In order to balance out the edginess of my current party, I've made an honourable centaur cleric who always tries their best to help others and never backs down from a fight. Greatly respects perseverance & nature, finds personal sacrifice to be foolish, competition as wasteful, pride distasteful and has an extreme hatred for cowardice and dishonourable conduct. Comes from a wholesome family background where they learned herbalism and alchemy, to make potions, tonics and spirits to tend to the various normal folk living around.
This is in contrast to two amnesiacs with tragic backgrounds that are steadily being uncovered as the weight of their past actions catch up to them, one exiled prince who has gotten himself trapped in the spirit realm (ironically saving him from the many, many enemies he's made throughout the campaign through a series of unnecessarily bloody actions), and a tiefling assassin with the mental age of a child who believes the world persecutes them for being a devil descendant, and not because they are a chronic thief-murderer. It has been such a fucking fun campaign for everyone.
My cleric centaur is steadily converting the atheist amnesiac wizard to her Earthen God in the name of justice, bountiful plenty and righteousness. Working together with the edgy amnesiac paladin to make him live up to the tenets of his oath, so that he can finally be the good man he says he is. Even managed to make headway with the edgy tiefling, telling him that the God of death he serves takes his time to take lives, so he should think his actions through too. And whilst she hasn't convinced him to return his stolen wares, she has convinced him to not treat violence as a matter of first resort.
Mechanically, I never liked 5e DND magic for a bunch of reasons. The main gripe being it had too many anti-roleplay "I win" buttons that just skipped over problems in exploration, combat or social arenas. The other main reason being it's very easy to outshine anyone else not using a spell list, as DND magic just provides a breadth and depth of power & versatility that renders the non-magical classes fairly vestigial as the campaign goes on, and the wizard renders the non-wizard magic people fairly vestigial in their own domains.
I always played barbarians, rogues, fighters, monks and so on because I liked the roleplay element of heroes succeeding on their merits instead of on magic, but was fairly disappointed at how 5e didn't let you make a char that could hold a candle to a hero like Diomedes, Odysseus or Hercules, or even Conan the barbarian. In short, it's easier to make a Greek god than it is to make a Greek hero... Which is strange?
So as a side interest I tried making various interesting multiclasses or various stupid multiclass specialisations that created mechanically inferior but roleplay goldmines, relative to doing a straight class progression. Things reached hilarious ends in two campaigns when my DM and fellow players accused me of making ridiculously OP multiclasses, and both times I showed them I was just playing straight monk and straight rogue. At this point my DM said he realised I wasn't pulling tricks on them, I was just the only one in the group who read the rules xD
Eventually however, we reached the point in a year and a half long campaign where our party had to either deal with finding some way up a waterfall/cavern entrance, or going through a heavily defended passageway infested with undead. The wizard and paladin misty stepped up, the tiefling flew over the waterfall, whilst my barbarian climbed up through the waterfall. Cue an entire fight through a flooded temple where my character, whose entire theme for a year and a half was that they were a sea monster hunter who had just learned how to breathe underwater, was completely obsolete in almost every challenge and obstacle. Before I could even try anything it would always be resolved by magic, with many of the problems resolvable only through magic. Despite having a glorious moment to shine when he was successfully wrestling a boneclaw that nearly TPK'd the party, giving everyone else advantage on it with constant grapples and shoves, my friends even asked me if I wanted to change char because I spent three hours mostly watching them play whilst I had naught to do.
I took up the offer, and as my humble fisherman retired briefly from adventuring to go back to sea monster hunting, I deployed a horrifying gimmick build. I made it as a threat to my DM; it was either that, or the 4 int wizard orc wizard who casts fist, or the wise sagely archer centaur that can't miss. Instead I chose to make Cayetan Carota, the Fortunate Centaur, who embodied concentrated plot armour - a walking reality glitch that forced the universe to exhibit internal cognitive dissonance every now and then.
By chaining together a fuck ton of feats, cleric, wizard and sorcerer spells, I made sure that every turn and with every action I could manipulate the result as long as I hadn't expended my resources. Out of character, I made sure my DM and players were ok with this, and whilst my DM threatened to have me murdered IRL if it turned out to be horrendous, my comrades were delighted. Fortunately, my DM did not murder me, as I also chose my gimmick options to be as streamlined as possible. In character, whenever I buff myself or a party member to roll up to 3 d20 + 3d4 + 1d6, we roleplay it as freakishly unlikely successes occurring, as reality warps around the power of Cayetan the Fortunate One's existence - much to her own ignorance.
There are many feats and classes which manipulate rolls, rerolls, success chances, advantages/disadvantages. If anyone's interested I can dump all the spells, feats & classes which do just that. Nevertheless, a lot of these features have overlap which prevents you from squeezing the most rolls out in the shortest amount of actions, or else have a high resource cost that prohibit extended shenanigens. This is one of the more fun ones I found which avoids this overlap.
Using standard array, I started with a lvl 1 Unity Cleric (UA), 16 STR, 8 Dex, 10 CON, 13 INT, 13 WIS and 15 CHA. First level of cleric unity gives medium armour proficiency, a whole bunch of useful spells like healing word or thaumaturgy, ritual casting - and most importantly, buffs like guidance, resistance, heroism, shield of faith and bless. Debuffs like guiding bolt and bane are useful but our WIS is pretty suboptimal, so it's best to use CONC spells for buffing. The special emboldening bond allows me to give +d4s to my allies attacks, which can stack with bless, whilst the 16 STR means I can stay on the frontlines with the melee fighters without being dead weight. As such, the touch range on a lot of the cleric cantrip buffs isn't an issue, as Cayetan is usually always where they need to be to buff her allies.
