What are some awful goals for a character to have?

Fair enough, that's just been my experience with that type of player.

You're not really off-base, there's a significant overlap between the people prone to "Shiny New Build" and the people who don't try to roleplay. It's all just subcategories of the powergaming fuckwit who ruins optimization for the rest of us.

Exactly. Then there are the kneejerk douchefucks who, the moment you make a character who is actually good at something, scream that you're a powergamer munchkin fag who can't roleplay.

Wanting to live the same normal day, every day, without change forever and ever.
And you won't forgive anyone who dares tear your normal everyday life apart.

What's even worse, to me, is the GM who runs a combat-mandatory campaign (IE, a normal one) and permits somebody to play a character that's utterly useless in combat. That player is just going to huff off before long and it'll be 100% their and the GM's fault.

If they want to literally repeat the same day, that could be worth it.

This is my favorite premise for a redemption arc. The villain doesn't really change his motivation, he just realizes the ideal he was fighting for such as "eliminate oppression" or "promote equality" was defined in such a vague and self-serving way that he wound up doing the opposite of what he really wanted.

That's not a 3.PF issue though, that's a shitty player issue.

>the GM who runs a combat-mandatory campaign (IE, a normal one) and permits somebody to play a character that's utterly useless in combat.

I've seen a few players like this. The rest of us are writing up high-flying adventurers who are good at fighting and exploring and negotiating and other adventuring-related tasks, and then there's That Guy who wants to play an ordinary merchant with no fighting skills at all.

And he says that if the merchant has fighting skills like the DM so helpfully suggested, then it defeats the entire purpose of the character.

What purpose? Disrupting the game? Making a character who will be useless at every pivotal moment in the campaign? What's wrong with a merchant who also happens to be good at combat, the central focus of the entire fucking game? Fuck off, you're not being clever, you're being a contrarian shithead who doesn't actually care about the group, only about your own selfish desires.

True, but it's especially bad in 3.PF because the game seems designed to attract shitheads like that.

that sounds awesome. A dude trying to turn civilization or even reality overall to a perfect stasis.

>nobody moves, nobody gets hurt

>A dude trying to turn civilization or even reality overall to a perfect stasis.

To gain a wife.
Before i get hatemail let me explain this.
A. It's a pretty easy goal
B. I have NEVER seen it go well so i might be biased
C. It's begging for a bad end
Or
To become the undisputed master at/in [blank]
Same as above

I knew a wizard rambling about something-something-quantum-something, but he was later taken by the Inevitables and I haven't seen him ever since.

>power gay men
That was autocorrect right?

Stasis, Gendo. S-T-A-S-I-S. Not "Blow up!" The sooner you get that through your thick skull the sooner we can all return to our physical bodies you ass.

Any motivations designed around ignoring the party and preserving the game's status quo.

You guys know the kinds of character i'm talking about. The guy who ignores every other part of the game so he can build his merchant/criminal empire. The guy who actively avoids working with the party and insteads spends all his time on his own building a business and his indestructible underground bunker. The guy with no interest in adventuring. The guy who avoids fighting, not by running away but by never placing himself in a position where he can get attacked. The guy who's ultimate goal is "don't die" and who thinks being the sole survivor of a TPK by virtue of not even being there for the fight is mission fucking accomplished.

No, that's 100% deliberate.

>"I want to gain a wife!"
>Alright, there's this petite peasant girl
>"Bigger"
>Okay, this noblewoman is pretty ta-
>"Bigger!"
>Well, there's this female knight who's kinda muscula-
>"Bigger!!!"
>Fine, a dragon starts hitting on y-
>"BIGGER!"
>....
>"COME ON, DO IT WHILE I'M STILL HARD"

>Long term: taking their grandmothers, mothers, wives, daughters, and granddaughters as your women, and intertwining his lineage with yours, bridging the gap with your enemy and bringing you closer through family bonds, and forging a strong dynasty together by overcoming your hate with love. Lots of love.

Unless you travel back in time to take his grandmothers and mother, then that's replacing his lineage.

To become the biggest slut in the universe.

>>"helping people"
>>"healing the sick"
>implying these aren't perfect starting goals for naive healers who will end up brutalized by conflict and spend every day for months on end just trying to get enough medicine to do their job

pic semi related

It'll be static after it's blown up.

Also, Gendo didn't want to bring about instrumentality; SEELE did. Gendo just wanted to use the power of the angels, which would have been used to bring about instrumentality, to be reunited with his wife, with a strong emphasis on "unite".

Well, now everyone's united as a giant pool of tang.

>flat
>anything but unfinished
Don't have terrible taste user.

