I want to emphasize that so I don't get weird personal messages or the like from someone feeling called out. The things that annoy me, or annoy you, may not be bad for every tabletop group or campaign story, and may even be fun for some groups or there may be exceptions that make them bearable and so on and so on. :zizek-ok:
With that disclaimer aside, I'll list some of my pet peeves, both when I'm running a campaign and when I'm playing in one.
The exile that doesn't actually experience any stigma or negative social consequences for being exiled, but the player insists that the character is exiled somehow because it sounded cool and badass. This gets extra annoying if the exile thing nearly becomes a plot point but that plot point is thwarted because the person playing the exile starts to complain about it.
"The last" whatever they are. Some wonderful stories are about someone being the last of their kind, but when it's used as a cheap and lazy gimmick to try to make a character seem special in a paradoxically basic and commonly-used way, it annoys me.
The walking talking powergaming template. Yes, I can tell that the player knows the rulebook and supplemental materials well, but when asked who the character is, this is the person that talks about the template's superiority and often can't come up with even basic character motivations besides "win and dominate in a game that is supposed to be about cooperation and interactive storytelling."
Direct lifts from any existing well known IP. They aren't just uncreative; I have yet to see a player play such a character convincingly or even design the character well enough to match the intended material. I might actually be impressed if someone pulled it off for a one-off or casual campaign.
Characters that are just the player in real life, but transplanted into the setting with better stats and cool powers. I think it's nearly impossible (and probably not worth the effort) to try to play a character that has absolutely nothing in common with the player's personality, interests, quirks, or the like, but with that said, a direct player-is-the-character player is almost always going to be trouble. In my experience, setbacks, injuries, and especially death can and often will make such players take it very personally, get vindictive, and sometimes have an Epic G*mer moment that can get profane, even violent. Not fun.
I've had that be ok when it's just like a face-cast, as in "this character looks a lot like this actor, here's what their personality is like". But if it's literally just another character, that sucks lol
Seems like something a kid would do when they're playing pretend after playing FF lol
I don't mind copping appearance, clothing, or personality to get the gist across to everyone, but doing that for all of the above is just lazy.
:soviet-bottom: I'm am just happy when players make it to sessions and have fun.
Players who choose to play the jerkass, and DMs who tolerate it. If your character hates the party, wants nothing to do with the party, and steals from the party, why the fuck would the party keep you around?
Both DnD campaigns I have played with completely unrelated groups of friends had a guy doing this. In both cases the DM said we'd have to fight them off to make them leave. In one the dude was a total minmaxer who would have smoked any of us, and did happily. In the other the character died to an enemy in combat and rerolled the same character. It's completely put me and my partner off of tabletop RPGs.
A lot of so-called "nerd" communities have had that problem for decades: they are so superficially welcoming to fringes and outliers of people that are exceptionally bad socially that they drive off a lot of people under the pretense of being inclusive. Inclusive didn't include everyone, mind, :us-foreign-policy: :feminism: . It just meant "that creepy smelly guy that stares a lot and scares off game store customers must be allowed to do whatever he wants."
It's Geek Social Fallacy #1:
As a result, nearly every geek social group of significant size has at least one member that 80% of the members hate, and the remaining 20% merely tolerate. If GSF1 exists in sufficient concentration — and it usually does — it is impossible to expel a person who actively detracts from every social event.
A variant of that fallacy is what caused 4chan to go from being edgy and "ironic" to being a nazi nest over time, too.
The nazis invited themselves in, nothing pushed them out, those who didn't like nazis left, so eventually the dominant voices were nazis and nazi-adjacent.
I have a strict no-PvP rule at my table. No matter what the excuse is the characters have to be people who work together and to some extent trust each other. No exceptions. I'm too old to deal with the rogue who steals from the party or the evil barbarian who for some reason is running around with five paladins.
One of my recent groups was blessed with a rogue that had a habit of sneaking up to unconscious allies... and getting them up with healing potions. He was a weird combat medic but it worked.
It is funny that, if you allow Fast Hands Thief feature to apply to potions and the like as a bonus action (RAW they don't, but a lot of people allow it), Rogues kind of become the best non-magical healers. Made a 'Thief' for a one shot that was a doctor, taking the 'Healer' feat, and DM allowed fast hands to make that a bonus action (stretching the rules a bit, but w/e, its a one-shot).
