Ray was, in some ways, a copy of Rafe Martel (my third Icon character), all the way down to the pictures. Ray was a brave and likeable street tough, a big man who didn't want trouble and who liked the ladies. However, I played him with a completely different gaming group, and not the usual crowd, so in many ways the tone was less gritty and realistic and the characters more traditional fantasy archetypes. I arranged with another player that our characters (my street tough and his knight) would be brothers who had grown up separately and hadn't seen each other for ten years. Fortunately, we got along well, and I got to experience that certainty of knowing another character would stand by my character no matter what. Everyone really liked us "playing against type" as well, most obviously in our fighting styles: while my character (the thug) would try to intimidate people out of fighting us and didn't like hurting people too much, his brother (the noble knight) was a brutal fighting machine that went around crippling our adversaries with ruthless efficiency.
I had no previous experience of the d6 system, and I haven't played it since. I found it a system that was very flexible but very unsatisfying on a number of levels. I've never read a published rulebook, so maybe the GM's house rules made me less inclined to like the system: for instance, it cost much, much more to improve an attribute by a step than to improve every skill that derived from that attribute, and that just seems wrong to me. To work out what I found so troublesome with the d6 system, I sat down and whipped up a simple version of what I'd like it to do. There aren't many details, but what there is may help clarify Ray's character design, which I've modified to work off my version of the d6 system.