for inefficiency, but man that was a cool build.  And he was fun as hell to play, because I could like punch an orc through a brick wall by the time I was 4th level or so. This would hopefully happen right before I got my ass kicked. I played him short term. This campaign was a friend of mine's world that made heavy use of the Goodman dungeon crawl classics. I can't remember his name right now, but it started with a K. Oh wait! Khaazra. I found his character sheet on the old campaign wiki.

My 3rd character was a Spellscale bard that took the "+10 jump" Vestigial Wings" feat from Races of the Dragon. I played her in Xendrik Expeditions. She was also (according to my tradition) woefully inefficient, but she was a lot of fun to play. I also had Perform Dance and Perform Sing like.. maxed out. Unlike the other characters of mine-- I didn't play her around my friends, I played her in tournaments, but she was still roundly criticized for being woefully inefficient. But she also developed a cool schtick where she would go invisible, and use her wand of cure wounds throughout the battle to keep the fighters up. So in a lot of ways she was untouchable even if she wasn't much for battle. Her name was Dragonsong. in XE, all the characters in the Crimson Codex faction have to have a secret undercover identity, and hers was as an operatic diva, "The Siren of Stormreach". Believe it or not, her operatic and dancing skills came in useful in several RPGA adventures. On one fo the more dungeon crawly "Expedition" adventures where the PCs had to leave the city, I made her appear completely inappropriately at the ship, with several trunks of clothing and costume jewelery. She complained anytime they had to walk through mud, and called the Black Wheel mercenaries that were guiding the expeditions "uncultured and uncouth". Haha, man that was fun.  

Tell us about your D&D characters.

Under 3.x and various d20 derivatives, I had:

Bernard, a holy-roller cleric of Pelor who was an absolute evangelical nut committed to saving the world, smiting evil, and spreading the good word of Pelor to the ignorant masses. He was a straight Cleric 7 by the time the campaign ended.

Thomas Cleft, a foul-mouthed Fighter with a heart of gold and unclear allegiances. He had the two most overpowered magic items I've ever gotten for a character - an amulet that gave +10 to saves vs. compulsion effects, and a greatsword that could cast True Strike 1/day on itself. He was a glass ninja style fighter, with OK AC, but excellent damage. I took a single level of Runethane from Arcana Unearthed for him, which gave him some good buffs that boosted his power level even higher. He ended up about level 12-13 at the end of the campaign. Thomas survived the campaign, and only ended up dying in a cutscene some years later during another campaign when he was a NPC.

In the same campaign (starting during an interlude where it appeared an avalanche had killed Thomas), I also played Ahmed bin Saba ibn Mutafa, a Magister with a super-high intelligence who specialised in laying templates on spells (especially the psionic and eldritch templates). Ahmed once slew an adult red dragon by himself due to clever use of spells (starting with summoning a mound of earth around the dragon while in flight, causing it to fall uncontrollably to the ground). He is one of the most powerful characters I ever played in a d20 game, partially because AU's spell system is very well designed and provides a lot of choice for a clever player to exploit. Ahmed ended up having his head crushed by a 3.0 style Rakshasa monk who was one of the big bads of the world in a near TPK.

In a campaign set ten years later in the same world, I played Roger, a diviner who served Nyarlathotep, and who was a raging alcoholic. He mainly laid damage buffs on his crossbow bolts, and then used True Strike to make sure they hit. He ended up dying when a ship's mate tried to bully him, and the fight got out of hand. He prompted a near-TPK with a single survivor as the pirate crew the mate was part of rushed the entire party.

My next character was about a year later, when I graduated from university and came back to play with the guys. I played Thomas Cleft 2, a paladin in an alternate reality linked to the other campaigns. He had his throat torn out by a ghoul early on, and was replaced with Arthas. Arthas was a Bard with Str 6, and just generally had some of the shittiest stats I've ever rolled for a character. He was a spy, and his bardic "music" was giving advice and confidence-building statements to his fellow PCs. He was fairly unpopular in character because the other PCs didn't trust him, and out of character, he is remembered with a certain amount of contempt as being too weak to defeat a knife-wielding midwife (who turned out to be a cultist) and her housecat. He was mainly useful for buffing the other members of the party. He died from a single hit by a Greater Shadow, which drained all of his strength (They leech d8 points of Str on a hit, and the DM rolled .

After that, I played Trevor Holmes, who was a conjuration specialist who specialised in soft-control of the battlefield. Trevor had a brother, another PC (whose previous char had also died in the same fight as Arthas from mummy rot) named Lochlan who was some fighter. Trevor was a blast to play because of the illusions and conjurations, which meant I was just constantly fucking with people's heads. I eventually got ahold of an undead cyber-arm (a recurring theme with my characters) of incredible power and some rods of quickening, which made him able to just take out entire armies in a couple of rounds.

