Making my own list with custom numbering

Question

I am making my own list, similar to enumerate. I want numbering to be aligned to the right, so everything looks like this:

 1. Text
    Text
11. Text
    Text

I also want to sometimes put a special symbol after automatically put number like (this doen't work, but I hope the idea is clear):

\item la-la-la
\item[*] difficult la-la-la

So I would like the document to look like:

 1. la-la-la
2*. difficult la-la-la

The problem is that it looks like:

 1. la-la-la
 *. difficult la-la-la

so the "2" is gone.

Is there any solution?

My code so far (I am using LuaLaTeX):

\documentclass[10pt]{extarticle}
\usepackage[top=0.5in, bottom=1.25in, left=1in, right=1in]{geometry}
\pagestyle{empty}

\usepackage{mathtools}
\usepackage{comment}
\usepackage{amssymb}
\usepackage{amsthm}
\usepackage{skull}
\usetikzlibrary{shapes.geometric}
\usepackage{tabularx}
\setlength\tabcolsep{0pt}
\setlength{\columnsep}{1cm}
\usepackage{ragged2e}
\usepackage[russian]{babel}
\usepackage{mathptmx}
\usepackage{polyglossia}    
\defaultfontfeatures{Ligatures=TeX}
\setmainfont{Times New Roman}
\newfontfamily\cyrillicfont{Times New Roman}
\usepackage{mathrsfs}
\setmainlanguage{russian}
\usepackage{enumitem}
\usepackage{lipsum}


\newcounter{qcounter}
\newcommand{\TTT}[1]{#1:}

\newenvironment{questions}{
    \begin{list}{ 
        \hfill\bfseries\upshape\arabic{qcounter}.
    }{
        \renewcommand{\makelabel}{\TTT}%
        \usecounter{qcounter}
        \setlength{\labelwidth}{2em}
        \setlength{\leftmargin}{3em}
        \setlength{\labelsep}{1em}
        \setlength{\itemsep}{3pt}
        \setlength{\listparindent}{1em}
        \setlength{\parsep}{0pt}
        \setlength{\topsep}{6pt}
    } 
}{    
    \end{list}
}

\begin{document}
\lipsum[1]
    \begin{questions}
    \item \lipsum[1]
    \end{questions}
\end{document}

Answer 1

Assuming that you do not want to nest these environments, you can define a new enumerate-like environment using the enumitem package with the command:

\newlist{questions}{enumerate}{1}

This defines a questions environment that behaves like an enumerate environment and has 1 level of nesting (to allow nesting change {1} to give the required nesting level but you will also have to modify \fakeitem below). You can set the "properties" of your environment using the command:

\setlist[questions]{
   label=\arabic*.,   % label format
   leftmargin=*,      % indent labels
   before=\let\item\fakeitem,
}

The first two lines I have explained with comments. The before= command redefines the \item command to be \fakeitem only inside this environment. The idea is that we hijack \item to make it do what you want. The label counter for this environment is questionsi so we need \fakeitem to accept an optional argument, which it should add to the label, and we need to manually increment the counter:

\newcommand\fakeitem[1][\relax]{% argument defaults to \relax
   \refstepcounter{questionsi}%  increment label counter
   \realitem[\arabic{questionsi}#1.]}
}

Here \realitem is the original \item command.

Putting this together gives what you want:

Here is the full code:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{enumitem}

\let\realitem\item% save a copy of the \item command
\newcommand\fakeitem[1][\relax]{% argument defaults to \relax=do nothing
   \refstepcounter{questionsi}
   \realitem[\arabic{questionsi}#1.]% make label <questioni>#1.
}

\newlist{questions}{enumerate}{1}% define a new enumerate environment
\setlist[questions]{% define properties of questions
   label=\arabic*., % label format
   leftmargin=*,    % indent labels
   before=\let\item\fakeitem, % change the \item command
}

\usepackage{lipsum}% for MWe only

\begin{document}

    \begin{questions}
       \item la-la-la
       \item[*] difficult la-la-la
       \item[$\dag$] \lipsum[1]
    \end{questions}

\end{document}

Btw, there is another nice feature of using enumitem: if you would like all of the questions environments to use the same numbering then all you have to do is add resume to the \setlist command:

\setlist[questions]{
   label=\arabic*.,   % label format
   leftmargin=*,      % indent labels
   before=\let\item\fakeitem,
   resume             % use continuous numbering for the questions environments
}