I've seen several threads recently about problem players. Of course none of us here have EVER been disruptive.::rolleyes:: So how about chiming in with a story about something you said or did that in retrospect you probably shouldn't have. I'll start it off.
I was a dick when:
Me and a friend turned another friend's character into a running joke. It was a modern monster hunter game and something about his character concept Mr. Meagi from the Karate Kid and the way he tried to mimic his accent and quiet demeanor struck us as hilarious. Yeah, he was actually roleplaying. What an absurd concept. But we couldn't keep a straight face, and somehow we started calling him Fortune Cookie (which he refused to answer to) and my friend started leaving his laundry bag outside his door for him to wash (they got thrown in the trash, of course), and when he finally blew up we both tried to hold in the laughter as we apologized, which consisted of "We're sorry, man, we were just kidding, we didn't mean anything by it," and he accepted and we could have moved on, but then there was a pause and then in my best Billy Batts impression I said, "Now go get your effing shoe shine box," and even the GM busted out laughing. And so ended the shortest campaign I've ever been part of (although we're still all friends and game together when we can).
So, anyone else got a story or am I the only dick?
Pete
Well, you know that GM game books warn about and tell you to not become? The one that favors one player at the expense of the others? Well, I've done that. And not as a one shot, but over a certain period of time (few weeks). It was years and years ago when we were teens, and I completely was unconscious of that fact, but I kept having cool stuff happen to one particular player all the time - he would get the cool shit, meet the most impressive NPCs etc relegating the other players a spectators to his own adventures.
I was a dick. And I didn't know I was.
Until the day we had a beer degustation together in a building one of my friend was rebuilding with his dad from the ground up. Everybody drinks, everybody gets drunk and tongues loosen up, and people start talking... and boom. It exploded in my face. Not in anger and all, but rather as a fait accompli, of which I was completely unaware, and which I tried to deny during the first good half hour of conversation. But honestly, there was so much evidence of this fact that I opened my eyes.
I had been a dick, and that wasn't going to happen anymore.
So I reassessed what I was doing and listened to what the players where actually saying. This changed my GMing for the best, as I'm very aware of concepts like spotlight, setting up situations based on characters capabilities and player personalities for them to shine through, and so on, so forth.
It was a huge learning experience to me.
One-shot game, World of Darkness, pre-Revised. Medieval vampire hunters, using Vampire: the Dark Ages and the Inquisition (Year of the Hunter) book.
One of the players is fiddling with his character sheet even as the game's running.
My tense, atmospheric descriptions are frequently interrupted as he goes "can I lose a point in X to gain a point in Y?", or "can I trade Z for W?".
By the third time, I can only say, "[player's name], if you change your character sheet again, you're the next to die".
Unerringly, the players persists on his mistake, interrupting the description of a grisly murder scene with some inane question on Backgrounds.
In a couple of scenes, our party of dauntless hunters is confronting the Big Bad du jour, a Lasombra neonate. I decide he's using Obtenebration 1 to darken the room, and then Obtenebration 2 to asphyxiate someone to near death. Or maybe he'll kill of a hireling, or...
Wait. They have no hirelings. And it's a one-shot game, right? And I did warn that player over there. So, fuck "near death".
"[player's name], you're suddenly running out of air, as if drowning on something you can't see or feel. You're being attacked by foul vampire sorcery!"
"Huh?"
"Roll."
[I don't remember the exact mechanics, but he was trounced]
"[player's name], [character's name] is dead."
Much laughing. The player was a sport. It was, after all, a one-shot game (which around here means, among other things, "high PC mortality rate"; that particular session had only one survivor. And it was 4 or 5 hunters against a single neonate vampire, played straight. :D). But I did feel kind of dickish afterwards.
I don't know how dickish this was but I once ran the Mechwarrior RPG module "Null Set" (long story short, the module briefly introduces cyberpunk-like mech control interfaces, VR cockpits, etc. and a mystery behind the creator). Had four fantastic sessions. I invited a couple of friends from a different group in for what was to be the finale. Sadly, all one of them apprehended about Battletech was it was Macross in a different universe and approached it accordingly. Right down to her Minmay like character who piloted a Phoenix Hawk ("VF-1S").
There was...friction.
