DMs: What are your character pet peeves?

[The Aberrantion]

Several pet peeves

2. The wise moron. Generally a Half Orc barbarian whose int wis and chr add up to 18 in total, yet somehow are infinitely wise enough to know they should let the half long bard do all their social interaction, negotiations, and purchases for them.

This is a bad post and you should feel bad. Do you also get mad at the 8 strength bard who lets the party barbarian bust all the doors down? Of course not, because even stupid people are capable of realizing that they have weaknesses their fellow adventurers can cover. Players work as a team, get used to it or stop dm'ing.

 

[Jon_Dahl]

High-maintenance characters

I've had insanely bad characters in my games and sometimes they make rest of the group upset too with their utter silliness, whether it's the name ("Hi, I'm Lagolas!") or bad ideas ("I'm chaotic good and I'd like to see bunch farmers do death-matches!") etc.
But there's really just one thing that makes me sad: The characters that consume lot of energy, thinking and especially TIME from everybody or at least from DM (which of course is reflected to the game).

Examples:
- Wizards that cast overly complicated spells but forget how the spells actually work.
- Extremely hesitant characters, that do a lot of minutiae without actually doing nothing and require lot of descriptions and dialogue without getting us anywhere.
- Characters that solo too much.

 

[Weregrognard]

1. Silly or joke names. This one burns me up the most.

2. Silly or joke concepts/affectations. For example: a knight character with a happy face helmet. No, not a fearsome, smiling goblin or devil helmet, but the famous, yellow happy face ->

3. [Alignment or Ethos] Stupid, or basically: "It's what my character would do!" Ironically, I may have been guilty of this one before

 

[Thotas]

My biggest peeve is the rogue who steals from the party.

Back in the days of Advanced D&D (when we didn't know it was "1e") our party had a monk that stole from the party, and when caught, defended himself on grounds that he had "thief functions" (or whatever they were called back then, I forget) and he was just making use of his abilities. As a player, I pointed out that he didn't have all of them, most notably pick pockets. In character, I pointed out that I was an assassin.

 

[Ringlerun]

I GM alot of point based systems and my biggest pet peeve is the one trick pony character.

The player who min and maxes everything to have that one skill at awe inspiring level.

 

[Mark CMG]

DMs: What are your character pet peeves?

Loner orphans with prophetic birthmarks.

 

[Thotas]

For those of you who are pointing to the variations of "my background is really an excuse for not having a background" ... I tried a group a few months ago in which one character's background was that they couldn't remember their background because they had amnesia.

I wasn't even the DM and I wanted to call "BS" on that.

 

[Barastrondo]

Not super-fond of characters created on concepts held before even hearing the campaign pitch. If I say "I'd like to run a Three Kingdoms/Bridge of Birds-ish legendary China-style game," I'd prefer not to hear "Cool, I have this concept for a tiefling paladin I've been wanting to find a game for." That doesn't mean I hate the idea of a tiefling paladin -- if the player instead goes for the inspiration of "I'd like to play an incarnated demon in mortal form seeking redemption, sort of like Sha Wujing from Journey to the West, maybe a tiefling paladin ruleswise" I'm all for it. But if the concept is something designed to fit into any generic D&D game, I'm not gonna be enthusiastic.

I'm also a little wary of "pragmatic" characters who don't actually understand pragmatism. You know, the sort who like to be ruthless and tough but take it to the extreme of not using very viable tactics like catching flies with honey instead of vinegar.

Those are the only problem character types I've had to deal with in the past few years, mind. I've gotten real selective about who I play with, and can afford to be picky. I'm sure I would have other problem archetypes (for example, I really don't like the "from another world/genre" character, like the Westeros knight who wandered through a magic portal into the game world because the player really likes ASOIAF), but I'm fortunate enough not to have to deal with 'em.

 

[Kobold Boots]

One player peeve and one character peeve:

1. Character peeve: Cohorts that are pack mules. If you've got Leadership and you have a cohort, you need to treat them like a full second character and role-play them. If you don't, I probably shouldn't let you take the feat.

2. Player peeve: Classified as "Mr. Recruiter". He's the player that must recruit for his or her games while my game is in session, and must talk about his game at any point when the GM is away from the table.

To peeve one: Easy fix is to work through character generation with the player and ask how the cohort augments his or her primary character's skills. Personality usually develops.

To peeve two: In my case I had to bounce the player after asking him to take recruiting to before/after the session or email, or other social events.

 

[Mark CMG]

Not super-fond of characters created on concepts held before even hearing the campaign pitch. If I say "I'd like to run a Three Kingdoms/Bridge of Birds-ish legendary China-style game," I'd prefer not to hear "Cool, I have this concept for a tiefling paladin I've been wanting to find a game for." That doesn't mean I hate the idea of a tiefling paladin -- if the player instead goes for the inspiration of "I'd like to play an incarnated demon in mortal form seeking redemption, sort of like Sha Wujing from Journey to the West, maybe a tiefling paladin ruleswise" I'm all for it. But if the concept is something designed to fit into any generic D&D game, I'm not gonna be enthusiastic.

Yeah, I've seen that one come up quite a few times over the years and it feels a bit disheartening to know the work you put in on coming up with a setting or setting mashup or system mashup is irrelevant to the player's character concept or efforts.