What is your favourite character class?

Come on guys & gals, what type of charcter do you like to play? Are you hooked on magic or do you use brute force to stay alive? I still play AD&D from the late 70s and my favourite class is a magic user, then again I do like to play the odd dwarven fighter.

back in AD&D i used to play fighter/thief deep gnomes alot. i played the character as a jester before they came out with the bard expansion book. i still preferred the F/T dual class to the bard specialized class. i was also known to play clerics quiet often, or a kender thief on occasion. in D N D 3.0/3.5 i tended to go with monks, bards (love my bards so much character to em), fighters or clerics. when we play epic characters i prefer mystic thralls (mage/cleric bad-asses). i love to DM, my style is improv, light-hearted, fun-loving and character driven.   

Well I'm afraid I'm stuck in a time warp and still play 1st edition AD&D. A few years back I did buy the 3rd edition books but after a brief fling we decided to stick with what we know.

I love DMing and I try to inject as much fun as possible and if I find I've made an adventure too difficult then I always give the players a break, after all it is the players that make the game. I knew DMs who just took delight in killing characters and that is not what the game is about. A good DM should always make the adventurers work for the spoils, that way the satisfaction is greater for all. Players should always have a certain trepidation about all encounters that way it keeps them sharp.

One of my favourite characters is a gnome fighter/illusionist who is one mean killing machine.

Sorry guys. Hands down; the best class out there is a Psionic. Well... At least the psionic class I created. lol. Never did like any of the psionic classes invented by WoC. They tried to develop them like magic users. Wrong thing to do. Psionics and Magic are two totally different types of energy.

Anyone ever play Palladium?  I shifted away from D&D and into Palladium before falling away from RPGs entirely back in the (gulp) '80s.  Palladium was a simpler system, in some ways, and redressed several aspects of D&D that never really made any sense to me.  For instance, there was more emphasis on percentiles than in other systems, which made sense to me. 

Also, magic-users didn't just instantly 'forget' a spell each time they cast it, as in D&D.  If your level was such that you had the magical 'stamina' to cast three 6th level spells a day, and you wanted to hurl a lightning bolt for all of them, that was up to you. Etc.

The other great thing was that, if something walks upright and uses language to communicate, it can be a player-character.  If you wanted to adventure with a party of ogres, goblins, orcs and even a troll or two, hey why not?

Anyway, to get back to the question.  Palladium had some cool classes:  Mind Mage (psionic), Summoner, Diabolist, for instance - in addition to the classics.

As for D&D, to the extent that I played at all (as opposed to DMing), I went for the standard Magic User (I was in it for the fireballs, I admit it).  If I ever picked up a sword, it was by the hand of a Ranger.  Ranger's were cool - especially at the higher levels when they start to pick up some druidic and magic-user spell abilities.

I must admit I have never heard of Palladium. I dabbled a bit with Rolemaster & MERP which were percentile based. Every fight in those two was a scary event as the system used an open ended system, if you rolled 96 or above you rolled again and added the scores together. You could have some sort of cool high level character and meet an orc who gets the drop on you and he rolls a 96 or above and then another and before you know it he's rolled a score of over 300 and you are dead - and you didn't even have a swipe! It made one a bit more wary of encounters.

I loved playing magic users, always my favourite class although I've dabbled in all of them. I remember going on an adventure into the 666 layers of the Abyss where I was playing a 20th level magic user and I was casting disintegrate spells at balrogs - great fun when you get through their magic resistanceand they fail their saving throw too!

I like Rangers too, they were mean against giants. A ranger and a sword of giant slaying was an awesome combination.

:-)  Someone should make a list of all the "instant kill" or deadly strike rules out there..  AD&D didn't have one, but I know people made up their own - like rolling a natural 20 and getting another roll - if another natural 20, then curtains.

Come to think of it, there was another (indirectly related) rule in Palladium that I, again, thought made more sense than AD&D:  0 hit points didn't mean you were dead; it meant you were knocked out, comatose.  0 minus your Endurance score (i.e. Constitution) meant death.  If you got knocked below zero (say to -3) and your Endurance was 14, someone had to come up and stab you a couple more times, or else if you remained there in an untended crumpled heap for 11 hours (losing a hit point each hour), you expired for good.

I avoid instant kills as much as possible. I don't even like Class A poison in my worlds. A character suddenly being slain or suddenly slain is rather anti-climatic and takes the joy away from the struggle. Just my humble opinion.

In some respects I agree that anything that kills instantly is not neccesarily good for the game however as long as there's a saving throw that the characters have a reasonable chance of making and the adventure is not filled with 'instant death traps' then I have no problem. I might have asked this before but did any of you use critical hit tables in AD&D?

I have not. I have seen them, made them, had other DM's use them; but, I just go with the simple "double damage" rule for critical hits in my games.

I'm a 3.5 kinda guy and I love the warlock. I'm also generally a gnome

ive used crit hit tables and crit to specific body parts effects they add flavor to combat. it depends on the group and the type of adventure style most time dont use em though to much refrencing and extra dice..3.5 all the way xav!

Hey Jess, did you also use fumbles alongside the critical hits? They could make a game somewhat interesting, especially at low level!

I've enjoyed 1st edition AD&D so much I've never played anything else. I did dabble with 3.5 but my mate wasn't keen so we went back to good old 1st edition.

Woo 3.5 fans! I can't wait till the next edition comes out! I'm doing the playtest!

I thought the next edition was already out. Isn't there a 4.0 now?

Yea, this is after 4.0. 4.0 SUCKEDish. I don't really want to get into the nerd rage and the nerd politics. Lets just say from what I've seen this edition will bring us all back together

I doubt it. I am straight 2.0; I don't want to take the time to learn another edition or another gaming system. There was nothing wrong with the 2.0 rules to begin with. This is, of course, just an expression of my opinion and my preferences; not a bait to an argument or anything like that. I just like 2nd edition best.

Yea I know, this one I promise is worth going to a demo

Don't tease me... If I played anything these days, it would be Pathfinder - whose originators bravely picked up the Gygaxian Torch and ran with it proudly, after the Wizards mislaid it in a brothel.

I'm still scarred by those horrific D&D4e "Encounters" sessions...

Don't worry its the best of four and 3.5