The most disappointing low of the game was when at the conclusion of the more prickly players from group "A" told me he thought the campaign was one of the best I'd ever done until he brought in those other two players.
:(
My friends and I were playing the AD&D module Day of Al'Akbar (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_of_Al%27Akbar). I was playing my Myrikhan character (NG Paladin variant from the A Plethora of Paladins (http://members.tripod.com/Lord_Eadric/paladins/paladins.html) article by Christopher Wood from Dragon #106). Another friend, Brock, was playing a core Paladin. Lastly, another friend, Dwayne, showed up with a unknown character. He said that he played this character with other people, but since he only played with us it was immediately suspect. He was known to have dubious scruples.
So, Dwayne's character was thin and frail looking and carried a sword with demonic runes upon it. Clearly to all of us, his character was an Elric clone. While camping for the night, our characters started talking with Dwayne's character and asked him about his sword. He told us IC that their was a demon in the sword that gave him strength and vitality. When we questioned him further about this demon in the sword, he said that it was benign and helpful rather than evil.
The two paladins exchange glances and then subdue the Elric clone. All the while we are telling him that it is for his own good, and his very soul, that we are doing this. We tell him that we are concerned for his mortal soul and that he needs to be separated from the sword. He protests, but without the sword his character is weak and cannot fend off both paladins.
Between the two paladins, we had a Bag of Holding and Portal Hole. We put the demon sword in the Portal Hole and then toss in the Bag of Holding.
BOOM!
We destroyed his demon buddy sword. Dwayne was livid! He pouted the rest of the night since one of us was his ride. He didn't play with us again for several weeks while he stewed in his anger over the atrocity committed against his kewl character.
In retrospect, it was a dickish move thinly veiled with in-game justifications. However, it was so damn fun doing it to his character since he wouldn't come out and just say that his character was an Elric clone- and that audacity irked us.
I have been a dick during RPG sessions more times than I can count, but I can't come up with anything hilarious or even particularly memorable - just cases of me being irritable or petty. I just wanted to note that I don't consider myself blameless of dickery :)
My last campaign was WFRP 2e, and I had a huge group of players. One of them has sort of a 'rivalry' with one of the others because, natch - one is an elf and one is a dwarf.
So they are descending down the dark spelunking tube when they begin to fall to their deaths. One of the other players is also a dwarf, but falls to his 'near' death (involving expenditure Fate) two levels down, while the elf dies one level down from the main party due to not having any more Fate points.
Ok, so the dwarf that hates the elf (not the one in the bottom of the pit) climbs down one level and throws the elf's body deeper into the pit - where the other player's dwarf body is. This is extremely dickish move on the players, and it kinda irked me that they'd be so hateful to one another (they are good friends in real life)...so someone had to pay. I threw a random die, and rolled the maximum on it...so I decided the body that was thrown had hit the one that had fallen to the bottom of the pit...and that it did damage...and it killed the dwarf player (the innocent one) AGAIN, requiring ANOTHER FATE POINT.
Of course this kind of harshness isn't uncommon in my campaign, but from that particular point on, the dwarf who hated elves played much better with the elf's cousin (who the elf player then began to play using the same miniature).
D&D game with my high school buddies. One of my players created a generic thief named Raven. For some reason this infuriated everyone else at the table. I still don't know why.
Another one of my players created a Fighter who, through an overly long and badly written backstory, was the heir to numerous awesome artifacts and the fulfillment of an ancient prophesy and thus could not be killed.
These two players were in constant conflict with one another. The Thief was there to hang out with friends and throw some dice around. The Fighter was there to tell his story and the rest of the group could suck it.
At some point they run across a Deck of Many Things (always fun), and Thief draws three very beneficial cards. This pisses off Fighter and when he drew a Wish card he used it bring down Thief. He crafted a one page sentence littered with comas, colons, semi-colons, dashes, parenthesis, etc that outlined specifically how he wanted to humble Thief.
I had had enough and decided it was time for my own Dickery to shine. I ruled that since the entire party had benefited from Thief's fortunes everyone's items and wealth disappeared. The group, outraged, destroyed the Deck. In my second Act of Dickery I quickly invented a patron deity for the Deck and had it appear to punish the PCs.
A one round TPK followed. My parting shot.
