Have you ever played a character who had absolutely no reason to go on a crazy adventure and no involvement in what was...

Yeah, but then he left the party

Welcome to the shit my players do every single game over and over again...

GMing is suffering.

My characters all have motivations and reasons to participate because I happen to like good writing.

Im not that dictatorial, but when I GM and someone tells me their character's defining trait is he "doesn't care" I tell them to try again.

I try to do this with my players as well, but there's always one guy who completely forgets his character's motivations the moment the game actually starts.

Maybe you should stop writing crazy adventures then?

Friend of mine's party convinced a guard to join their party by going "We need your help", bringing him to fight stuff and then distracting him with more combat whenever he tried to leave

I had a player who basically forgot to give his characters motivations, but this was usually just because be couldn't figure out roleplaying. It was never really a problem though, because he'd just always wind up--of his own initiative--acting the yes-man for one of the veteran players.

But in talking players who intentionally try pitching some lone wolf badass with no interest in doing anything but showing up the party. That shit doesn't fly, because a "whatever ..I don't care.. " attitude is complete poison to storytelling.

All campaigns should have hooks that presuppose the PC's interest.

>You decided to become a town guard here
>why?
>I don't know, you fucking tell me why your character decided this

Paizo is shit at a lot of things, but one of the things that stuck with me was while I was playing Skulls and Shackles, and the Adventure Path gives you free reign to build your character, with the requirement that you have long held a dream or ambition to engage in piracy.

That's fucking smart.

During the D&D 5e playtest I was invited to a convention game. I made a generic archer barbarian (It was a viable build at the time, and ranger hadn't been introduced yet). I thought it would be a one-shot as part of the playtest.

I began to suspect that I had misunderstood when the other players began to talk about how their new characters were the offspring of previous characters. MAX level characters from a 3.5 campaign, with a DM who has an ironclad rule of starting new characters from level 1.

So now I'm a backwoods hunter, part of a spelljammer crew, who has visited Sigil, mount celestia, and Valhalla several times.

When we first tried 5e, I made a druid whose only backstory was that he was in town to finish his training/get to level 2 and learn to shapeshift.
>DM proceeded to involve everyone else in different plot lines and tell me nothing.
>DM's also having trouble dealing with the HP sponge that is low level druids
>ask to make a cleric or something that can be involved in the plot
>says sure
>next day
>"ok so the dragon killed ur entire village ur from now so ur involved right"

"I didn't ask for this!"

But really tho Penello was exceptionally useless, even for a Final Fantasy party member.

Yes, because I have no reason to play DnD and I'm not involved in the game.

>Yes, because I have no reason to play DnD and I'm not involved in the game.
>Because DnD is the only RPG out there.
>Because the OP specified the system, or my personal motivations for playing RPGs.
>Because ironic shitpostan is somehow higher-brow and more cultured and acceptable than regular shitpostan.

I know you were being facetious, but son of a -bitch- this got me riled up for some reason. Goota jabba, user. Gold star, 8/10.

I haven't, but one of my players is playing a character who keeps trying to avoid and ignore crazy adventure while it constantly finds him.

So far his character has jumped through countless hoops to try and remain as normal and mundane as possible, but the other players' actions keep getting him involved either on accident or by association and he can't escape it.

Most recently he found a generic ancient evil buried in the ground while digging and decided to just bury it again and walk away only for someone else in the party to wake it up and get him dragged into the mess anyway.

Yeah, she pretty much only existed as a flimsy reason for Vaan to go along with the others. Her existence is only a thing because Square wanted Vaan as the MC for some reason rather than Balthier.

I have played a couple of characters who have simply been drug along, though if that counts as little or no reason is up to you guys.

The first one was drafted, unwillingly, into the military everyone else belonged to and he wasn't exactly thrilled about it

The second one was a weird case, we were all from the same INCREDIBLY isolated town in a hellscape with very limited resources. Every 10 years the city would select volunteers or hold a lottery to send out 5 people to search for ANYTHING else really, but mostly it was a method of controlling the population and keeping resources in check. Every other player was a volunteer who honestly wanted to help our city out. Mine was a shopkeeper who JUST managed to get his life on the right track, he was even engaged, but he "won" the lottery

The third one was a weedy low level mage from the same town that the weedy low level fighter was from. When the fighter's raging adventure boner (adventurection?) started calling he literally drug my character out of his house to go with him. Plans to run away were typically thwarted by the fact that said mage had pretty much zero outdoor survival abilities plus he did actually care about the fighter (and really only the fighter)

Those all work, because there are some forces keeping the character involved with the party. "I don't want to be here" is not the same as "I have no reason to be here".

That last one reminds me of that JourneyQuest series. Which starts with a cowardly mage fleeing the party and getting caught by the paladin. Who then tells him he needs "encouragement" and joyfully beats the shit out of him.

