Awful little creature reporting for duty
Awful little creatures make the most fun characters by far regardless of game or setting.
Every party needs one, just to keep the party moving. When the entire party is busy hemming and hawing about how to best approach an encounter, they often need a Leroy Jenkins to just axe-chop the door apart and start taking heads.
The real issue is that oftentimes, the heads belonged to the hostages that the party was there to rescue. If the awful little creature had actually paid attention at all, they would have known that. But they were grabbing their fifth beer when that part was explained, (and they wouldn’t have listened to it anyways), so they had no idea who was inside the room.
Sure but what’s your TTRPG character?
Dead. cackles
My sister always picked those lol just troublemaking groblins
I’ve taken more damage from party members trying to get me under control than from the enemy. Now they keep me on a leash.
Missing:
- god-like magical being, masquerading as Just Some Dude (closely related: The Super-Powered Self-Insert)
- Most boring, generic build available in the system, played ironically (“His name is Hugh M. N. Fi-Thor”)
one time my buddy was running a game of Monster of the Week and I came up with the most mundane character possible: a Wisconsin corn farmer named Pete Faber, competing with angels, demons, and the miscellaneous supernatural
Sounds like he could be the next Ash Williams who works on over in housewares at S-Mart!
Oh! My first dm assigned me the god-like magical being role! It started as a group campaign and ended up being just me and her husband, and I was super new to it, so she wrote out a whole thing that my character was unaware of, and the entire story became finding out about this.
My own backstory probably sucked, but my character was a fire genasi mix who was trained as a mage blade. She was purple with white eyes due to badly botching her familiar summoning spell, so she ended up with a thievy purple monkey (incapable of following directions, unless I critted the roll) instead of the phoenix she was aiming for.
The dm snuck a giant gem into my inventory thanks to that sneaky thieving monkey (which caused a lot of problems, as you can imagine of a familiar that doesn’t obey fucking anything.) it ended up being an artifact from her ancestors, and unlocking the secrets of it brought out my latent goddessness.
So that was a blast.
Thanks for bringing up those memories! It was so long ago now…
DM assigned specialness is different and often really fun.
I’ve played a few “mystery backstory” games those are really fun, especially the one where we had to figure out even our class
MORE FLAWS
MORE
I think of myself as the chaos engine that drives the plot forward. Everyone else in the party would just sit and talk plans forever if I wasn’t out here rolling death-saves.
- Whatever lets me create the biggest explosions
Haha, yeah, the fact that I played almost exclusively women and my few masculine characters still often had more feminine features and mannerisms was totally just to challenge myself. Never a subconscious exploration of my deepest desires.
Says the now VERY out and proud about it transwoman.
Also missing: pure random-roll character who makes no sense and contributes nothing other than needing to be rescued a lot.
And the corollary, overbuilt min-max character based solely on researching the meta for hours but only rolls good at things they’re not built to do
I actually like point-buy systems where you get better at what you actually use (like in Morrowind).
I start at average values in everything and see where the story takes my character.That’s actually an intentional mechanic in Monster of the Week. The Mundane gets bonus XP by wandering off on their own and pushing the plot forward by needing to be rescued a la Xander.
I think there’s also a pair:
- Takes the setting and theme very seriously. Reads the lore. Knows the details. Can tell you why the Lancea Sanctum and Invictus are traditionally allies
- Absolutely does not take the setting and theme seriously. Wants to play Barney the Dinosaur in your game of Vampire, and Punisher in your game about running a bakery.
I’m old and tired and generally am super tired of “wacky” ideas like the second one there. I feel like I’ve come full circle. As a youth, I thought like “let’s play vampires and struggle with humanity!” was cool . Then there was a bit where i wanted to flip it- “let’s play vampires but like go to theme parks and don’t do anything sad or deep!”. Now I’m back around to wanting to just play the theme as intended.
This is especially true if it comes up after session 0. Like, if you want to do a D&D game about running a BBQ shop, fine. Let’s do it. Let’s kill, cook, and sell some weird monster parts. But please don’t derail the whole game on session 3 when you insist on going back to town to cook the monster meat when it was clearly a random encounter and everyone else wants to continue the dungeon dive pitched in session 0.
I can’t play with my friend because we play the same guy.
Both rogue. Both street tough types rather than the shadowy assassin type. Both used to end up taking a couple of levels of either Bard or fighter and ended up with a swashbuckler. No strength, all dex and cha.
We did play together a few times and would swap out which one of us got to play that guy. The other always played a very angry wizard. Just grumpy as shit. Good at a lot of things, but preferred to either fireball or magic missile his way out of situations. Talking to NPCs? I think I’ve got potions brewing. Must be off!
Before we played together we played the same MUD separately. Yep, same character. We ran into each other from time to time.
In high school we played at the same place but a couple of years apart. I started going when he left for the Navy. The guy who DM’ed there said my character reminded me of that guy a lot.
