Munchkins. I know it's one of those seven words, but it fucking applies. I mean those people who minmax to such a fucking high level that they make the game no fun for anyone else because they go first and kill shit in one hit and no one else gets to do a damned thing.
So, playing a fighter that can Identify every monster that they fight and then uses tactics that will kill certain targets after a full round of attacks is too much?
I nominate the Copy-Cat. We have this player that always (literally, he does so in every campaign) copies other people's builds and stories, twists them, forgets the essence of it, and then goes on about how good he is and generally gets in the way. (One guy was a charger, so he copypasted a theoretic charger build, but forgot LeapAttack and Shocktrooper. In the end, he isn't so effective, yet is clustering up combat for people who are. )
He is also the one that, whatever you do, he does so too. "I make a perception check." Him: "Yeah, me too!"
.... it's annoying as all hell, but you have to realize
why they do it.
They do it b/c the people they are copying are people that they want to be like.
Do they copy everyone? or just the most effective players?
In some ways, such a person is actually really good for the party b/c they can realize and accept that some people are effective and worth emulating.
Such people can be made pretty effective in their own right if you give them advice on how to look at building a character or specific pointers that you think would work well for them.
The Disbarred Rules Lawyer
We had a guy in our old DnD group back in the day who used to love to quote the rules. However he would quote them wrong. He would quote page numbers as well as his version of the rules. We were lazy, trusting of our friend and just wanted to keep the game moving so we didn't question him for a long time. But then we started calling him on it and found that he would have the page numbers close but off, and have misquoted the text and always to his favor. This guy is also know as "A CHEATER!"
That shit is really annoying.
DMs that do that are even worse.
I've got a tendency to consult the rules when things are in question.
As as result our group knows how:
-
grappling works
-SR and DR multiplication and/or stacking both act (SR stacking does happen, it's wierd but it works, DRs stack and have to be blown past seperately)
-how hide/move silently vs spot/listen checks work (distance modifiers always seem to be
ignored i find);
-how critical hits work (must be a 20 or must hit before you roll to confirm)
Of course, knowing these things means that it can cut back and forth.
Some times the DM's stupid on-the-fly-ruling about how some NPC enemy can grapple and successfully drag off an NPC we're escorting (they can't; and if they make the grapple check they get to drag 5' at a time at most) gets blocked by me actually looking that part up in the rules; other times I figure out that I
can't quite do something, and my spell-caste rgets grapple-swallowed by a Dire Shark. Whatever.
I have to say I never DID run into a Heterophobe before, but my group is full of Homophobes (myself included).
I don't really care much if someone wants to play a fruity elf/vampire/whatever. Though it often pisses me if someone accuses my characters of being flaming/fruity (I once had a kitsune character in a homebrew world. Basically, he wanted to become a nine-tails, and to do so, he served Amaterasu. The running gag (which unfortunately the other players won't EVER let me forget) was that he bent over so the Goddess could stick another tail on his ass).
Never-you-mind that the player who came up with said gag is an elf-lover who never had a girlfriend, and that as soon as 4e came out claimed that Elves had suddenly become 'manly' while Eladrin were to be the "the fruity side of elfdom"...
I should mention that the more homophobic a person is.... the more likely they are to be homosexual.
The people that honestly don't give a damn about the sexual orientation of others or with the way that others perceive their own sexual orientation tend to be the people whose sexual orientation is what they say that it is.
People who hate certain sexual orientations tend to just be really in the closet. It happens every time and always for the same lack of self-confidence reasons.
Is the Accountant-DM already nominated?
A DM who keeps track of every little detail, spins an excessivly detailed, but bland, story with a hundred named NPCs who have no real value, and gets brilliant ideas like replacing crits and natural 1s (always hated the houserule fumble) with rolling on a seperate table to determine effects, or when an attack misses you by the amount that you get AC from armour, that that attack hits your armour instead and damages it? (Que hardness and armour HP). We're in a nine player group at times, so you can imagine that it takes quite a while to handle that.
It's a
style of gaming. Not one that I play, but it does exist.