The goal of just mindlessly going around fucking shit up for money/power.

>recettear.jpg
If all the GM and the party want to do is go dungeon delving, cool, not that player's piece of cake; time to move on. If they're doing other things, namely world-building at all, then there remains a purpose for a character who cannot actively contribute to combat. If the GM is open to working out the rolls the merchant player wants to make when he's setting up his business, negotiating prices and contracting suppliers, then there's no reason to stop him. So long as the merchant player is willing to read a book while the party is dungeon delving and he's back at the store, then the party as a whole has a nice source, mostly honest place to get loans and equipment from, and it gives the GM a way to introduce plot hooks. Suppose the merchant is being forced into a protection racket. Good thing he's been equipping a band of murderhobos for years.

TTRPGs are all about flexibility. They do make this point explicitly clear in every single rulebook and supplementary material. If the party is similarly flexible, the system will support it. There's no reason to be close-minded and deal in absolutes.

>Set Ambition: Get Married

>I've seen a few players like this. The rest of us are writing up high-flying adventurers who are good at fighting and exploring and negotiating and other adventuring-related tasks, and then there's That Guy who wants to play an ordinary merchant with no fighting skills at all.

That's only a problem in systems where it's impossible to do something effectively unless you build for it. Try playing TSR D&D. It's hard to build a character who doesn't have at least very basic combat ability in TSR D&D unless you pick wizard and choose all noncombat spells. 5e is also better about this than 3.PF, but still not quite as good as ≤2e.

My advice is to frame the question you ask the player in terms of the character.

Don't ask
>Why are you playing a character who acts like that?
>Why are you in this combat-heavy campaign if you don't want to participate in the combat, which will comprise more than half of this campaign?

Ask
>Why is the character acting like that?
>If the character is no good at fighting and has no interest in getting good at fighting, why are they embarking on an adventure that they know full well will involve lots of fighting?

Don't ask the player for a justification for their own actions; ask the player for a justification their character's actions. It comes off less accusatory and may help you better understand what to expect from the character. You'll learn what to expect from the player in time.

I am reminded of a game I was in a few years ago. One of the players had a character whose goal was, "Find my kidnapped sister."

Well in the third session the game master decided, "Oh hey, your kidnapped sister is here, you found her. Congratulations."

And the player goes, "Well. I guess my character's job is done. He'll thank the other party members and go home. I'll work on a new character and bring them in next week."

>Flat is best
Not a fan of girls with the bodies of 12 year old boys but that's just me personally

You can't fault a man for wanting a quiet life.

I think that's a genuinely cool move.

All I see is putting extra shit on the GM's plate to deal with a problem character. The GM shouldn't have to bust out Feudal Economics for Dummies to make one player feel like their character isn't worthless when they were specifically built to be worthless. And every hour devoted to doign solo roleplaying sessions with Mr. Manager is an hour where the rest of the party -- who all managed to be on the same page and ware working towards common ends -- get to fuck around on their phones.

TTRPGs are flexible, to an extent. Making a character that fails to contirubte towards combat or exploration or intense social maneuvering in a system that focuses exclusively on those aspects and with a party that is hoping to do a lot of combat and exploration and intense social maneuvering is an act of contrarianism, not flexibility.

Also, nice job pretending all those good things you lited can *only* happen with a character that's absolutely useless on an adventure. Not like there can be merchant characters that are also competent faces or travellers, or that anyone can include extortion troubles as a plot hook in their backstory. Nope, if you're a good roleplayer, your character has to be mechanically incompetant and a drag on the party, who -- being mechanically competant -- are all stat sheets that never ever roleplay because being roleplaying ability and mechanical competancy are 100% mutually exclusive.

I don't know why, but I laughed.

Girls are for hips, thighs and asses. Tits are secondary.

>if the GM is open to [working with the merchant player] then there's no reason to stop him
>if all the GM and the party want to do is go dungeon delving [then don't bother broaching this idea and just don't be the merchant player]

Reading an argument before replying to it is common courtesy you know.

>he doesn't know

When you hold dfc, you are automatically closer to her heart than you could ever be with a cowtitted slut.

Revenge.

Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
nothing is going to get better. It's not.

I can live with being pressed to big fat titties.

That's very awkward wording. It sounds like you took the original post that said that and put it through Google Translate a couple times.

Where do personalities and ambitions fit in to that? Or are they on a separate scale?

Not him, but are you lads new? This meme is ancient.

Wrong image. Here we go. No translation involved.

>Or are they on a separate scale?
I could only judge from anecdotal evidence, so I will remain silent on this.