Interesting to see how many Rogue class features can make sense as a doctor or non-magic intellect character. Perhaps not too surprising that Pathfinder's Investigator is pretty mechanically similar to Rogues.
How feasible is it to make an archer healer with something like salve sacs on their arrows?
RAW, in 5e? You'd just have to reflavor healing magic. But depending on what you're going for, shouldn't be too hard of a homebrew, and there's a lot of classes it could fit into, depending on what you're going for. Healing is relatively plentiful, and could be powered by money (aka buying potions), magic, or class features like channel divinity or lay on hands. Especially since something like Ranger does get healing spells, easiest way would probably just give Ranger a spell to make healing arrows.
In Pathfinder 2e, the alchemist class can just yeet healing elixer at people to heal them at base, and there's a crossbow that can deliver elixers with its 'bolts'. RAW, it has to be damaging, but honestly I don't think it really makes a difference to allow it to load healing into it. If you were set on doing an archer, should be simple to swap crossbow to normal bow.
Yeah not necessarily an archer, just some kind of mundane ranged healer. Making it damaging but also restorative would be an interesting twist too, like you'd have to be proactive with healing or buffs in order to not accidentally kill people in the process. Maybe healing over time to minimize the number of times you're shooting people lol
Yeah, nothing like that exists too similarly in 5e, probably the closest being the 3rd level feature for the Purple Dragon Knight, which lets your Second Wind also heal nearby allies with a encouraging shout. So you're solidly in homebrew territory, with the biggest thing to watch for is how often you can heal people. Just tie it to something you can't spam and it should be fine; like the healer feat only working on each specific person once per rest.
Lots of ways to make it work in pathfinder 2e tbh, but the game has a specific focus where anyone that has any focus on the medical skill will have enough healing to make sure every is pretty much always full health outside of combat, no magic needed, and some way to more limitedly heal in combat non-magically. Along with a few classes getting free elixers everyday, including the Herbalist being allowed to use nature instead of crafting/medicine, it shouldn't be too hard to get any class ranged non-magical healing ('multiclassing' is pretty easy in PF2e, you just swap your own classes level up abilities for anothers, with some level restrictions).
I found 99% of characters too edgy. I'm just a dude who knows herbs and some medicine
"Is a member of (class-related organization) in good standing" is one of the rarest career profiles.
I usually play the third son of an undistinguished farmer who wasn't going to inherit anything so set out with an old sword to seek adventure. It's just easier to fit a down-to-earth, reasonably friendly and helpful person in to the DnD milieu.
I'm still fond of "mid-life crisis fairly well to do bank clerk that has to keep writing letters back to his wife to lie about his ongoing 'business trip.'"
I was about to leave town after selling all my potions to go back to my village in the mountains, but I got hijacked and now am peniless looking for some work at the tavern. I just need enough to at least make the trip back home and the rest will use it to buy new alchemy equipment
One of my biggest annoyances is when people make a 3 page long retelling of all the feats and battles their charater went through as a backstory... at level 1. Mind you, I personally think even a high level character being created shouldn't have a massive backstory, but it is specially jarring when your badass battle hardened veteran gets ganked by 3 goblins.
CW:SA
This isn't a "character concept" but a friend of mine once had a habit of putting random sexual assault mentions in their backstories, to make them more tragic or something. Thankfully after I realised that it was a recurring theme I asked them to, you know, maybe tone down the sexual assault in our lighthearted adventure game, they got it and stopped with that:::
That's chilling. The only way it could be worse (I only read about it being this worse) is a DM being so creepy that he announces that the characters were sexually assaulted as an edgy variant of "you wake up in a dungeon." The incident I read about even included the "this is just realistic" excuse that chuds are so fond of.
Yeah pretty much every game I’ve been it started at level 5-6 just cuz the DM said that would let players have more justifiably badass backstories. If you’re really starting at level one your character should be a fresh off the boat peasant, maybe with some mild combat training. But everyone wants a cool backstory so just start at a higher level.
That one guy who insists on playing a Chaotic Evil character, no matter how (in)appropriate such a character would be for the campaign or not.
Y'all know at least one.
(I had a friend who kept playing Fish Malkavians, but thankfully he grew out of it and got better about integrating that kind of jokey character into the campaigns appropriately. Mostly by figuring out how to turn it down and not derail a campaign.)
