I've played the "hated" a-hole "hero" and now am on the receiving end of the schitck. Oh how the crap tastes bad... But, I agree with Reveal, if played right, it can work, but damn if it's played just as the "non-charismatic" a-hole character.
My "sarcastic" character was an "attorney/private investigator" in a futuristic "blade runnerish" homebrew game. He quickly made enemies of the party in the first encounter of the campaign where he negotiated with a street gang by blowing the head off (called shot!) of the gang leader...which made for a very nasty gun battle totalling one of the fancy cars of another PC. From then on, he was the target of several PC attempts at framing him for murders, attacks on the yakuza, etc. (he gave business cards out where ever he went, so the party managed to replicate some...and leave it at every scene of carnage whenever I missed a game session).
I think my character worked, because he was not only a loud mouth bad-apple, but he carried his weight. Where almost every other player went with heavy armor and high rate of fire weapons, he went with light armor with called shot head attacks...blowing foes away rather quick and fast. He also pulled on tons of outrageous stunts that made him legendary in the campaign.
But more so, he was the underdog bleeding heart under a thick skin of mechanized armor. While most of the players were either extermely selfish or evil, he was one of the few that had a sense of morality. One of the classic scenes from the campaign was when our wetworks made a raid against a rival corporations research plant. Several team members opted to "kill" all the facility personnel (which in my opinion was just blatant excessive killing). As another member pointed his gun at a research scientist, my character pulled his gun to the team member's head...then another player pulled a gun on my character, and in turn a second gun was pointed at another PC's head....then a third player pulled guns on both the other PCs and my character....and thus, one of the most intense standstills we had in game...quite fun, quite harrowing, but in all, quite dramatic.
In the current 4e campaign I'm playing in...my poor pally is facing awful woes with one of the a-hole dwarves. The player is kind of hardcore and likes to make situations must worse that it needs to be...and his character is just headstrong and charges anything and everything that moves...which is competely tactically unsound. He's fallen several times by rushing in...err, but now he has a pocket healer (another dwarf which makes him much more durable...fortunately 3 lay on hands makes my pally almost as durable).
This last weekend, our characters fought for several minutes because I wanted to take "two" short rests back to back so I could get the dwarven cleric's heals versus burning healing surges...could he wait an additional FIVE minutes? NO! So he moved forward exploring. Likewise, after we knocked out the evil warlock (who in fact was only insane, not evil), and voices started filling the dwarf with maddening whispers...we came to an inpass as he refused to move forward unless we killed the warlock....my pally challenged him and was not able to deflect "two" attacks (as the other dwarf join his side)...resulting in the "murder" of the poor fool.
Sigh...
The conflicts between the PCs is really irking me and pissing me off as a player (not to mention that the dwarf's player cites every rule that hampers my PCs actions while I look up stuff to clarify rules that saves his butt). Fortunately, our gaming group is splitting in two, as the two dwarves are moving to the mainland...and they'll continue gaming via Skype but with a different set of players.
Ah well. Just venting.
Fox
