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.
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:
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).