So, in gathering thoughts for a review of King of Fighters 2006 I'm trying to write, it occurs to me that SNK characters in general manage to mostly come across as excessive attempts at being "too cool."  It also occurs to me that Alba Meira in his primary costume's black and yellow color scheme would probably make a good image for how I'm starting to picture my latest Mekton character.  So, since players of RPGs besides myself also definitely have this tendency to dream up characters that are just too intentionally cool to be believed, I figured SNK games must be a fertile ground for concepts.  But it goes beyond just that company's properties and all the way to Soul Calibur, Tekken, or any other property that has recognizable characters.

How many of you have lifted characters for your RPG sessions (whether completely, or just partial concepts) from a videogame?

Never.
Not for any character I would play anyway.
I've lifted my fair share of villains, though.

I have. NPCs, and a couple of PCs.

The only videogame that's ever really inspired my gaming is Silent Hill.

Every horror gamer should play at least the first two in the series (I found three mediocre and four excerable).

Even though RPGs and videogames and not the most similar things in the world, they are both games.

Despite all the scary movies and books I've consumed, I had great difficulty understanding how to get surrealistic, otherworldy supernatural horror (the kind where the protagonists seriously question their perceptions and, ultimately, the nature of reality itself) to actually work in the context of an interactive game.

Silent Hill is brilliant for that.

The only game to have really influenced my RPGing is Shenmue.  Many is the game when I've said "Actually we're going to play out waiting for the bus in real time.  You've got 45 minutes of sitting around waiting" or had them wander around the back streets of a town looking for sailors.

I'm joking, except for the sailors thing but that was an intentional reference that none of them got *sigh*.

Seriously, the only game to influence my RPGing is Suikoden where you don't just have the characters go on adventures, you allow them to slowly build something up so that their sense of accomplishment has something real to focus on so that if they die they can say "well... I helped create that".  I also had like unlockable NPCs who could be played if your main PC died.  This was all in a Buffy campaign.

Beyond that I don't really like videogames... apart from Football Manager.

Can't say I've ever been inspired to play a specific video game character but the game as a whole has given me ideas to turn into games.