[Dwi]

...Who would you be? What loadout would you take etc? This is a question I often ask myself when I am feeling... 40K reflective I guess you could say, I thought I would ask as meny people I know often base their chars of themselfs and all that.

Me I don't think i could be anything other than a Desperado arch-tipe as I would pretty much suck as everything els. I not a very disaplined person though I follow orders and the rules to the letter but I am not a very agresseve person eather so that pretty much rules out everything Navy and Guard, preachers, Comms etc. I am not good with tech (though I do know my may around some of it) so no AdMech, No powers So I an't a psyker and most importently I'm a little bit of a coward so all that stuff is not really my thing, could I face down something scary? Maybe, preferably with a whole feck ton of people in front of me, but I would prefur to get the hell out of there than try to kill it and get a shot at being a hero.

Now as we are talking abut 40k/IQ it wuold mean I would have to fight and in that case I would prefur a Hunting Rifle, Long Las etc so I can sat as far away from the bad guys as I can. If I HAD to get up close probably a Hand axe or a pair of Brass Knuckles would be my choice. A shotgun would also be on the list due to it's driffrent ammo tipes and over all ruggedness.

As for armour, a helmet is a must for me, after all, can't work with bits of frag in your brain. For the body I would prefur something to protect but light enough that I can leg it I have too.

What about you guys?
 

[Inquisitor Octavian Lars]

My character Octavian Griess-Lars was designed as an "ideal" me, but if I had to go as I acually am, I would go as an elite combat guy/storm trooper with a compact hellcarbine! (for the adrenaline rush)

[Dolnikan]

All my characters are based on facets of who I am. To represent myself I would probably go for a magos biologis, I am a biologist after all. I am very cowardly so to fight I would try to get some servitors but mostly to stay away from dangerous situations.

[krenshar]

I like to think that I'd be a savant or interrogator (if in the Carl Thonius mould, except without the fine dress-sense and flect habit).  But having failed to get qualifications first in blacksmithing and then in civil engineering, I suspect I'd be a fabrication servitor by now.  So when pressed into field service, I'd have overalls, some vat-muscle, a leather apron if the Mechanicus smiled on me and a hammer in place of one hand.

[TallulahBelle]

I would either be a savant with a cane or an archivist or some sort of duelist/techie sword and pistol for me with a small bag of explosives

[MarcoSkoll]

To try and put some more "on topic" into this (as the 'Clave isn't big on General Chat/Off Topic stuff), basing a character straight on oneself isn't a great move. As it involves "Me if I were more awesome", it means that someone disliking the character can be taken as something of a personal insult.

Sure, using elements of yourself in a character is fine - it can help identify with the character when roleplaying and they say to write what you know - but using too much of yourself isn't really something you want to get into.

As for who I'd be, I'd most likely be the heretic being burnt at the stake. I'm too rational, tolerant, autistic and atheist to be tolerated in the Grim Dark. Frankly, I'm surprised I'm allowed in this universe.

[Inquisitor Octavian Lars]

As for who I'd be, I'd most likely be the heretic being burnt at the stake. I'm too rational, tolerant, autistic and atheist to be tolerated in the Grim Dark. Frankly, I'm surprised I'm allowed in this universe.

All this is me as well

[seiterarch]

[...] basing a character straight on oneself isn't a great move. As it involves "Me if I were more awesome", it means that someone disliking the character can be taken as something of a personal insult. [...]

I think part of the issue could be with people basing the character central to a warband off themselves.  Because of the nature of =][=, the such a character is almost invariably going to be "Me if I were more awesome" or it would feel a little out of place.  A peripheral character could be pretty much anyone though, as there isn't so much need for justification if their reason for being on the table is simply, "The main character brought them along for field experience/specialist tasks/someone to take the blame if all goes wrong." Obviously the last part of what you said holds, you would just have to be prepared to take it on the chin if it comes to that.

I think I could put myself into the game without much changing. I'd be an initiate of the Mechanicum, at a level where I'd been given a modicum of freedom to work as I pleased. I'd always be haring off with a thousand and one interesting (possibly only in my opinion) projects in just about every topic, never quite finishing any of them. As a sideline, my mechanical appendages would have a mysterious tendency to fall apart.  Weaponry and equipment is largely beside the point for the character, it would probably just be something easy to come by (in universe) and not too cumbersome.

Characters like this might seem a little underpowered in a game, but they could work as specialists in a warband or just as a comic foil. Not sure whether I'll ever make this character, but it's an idea if I do an AdMech warband.

