Why do I alwaus get one player......

[Turanil]

I've got a player who always want's to play angels and definitly sucks at it (some of em definitly evil/vile and he doesn't even noticed it) and if I don't want him to play an angel he want's to play something with wings and plays it out like an angel.

I call you unlucky. Tell him that the psychotherapist is an angel too.

 

[Ellie_the_Elf]

There are preventive steps to this. As a DM, try to be clear on the style and form the campaign is likely to take. For instance, I'm just starting a Banewarrens game and told the players that this was a mostly urban/dungeon crawling module, and that druid/ranger/wilderness characters would be inappropriate before they created their characters.

The 'wilderness rogue' PC was in the Banewarrens actually- the player's former character got killed right at the start of the dungeon, before the first sealed door.... We tried to talk him round to making something more appropriate, but he was dead set on the rogue. To be fair, after a couple of levels, he began taking some more useful skills based on what they'd been doing, but complained quite a bit about the lack of wilderness in the adventure and not being able to use his abilities (erm, it's a city based dungeon crawl- what were you expecting??)

Personally, I question the player's mental stability. Does it happen EVERY time?

Or his knowledge of FR--he KNEW that Lathander hates undead, right?

I have two players that do it, out of a group of between 4 and 6. It's not every time, but generally one or the other of them each time they make characters- I think they take turns . Fortunately, I also have two who go out of their way to make a character to fit the campaign, and spend a lot of time discussing their ideas with me

We've been playing a FR campaign with Lathander fairly prominent for 2 years, so that shouldn't be the issue, at least I don't think....

Ellie

 

[Storyteller01]

There's always the player that purchased something new (I'm usually guilty of this). Have a player who just purchased Lords of Madness. Now he's working every angle he can to play an abberation Thrall master (or some such PrC) with a fleshwarper cohort.

Wouldn't be so bad, except the abberations in my campaign exist in a separate community... that's currently trying to overthrow the kingdoms that all the other players come from!

 

[HeapThaumaturgist]

I'm very lucky that my group for the last 2 years was gathered from individuals largely new to RPGs and who I was able to mould and shape to my own meglomaniacal ideals. Mwa ha ha ha ha ha!

But seriously, it was just a stroke of luck that I showed up at the local gaming club with my books, some pre-gen characters, and an adventure, and some nice, balanced, pretty cool people showed up wanting to learn D&D. No bad habbits to break.

I'm a crazy min-max savant, because I'm a mechanics-junky. I like to pop the top on a system and each individual rule and look at how they interact with one another. So all of my players got to see that you could do a lot of crazy crazy stuff with the core PHB, and that when introducing new rules, those new rules often interact with other things in ways not immediately predictable.

Which is why I'm a draconian monster of a GM when it comes to character creation and character concepts. None of my core players are into being different for the sake of difference, and I tend to ask for concepts BEFORE accepting anybody into a game, and often forget to call people back when their concept is a Half-Dragon Minotaur Vow Of Poverty Monk.

--fje

 

[Von Ether]

I'm very lucky that my group for the last 2 years was gathered from individuals largely new to RPGs and who I was able to mould and shape to my own meglomaniacal ideals. Mwa ha ha ha ha ha!

But seriously, it was just a stroke of luck that I showed up at the local gaming club with my books, some pre-gen characters, and an adventure, and some nice, balanced, pretty cool people showed up wanting to learn D&D. No bad habbits to break.

I'm a crazy min-max savant, because I'm a mechanics-junky. I like to pop the top on a system and each individual rule and look at how they interact with one another. So all of my players got to see that you could do a lot of crazy crazy stuff with the core PHB, and that when introducing new rules, those new rules often interact with other things in ways not immediately predictable.

Which is why I'm a draconian monster of a GM when it comes to character creation and character concepts. None of my core players are into being different for the sake of difference, and I tend to ask for concepts BEFORE accepting anybody into a game, and often forget to call people back when their concept is a Half-Dragon Minotaur Vow Of Poverty Monk.

--fje

I had one player who did this ever time.

If I played a fugatives running Farscape game, he'd want to be a Peacekeeper spy and then he wanted to be an alien prince who could buy the ship and crew. If I ran a game where the PCs were to recontact a lost colony, he'd want to be colonist with a lot of political pull.

Not that I'm assuming what's going on with your problem PC, for my "special" player it boiled down to two things, a scramble for power in the game and gloryhounding. The motivations for the two behaviors can vary.

* "I can't do anything cliche," which includes anything that would reasonably be within the parameters set by the GM.
* I just have to be different, I'm creative like that
* Being different means the GM will always have to give me special consideration, if not, then I'll probably have an edge
* My concept ensures I have something over the other players.

You get the idea.

 

[Von Ether]

I'm a crazy min-max savant, because I'm a mechanics-junky. I like to pop the top on a system and each individual rule and look at how they interact with one another. So all of my players got to see that you could do a lot of crazy crazy stuff with the core PHB, and that when introducing new rules, those new rules often interact with other things in ways not immediately predictable.

Which is why I'm a draconian monster of a GM when it comes to character creation and character concepts. None of my core players are into being different for the sake of difference, and I tend to ask for concepts BEFORE accepting anybody into a game, and often forget to call people back when their concept is a Half-Dragon Minotaur Vow Of Poverty Monk.

--fje

Thanks a Heap

I had a similar player, always wanting to max out his character and ask for special consideration and then when I played in his game, no such love. I'm sure you are a great guy, but the experience was very frustrating to me.

 

[The Shaman]

(erm, it's a city based dungeon crawl- what were you expecting??)

That perhaps at some point the game would move to the outdoors?

Do you ask your players to create new characters for each adventure, or are they expecting to make characters that will last through many adventures in a variety of environments?

 

[jasper]

this breaks down to "I wanta to be the center of attention." Followed by spitting out pacee and wetting his diapers. Most people get over this stage. However a lot of gamers just get tiolet training and change their pacifier.

 

[Ogrork the Mighty]

This is why it's important to review characters before the player shows up on game day. Especially if you've had problems with the player before.

 

[Impeesa]

Hehe. I've had one of those. Two different Alternity games:

One is a group of hardass, heavily armed, very violent people (two of us had body tanks and extremely heavy weapons) in a parallel-dimension-travelling Sliders-ish game. Inappropriate-dude wants to use the FX rules to make a magic arabian guy.

Game #2 is a high-level, high-power game, where the players are the most elite squad at the top of a large mercenary company. Lots of cybernetics, advanced weaponry, etc - Mr No-Regard-For-Campaign-Flavor wants to play a technophobic time-travelling dark ages Scotsman. :\

Yeah, both of those could still have been cool if done just right. But he didn't.

Which is why I'm a draconian monster of a GM when it comes to character creation and character concepts. None of my core players are into being different for the sake of difference, and I tend to ask for concepts BEFORE accepting anybody into a game, and often forget to call people back when their concept is a Half-Dragon Minotaur Vow Of Poverty Monk.

--fje

Really? A real min-maxer would be fine with that as a DM - he'd know that it'd be crippled with the huge LA plus the VoP drawback, and could laugh when it dies the first time the party runs into a decent challenge despite dishing it out pretty well. Of course, if you've got a player who asks to play something like that in a game starting at level 1... that's not inappropriate so much as it is just dumb.

--Impeesa--