"I guess someone else will fulfill that prophecy."
We still game together, and laugh about the event, but we don't bring Decks into our games anymore and I limit backstories to half-page bullet points, but that's mostly because I hate ready bad prose.
Edit: Oh and If I'm feeling surly I'd add hit points to momsters, ignore a PCs actions for one round, or keep a monster alive so that a player who won't gloat about its death gets the killing blow. That happens less and less as we roll in the open now and I take the game less seriously.
Before I started Gming, I was a "But that's what my guy would do!" kind of player. I didn't do it maliciously, I was just clueless. I had no idea how much work (some) GM's put into prepping an adventure, never stopped to consider that if a fellow spend all his gold on a +2 sword he might be itching to actually use it. For me it was all about doing what felt right and natural for my character, often with little regard for anyone else at the table.
Gming was an eye opener. And as a result I turned into a much more considerate and constructive player.
Unfortunately this also turned into a boring player and in the process lost some of the energy and enthusiasm I used to bring to the gaming table. And truth be told the player characters my friends still remember fondly are all the older ones.
You just can't win.
Quote from: Cole;410764I have been a dick during RPG sessions more times than I can count, but I can't come up with anything hilarious or even particularly memorable - just cases of me being irritable or petty. I just wanted to note that I don't consider myself blameless of dickery :)
Same here.
I once threw another Player's kender PC down a dry well. It was considered justifiable.
Then there was the dungeon in which, right before the entrance to an undead filled crypt, there is a magic font that bubbles up holy water (supposedly trapping the undead in the crypt). Naturally we all fill our empty potion bottles and wineskins with the holy water, except for the guy who decides to bath his Character in the font and thus soak himself in the holy water. In the heat of combat, I pointed out to the Player that he could consider himself a magic weapon since he is covered in holy water, and thus he should go hug the undead, causing it damage. Two level drains later, the Player is cussing me out from across the table because I suggested such a dumb thing for him to do.
When I was about fifteen, a friend's little brother wanted to play in our Star Frontiers game. He was maybe nine or ten. He persisted until we finally let him play, and then basically raked him over the coals. We gave him impossible goals, set him up to fail, fudged the die rolls, and brutally punished his character no matter what he did. He never asked to play with us again, and I could hardly blame him. We were complete assholes. Given the chance to go back, I'd do that differently.
Back in the 90s, there was this long-running Vampire LARP that many of us had a love/hate relationship with. It was fun for awhile, but as time went on it got more and more twinkish and ridiculous, so rather than just leave gracefully, a group of friends and myself organized a massive trolling of the game. We showed up with satirical characters, fucked up everyone's subplots, made elaborate fun of the campaign and Vampire in general, and basically acted like we were better than the game and everyone in it.
Of course, we thought we were
hilarious, but years later someone who played in that game told me that they were just trying to enjoy themselves, and us coming in and shitting on our fun wasn't as charming as we thought it was. I often have mixed feelings about this one. On one hand, we were dicks. On the other, that game was already a joke, and I still think some of our gags were hysterical.
Finally, there was the time when a fellow player in a fantasy game kept aggravating the GM, basically taunting an omnipotent, evil NPC whom the GM had made very clear was not to be fucked with. This NPC was the quest-giver and, while not part of the main plot at all, was an unstoppable bad-ass. But the player decided it would be awesome to get in his face for no particular reason. It went something like this:
QuoteNPC: You must go to the Froofraw Mountains to go get the magical fershlugginer.
PC: Fuck that, you're not the boss of me.
NPC: I pretty much am.
PC: You're not so tough, I could take you.
NPC: Mouth off one more time and I'll disintegrate you.
PC: Nanny nanny boo boo.
NPC: *disintegrates PC*
Player: WTF WHY?!
While I was a spectator in all this, I admit to dickishness because I thought this was hilarious and laughed in the guy's face, even though he was mad enough to nearly come to blows.
Also, during a tournament we left some character to be eaten by a carrion crawler because we didn't like the player.
Granted most of this was 10+ years ago, but wow, I was a lot more of a dick than I like to think about. :/
Quote from: jeff37923;410791I once threw another Player's kender PC down a dry well. It was considered justifiable.