I want to play BG3 with him remotely and both play swashbucklers.
Play identical twins.
Separated at birth. Completely oblivious to their similarity.
If we didn’t both know who our fathers were and if he weren’t a few years older that would absolutely describe us anyway. Went to school not far from each other and I played baseball against his younger brother, then was on the team with his brother for fall ball. Different churches that were part of the same cult. Similar teenage interests. Same social circles just a few years apart. Same branch of the military and same rate (this is where we went from being aware of each other to being friends). Both married and divorced young. Super similar career paths. Both settled in the same large city several hours from our small hometowns (I got here first, for once) and played music with the same people. Super similar adult interests completely separate from our teen interests. It’s fucking freaky. We didn’t even realize it for years until it was pointed out.
He eventually moved out east while I stayed. I’m one of like 3 people he still keeps in contact with in the state.
Reminds me of this: https://youtu.be/Dzner6zTEVs
Me and my best friend played halfling twin brawlers one time who would use each other as improvised weapons and crawl in big guys Shadow if the Colossus style. It was the most fun thing ever, but the DM turned out to be the “if someone doesn’t lose a limb during every encounter I have failed” kind of DM so it didn’t last long.
Have you ever thought about taking him on a trip to El Dorado?
“Okay, tell us about your character.”
“Hm? Oh… human fighter.”
“That’s it?”
“Mm-hm.”
“What do they look like?”
“Middle sliders on the character creator.”“Any motivations?”
“Do quests to earn money.”“How about a backstory?”
“Did quests and earned money.”
6 sessions in and no one has identified/mentioned the person my character is based on, probably because I’m not good enough at doing a Rodney Dangerfield voice
No respect. I tell ya!
Where does the “ridiculous minmaxed character to game the mechanics” fit in? We had a miner/scribe once.
One of my favorites that I ever played was a character I where I rolled my stats first and ended up getting a -3 modifier even with mulligan rolls. Every other stat was anywhere from decent to fuckin ballin’. I sat and thought about it for a minute: what stat would be fun, interesting, and challenging to have as a -3? STR would suck, INT and CHA would be anything from really annoying to insufferable or ablist to play (every VERY low int character ever in D&D podcasts is extremely cringe to listen to), so that leaves WIS and DEX. I chose DEX and said that it was because my human fighter was a war veteran with an Above Knee Amputation from the war. From there, I arrived at him using pole arms because they help him to steady himself on his peg leg outside of combat, and that he’s deeply uncomfortable with magic, since magic cost him his leg and many comrades in war.
It led to one of my all time favorite moments in an RP where he and the paladin were dining in a Giant’s great hall, having a disagreement about how to proceed, when the Paladin cast a spell on him (I can’t remember which, I want to say it was silence or Zone of Truth, but it can’t be because it specifically targeted him). My character stared him down, slugged down the rest of the drink, then flipped the table and commenced to trying to murder the paladin. It was a pretty nuts PvP fight, since we both ended up successfully avoiding the party members who were trying to restrain us, landed a few solid blows on each other, and it only ended when the Giants had had enough of our shit.
I ran a game where one of my PCs played a character with high Int and Cha and like 6 Wis. He played it very well as a character who was too clever by far but consistently made poor choices counting on his wits and charm to see him through.
Oh shit I’ve done the same thing with the same modifier for the same reason! We used a “roll 3 6x3d6 arrays and pick one” method and the one with 5 Dex was the only interesting one of the three, so I made him a former shipwright whose leg got fucked up when a mast collapsed on it
I think he passed one dex save in his entire career
I’ve done too many of these. I tend to fall on 1 often though.
Number 1: my barbarian idea was just “funny Russian man with pet bear”, who dual weilds a hammer and sickle. I chose totem barbarian with a bear totem, and little did I realize that would make me practically invincible
I did the accidental #5 to #1 pipeline. Which is pretty easy to do in DCC. I just rolled some amazing stats for a fighter, went “ok I’ll be our muscles” and picked up an extremely powerful cursed sword.
The GM decided to buff the curse and actually make the demon inside it the main BBEG of the campaign after I took my first swing with it and one shot what was supposed to be a tough mini-boss for our party.
Missing
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The didn’t listen when the GM talked about Theme and mood and end up with a character who doesn’t fit with the party/canpaign
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The traitor, you know the Scorpion/Tremere who will betray the party at every possible occasion and stab any PC showing their back
-The hero, who feel like their main character
- The anti hero, in general their player use all the possible flaws (and therefore built a strong character) A one eyed, alcoholic single parent with a deadly enemy, but they can shoot a coin at 1000m, so feels like they’ll have again to do the job rather than staying home.
And many more
The didn’t listen when the GM talked about Theme and mood and end up with a character who doesn’t fit with the party/canpaign
Hah, for a second I thought this was my own post because I wrote something very similar here. But yes, this is one that bugs me.
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