My halfling cleric has low strength, constitution and dexterity. His Intelligence and charisma are barely high enough to make a decent cleric. His wisdom is his highest but is only 16. His halfling luck and bravery have saved his skin more than once . When he’s in really dire straits, he can pray and call upon the Aspect of Kord to come to their rescue though. Aspect of Kord in our game uses modified stats from the stat card that came with the mini. He will only come if the party is out of healing surges and if a party member is near death. Then he stays for only one day once summoned and won’t come back for several days after he leaves. So even though he’s really powerful, we have to be careful in when we decide to summon him. This makes it fun to try to keep my cleric alive and able to heal the members of the party. We try to see how far into the adventures we can get without needing Kord’s aide.

We also made it so that my wife’s dragonborn can trasform into a medium copper dragon if she’s out of healing surges and her HP reaches 0. She regains half her HP when she transforms. The transformation only lasts one day, so she’s back to a dragonborn the next morning. It makes for a more dramatic and fun way to keep our characters alive than doing death saving throws.

I like playing clerics and paladins while she enjoys being sneaky and playing theives and rogues. We don’t really venture out into other classes because the ones we play feature the aspects of the game we enjoy the most. For variety, we change races and backstories each time we roll up new characters. Being a halfling cleric of a god of war is a fun twist and more challenging than my last character who was a dwarf cleric of Morodin. He got to be almost too good at adventuring after a while.
dukethepcdr´s last [type] ..Lookng for D&D Mini – halfing with bow or axe

In the group I DM for we have a Tiefling Warlord, and a melee one at that. It’s an interesting character and has had some difficulty in play, but he’s paired with a Dragonborn Fighter which has helped save his hide several times. It also makes for some very interesting party dynamics as the two expertly channel the hated rival but trusted comrade relationship.

One of my personal characters was a Tiefling Paladin of the Raven Queen. I’m still waiting to play the character, as I was unfortunately unable to participate in the game I created it for. I created the character when I realized that the 4E core rules had dropped the Lawful Anal requirement for Paladins. Upon realizing this I set about creating a Paladin that was as atypical as possible while still being a, admittedly nominal, good guy. Thus, I went for a somewhat classic Chaotic Neutral Tiefling with the unusual class of Paladin. And then further subverted it by making the Paladin as much of a striker as I could, who followed the Raven Queen and worshiped her through combat. I still regret that I haven’t been able to field the character, even though I suspect I’d have had some difficulties early on.

I think playing against type is awesome, both in terms of avoiding power-gaming, and in terms of avoiding stereotypes (instead of making a goliath barbarian, how bout a goliath rogue or assassin?). The only problem is, unless you’re playing with a skilled DM who knows how to properly tweak encounter difficulty, your party will probably not do so well. Having been in parties with unique/interesting characters, it can get really frustrating when your low attack bonuses cause you to miss all the time, and the enemies end up just murdering your party.

I think these kind of unique combos only work when the DM is willing to lower the difficulty (by lowering the defenses of monsters/changing their hitpoint totals/etc). Otherwise, it just seems to lead to a lot of dead PCs.