Quote from: BalbinusWhen you have a Roman in ancient China you have two choices.  Realistic reactions, in which the entire campaign becomes people wondering who the Roman is and reacting to how alien they are, or ignoring it in which case the game world lacks any real internal sense.

Well, in reality the way its played out has been that his character came to China with his father and granduncle back when he was only a boy, so he grew up learning a lot of chinese customs. His father had become a trusted servant of Sun Jian, and so now the PC himself is a trusted servant of Sun Quan.
That said, being a "Barbarian" his options for social advancement are pretty slim, but being in the south has given him a distinct advantage. In the time of our current game, Sun Quan is colonizing the barbaric south (the lands to the south of the Yangtze river), and the Roman PC has been put in charge of fighting or pacifying the various barbarian tribes that occupy that area.  Leaving a Barbarian to take care of Barbarians was a very chinese thing to do, so he's found a place for himself.
That said, the player knew (I told him) that he was always going to face a social stigma playing a Barbarian in china, and that this would be a disadvantage to him with no conceivable advantages to counter it.  He decided to play the Roman anyways, and to his credit has been doing a fairly good job of it without complaints.

Meanwhile, the same player has, over in my Roman Immortal campaign, decided to play an immortal that goes around openly saying that he doesn't really give a fuck about The Rules.  This character is unlikely to live very long, unless he is very very careful (or very very powerful, which he isn't; thus far he's been treated patiently by the immortals he's met because his character is actually very young, less than a century old, but that has been largely good luck in meeting with very generous immortals, I suspect his luck won't last).

RPGPundit

That all sounds well handled Pundit.

On the more general point, I still say if you can't play a decent fighter I'm buggered if I know why I should expect you to play a decent half dragon shadowdancer or whatever.

Quote from: BalbinusOn the more general point, I still say if you can't play a decent fighter I'm buggered if I know why I should expect you to play a decent half dragon shadowdancer or whatever.

Meh, two rather different playing styles. There's the so called "rogue divide". Some players can't play scoundrels, some people can't play anything else.

I'd second the vote if it's "rogue vs half-dragon shadowdancer", though.

Quote from: SosthenesMeh, two rather different playing styles. There's the so called "rogue divide". Some players can't play scoundrels, some people can't play anything else.

I'd second the vote if it's "rogue vs half-dragon shadowdancer", though.

Fighter was just an example, basically I mean if you can't play a fairly straight character odds are you can't play a bizarro one any better.  I do appreciate some people just don't enjoy or aren't good at some particular types of character.

Quote from: BalbinusFighter was just an example, basically I mean if you can't play a fairly straight character odds are you can't play a bizarro one any better.  I do appreciate some people just don't enjoy or aren't good at some particular types of character.

Some people think in terms of characteristics rather than character. Give them a one-eyed half drow former prostitute turned Warblade with half- draconic ancestry, a lisp and a gammy leg and they're excited. Ask them to weave a convincing backstory around a humble baker (who doesn't fill his pies with the remains of his poisoned wife) and they're stumped.

Ahh, my favorite species of gamer, the good 'ol "beautiful unique snowflake."

Drew has the gist of it, I think:

QuoteAfter months of this we eventually had a sit down where I told him the effect was quite the opposite of what he was shooting for-- his zaniness was predictable, his off-the-wall approach was leading him to be typecast as "that guy who just doesn't get it."

QuoteSome people think in terms of characteristics rather than character. Give them a one-eyed half drow former prostitute turned Warblade with half- draconic ancestry, a lisp and a gammy leg and they're excited. Ask them to weave a convincing backstory around a humble baker (who doesn't fill his pies with the remains of his poisoned wife) and they're stumped.

Fundamentally, it is easy to play the oddball; you need not engage with the setting/style at all except to set yourself in opposition to it, and in fact may not even be able to make such an engagement.  Effective subtlety is hard work, and the true inspiration for creativity is limitation, after all.  

So on the surface level we have both laziness and a desire to be the center of attention.  I also susupect that, in a darker way, this "style" has to do with the reflexive geek allergy to authority.  When you say your game is about x, with y and z constraints, you are laying down an authoritative stance (an essential one, of course); this turns on the "petulant 13 year old" in some folks, and they go into sabotoge mode, even if only in an unconscious way.

If I wanted to get really dark, I would suggest that a more fundamental kind of sabotage is going on.  From personal experience, this type of play comes with a ready-made excuse for leaving the game.  That is, the conflict and drama their oddball character creates gives them an "out."  Hell, they might just want the out-of-game drama directly.

The thing to realize is that a player who listens to your pitch for the game, and then makes a character in direct opposition to its style and themes, is being aggressively disruptive whether they realize it or not.  So, like others have said, talk to them or kick them out.

Why not just kill the character? I mean, some dude who's playing an ordinary dude in a Supers game is going to get burnt to cinders the first time the big bad flings a firebolt. So incinerate him, hand him another character sheet and say "What's your next character going to be like?"

In RPGs, where violence is pretty common, people who don't fit into the world and have some way of either coping with its demands or forcing it to obey theirs tend to end up dead.

Because using in-game methods to fix out-of-game problems is a patch at best.  From reading Pundit's description of his solution, it seems that he has struck a balance, but he was also rather upfront about the consequences, so there you go.  If you tell folks that their non-superpowered character in a superhero game is probably going to bite it, then that is a OOG fix for the problem, of course.

but if the guy constantly fucks with the game this way, and then constantly has his character killed, you think he'd get the point and change, or just leave.

this assumes talking to him didn't pan out

If talking to him didn't pan out, he really shouldn't be in the game.

This

Quoteyou think he'd get the point and change, or just leave.

is just passive aggression.  Man up and kick him out, or talk to him like an adult.  If you use in-game solutions it just adds several more layers of ambiguity for someone who is obviously not good at picking up subtle hints.