The DM made a mis-step at one point, and gave a NPC an amazing magic item thinking that we would either a) have to run from the NPC (who was significantly stronger) or b) would refuse to use the item because it was so obviously evil and soul-warping. Instead we defeated the NPC, and Trevor nearly put on the "Crown of the Arch-Lich" until the DM outright banned me from doing so. Trevor later merged with an abandoned character from a player who had left the game, and became a lvl 20 mystic theurge. I used rods of quickening and divine metamagic to get around the "One spell per round" limitation, and was only killed by DM fiat when one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse blew up the platform we were standing on. I technically could have survived it (I had feather fall memorised, and had more than enough HP to survive the explosion) but he just declared me dead.

After that, I was Erik the Vengeful, a viking Iron Heroes Archer who could never give up on a grudge. I got a god's bow that could warp space and time,  got cut nearly in half by a laser, but survived and ended up causing Ragnarok and restoring the viking gods to the world. Erik specialised in high accuracy attacks, and ended up with excellent damage and many attacks. His main problem was a lack of mobility, esp. after the spinal damage from the laser meant that he lost squares of movement. He was the only PC to survive the campaign.

Then, in our last campaign, I had a whole bunch of characters.

The main one was Wayland Dessinger, the last son of a former-nobleman who was responsible for defending the northern borders of the kingdom. The other PCs were his older brothers. Wayland started off an Executioner from Iron Heroes, then eventually became a custom class called the Darkseer after he studied under this band of evil wizards who taught him to drain energy from these evil alien ghosts that up to no good. He was a brilliant doctor and engineer (I had the most ridiculous Heal and Craft checks), and an excellent businessman, investor and administrator, all of them as a child prodigy (I had to begin the game as an eight-year old without a class). He ended up getting his hand mutilated beyond repair, and he cut it off and replaced it with a cyber-arm that channeled his magical powers. He restored his family's titles, integrated two hostile hinterlands filled with barbarians and ancient enemies of the Kingdom as provinces under their control, helped start a civil war to profit his family, wavered between lawful evil and neutral, was good friends with most of the villains in the game, and died saving his brothers from a super-powered alien ghost. He was eighteen when he died, and one of the most moving scenes in the game was of his brothers returning home after his death and having to use a road Wayland built (and named after himself) to do so.

At the same time, I also ran Gil, who was an Iron Heroes weapon master specialising in crits using a scimitar. Because of a high str and the attack bonuses of a weapon master, he almost never missed with a sabre attack. Gil worked for another PC named Louis Roseche who ended up defender of the southern reaches of the kingdom as a result of the civil war Wayland and his brothers started. Louis was their uncle, btw. Gil was a murder-machine, and was probably the second most powerful character I've ever played. He ended up dying and coming back as an undead creature with fast healing 5 and 1/2 damage from slashing, which meant he was basically unkillable.

He ended up working with the Dessinger brothers later in the game to kidnap the pope-equivalent, and he could never quite decide whether he was chaotic good or lawful evil until the end of the game, when he realised that he was now the greatest swordsman in the kingdom and possibly the world, that he was basically immortal, and that no one could stop him from doing what he wanted. So he rode off into the sunset at the end of the campaign to make the world a better place by killing anyone he thought was evil, because literally no one could stop him from doing so.

I also played Lenny, an Iron Heroes thief who had a ton of skills but wasn't that great in combat. He was a big fat guy who used to work as a printer before the local nobles had his press destroyed for printing seditious material. He was able to figure out how to make money out of anything, like the time that he and "the Dunk" set up a toll booth on the road while they waited for someone to come by and robbed quite a few pilgrims fairly casually. He ended up working with the Dunk to organise a band of outlaws that would fight against the church after they slew the Dunk's boy Huck in a ritual. The church ended up killing them both and their band of outlaws too with an army of undead monsters and wizards specially sent to root them out.

There were a few other minor characters in that campaign too: Sgt. Fusker of the Dessinger household guard, Rook who was the chief of the Bear Clan, etc. but they only lasted a few sessions and barely count.

I think that's pretty much everyone major. I may have forgotten a couple in the mix somewhere though.

My favorite D&D 3.5 characters include:

Elar Stravan, the only character I created twice for two different campaigns.  He first appeared in an Age of Worms campaign a friend ran.  The opportunistic son of a miner, Elar was a cigar-chomping entrepreneur who dreamed of converting ancient dungeons into modern casinos and four-star theme hotels.  His iconic weapon was a stone giant's crowbar, called Tombcracker, that Elar had enchanted multiple times until it was a weapon of legendary status.  A true brawler, Elar was best known for his use of the Sunder and Bull Rush maneuvers.  He was later reborn as an freedom fighter who had participated in the Mine Riots of Andor for the Pathfinder Society.  At his peak, Elar achieved 6th level as a Fighter (with no resurrections) before the campaign was retired.  In Pathfinder Society Elar is currently a 2nd Level Fighter.