Yes, unintentionally, because the DM refused to tell us even basic things about his setting. I made an alchemist who had a dream-like vision of the source of flame, and decided to seek it out, despite many not believing it to be real. DM says it will work great.

The entire campaign devolved into his shitty Game of Thrones ripoff, with the "twist" that it was post-apocalyptic United States, and the White Walker stand-ins were made of garbage controlled by GAIA WHO IS MAD AT US HUMANS.

Every character is a giant asshole, we have no freedom, the setting is a nonsensical, barren wasteland. I try to roll my science guy skills, but quickly all the technology we encounter was like modern stuff and I auto-fail all checks.

Then aliens invaded the setting and killed everyone.

>>
On the other hand I had a wizard who was mostly a student and researcher. He fit in fine for the first two quests, but tensions started to mount after that. The party was pretty much full murder-hobos and my dude spent most of his time in a university. Trying to be the mortal compass of the party was a drag for me and everybody else, so I retired that dude and made a new character who wasn't such a stick in the mud.

Exact same thing happened to me.

I ended up making a second character who joined the royal intelligence agency thinking he'd be an awesome spy, but instead got assigned to the party as their handler/damage control guy.

He wanted nothing more than go get a transfer, but he still did his job.

Pretty fun.

> with the "twist" that it was post-apocalyptic United States, and the White Walker stand-ins were made of garbage

I played my character as if he had that face constantly.

Three times.
One was a Cleric who was told to go on the quest by both her people and goddess despite not wanting a bar of it.
Two was a Thief who didn't want to go and had no personal involvement but the party did and she was rather reliant on them at the time.
No. 3 is a 'Survival Horror' campaign in which we're children patients in a haunted hospital where we were involved only in so far as we try to survive.

>DM who has an ironclad rule of starting new characters from level 1.
WHY?!

As amusing as your character's situation sounds at this point, that seems like the worst way to start and any DM who would force this sounds like a shit DM.

It is textbook shit DMing to start a player off with that kind of power deficit. Now the player is completely useless, and the rest of the party is effectively lugging around deadweight who will never catch up to them.

This thread is interesting.

As a rule, I actually NEVER make a character with any ties into whatever the plot is. At best I'll play a retainer or bodyguard, but I always make it clear to the GM that I'm just there to help out. Any decisions as to where the group goes, any dialogue or world building; I leave all that to the other players. I just follow along and try to help them do whatever they're doing.

My wizard, he was my 2d character and he was to deliver the next goal to the pc's,but decided to stick around for no in-game reason

Stop treating games like an MMO, mate.

I've had players try to pull this bullshit to justify their inability to roleplay and lack of immagination.
If you do this intentionally, you should be killed.

When half of games use an MMO-style formula for level progression they're gonna get that treatment.

If you're playing D&D and forced to start at first level when the rest of the party is 8th level, then there's going to be some major power gap issues.

Depends on what you call no reason. One of my favorite characters I ever ran was a drunken , philandering sword duelist who only joined up with the party to help him skip town and avoid a gang of jealous husbands. He wound up staying with them because adventure kept him in booze, fine leathers, and eventually fantasy cocaine, plus the ladies love the triumphant hero act

If your DM runs a shitty version of diablo, yes.

Actually, in the first draft Basch was the main character, but Square thought a younger protag was necessary.

The courier?

The Courier does have several obvious reasons to get involved in the plot though.

I made a character once who was just a really lazy neet that didn't want to do anything but lay around and do nothing. He only became an adventurer because his mom made him do it.

If I recall, it had something to do with Vaan being a better focus character because it makes sense for him to not know shit about the world, so he'll ask questions and need things explained, in turn explaining shit about the world to the player.

Every other character besides Penelo is much more worldly, and Penelo doesn't have the "I want to be an adventurer/I hate the empire, they killed my brother" motivations for actually getting off her ass and adventuring. Instead she has the much more conditional motivation of "I need to make sure my friend doesn't get himself killed doing something stupid."

Kind of. I played a game with a new DM, he wanted us to explore a dungeon. I started pitching ideas for why my character would want to explore the dungeon and he shot down every one. So my character left, never to be seen again.

Lots of players do that when they create a block of stats with no personality attached.

I swear I've read somewhere that Penelo actually had the "the Empire killed muh family" motivation too but it got cut from the game proper. That said that sounds like something TVTropes would just plain make up to put more "characterisation dot points" on that page.

I don't like writing bckgrounds. In fact, I hate playing set up characters.
I only give the GMavague idea as to why he is adventuring, and write the character along his adventure as it goes.
We go in a forest? Maybe I'll make him allergic to the flowers there. Wrote that down and that's it.