I've seen the original post. What I'm saying is compare:
>When a flat chested girl hugs you, she's holding you closer to her heart.
versus
>When you hold dfc, you are automatically closer to her heart than you could ever be with a cowtitted slut.

That's just terribly clunky sentence construction.

I hate anyone who doesnt want to become a god. At any level.

We should team up

Let's talk theoretically here for a moment. Would you prefer Alice (who has a bad personality but good hips/thighs/ass) over Boberta (who has a good personality but bad hips/thighs/ass), all other things being equal?

What constitutes a "good personality" is subjective. And so is hips/thighs/ass, for that matter.

Are either of them willing to fuck
If y the hot one
If n the ugly one

Yeah, this.
Favoring personality over looks is a modern believe that stems from the changing nature of marriage. It used to be that matches were made for genetics. You see this in letters between Italian families where they look for attributes like height, hip to waist ratio, etc.
Favoring personality is just a union for love without caring about the next generation.

What are you, gay?

Do you have links or sources for any of those letters? That sounds interesting if true.

But among the vast majority who could not read, convenience was a pretty significant driving force. If the love of your life was more than a couple miles away, tough titties.

More relevantly, though, I'm asking about the present, not history. Those Italian people you're mentioning were probably not posting on an American cheeseburger-eating image board.

go away pedo

What's wrong with being pedo?

My very first character's goal was money, pure and simple.
Sure the Danger-to-Payout ratio is WAY skewed in Adventuring, but when your only skill at that point in your life is "I have this huge sharp piece of metal that I'm pretty good at hitting other things with" adventuring is much more lucrative then Soldering or Bodygaurding.

Yes other motivations arose, like those bastards a few kingdoms over are causing trouble and its inconveniencing him, those fuckers! And the Orc invasion would have put a big damper on his plans to live it easy with many young buxom women. Orcs are great in the sack, but not much to look at. Plus they wanted to kill or enslave everybody, and that's not something he wanted to do again.

I'd gravitate to Alice, but Boberta would swoop in and sweet talk me.

>Saving the world in immature
But that's where I keep my stuff!

Okay, follow-up question, just for my own edification (and at the risk of becoming a further agent of derailment than I already am)--what, in your opinion, constitutes nice hips, thighs, or ass?

Large, but not disproportionate to the rest of the body. Not chunky. Soft. And only slightly exposed.

Correct answer. Everything else is secondary; I'd prefer a character with a shitty motivation to a sheet of statistics any day.

I don't know if I can give you an online source for them, but I'm looking at some letters passed between members of the Medici family from 1467, as listed in Lauro Marines "April Blood: Florence and the Plot Against the Medici". Ignore the sensationalist title. This is very much a true historian's work. Be aware however, that he is doing his own translations of the sources, since most are in Italian. I don't know if English sources exist.

The citations reads:
"Lucrezia's letters: Tornabuoni, Lettere, 62 - 4; Maguire, Women, 129 - 32."
"Litta, Famiglie celebri, IV"

The excerpts, in part, read:
"Thursday morning, on the way to St. Peter's, I met my lady, the sister of the cardinal, Maddalena Orsini, with her daughter, who is about fifteen or sixteen years old. She [the girl] was dressed in the Roman fashion, in a broad wrap of linen, and seemed to me very beautiful in that outfit, fair and tall; but because she was rather too covered up, I couldn't see her as I would have liked. [...] [The girl had] an attractive height and fairness, and she has a sweet manner [...] she's all modesty and could soon be led to assume our ways. She's not a blonde, because you don't find those in these parts. Her hair tends toward the reddish, and there's a lot of it. The face itself is a bit round but I don't disapprove; her throat is nicely slender, though it strikes me as a bit thin, or, rather, on the delicate side. Her bosom we couldn't see [because she was all bundled up], but the promise is good. She walks with her head not up proudly, like ours, but bent somewhat forward [down], and I believe this comes from shyness. She really is bashful. Her hands are long and slender. So, all told, we consider that the girl is definitely much above the average [...]"
In a second letter sent that same day:
"The girl has two good features: she is tall and fair-skinned, and though she doesn't have a beautiful face, neither is it a peasant's, and she does have a handsome presence"

1/2

...

from another letter that I liked, about a different girl:
"[...] she seemed to me to have a lovely presence and to be well-proportioned. She's tall like [our daughter] or even taller; she's got good skin, not one of your fair ones, but neither are they at all coarse; and it seems to me, judging by her walk and the look in her eye, that there is nothing slow-witted about her"

The rest of the letters talk about dowries and family names, with the only comment on the girls themselves being disparaging remakes about the only other remaining options looking like peasants.