Then there was the dungeon in which, right before the entrance to an undead filled crypt, there is a magic font that bubbles up holy water (supposedly trapping the undead in the crypt). Naturally we all fill our empty potion bottles and wineskins with the holy water, except for the guy who decides to bath his Character in the font and thus soak himself in the holy water. In the heat of combat, I pointed out to the Player that he could consider himself a magic weapon since he is covered in holy water, and thus he should go hug the undead, causing it damage. Two level drains later, the Player is cussing me out from across the table because I suggested such a dumb thing for him to do.
Oh God, that reminds me of one that unfortunately wasn't mine but some gaming buddies of mine love to tell this one. In college they gamed with a guy who was there at the table but wasn't "there", if you get my meaning. Anyway he had his soul stolen by a demon, which they slew, and one of the players smashed the demon's amulet (which had its essence inside it) and another player said "Hey, Ponder, that smoke escaping the amulet is your soul - go breathe it in, quick!" "Uh...okay..."
whoopsThe demon got a new material form and had about two seconds to enjoy it before the party pounced.
Quote from: jeff37923;410791I once threw another Player's kender PC down a dry well. It was considered justifiable.
Then there was the dungeon in which, right before the entrance to an undead filled crypt, there is a magic font that bubbles up holy water (supposedly trapping the undead in the crypt). Naturally we all fill our empty potion bottles and wineskins with the holy water, except for the guy who decides to bath his Character in the font and thus soak himself in the holy water. In the heat of combat, I pointed out to the Player that he could consider himself a magic weapon since he is covered in holy water, and thus he should go hug the undead, causing it damage. Two level drains later, the Player is cussing me out from across the table because I suggested such a dumb thing for him to do.
This reminds me of a running semi-joke among our 3e group regarding trying to test someone for being a vampire with what became known as "The Holy Handshake." We never had the guts to try it though; one of us asked the DM "so, does an undead have to attack you to level drain you or can he just drain you if you grab hold of him?"
The DM, displaying his DMing skills artfully, replied "you don't know."
I think I managed to make just about all the standard GM mistakes over the years...
One that I specifically remember... One player was the 'I kick down the door and rush in screaming!' type... and I had this room, with no door, that had a large glistening gem sitting right in the center of the floor. It was a trap... he rushed in... the ceiling came smashing down... he died.
Then the argument started... it wasn't fair... he should have had a chance to dodge the ceiling... whatever, I was stubborn about it and kept him dead... but decided I'd give him a chance spirit-jump into some nearby critter and rolled on a quick random chart I made... and put him into a dog.
So he was a dog until they could get him somewhere and have his spirit put back into his body. (the dog turned out to be quite useful and the player made the most of it... but he was still kind of cranky).
It's embarrassing to even tell that story... and know I've got a shedload of them waiting in the wings.
I think I managed to make just about all the standard GM mistakes over the years...
One that I specifically remember... from High School... one player was the 'I kick down the door and rush in screaming!' type... and I had this room, with no door, that had a large glistening gem sitting right in the center of the floor. It was a trap... he rushed in... the ceiling came smashing down... he died.
Then the argument started... it wasn't fair... he should have had a chance to dodge the ceiling... whatever, I was stubborn about it and kept him dead... but decided I'd give him a chance spirit-jump into some nearby critter and rolled on a quick random chart I made... and put him into a dog.
So he was a dog until they could get him somewhere and have his spirit put back into body. (the dog turned out to be quite useful and the player made the most of it... but he was still kind of cranky).
It's embarrassing to even tell that story... and know I've got a shedload of them waiting in the wings.
Back in the day, we were egging on a very egomaniac player who had an 18/00 fighter, to do all kinds of dangerous things. Apparently this egomaniac player thought his 18/00 fighter with plate armor made him invincible. (The DM allowed the fighter to have plate armor at the beginning of the game). After a short while, this 18/00 fighter ending up dying from too many stupid mistakes and the DM just happening to roll some powerful monsters from a random table.
After his 18/00 fighter died, this egomaniac player punched the DM in the face over it. After that, he got pissed at the other players for "egging" him on to do so many dangerous things, that he tried to punching one of the players in the face. So we all ended up ganging up on this egomaniac player, and physically threw him out the front door and onto the front lawn on his ass.