Ugh. Malkavians. Speaking as a mentally ill, it's not fun being mentally ill and most Malk players I've run in to don't really get that.
Yeah, the only time I've seen Malks done well is when they kinda abandon the whole mental illness angle of the bloodline to focus on prophecy and being the Cassandra... things that fit in better with a supernatural horror setting.
I like that. Most Malk concepts I've seen end up being really cringe pop culture versions of dissassociative identity disorder, or just "I'm so random" fish malks.
I think it would have worked better if instead of saying they’re “mentally ill” they said they “embrace chaos” or something like that, they’re not really “insane” so much a s they’ve just embraced a different way of interacting with the world that makes them seem unhinged to everyone else.
Min-max players, the kind who try and treat ttrpgs like some fucking looter shooter like Borderlands or Destiny.
Don't give a shit about the characters or the story, just want to make sure they always have the best possible items the DM can give them for their "build."
A prejudice of mine that I know I have but I feel justified in having is about people that call their character sheet their "build." It usually means that player has the wrong attitude and goals that will make the rest of the group has a less fun time. :sus-deep:
You remind me of just about the entire companion NPC cast of the first modern Neverwinter Nights game, where you have an eloquent and polite Half-Orc Barbarian with a double-ended double-headed axe (not a typo, it was a very stupid weapon), a clumsy Elf Cleric (admittedly she was charming enough to get a pass), a bloodthirsty cockney Halfling Rogue with a kukri because exotic weapons are more epic and should be used as much as possible, a vaguely defined but superficially hot Bard with a Darth Maul-style double sword because 3rd edition was obsessed with double weapons, and the worst one of all: a Chaotic Evil Dwarf Monk, bald with no beard, named "Grimgnaw."
The expansions gave us Deekin so they made up for that.
I appreciate the offer, though I already have my own modeled after the "Ships and the Sea" supplement from 2nd Edition. Weird but had some useful bits.
To be fair, all of those exotic weapons you listed are in the core handbook of 3.5, even the Orc Double Axe, so I think players can be somewhat forgiven for using them, since they had cool pictures and shit with them.
My personal fav exotic weapon is the Sugliin. Just look at that fucking thing. My (somewhat old) homebrew for my dnd 5e game added a whole fighter subclass just focused on the silly exotic weapons of 3.5, here if you care to look. Should start on page 10.
Oh I know they were always there in 3rd Edition. That's actually why they were pushed so hard in Neverwinter Nights as official canon novelty.
They were mostly ridiculous to me, especially the "Orc Double Axe" (it would take a lot more strength to swing than it would be worth compared to just having a really big axe) and the "Dire Flail."
I think Darth Maul's debut really influenced that edition.
Shame that their 'rule of cool' didn't apply to balance. Man, martials were bad in 3.5, and those double weapons were pretty much all traps that were not even close to being worth the investment to wield them. Pretty much all the mechanically good exotic weapons were just dumb shit like Kaoti resin kukri.
There was some Orientalist colonial ideology :zizek: to the whole idea of what is "exotic" and what is not, too.
Weeaboo hype aside, a katana is a sword. A daikyu is a bow. For someone that lives in cultures that make and use such things, that should require roughly as much training as using a "normal" longsword or longbow.
Well, and the Sugliin is just a pike with Carabou antlers tied to it, there's no metal in that thing.
Thanks so much, this is really impressive! I've got that saved now. I've always wanted to do a naval campaign, something about it has so much more charm than a generic fantasy setting
My big one is characters that players try to justify "power gaming" with
Just because you say Ragthor is Half-Angel, Half-Demon doesn't mean you can give them 20 in every stat and immunity to elemental damage
I considered ranting about half/half/half/half specialness-binging fantasy eugenics enthusiasts, but I'm glad you brought it up first.
Yeah, as someone of mixed ancestry myself, it's a really big red flag when people treat fantasy species like dog breeds
It just gets gross almost every time
If the rules of the fantasy setting really did do "hybrid vigor" ideology to that degree, what would stop some eugenics-obsessed villain from weaponizing that ideology and making truly absurd hybrids in some evil laboratory?