Carmen Fortunado was a "Spanish" aristocrat, a tomboy who grew up in a keep full of soldiers, who ran off from an arranged marriage to join a mercenary cavalry squad.  A brief affair with a paladin lead her to the Luminous Order, a secret society dedicated to holding back the forces of evil, where she was put in charge of a rag-tag group of adventurers. Together they faced the Shattered Gates of Slaughtergard and the Ruins of Castle Greyhawk, as well as numerous side quests.  Haughty and imperialistic, Carmen was most famous for striding into rooms without consideration of recon, loudly announcing her presence, and challenging everything within ear shot to duel to the death.  Miraculously (seriously, a LOT of Divine magic was involved, mostly Cure X Wounds spells), she survived to achieve 10th level as a Knight (with no resurrections) before the campaign was retired.

Rik Rascal, Raccoon Ranger was born the day an unknown druid awakened a simple raccoon to serve as a scout in a city.  Seeing the human world with new eyes and falling in love, the raccoon fled the druid, fearing the spell would be broken.  Falling in with a human adventurer named Kurtz, the raccoon took the name "Rik Rascal" and set off in search of fortune and glory.  Rik was most proud of his tiny green felt cap and deadly accurate bow.  He achieved the lofty heights of 3rd level as a Scout before succumbing to deadly Giant Spiders.

Those were my favorites.

My guy's a halfling.

Basic is simpler.

Let's see, the characters I have in the ongoing 3.0 campaign are:

-Human Cleric.  This fellow is the younger son of a mercantile family that has risen to the level of minor nobility.  As the younger son (3rd of 4 kids), he was expected to either go into the military or the priesthood.  (The campaign is a homebrew that uses Greek and Egyptian Mythologies as the two major antagonistic groups.)  He opted to follow his older sister into the priesthood, and developed a talent for scholarly work.  Despite his talents, the itch to travel seized him and he's been adventuring ever since.

One interesting thing that happened to this guy early on was during a major fight, he charged into battle with his spear (favored weapon of Zeus in the campaign) and miraculously emerged unscathed.  That, combined with his minor noble status, has him thinking that he's somewhat invincible on the field of battle, so he constantly charges into a fight.  (Not smart, since it nearly cost him his life in a fight with an owlbear.)

I tend to play this guy as a weird dichotomy of caution and recklessness; he's cautious until there's a fight, then the gloves come off.  He's more the conscience of the group (cleric, naturally), and fancies himself a scholar.  Unfortunately for him, he's been upstaged in that department by the Elven Wizard (see below), and he's had to eat a bit of crow lately.

-Elf Wizard.  She's a recent addition (and to be honest, I've not played many magic users of any sort, so I'm kind of still feeling my way around here.)  In the homebrew campaign, most elves that adventure are those who have not quite reached adulthood and adventure to find their life's path and to act out their youthful impusles.  This particular elf has already done her time of wandering and had returned to the Elven school of knowledge to attempt to take her place among the learned masters.  However, the headmaster read the signs of great evil stirring (yeah, the DM came up with the standard cliche) and that she should attach herself to those at the apex of the fight (the PCs).  The twist to that is that while she's a good adventurer, she has a lot of spells and knowledge that aren't typically found in the standard adventurer's spell lists, so she has to be creative with her magic.  Additionally, magic is feared and distrusted by the local populace, so she has to operate her skills in as clandestine a manner as possible.  

I tend to play her along the lines of a know-it-all grad student who condesends to travel with the PCs.  Her tongue is her weapon of choice, and she tends to use it to great effect, particularly on my poor cleric.

--Mike L.

My favourite was Zana Than, a human Ironborn Fighter and Resistance member in the Ironborn setting.  She had a lot of personal issues to do with her father, who had impregnated and abandoned her mother.  She loved to get up close and personal with the enemy, which in Midnight really is not a good idea.  Still, she kicked butt and was very cool.  She was black, which seemed to disconcert the (German, female) GM a bit.  Her mother was white (Dorn) though.

The way Midnight goes, she saw her companions being killed around her.  At one point she surrendered to Shadow forces in an effort to save the life of a fellow female warrior.  She managed to escape, but another companion screwed up (an elf Channeler, he was careless) and got the woman killed.  That made Zana angry.

In the end she was the last survivor of the original crew.  She took part in a raid that destroyed a Black Mirror, and survived, but was killed leading the assault on an orc-held fort.   AIR she was 6th level at the time.