Wow, you guys are a bunch of assholes! :)
I was at a convention with a bunch of friends several years ago and the bunch wanted to do the whole con together so we signed up for games only if all six of us could get in together.
On Saturday afternoon, the only fully open game as this dude's playtest of his new sci-fi game. We said WTF why not and jumped in. It was atrocious, a textbook of bad game design by someone who had only ever played AD&D and Champions and didn't really know that RPGs design had advanced from 1983. This was 2003 or so. More importantly, the dude was 100% sure that his game was unbroken and utterly perfect and because he was an engineer in real life, the game math was also utterly perfect.
So I proceded to demolish his system. The most casual read showed me that min-maxing would be hysterically simple with his point-buy so I created the "FahJa" after the creepy Dutch swinger dude in Austin Powers 3. He was uber-rich with no skills and had to be contained in power armor because he had viral airborne venereal disease, but fortunately the power armor was anatomically correct. More importantly, I bought up a giant robot and filled it to the brim with goodies.
The other players were shocked. I had fucked his system like a Tijuana whore and it just got worse and worse in the gameplay of his demo. I egged on the rest of the group and we set about tearing apart the "nice parts" of his setting (Crystal Gardens of the Imperial Empress, etc) and stomping on his canon NPCs to the point he kept writing down notes because now they were dead and he said couldn't exist for future games.
Once we learned that he literally would cut out aspects of his setting based on what we did in a convention one shot demo, it just got really bad. I led the charge to squash any NPC he had built (which takes about an hour of chargen).
We were merciless. I've done a lot of demos and lots of playtesting of homebrews, but that dude's insistence of his RPG perfection just set off my shiny red button that day.
And yeah, I'd do it again.
I've been a dick a bunch, especially when I was a teenager playing with my nutjob friends. The two worst incidents:
Back when I was playing with the guy who tried to stab me & the rest of them, I used to have an exacto knife most of the time. When someone died, I'd snap my hand out, grab the character sheet out of their hands / off the table, and slice it in half with the exacto knife while shouting "You're fucking dead! Rez this motherfucker!" I had it down through practice so that I could do it in a single swift motion while cackling. Occasionally I'd throw the pieces back at them.
The second one is the worse of the two, and it's that I was in a group where one PC raped another PC (worse yet, the player playing the rapist was a dude, and the player of the victim was a woman who may or may not have had a crush on him until that point). I pretty much kept my mouth shut and averted my eyes (I wasn't DMing this game either, thankfully). She quit the group basically at the end of the session. Not my proudest moment.
Most of the rest of my dick stuff is lightened by being funny in some way, but those were not good. Thankfully they were both a long time ago.
Quote from: Soylent Green;410786Before I started Gming, I was a "But that's what my guy would do!" kind of player.
Oh yes, I've done a bit of this in the past too. :o
Those guys that didn't let Sasha Grey play D&D with them in high school were probably dicks.
Speaking of high school. A friend of mine was running Al Qadim at one point. He wasn't very experienced with GMing but I was excited about finally getting to play instead of GM for a change. Well, it didn't turn out very well when I began to argue with him about the very premise of the adventure. I think he was using a module and at one point we were supposed to travel by land along a coast line. I was whining (I admit it, I was whining) about why we couldn't take a boat instead. I just wouldn't shut up about it. Let's just say that the game ended suddenly.
I...I don't think I was ever a real dick when taking part an in RPG game. I've been a dick plenty of other times, but I don't remember anything about RPGs. Honestly. :idunno:
I've always been tagged as the level-headed sane guy, even in my broader group of friends.
Granted, being too nice as a GM lead to its own share of problems, even if we did have a bunch of fun to make up for it.
My dickishness has not seeped into my gaming (yet),at least not overtly. Perhaps my gaming groups have just kept quiet about it?
:hmm:Not sure this qualifies... I tend to beat a dead horse (unless the GM shuts me down) thereby obfuscating/taking time from the otherwise smooth flow of play (my characters just like to be thorough :o)!
I once witnessed a game at a local store that caused me to walk over, take the DM's giant soda, dump it all over his books, lap and campaign notes, then inform him that he was banned from the hobby on pain of curb-stomping.
Quote from: Shazbot79;410883I once witnessed a game at a local store that caused me to walk over, take the DM's giant soda, dump it all over his books, lap and campaign notes, then inform him that he was banned from the hobby on pain of curb-stomping.
