The most character-less character you've ever played?

[Ed_Laprade]

Too many to count back in the early 1e days. Before long a character wasn't considered a real character until 2nd or 3rd level, they died so easily. And even some who made it that far, but weren't expected to last much longer, remained pretty blah. Other than that I don't think I deliberately made a character uninteresting, although some were due to lazyness on my part. (Not surprisingly, I don't actually remember any of them!)

 

[Stoat]

I knew a guy who played Fred the Fighter, a character specifically created because "nobody plays generic, ordinary fighters anymore." This happened in a 2E game played in 1992.

 

[radmod]

I played a Vulcan in ST:tRPG once. Does that count?

Especially since I had never played it before, I said little except dispassionately informing the Captain that at the end of the mission, I was going to report him to Starfleet and have him brought up on charges.

 

[TarionzCousin]

I once made a character based on myself so that I didn't have to roleplay.

That was encouraged by the original Villains and Vigilantes rules. Of course, my bland, weak, "below average in every stat" friend was understandably underwhelmed at his character.

 

[Terry DM]

In the early 90's, I once played a Knight of Ansalon in a very short-lived game ... the DM wouldn't let my character do anything because the home-brew "code of conduct" was so insanely OTT strict that I basically gave up trying to role-play intelligently and just rolled dice when I had to. I was disgusted.

Being a major role-player at heart, it was without question, one of the worst gaming experience I have ever had ...

 

[wingsandsword]

Vorn Sorl, Dwarf Fighter. Stoic, silent, amnesiac.

The DM had created this incredibly intricate setting, practically an entire book of history and lore, an atlas full of maps, dozens of fully-fleshed out kingdoms/empires with byzantine politics and full codes of law, dozens of cultures for every PC race (and several monstrous races), even pages of sketches of fashions that were popular in the various regions with different races and social classes.

The DM encouraged us all to read up on his homebrew world and make characters that were fully immersed in the setting. It would have taken weeks just to digest all the information (seriously, he fleshed the setting out in as much detail as a number of actual official settings). The setting had no "hook" or really anything distinguishing, and many of the little cultures and kingdoms were pretty similar with just fairly small or arbitrary differences.

Then top it with the campaign he was running was a 4 session mini-series because he was moving away to go to graduate school at the end of the summer. So, do several dozen hours of reading and studying to create characters that would only be played for 4 sessions each of about 3 or 4 hours (all we had the room for).

So, most of the players all decided to protest against this by making minimalist characters (which was helped by it being an AD&D 2e game, which he only used core rules so there wasn't a lot of room for character tweaking). We'd play in his game because he'd been wanting to run this setting for years (he'd been working on it all his undergraduate years, but had kept it to himself except for occasional mentions of tiny details along the lines of coming to a gaming club meeting saying that he'd finished his map of the northern pier district of outer transwesteronia or something like that). One PC decided to try to do the homework and make a character. . .and found out that the backstory he wanted would contradict some of the secret DM lore and backstory we weren't provided and had to change it, several times, until it fit, and then was chided for having contradictions in his backstory that made it fit poorly within the setting when he came up with one that at least was remotely possible.

 

[Set]

In a Vampire: the Masquerade game, I had been playing a Tremere who had followers and influences and all sorts of grand plans for how to make his mark on the world.

Every single session revolved around increasingly pointless combats with foes that simple proved immune to reason (begging to be killed rather than even considering the possibility of an alliance or cessation of hostilities).

So I ditched the character and brought in a Brujah with Potence 5 (max ranks of super-strength, basically) as the sum total of her vampiric powers, whose philosophy was, 'If you can't solve a problem by hitting it, you need to hit it harder.' The game was pointless, so I made a character that was pointless, and had much more fun!

Combat - punch!
Negotation - punch!
Social interaction with another PC - punch!

She died after punching something that didn't fall down and punched back, but it took six sessions before she found something that didn't fall down, and I suspect that the ST had to design it specifically...

 

[Particle_Man]

I played a "servant" character in a Dark Heresy battle while waiting for my main character to heal up or get out of prison, I can't remember which.

 

[cignus_pfaccari]

In my freshman year of college, our Shadowrun games had high levels of lethality, such that we'd typically have new characters every other session.

One of those, Sid, was designed to fire full-automatic bursts of ten rounds from his Ares Alpha combatgun and still have a target number of 2.

I've never had such a deliberately mechanistic character since.

Brad

 

[pawsplay]

In a Vampire: the Masquerade game, I had been playing a Tremere who had followers and influences and all sorts of grand plans for how to make his mark on the world.

Every single session revolved around increasingly pointless combats with foes that simple proved immune to reason (begging to be killed rather than even considering the possibility of an alliance or cessation of hostilities).

So I ditched the character and brought in a Brujah with Potence 5 (max ranks of super-strength, basically) as the sum total of her vampiric powers, whose philosophy was, 'If you can't solve a problem by hitting it, you need to hit it harder.' The game was pointless, so I made a character that was pointless, and had much more fun!

Combat - punch!
Negotation - punch!
Social interaction with another PC - punch!

She died after punching something that didn't fall down and punched back, but it took six sessions before she found something that didn't fall down, and I suspect that the ST had to design it specifically...

Playing Vampire during the daytime is a sin!!! Vampire is for nighttime!!!

KOBAYASHI PUNCH!!!!