Who is your favorite PC? What made them your favorite?

Did the rules help or hinder your portrayal of that person?

I had a B/X D&D Fighter who's highest attribute was Charisma, had unremarkable strength, and a -1 penalty to AC due to his crummy dexterity.  He was like a charming, yet clumsy and accident prone knight.

This was back when we thought you *had* to roll 3d6 and wrote them down in order.  After we moved to 4d6 (highest 3) and place attribute scores where you like character creation, we never saw a PC so unoptimized for their character class.

I think he felt more "real" than a lot of other characters because of the way he was generated.  It was more of a feeling of accomplishment to get him through the levels as well.  I also didn't do the standard D&D sword + bow equipment, since he was so bad with the bow anyway.  While that put him at a disadvantage game-wise it was better genre emulation.  Archers carry bows.  Knights don't.

Current PC in an L5R game. A Crane clan samurai trained in the Kakita Bushi school. The school specializes in dueling, which is his forte, but he is capable enough in general combat. The school and the clan as a whole are well versed in other arts and social skills, and places a high value on honor.

This is one game where the rules have helped my roleplaying. There is a mechanic for tracking honor and there are mechanics for the in-game effects of honor.

I usually don't play the righteous paladin or the pious priest type of character in an RPG, and this is one of the first characters I've played who really strives toward an ideal (honor).

The fact that there are a few rules and mechanics for how to handle honor in game give both myself and the GM a point of reference to frame player and NPC actions and reactions around. You can easily argue that such rules aren't necessary to role play something like honor, but I have found in this case they really facilitated it.

This character is something new for me and I'm enjoying it greatly and it is now one of my favorite PCs.

Torin Proud, a halfling Thief-Fighter that I played a Forgotten Realms PB3. He and his twin brother Jace were the only children of a cheap skate inn keeper in Waterdeep.

He left Waterdeep after stabbing his brother in a fit of rage, mistakenly believing him dead. He multi-classed into fighter after getting jumped a few times, and beaten because he was a halfling.

Thomas Cleft, a cigarette-smoking, spitting, foul-mouthed fighter with a charisma of 8. He was a deadbeat husband, and impulsive and unreliable at the best of times, but he was fearless and couldn't be bought. His best friend in the world was a guy he'd tried to kill (and who'd tried to kill him), who later became the Big Bad of the whole campaign. He won the cockroach award - nearly dying more than any other character I've ever had.

One of my favourite stories about him:

The party is riding along on horses created by the Mount spell. They need gold. A horse merchant is hanging around a crowd at a religious gathering that the party approaches. Thomas offers to go get some gold by selling the horses, and the party tentatively agrees.

Thomas rides up to the horse merchant, and offers to sell him the Mount horses. The DM has me make a diplomacy check to get negotiations going, but I fail and he has the horse merchant ignore Thomas. Unable to get his attention through talking to him, Thomas spits in his face and leaps down from his horse. He grabs the merchant, draws his (awesome, magical, two-handed) sword and shouts "You're gonna buy these horses or I'm going to kill every one of you motherfuckers!" to the horse merchant and his entourage.

A reasonable price is negotiated for the horses (which have about six hours of existence left in them, though this is not mentioned), and Thomas walks back to the party. The spitting in the merchant's face has since given rise to the expression "Ranged Diplomacy Attack".

Edit: I loved being Thomas because he was the biggest jerk I've ever played, and as a result, he was a good corrective to the other PCs, who were generally straight-and-narrow types, and the NPCs, who were all serious melodramatic bad-asses.

I had a character in Heros Unlimited, mixed with Ninjas and Super Spies. That was a Jujitsu Master, and could turn into metal. (Like Colosuss from the x-men). He was pretty sweet.
But my favorite would probably have to be the character I play in my buyddies D&D campaign. Gunnar son of Brock, of the tribe of Torbjørn. Hes a hulking, stupid barbarian. Hes a good person. But isn't very bright. Chops the hell out of people/creatures/stuff with a big great sword. I talk like Arnold, or Reiner Wolfcastle when in character. Good fun.