Your group should discuss in detail whether they want to focus on bean-counting details, story advancement, character choice freedoms before agreeing to play together.
Has the archetypical Chaotic Stupid player already be mentioned?
I think that is an extreme case of "but that's what my guy would do!". Using alignment (or mental disadvantage or god or code of conduct or whatever) as an excuse to kill your friends and take their stuff is practically an RP rite of passage.
>_>
I've never been that player, and I'll probably never be that player.
I justify everything that my characters do as being part of my strategy of "the party gets out of this place alive"
Sometimes I roll a fighter when all that we've got are assasins, rogues and wizards (eventually this 2ed game got my brother playing a samurai, then we all went dragon slaying, but in my defense, the GM was also the guy who played in the 4-person group). Other times I roll a wizard to make sure that our living greyhawk party had
Enlarge Person at it's disposal. I've made an Archivist that made sure that the other spell casters would have scrolls that they could cast spells from (3 spell casters with 3 different party buffs cast in the first round of combat is really handy; Recitation, Prayer and Haste). I've played barbarians and fighters that could single-round kill monsters of their own CR (and sometimes a bit higher) so that other players wouldn't get overwhelmed (8 lvl 4 PCs vs 8 Wood Woads and 2 Woodling Monitor lizards is a mite hard; as is 3 lvl 6 PCs vs a War Troll in a confined dungeon).
If someone asks why could anyone continue to play with such a DM, i'll probably commit suicide in shame...
Sorry for the nerdrage but this thread was the right place to vent it...
Easy, it's the only game around. D:
*snip*
... What about the DM that not only specifically
targets certain players b/c they
don't want to be accused to favoratism towards people that they are more friendly with in real life, but also try to use the most powerful options in doing so?
As for DMs with powerful NPCs, I've made powerful NPCs before and will probably always do so; I sometimes just need to get a character concept written down and fleshed out so that it stops bugging me. On the other hand, I never let them have anything that a PC wouldn't be able to ask for or somehow get. I also almost never use such characters in games that I run, mostly b/c the campaign hasn't moved to a place where such characters can be introduced.
The Quad-Class Gestalt and 4-full round actions worth of actions per round is just a really shitty way to hide the fact that you suck at building characters.
Really, that DM would have been better off making a 4-person party; it'd be as effective, have more HP, spread SoDs around more and maybe allow more power as these characters could be built to synergize well.
Anyway, a really personal peeve of mine are the DMs that go on and on and on about how much they're a "storyteller" (they are
not, I've been a member of several storytelling circles in the nearest two cities from me for a few years now; these DMs can't even tell the story of Jack and the Beanstalk properly and they want to somehow narrate a Robert Ludlum type story, and of course it never works out at all and always looks and sounds stupid).
I know my own limitations as a DM, I hate railroading PCs into a stupid contrived plot and instead I narrate the results of 'random' events that have occured. The story is told by the groups actions, and it narrated by the DM after the fact.
Running a game the way that the DM of the Rings webcomic is run is mind-bogglingly stupid.
((on a side note, my web browser doesn't recognize webocomic as a word, yet has no problem with mind-bogglingly as a word))
The other type of person that I really hate are the ones that go on an on and on about how their WoD game is full of role-playing; and want you to develop a character history; and when you write about 1,500 words they then say "TL;DR" and proceed to make the game an all out gun-fest.
Actually, I find that all WoD games are run by such people. If I want to RP in a game that they tell me to that they want RP in, they decide to turn it into a combat game. Which is usually okay with me, they should just be honest with themselves from the start and just say "this is a pretty combat heavy game, and I'll give you players very limited Japanse-RPG style RPing moments."
But no, they think that they're "roleplayers." I'm guessing it's b/c they're
shitty at building characters and like to pretend that they can RP, so they use "roleplaying" as a refuge.
Then they utterly lose it when someone with a character that can kick ass and take names prefers to use diplomacy or threats to avoid actual combat instead of always just attacking. Since of course, we all know that people that have actually been in combat tend to want to always start combat, and the wary vetran is an archetype that is based on fiction and not the real world at all. :rolleyes