2 levels of divination wizard give a whole bunch of useful utility spells like mold earth, shape water, find familiar, healing elixer as well as the buff gift of alacrity, which gives +d8 to initiative without costing a concentration spell slot. The class feature divine portent allows two d20s to be substituted a day with two pre-rolled d20s without using any action, which is vital when your paladin is jumping onto a dragon's back from an airship somersault and you have a 20 in reserve - or you want an enemy to fail their save for sure.
From there wild magic sorcerer all the way, taking up all the buffs you can. Enlarge/reduce, enhance ability, shield, mirror image, blink, haste, counterspell, skill empowerment all ensure your less magically inclined party members can't be shut down by magical monsters or enemy wizards. As the char doesn't use offensive magic, the lack of optimisation does bugger all to stop the FORTUNE CLERIC from using the entire party as an ever more deadly sword and shield.
Magical guidance (reroll failed rolls for 1 MM point), tides of chaos (gives advantage, use restored after every 1st lvl or higher SORC spell is cast) and bend luck (spend 1 MM point to add or subtract d4 to a roll, costs reaction though - most importantly, can be used on enemies without save) drastically expand the options available to Cayetan. Feat: Wild Talent allows me to add a psionic dice that scales with level (d6 to d12) to my CHA rolls and attacks, amongst other things. Shield, enhance ability, enlarge/reduce, blink, mirror image and later on skill empowerment all also give me more options to make my teammates surely succeed whenever it truly counts. Feat: Lucky was also an obvious choice, which lets you get super advantage (an extra d20, which can be added on top of disadvantage/advantage) 3 times per long rest. Going halfling would've allowed for even more optimal fortune bending but alas, halflings don't get the great carry capacity the centaur does. As is, I'm carrying a crap ton of equipment, weapons, rations, supplies, kits (alchemist, herbalist, climbing), tents, common conveniences (mirrors, combs) as well as multiple changes of clothes, with plenty of carrying cap left to carry an unconscious teammate in a hurry.
Right now I have two options when it comes to level progression.
1. Continue straight sorcerer to get more sorcery points + some character appropriate roleplay spells, like otherworldly form (appear like an angelic servant of the Earthen God), Earthquake (obligatory) or wish (options!).
2. Get 3 levels in Rune Knight for more buff/debuff options, a battlemaster dice & at least 1 lvl in bard to access those inspiration dice, and maybe mage initiate or a class or two in warlock to get the talisman buffs. Warlock's not really worth it though.
As it stands my char's lvl7, and by lvl9 can with careful resource and action management using haste:
-Add to every ABI check, attack or save up to +3d4, +d8 (CHA only) advantage (+d20), super advantage (+d20), or subtract d4 to 2d4 per round.
-Replace two rolls per long rest.
-Provide any other utility benefits a high lvl spellcaster can.
-Immunities to a shit ton of conditions through things like heroism or environmental manipulation.
-The one downside is that the character itself is really maladapted for save or die spells, spell attacks and melee damage in general. This never bothered me as I hate save or die spells, spell attacks and damage counting to begin with, and the buffs you can add to your party mates or yourself more than compensate for the paucity of 20 tier stats. It also means you can make your multiclass-averse best friend shirk in horror as they finally find out the straight cleric they think they've been adventuring with has secretly been a cleric-wizard-sorcerer-fighter-bard the whole time.
Whether I decide to go the route of adding fighter/bard dice or not, I'd say I've been pretty satisfied with my first proper magic man character... Even if it's not a "proper" magic man who cries lightning bolts and sneezes fireballs. That'll come later, no doubt when I make a muscle wizard that only speaks in Ancestor and Bane quotes. What's even better is I'd say my focus on making other player chars shine instead of making my own shine has in turn led to less main character roleplay, and more team player roleplay. A L L A C C O R D I N G T O K E I K A K U
Anyways this has been a way too large wall of text. Sorry if it bores; I couldn't decide if I wanted to talk about the social dynamic, the roleplay adventure or the dice rolling more.
*EDIT
It should go without saying that the theoretical maximum amount of dice roll hasn't happened yet, because in actual play it is much better to only use as many extra dice as your comrades need to succeed. To go all out leaves you rather unarmed for subsequent encounters, and has only happened once - whilst searching for a relic on a crashing airship in the middle of a dragon fight. After all, the help action is free advantage. I could also use find familiar owl help action shenanigens, but the charm of this character is that their in-character impact is them appearing with their God's banner held high and inspiring everyone to charge into the fray. Plus with a venomous snake familiar you can make plenty of snake milking puns whenever you're collecting venom for potion making. But yea, besides the unbelievable luck people experience around them, there's nothing empirical to prove as the result of Cayetan. The paladin player RPd perfectly in character how their char felt inexplicable strength and guidance helping them slay an ancient dragon. It's a very low fantasy kind of shenaniganery, where your impact is felt but not seen. I just love it, it actually feels like magic at work