Going back more than ten years! (has it been so long?! It has, sadly...) I had a shadowrun character who went by the simple moniker 'James King'. He was a Brooklyn mafia guy who had taken a heavily armored stolen cab and drove to Seattle on a whim.  He smoked cigars, wore 5000 nuyen suits on the job and generally stuck with shotguns.

Half the damn character was that stupid cab (King, btw, was a fairly conventional 'bioware sammy', with a drive skill of 1), with hydralic doors, a front ramplate (also hydralic actuated) and spraypainted flat black, eventually mounting the cyberskull of a cyberzombie as a hood ornament (complete with christmas lights for eyes...) that he'd crushed with the damn cab.  It had, as backstory, salvaged battleship armor for a shell, so it was slower than a bicycle (had maxed out body and armor, it shrugged missiles on more than one occasion without any damage... the driver did more damage due to glitches than any enemy ever did).

Mind you, in the party I made him for we had a 'mantis possessed' uber mage that made the 'wired 3' street sams look slow, and several members of hte party sported delta grade cyberware. King was positively mundane in that group, but using the troll for mobile cover was inspired, never did have to replace a suit after a run.

He was so popular I was asked to resurrect him for future Shadowrun campaigns.  I still have the character sheet(s) in a box somewhere.   Still, sometime around the third or fourth time bringing him to a game (sans cab, I think...) I stopped playing him as 'James King' and more as 'generic shadowrunner with a suit', and lost interest in him.

Quaade Arakyn, standard Quixotic Jedi out of the back of Star Wars: The Role-Playing Game.  Really my first PC, and I played him a lot.  Moody, heart on his sleeve, deluded, altrustic and foolish.  Good times.

I rarely get to play, though; I'm always the GM, so...I don't have any PCs that I've actually, you know, played.

Jonny Tyso, CP2020 Rockerboy in the very best traditions of the genre. Inspired by a combination of Waynes World and dimly remembered interviews with Jon Bon Jovi and Brett Michaels from the Kerrang! magazines of my youth, he was big, handsome, charismatic, egotistical horndog who used IQ as his dump stat. :cool:
 
At the mission breifing, whilst the other characters were asking technical questions and trying to outdo each other with military slang, he spent most of it admiring the legs of the female assistants. When they were discussing tactics and comparing their pimpcannons on the plane, he was listening to his Wearman™ and playing air guitar.
When they wanted to gun down a suspected spy in broad daylight in the middle of a hotel, he just seduced the spy upstairs where he could have the crap kicked out of him in private.
 
He wasnt actually that good a musician, but in true CP2020 style he looked good when doing whatever he did. (He died in true CP2020 style too, being shafted by the GM.)

Kaval Rem, a RQIII human thief who had an unfortunate run in with a vampire and got turned (this was back before playing vampires was considered cool).  The GM let me continue to play him after the transformation and he went on to become a follower and then Rune Priest of Subere, the Godess of Primal Darkness.  He used to harangue trolls he would meet for their lack of piety and drag them to improptu worship services.

Hmmm...

Lazlo something-or-another: Half-elven Wild Mage; do I need to say more?  I think I enjoyed playing it so much 'cause the GM was wired so damn tight that my general tomfoolery cut right across the way-too-serious grain that he was trying to impart.  When he got "serious," I got "zany."

The sociopath I played in a Star Frontiers game runs a close second.  His modus operandi was quite similar to the Wild Mage's except his magic wands fired slugs at several hundred feet per second.  That, and he hired a mariachi band to follow him around for a day at one point after scoring some loot.

Immar Blackhammer of Clan Blackhammer, Son of Dagan Human-Slayer, Son of  Rindorn Dragon's-Bane (it choked to death on him). He was a Dwarven Battlerager in AD&D2e. He was legendary. He epitomized the drunken, loud-mouthed, death-seeking, mohawked bad-ass long before any of my gaming homies had ever heard of Gotrek. Immar's fame got to such heights that other gaming groups' DMs would call me up and ask me if he could be an NPC in their games.

Unfortunately, playing Immar reminds me of my best friend Jon and that motherfucker went and shot himself in the head. So there's a pall over the legend of Immar now. At least for me. But he's still the best character I ever played.

-=Grim=-