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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Imagicka" data-source="post: 3214780" data-attributes="member: 4621">Greetings...A character's background doesn't not an interesting character make. Your character is only as boring as you choose to make it.  If this fellow thinks that his character concept hasn’t been done a million times over, he’s sorely mistaken.  Oh look!  Another ‘I’m going to backstab the party members because they don’t know I’m evil!’ -- How friggin’ boring!You think your being original playing ANOTHER evil character hiding amongst the heroes?  It’s so common now, it’s cliché!  It wasn’t original the first time you did it… and it isn’t original now.  You want to do something original?  You want to play something impressive?  Start with a good-aligned character, and slowly slip into becoming evil… and become a necromancer.  Impress me with your roleplaying, and rationalize it for me. I have a friend who designs *fantastic* character backgrounds.  But somewhere from the page to the dice, he would fall short.  He was such a boring player to play with.  One of those guys who would sit back and do nothing, waiting for his turn…  With a little poking and prodding from the GM, and where his character is placed into situations and encouraged to take advantage of his background, did he really shine.  His character?  A fighter with poor stats. The problem I find is that whenever someone comes up with some whacky atypical character background, all it does it cause problems for the party because they don’t want to be part of a group.  Usually they aren’t a good roleplayer at all.  They somehow think screwing over the party is roleplaying.When everyone wants to play anti-heroes (correction… villainous-heroes), I break out the Vampire books… or run an all-evil campaign.  But the problem always seems to be that one person always wants to be the one who’s ‘different’.  If they want to play an evil loner. I tell them to go buy Everquest or some other MMoRPG.  Where they can be ‘unique’ just like all the others out there. Why don’t they want to play a ‘vanilla’-hero?  They say it’s boring.  I say it’s laziness and selfishness.  That they don’t have the roleplaying chops or are just too lazy to pull off a seemingly boring/normal character and make that character interesting.  That they couldn’t care less about being part of a group, and don’t care about the other players’ enjoyment.  They also don’t want to be just like everyone else.  The balk at the idea of being in an all-evil group.  They need to have that advantage that they are the wolf hiding among the sheep.  That they have to make their character interesting by hiding behind non-common classes, races, templates, concepts and magic-items.  You don’t think so?  Prove me wrong.  If anyone ever comes to my table wanting to play the anti-hero right off the bat, I usually reject the concept.  No one ever gets a free ticket, unless they’ve proved to me in the past that they can pull it off, and do so for the benefit of all the other players at the table.  You want to roleplay becoming the anti-hero?  That’s another story!  But I never let players play the odd-man-out.  As for D&D bringing out a mercenary streak.  Well I’ve always thought that this was a method of outlet for these people.  One person I’ve mentioned before that I’ve played with, who always has to play the odd-man-out… who has more than once played the ‘I’m evil but no one knows it’-character is a milk-toast kind of person in real life.  Straight-laced.  That he’s too cowardly to let off some steam berating some obnoxious-rude woman in the checkout line who’s complaining because it isn’t moving fast enough for her… (Which incidentally… I did the other night…)The best played evil characters who don’t believe they are evil.</blockquote>

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