If you're struggling to come up with interesting character ideas, follow these strategies and you'll have a cool idea for a fun character to roleplay as in no time.

Take and tweak ideas from your favorite stories

Take your favorite characters from the movies, books, or games you love, and change them in some way:

• Adapt them to the genre you're playing in.
  For example, take your favorite sci-fi character, and adapt them to fantasy.

Iron Man but in a fantasy universe - a brilliant aristocrat inventing steampunk machines in his spare time.

• Change one of their key personality traits.
  Take a cool villain and create a good version of them, take a shy and humble character and play an eccentric and outgoing version of them, take a high status character and play them as low status.

Low-status Gandalf - an ancient wizard shyly mumbling something about the powerful artifact that would be nice to destroy, if that's not too much of an inconvenience to you.

• Reverse their physical characteristics - gender, age, appearance, etc.

Female Yoda - an old goblin witch people always come to for wisdom and advice.

• Combine characteristics of two different characters into one.

A squirrel from Over the Hedge with the skill set and costume of Zorro.

Google the lists of the top TV/Movie characters, pick your favorite ones, and experiment with changing them in interesting ways, or recombining the interesting aspects of these characters into something new.

Start by choosing your appearance

Search websites like ArtStation, and Pinterest for things like "Fantasy Character Design", "Paladin", "Ranger", etc. Or view the top posts on /r/ImaginaryCharacters.

Find an image you find inspiring, and use it as a foundation of your character idea.

Start with a superpower

Finally, you can start with a cool occupation, fantasy race, or a superpower you'd like to have, and build a character around that.

Be yourself

If all else fails - you can always just play as a fantasy version of yourself.