Anyway, I still can trace this sort of union for genetics up into early America, post colonies, but you are right that it doesn't exist much in the modern day. Admittedly this is a shame, if you've ever read Washington Irving's "The Wife", where even though love between the two partners is more of a focus than children, there's still fair value given to matters beyond just fanciful love.

So being partial to playing as ents, I made a cleric once. However, this cleric was one that believed in a powerful ancient diety of old that was fractured and became the first wasp hive ever. So all wasps in existence held her essence, as such he always made sure to have a wasp nest growing in his boughs. His end goal was to help bring down the BBEG who was trying to ascend into godhood, then use their preparations and his wasp nest to rebirth that "ancient forgotten god"

Long story short, his plan worked and we had a Cosmic Wasp Queen summoning divine wasps to wipe the party and everyone hated me because nobody expected me to axtually follow through on what was understood to be a joke.

Wait, everyone including you? Did the wasp queen hold no regard for her most loyal follower?

Saving/impressing/winning the girl is pretty played out.

Wasps are cunts.

>yfw you desperately want a character like this
>they escaped the bullshit of their previous life, only to be caught up in the party's shenanigans
>Stay with the party since its the only way to survive, but also do petty and LE shit out of spite
>otherwise being the total "straight man" of the group
>without being straight at all

Wow, so much for reasonable moderation.

You had me up until it got pathetic.

The patheticness really is the point of it for me, "fish out of water, who is desperately suffocating" is just my kind of humor.

Obviously not intended for a more serious game.

> Non-combat spells

user, you're not understanding wizards if you think that's a thing.

Nice thread.

To lose their virginity

To adventure for the sake of adventuring.

>the kid from bumfuck nowhere heard a lot of stories about brave adventures doing epic stuff and wants to do the same
There are worse reasons.

There is no excuse for not making a character that works with the group.

As a person who can't find anyone into tabletop, but only magic players, i really want to play a classic fantasy game, but more low fantasy. I just want ti make my dream character and play it with a good group and dm. "Dwarf shroom farmer/brewer who is hunting a roaving gang of half-elves for killing and raiding the elf tribe his people were ancient allies with." may never come to be.

>Dwarf shroom farmer/brewer who is hunting a roaving gang of half-elves for killing and raiding the elf tribe his people were ancient allies wit

"I want to become rich" How rich? An average PC gets enough money to own a mansion after the second or third major dungeon or after the second major plot point

"I want more power!" Then why adventure and take the long path instead of sacrificing your hometown to murdergods

"I just want an easy and normal life" Then stop being a PC

"I just want to see the world and it's wonders" Join a caravan and take a camera with you

Generally anything extremely vague and broad just because by the end of the day you've pretty much reached your goal by becoming a PC in the first place.

I have no clue what you were going to convey with that image, but I choose to believe it was something good.

Tldr; How do you make: "Da Strongest!" entertaining to play? Since this seems to be an appropriate thread.

Got a barbarian in a small group who set out to adventure since his tribe has a boner for being the physically best, may or may not be related to living in sp00ky tundra where shit is trying to kill them at every turn. So as custom he goes out to "make his name" and not come back to the village 'till you gained some level of honor by beating the shit of things around the world.

Obviously, in practice, this sucked. I felt at a loss on how to make non-combat compelling, and attempts at doing so (usually by challenging dangerous shit, and old) tended to be hazardous to the party, or annoying even for myself.

So far I was thinking about emphasizing the "traditions" of the tribe and having my PC beholden to all of them in general, and sliding in worries about not living up to the expectations of others and the only tribe he knew for all his life.

Any other ways you can make "The Strongest There Is!" Interesting?

Nah, I was retarded, even when it comes to deleting my own posts.

I want to kill monsters and get paid for doing it

I agree with most of those except for the "I want to become rich" some people just want to be filthy rich Bill Gates level.

Redemption. It's just pretentious.

Boast. Any story of heroic triumph you tell should be 10 times as long and even more exiting than what actually happened. Exaggerate not only your strength and heroics but those of your party members. Maybe add some fate and portents to spice up the narrative. Put the bard to shame. And if called on this act confused because in the heat of battle your version is the one you experienced.

Have him come to find simply killing big monsters leave him hollow, and set out to find what other cultures see as strong and honor worthy. Make him become a "do badass things for honor" philosopher. Study the heroes of other civilisations and peoples to find a type of badass that brings joy to your barbarian heart.

Damn it. Ah well, one can dream.

god damned elves man....

nobody wants to fuck them, not even orcs..

...

Like a man walking the earth trying to find the right religion, but instead it's the most Honorable way to earn Honor!

That's my next character.