That was you??
Man, now my copy of Exalted is all orangey :/
I like to think I haven't been a rude or inconsiderate that much, but one occasion leaps immediately to mind. I was a player in a dark sun campaign (I think it was dark sun anyways), and my cousin and his girlfriend were the other two players. We'll say the GM's name was Fred.
We played friday nights. I am not much of a drinker at all, but I was probably 19 or 20 and me and my cousin spent the whole afternoon drinking in his living room, completely forgetting about the game. We even invited a few people over. Basically we blew off the session to get wasted.
Around 7 PM there is a loud knock at the door. It's fred and my cousin's girlfriend. He basically convinced us to go to his house for the game session.
I think the people hanging out at my cousins (who weren't gamers) thought Fred was out of his mind; he kind of showed up like an FBI agent or something.
Quote from: Shazbot79;410883I once witnessed a game at a local store that caused me to walk over, take the DM's giant soda, dump it all over his books, lap and campaign notes, then inform him that he was banned from the hobby on pain of curb-stomping.
*Rolls to disbelieve*
Nope, I don't believe you.
Dick move #1:
When in the military, my weekends would involve a night out in the town on friday, and some gaming on Saturday, another night out in the town in the evening, heavy carousing on both occasions. We had a AD&D2e game running by a close friend of mine, who stepped in to GMing, because I could not during that time. I REGULARLY fell asleep. It was a bit boring (our first encounter with 2e Forgotten Realms-Style), but it was of the most impolite and inconsiderate things I did as a player and friend.
Dick move #2:
When I was 14, I got invited to an group of seven or eight people playing Runequest (ages 16-21). There was a weird group dynamic going on, with one player being a little bit of a grumpy know-it-all. The other players would write little notes to each other mocking him, his grouchiness, character and even his looks. That lead to several instances of notes being exchanged that ended up in giggles, only the grumpy guy grew grumpier and grumpier. I participated in note writing and felt accepted by mocking someone else.
Some years later I met the "grumpy" guy again, and we became good aquaintances. The game itself was a bore, so I never played with the RQ GM again. All in all rather sad and cruel instead of spectacular.
Quote from: Settembrini;410936Dick move #1:
When in the military, my weekends would involve a night out in the town on friday, and some gaming on Saturday, another night out in the town in the evening, heavy carousing on both occasions. We had a AD&D2e game running by a close friend of mine, who stepped in to GMing, because I could not during that time. I REGULARLY fell asleep. It was a bit boring (our first encounter with 2e Forgotten Realms-Style), but it was of the most impolite and inconsiderate things I did as a player and friend.
I used to be a bartender; in those days I was often guilty of the nodding off during a Sunday game session myself. I tended to get very fuzzy during long d20 style combats, too, which made it even worse.
Quote from: Cole;410910That was you??
Man, now my copy of Exalted is all orangey :/
If it's any consolation, I got 86'd from that store for a month after that stunt.
Quote from: Shazbot79;410943If it's any consolation, I got 86'd from that store for a month after that stunt.
Given that the event was true, what exactly were the circumstances?
Quote from: thedungeondelver;410950Given that the event was true, what exactly were the circumstances?
The DM in question had an NPC named "Ravenwing Darkcloak".
Quote from: Shazbot79;410985The DM in question had an NPC named "Ravenwing Darkcloak".
My brain uncontrollably switches back and forth between both trying to make sense of which is supposed to be the main name and which is supposed to be the epithet, like a lexical analogue of the Umber Hulk's four eyes.
Quote from: Shazbot79;410985The DM in question had an NPC named "Ravenwing Darkcloak".
Hijacking this to start a thread on regretable PC/NPC names
Quote from: IceBlinkLuck;411020Hijacking this to start a thread on regretable PC/NPC names
Rob (you'll hear me mention his name a lot if you pester me for no shit there I was gaming stories) had a paladin named Palentides. (Pal-en-ti-dees)
Ol' Pail-n-titties was regret pretty quick, I can tell you.
And to be ecumenical and self-deprecating, I ran an Iron Man ripoff (well, to be fair the GM allowed me to have a guy who worked for Tony Stark as a character so it was less ripped off than 'inspired by') named Bastion. As in, fortress.