[DapperAnarchist]

I have a character that is based on my interests (he's a mystic, a philosopher of sorts, a political manipulator, fascinated by the concept of complexity and combination, a sort of 40K Discordian with less humour),  has a bionic arm in part because of a recurring dream of mine from a few years back, and has a name taken from the pen name of my grandfather... but he's not me, at all.

If I were in Inquisitor I would probably have been servitorised for something, that or shuffled off into one of the more contemplative orders of the Ecclesiarchy.

[Trasher]

The only role I could see myself fit in would be as an Imperial Guard, possibly Valhallan, seeing as I did my military service in Boden, Sweden, which is pretty far up north. Armed with a lasgun or perhaps something akin to a heavy stubber, and a few frag grenades.  I'd have pretty thin armour, prefering flexibility over protection, probably just against shrapnel. A small radio would be good to have too, and some rope.

So Dwi, is this just out of general interest, did you just want to tell us who you'd be, or is this a kind of survey?

[Brother_Brimstone]

I always find questions like this a bit problematic. To face facts, the majority of members of the imperium are, for want of a better term, rabble - peasants, underhivers, industrial workers etc... By statistics alone it's almost certain we would be either a home-front worker or, at best, cannon fodder. It's also kind of difficult insofar as education in the Imperium is nothing like what we have now, so while someone now might have a degree in engineering, it hardly means they would be an Imperial engineer.

To ruin the fun even more, i have an issue with this kind of view of 'you' if you were born under completely different conditions. After all, what are we classing as 'you' here? Your particular genetic composition? Your particular personality/ personal identity? If it's the former, then we cannot say what we would be, as we simply don't know enough about how our particular composition would turn out under vastly different conditions, and if it's the latter, then there would be no 'you' in 40k, as a large amount of our personal identity is determined by our sociocultural identity. For reasons of philosophy, i'm a personal identity skeptic, but regardless, it seems that unless you're willing to make some pretty big metaphysical claims regarding some immutable soul or abstracted Cartesian Identity, there is nothing that is a 'you' which can be hypothesised about.

Based on this answer alone, i think it's pretty evident that if there were some kind of 'me' in 40k, he would have been executed long ago for asking far too many questions...

(i'm not meaning to ruin this thread or sound dismissive towards anyone involved, I just thought i'd throw a couple of my thoughts on the matter out there. I hate that the internet is so incapable of conveying tone that I feel forced to add a disclaimer of this sort, but i'd rather that than be misconstrued.)

[DapperAnarchist]

Brimstone - I understand the problem of "what if I were X" (classic examples include "What if I were Napoleon?") but I think there is a set of meaningful ways to interpret this. Firstly, is the "teleportation" issue - find yourself with all your current knowledge in a midhive township on Necromunda, what do you do? The other is a claim that there are a set of dispositional properties, attitudes and beliefs, that define us more clearly than a biological or strictly sociocultural position, along with the claim that those attitudes and beliefs are in some sense universally possible (pretty contentious for beliefs, less so for the fuzzier idea of attitudes). So, my "Andrej Cass" character has some of my properties, though I have intentionally not given him all of my properties. However, I could have, even with a different origin, and so I can ask "what would I (or someone sufficiently like me to be comparable) do and what would I be likely to achieve in a different world?" and still make sense.

However, I agree that making yourself your character is a troubling thing, for a couple reasons - one is the personal insult reason that Marco mentioned, the other is that you might miss out on the fun of being totally different. When I get round to playing Mass Effect, I will definitely be playing bad-ass space lesbian, partly for the fun of totally not being me at all.

[Brother_Brimstone]

I agree, but with the 'teleportation' claim, then surely anyone's answer would be 'alone, confused and with a very short life span'. With the 'dispositional properties' angle of things, i just find the whole thing arbitrary. What decides that me 'being a good reasoner' is a dispositional attitude, but 'really liking pork chops' is not. As i say, i'm a skeptic for personal identity. i don't believe there's any viable non-arbitrary criterion for selection of what is and isn't relevant to 'you'.

Still, i don't want to overly derail the thread, as i realise that we are both philosophy students; a group not known for their ability to simply drop an issue without it being talked to death :p

[TallulahBelle]

I tend to write characters I think are cool rather than base off me. i would really struggle to build off myself as the archetype of anyone.

[Dolnikan]

What I mean by basing them on me is that I take some aspects of my own personality and insert them into my characters. In this way I can much more easily get into their mindsets to make their behaviour make sense. A character with my own personality would be immensely boring, but some parts can be used with some other properties to make a nice character.