Point for OP, had one of this blank characters, and one time we where on some docks and my character piss his pants when he saw some guys. GM make them slave traders passing by, and the party sold me and themselves for adventure. Wrote that down.

Try doing what my GM does and just make some generic first day thing where the party is thrown together by circumstance and has to cooperate to make it out alive.

Then make up the real story between sessions 1 and 2 now that you know what their characters are like.

I unwillingly did this in my current campaign.
To be fair the DM only mentioned little tidbits of information so I rolled with something accordingly, sadly those little bits have still to be important in the game.

Nah, Vaan and Penelo are both explicitly war orphans but she really only sticks around because he decides to.

And then ends up being a semi-important part of the political spectrum because that young prince dude wants to peel her jumpsuit thing off.

I think that, given more time, they would have had her do something for Larsa the same way that Vaan helps to keep Ashe grounded.

Only once. We did Pokemon (PTA). Everyone else had a reason to travel the world to defeat whatever "Not Team Rocket" was called.

My character on the other hand was a tourist who became a ranger because I could get paid to travel and claim it was work. I basically set myself up as the "knowledge" guy for the group who just kinda knew all about everything and had good social abilities. So I'd find where their lair was, convince some guards to look the other way so they could go in and investigate...and then fuck off to go visit the local six flags or whatever under the guise of checking a lead while the people focused on fighting could do their thing while the combat focused guys could fight and not worry about having to watch over my (relatively) worthless ass.

Eventually I actually ended up having a big contacts list of rando trainers from my time watching local league battles and a Team Rocket Waifu. So it's not like I wasn't helping...I just wasn't...y'know...personally involved.

I remember reading somewhere that all the party members were there to teach some kind of lesson to Ashe, like Vaan learning to let go of his grudge against the Empire, or learning through Fran the dangers of messing with ridiculous magic bullshit. Presumably, the lesson Penelo would teach through her relationship with Larsa is that not all the Archadians are huge assholes, and that it's mostly Vayne and his pet Judges stirring shit up.

It's been a while since I last played though, so I'm not sure how accurate it is, but it seems plausible to me.

My last cleric. She was an adherent to a life god, barely knew the other player characters (whose first action in-game was to accidentally kill a town)
She had no business being with the other players other then the GM saying "I am not letting you fucks split up again"

Kind of.
Made a merc for hire to replace the character of mine that got his soul sent to the Plane of Beasts because he pulled the wrong damn card out of a Deck of Many things.
How it goes from there I'll find out this Sunday.

The guys a great DM most of the time- his job is tech support for the elderly, so he has the patience of a saint; he does improv acting in his spare time, giving him great npcs and villains. He thinks nothing of drawing out an entire town on an 8' x 6' mat as prep for a game. Gameplay itself is almost always wonderful with him as DM.

Then again, when discussing the 5e playtest, he said he has "fond memories" of darwinian characters in earlier editions- meaning making character after character, watching them die and die until one finally survives the early levels and becomes a dependable, useful character. (he LOVES DCCRPG)
He was especially nostalgic about the risk vs reward trade off of a fighter who can survive the early levels more easily, but doesn't scale well compared to a wizard who has to cower at the back early on, but becomes god-like at high level.

Ventus?

I really liked her outfit.

That's pretty much the only value she had.

DM kept shooting shit down cause it would essentially be me replaying a previous character for the 5th time, we played almost everyother day for around 6 years. I got a little grumpy so i said fuck it and figured he'd either be dead almost instantly or he'd retire or some shit.
Just some random jackoff of a city guard captain. nice steady income, family at home, respect of the community, was contemplating going back into the military as he enjoyed it, while dangerous he was decent enough to come back from the frontlines in a war and that particular country you could earn a royal title and land from conquered lands if you achieved high enough rank or grand deeds, despite being 37 and not being spry, though that may have been the difference between a 20 something body in the military routine versus the body of a guard who routinely visited the tavern. Digression aside he had every reason to stay a family man and remain in a steady and safe(ish) job he enjoyed.
Then the barbarian started a tavern brawl that didn't go as planned and the rogue held me hostage at knife point until they knocked me out and the barb threw me on a horse and went on a daring escape.
Came to with an angry paladin, cleric and wizard berrating the rogue and barb(he cried, a lot.) on why the hell they showed up with a guard captain as hostage.
Bill's Awesome Stockholm Syndrome Adventure ensues.
Eventually he came to greatly enjoy the adventurers life and routinely sent care packages and letters home. The wife was oddly supportive of this, most likely the fact he wasn't home and she now had ten times the income she got to spend all on her own. He actually rose to party face as he was the only level headed person who was willing to make reasonable demands during negotiations, even negotiating the return of his person, safe and sound, to the city on behalf of the party for a nice ransom that he then graciously accepted before walking back out of town back to the party camp 80k richer.