I don't allow half angel half demon half vampire nonsense template stacking character concepts anymore, but if I did, I'd be tempted to roll out the above villain concept, and maybe even subtly dunk the powergaming player by making them realize that they were just a stepping stone toward the really powerful super hybrids that came afterward, maybe some amoeba-like Akira-style blob. :troll:
On the lighter side of things, I made an entire civilization of "Half-Elves" that didn't call themselves that because their shared ancestry had cultures and traditions woven together in an inseparable way. Both Humans and Elves were seen as outsiders to their own kind because they did their own thing as one people long enough.
I really liked them, too. I took inspiration from Maori, Incan, and Ainu sources to make something new.
As long as your character is a team player, I'm into it. So the only character pet peeve I have is when your character is a loner or doesn't gel with the party and its goals - its why I usually tell my players at the start of the campaign what the initial quest is going to be and ask them to figure out why their character is willing to risk life and limb and travel for weeks cross-country with a bunch of strangers to accomplish it.
I get kind of iffy when someone wants to play the strong, silent type. That usually means they want to focus more on combat, which is the part about tabletop RPGs that I am least interested in. Same with any kind of powergaming really. I'm not pissed at any person for finding joy in looking for ways to maximize their character's combat potential. It can be fun to play around with numbers and try to find ridiculous combinations that do weird stuff, and I don't begrudge anyone that fun. But when it comes to actually playing, this pretty much means that these players are trying to maximize the part of the game I enjoy the least, so it goes in my list of pet peeves.
One time, a "strong silent" character did a lot of body language and was actually quite a likeable concept. He was almost the party's mascot, in that silent but expressive way. :cursed:
Oh, it's not impossible to do well, just a bit of a red flag that this player may be looking for a different kind of game than me. I guess it's when the player wants to be silent I don't like it. Sometimes you will get someone who wants to play a bodyguard kind of character that just stands by and pretty much does nothing until combat starts. I hate that. Someone doing a lot of body language is engaging with the group and participating in a way that I think would be fun.
This is something that I’ve sorely missed since moving to online gaming because of covid/people moving. Hamming it up with body language and overacting doesn’t translate to a tiny window in the corner of a screen
Joke/comedy characters in general. I have played with good comedy characters and bad comedy characters. The bad ones make everyone else at the table hate the character and the player for coming up with it, the good ones bore the player after two sessions.
I've had some players that I trust with comedy characters if they can reliably get serious when the encounter is serious. It's a license I can revoke if it gets out of hand. I was fortunate to have some funny players that could also resist ruining too many serious moments.
the good ones bore the player after two sessions.
Did they bore themselves, or did you mean the others got bored of them, even when "good?"
I mean the player who brought the comedy character. Even if it's a good one they're usually ready to move on pretty shortly
Oh, I see now.
I don't think he was being funny on purpose, but one time a Chaotic Stupid Rogue in the party got himself killed in a funny way as his bow-out moment.
The party was visiting a highly-advanced fantasy-futuristic flying city high above the rest of the campaign world, complete with magic-powered sentry robots and philosopher-citizens spending all day discussing highly sophisticated arcane and divine topics. One such philosopher-citizen politely asked the Chaotic Stupid Rogue his opinion about some apocrypha that the plaza-goers had been debating for a few years nonstop, and so the Chaotic Stupid Rogue answers with a sneak attack murder, in broad daylight, in public, only a minute after I described the security robots.
I then had Chaotic Stupid Rogue roll initative. The rest of the party declined to roll, staying out of it and disavowing association.
The security robots went first. I described how their elemental cores channeled and directed concentrated beams of elemental energy, basically D&D lasers.
I then described a new kind of robot that they overlooked before: basically a D&D Roomba, gathering Chaotic Stupid Rogue's ashes.
I try to be open to characters that are weird and goofy like how real people are (anyone who goes on adventures is going to be a little strange), but nobody ever wants to do that. If a character concept isn't straitlaced serious, then they exist entirely to facilitate one joke.
It's not a direct answer, but I'll share a character I came up with once that maybe shouldn't have worked, but it did.
I played a character who was quite genuinely the crown prince of a large and wealthy kingdom... but was such an idiot that the kingdom convinced him to go off on an adventure ("we need you to go save the world!") so that they could be governed by someone competent instead while he was gone. A good person, but just very suggestible and airheaded, with some Don Quixote type stuff mixed in for good measure.