The Neverending Story jokes that got thrown my way...oy.
Don't know if this qualifies,but I always feel a little bad when I think about it. My freshman year at college there was a graduating senior who had become a legend with his long time campaign and he was starting a new group in that world. I got in and I made a first-level magic-user with a fairly elaborate set of motivations. Almost immediately discovered that this was pointless for a first level character as the strategy the group pursued was a "try and die" roulette where a large number of first level PCs would engage in repeated battles with a horde of goblins; about 70% mortality rate for the PCs but the survivors would advance levels and then recruit replacements (new first level PCs).
My character was a spanner in the works because I wasn't willing to see him die and replaced. So I would have him cast "sleep" on the goblins, then essentially flee (occasionally walloping a goblin who got in his way with his quarterstaff). The other players, including the GM, concluded I had not contributed to the battle and my character earned 0 x.p.s over the course of four of these fights (including one time when he got lost in the wilderness for two weeks and survived by eating his spell components).
One of the other players decided to help me out and had his ranger introduce me to an NPC magic user (3rd level) who was willing to let me memorize "find familiar" from his spell book. Enraged and humiliated, my character waited until the NPC had opened his spellbook and then cast sleep on both him and the ranger (was barely able to affect them both) and then murdered them both and ran off with the spell book. The GM would not let me bring the character back into the campaign, and the campaign died soon after . . .
I'm a terrible player. I have this bizarre need to create obnoxious PC concepts that are terrible fits for the games, especially when the gm is someone who lets me get away with it.
Some of my more terrible PCs:
* I insisted on creating an investigator for a Bureau 13 game who was blind.
* I had a paladin in a birthright game who insisted on not taking on rulership of a region along with the other PCs. That managed to piss everyone off.
* I had a white supremacist PC in a vampire LARP that insisted the tremere were jews. It was intended as a parody but I think that got lost on people.
* I created "Thor" for a D&D game - the brain-damaged blacksmith who thought he was the god of thunder.
* Once Thor died, I created a bard who played the organ grinder. Worse, I insisted he had a pet trained monkey who could fire a crossbow. I can't believe the DM went along with that.
* In a fantasy Fudge game, I had "Mordath the Contemplater". His only skills were in things like Philosophy and he was incapable of making a decision. Worse, because he was a nobleman (he was out adventuring while the roofer repaired his castle) the rest of the group made him the leader. A large portion of the one and only session was me going, "well, on the one hand, we could do X; but then again, we could do Y..."
* Finally, in another D&D game, I had Hamza, the Muslim fighter. He spent most of the game complaining that we allowed the women in the group to talk and not wear veils. He wouldn't let the female cleric heal him by laying on hands because they weren't married, nor would he sleep in the same tent as the women.
Quote from: jgants;411220I'm a terrible player. I have this bizarre need to create obnoxious PC concepts that are terrible fits for the games, especially when the gm is someone who lets me get away with it.
Some of my more terrible PCs:
So maybe I'm a terrible player too, but a few of those character concepts sound pretty awesome.
I know this is the autodick thread, but jgants' post reminds me of one of the more frustrating players I've gamed with, who took criticism of his characters' actions very personally.
That's not entirely unreasonable, since a PC's actions are the player's choices, but he insisted on playing what he thought were quirky characters but were actually difficult, contrarian pricks.
You can't pitch an obstructive pacifist cleric into a party you know is composed of violent, amoral mercenaries, then get sulky and passive aggressive when other players get frustrated with your deliberate attempts to frustrate them
Quote from: jgants;411220I created a bard who played the organ grinder. Worse, I insisted he had a pet trained monkey who could fire a crossbow. I can't believe the DM went along with that.
Should I ever meet you in the Real World, I will buy you a drink for creating this character. Kudos.
Well, I guess this was kind of a dick thing to do...
The Dwarven Cleric in our party, played by someone that would test the patience of any living soul, was petrified by a Beholder.
The player was expecting us to have him restored once we got back to Waterdeep, but we decided to give him to an innkeeper at a place the party frequented. He made a fine statue near the birdbath in the inn's lovely garden. We eventually had him restored, after we saw how much we were missing his healing capabilities. But it was a tough decision....