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.
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.
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.
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
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 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:::
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."
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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 mean the player who brought the comedy character. Even if it's a good one they're usually ready to move on pretty shortly
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.
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.
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
