Rogue or Paladin. Burst damage skillmonkey with fun roleplay opportunities, or frontline tanking/support with fun roleplay opportunities. Sometimes Sorcerer when I'm feeling spellfling-y, but that hasn't happened in a long time. The more time goes on, the more I lean towards keeping things simple on the character sheet, and having fun with being useful both in and out of combat.
I enjoy caster-type characters mostly, partly for the fantasy and partly for the versatility. I've played two so far, wizard and bard, with a cleric waiting in the wings for an alternate campaign. Because my group has a couple people that just want to smash face and not think about it, casting duty has to fall on someone's shoulders, so I tackle the more complicated role.
I usually GM, but when I play I invariably make characters that are either sneaky gear-centric fighters or else illiterate dirtfarming peasants.
I usually end up playing Support style classes. It initially started because no one in my group was willing to but over time I've come to really like it. I am usually a ForeverDM but recently I got to be a player and I chose a more damage focused class as a change of pace and 3 sessions in I was like "Man I'd rather be helping our other damage dealer get bigger numbers than rolling them myself and helping stand our poor bullied Fighter back up when he gets his once per combat knock out than chasing down enemies".
It fails on one of those since "give me your most valuable possession" isn't really reasonable. As a GM I probably wouldn't allow a second level spell to have that powerful an effect.
Ah, Tomb of Annihilation. An interesting romp. What level is your party right now?
I'm a sword and board guy all day. The only time I played anything close to a true spellcaster was the one time I played a bard.
We just hit level 7 after said battle with the wizards and the King of Feathers. We're slowly working our way through solving the various temple puzzles, and doing a good job of it so far. Aside from this last bit of chaotic fuckery, we've been having a good time of it.
Whatever the fuck has the least Vancian shit in it, from spells to "per resting period" gimmicks I'm always hesitant to deploy. So fighters or some sort of rogue, typically, at least when it comes to fantasy. Or, just whatever idea pops into my head that sounds fun and interesting and works with the setting and campaign. I've done everything from big tiddy doctors to sneaky bastards, both with stealth and words, to doorkickers with either blade or gun. Never done an outright assassin though. They're a struggle to integrate with the party given how solo they tend to operate.
I always viewed the suggestion spell as doing something the NPC might be inclined to do already. I was never a fan of "me cast cantrip-level spell get god-tier results" thing.
that's because it clashes where "real world" meets "game". why should the decker run around with the party when he can sit in a secure room somewhere and do his own thing helping the party out? makes perfect sense, but a shit "party".
Ironically, the Virtual Adept running remote support/interference using Correspondence in Mage the Ascension worked better than most iterations of the "decker/hacker" archetype I've seen so far in cyberpunk games. I guess embracing the magic really does do something in this case.
I was a perpetual GM and generally played complete assholes whenever I was playing characters, but my favorite was a very stable, competent, reliable NPC that would always be helpful to the PCs. Since it was always across campaigns, I made it blatant by giving him the same name everywhere. So they could know they could always trust this one particular dude.
I know i'm late, but I want to say that even with my sense of humor and irreverence for our modern societies unquestionable Sacred Cows like the Holocaust, the concept of fighting ghosts at Auschwitz for treasure is absolutely tasteless and actually offended me. And it's just a bad idea for an RPG as well.
I love the absolute retardation of someone thinking having a campaign about fighting dead Jews for their Jewgolds at Auschwitz would somehow be politically tenable.
It's just what happens when you try to mix in real life with RPGs (and why settings like the World of Darkness was supposed to be like Real Life but not quite). I'm sure these idiots thought they were being clever porting the classic "crawling through a crypt dedicated to some horrible tragedy" adventure structure to a modern setting, without thinking about the consequences. Just like WW thought they had it in the bag when they blamed the persecution of gays in Chechnya on the fucking vampires of all people.
Without taking away from my condemnation of what Catalyst CGL actually wrote, there is something grimly amusing about how truly blind to their own racism some of these (typically progressive) people actually are. In addition to the Chechnya episode, don't forget that the V:tM authors made an entire vampire clan of gypsies whose powers all revolved around stealing. And whilst not offensive, the cultural stupidity of naming their Italian 'Giovanni' bloodline set countless Italian players into hysterics. Imagine it in translation:
Then frankly you were playing it wrong. The game effect of the changes in 4th, as I said, moved you away from the Cyberspace "dungeon" model of earlier editions. The Matrix was now closely integrated into the physical world with drones, access points, enemies all being effectively mobile mini-Matrices and entry points in their own right. In doing so, the hacker was (a) running across numerous opportunities in the physical space to use their skills and (b) not some comatose dead weight working their way through some series of virtual nodes to get to the useful thing whilst physically wired into a wall. They were mobile and with lots of active overlap.