Pet Peeves Thread

What you need are state sanctioned profiteers. Sanctioned by a state that doesn't like you, it's pretty much pirating but more militarized.

Using "It would be in character!" as an excuse to do something irrational that just... Ruins things both IC and OOC. Like having a character practically commit suicide via attacking somebody they shouldn't and ruining the parties reputation, or having a character be so abrasive against another player's character that it makes the other player uncomfortable (and they won't stop when politely asked to).

Role playing flaws in a character is fine. Using those flaws as an excuse to ruin the fun for everybody else is not.

>ruin the fun for everybody else

This is the key word. Betrayals and yolo shit can be fun as fuck, but everybody has gotta find it fun.

Game of Thrones

It is all anyone ever wants to fucking run now and complain about me not wanting to run a campaign about it.

Last DM I had very transparently favored me and toed the line of shitting on someone when it came to the other player in the game. It was infuriating.

Powergaming for sure.

>Guy wants to join my game
>Has his character already preplanned out from 1 to 20 without hearing a single detail of the setting
>Look over his sheet and point out that I'm not playing with a particular rule because I found it a little overpowered
>Whines and argues with me that this small feature makes his character "completely unviable" and he should just be another race/class combo altogether if that's how I felt
>Tell him to just make a character and not a statblock
>"STORMWIND FALLACY! STORMWIND FALLACY! REEEEEEE"

I'm legitimately losing faith in the stormwind fallacy as a whole, as I've yet to see a single person bring it up without trying to use it as a means to browbeat the DM.

Oh god this so much.

>That Guy who manages to convince the group to fuck off and go be pirates for literally no reason
>Because he had heard about the "Play D&D and be pirates :^)" meme
>They get bored with it 2 sessions in and just stop.

When my players lack agency. It bothers me so much when they can't make a bloody decision. It's my job to be an impartial arbiter of the rules, not lead you by the hand to a solution.

So i started applying consequences to their ineptitude. Spend an hour trying to decide what to do with a prisoner? He makes an escape artist check and runs off. Can't decide what to buy while shopping? The shop keep has other customers to attend to. Argue outside the evil wizards door? He escaped through the back.

They havent caught on yet. But i keep hoping.

Well at least you are moving things along.

Sometimes I throw them a bone and give "common sense" rolls to help them think of a good answer

God fucking damn it this.

Running a game and have all but ass fucked them with plot hooks and all they do is sit around talking about the hooks until I spring something on them because 4 hours of debating their next move out of character is enough.

2 of them have character goals and motivations but will only ever mention them in passing and will not work with me on what they want beyond the concept.

I wish my players were generally smart enough to take the hooks. Most of the time, they just sit there until I offer an idea of what do to, and then they always just take the first idea straight up and stare at me like soulless cows. Its unnerving to say the least.

Could be worse, when mine actually do take action, it is a nightmare.

They went to investigate a ruin three games ago, still have not finished it and we play for close to 10 hours every third weekend.

They will scour a room, debate about the contents then halt to evaluate each individual item before moving on. If there is a trap, they will try and argue every bit of real world logic,science and engineering on how to bypass it.

I fucking hate going to the games I run now. Lifeless and reactionary when out of combat or spelunking, embedded ticks when doing so.

>2 of them have character goals and motivations

Then act on those goals directly.

>Pet Peeves
>Rogue: "I'm a Vistani! I grew up in Barovia!"

Hmmn...

Here's the solution to your problem with that.

Wandering Encounters that are stronger than the set-encounters with less reward.

Make them count their time. Make them HATE fighting random encounters. Make them fucking hate having to do with it. Every time they stop for a moment to inspect a trap, you roll that dice to see if there are wandering monsters.

If you make time an element, I guarantee the Trap-Tea-Time will just go away on its own.

I get tired of forcing the issue.

One is a necromancer who wants to become immortal through necromancy. Other is a changling who wants to shed their humanity for true doppleanger status.

I have asked time and again what they would like to do to start these, no real answer. I have hit them in the face with plot hook cock and they do not react. I throw them notes that they think a certain npc might be able to help, never gets acted upon. I have offered single session to discuss this or have them describe how they are working on this.

Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Im just fucking tired of trying.

This. Especially if they call it "Game of Thrones" or aren't using the official ASOIaF system.

>Pitching the next campaign for the group, hopefully the first full length campaign we'll play since we have aligned our schedules with school and employers
>Dead set on running it in Eberron, letting them decide what sort of campaign they want
>Settle on my first suggestion, a startup Inquisitive (Private Eye) agency in Sharn (setting's biggest city)
>Party's BigGuys both make strength 1h+shield fighters
>Party's RP heavy nerds both make changeling rogues
>Party's RP heavy but wish fulfillment as fuck, but also clever makes a bard

>They keep just 'finishing missions' and trudging through things violently

>They get hired to get dirt on the Darguun emblem bearing hobgoblins that have been acting as a paramilitary unlicensed guard force in the lower city
>Big Guy gets tired of waiting outside and forming a plan, axes a passing civilian the party previously had trouble with
>While he fights an alley full of alerted hobguards, the rest storm the front door and bloody up the place
>After a few rounds, party is running home with 2 unconscious, all injured, leaving 9 corpses and 2 fatalities in their wake

>Get hired to trail these hobgoblins since papers they retrieved point to some illegal mining operation
>Find an abandoned mining outpost in the Depths, entrance to an ancient goblin empire warrior's tomb
>Instead of turning back and preparing and reporting they trudge right the fuck in
They're going to get in deep shit eventually, but for now their patron is a member of the Droaam mafia who wants the hobs out of the way anyways and will pay extra for the service

I hear "player agency" more instead, but how the terms are used (or misused rather) appears the same.

THat's because there are always shitheads who will abuse a term because they are shitheads who will use any excuse to whine.

> he has never played rogue trader
You and your unimaginative group sadden me.

>Start up a game
>GM lets us all know what we're doing beforehand, so even the new players know where we are and what the setting's vaguely like
>they come in with characters with half-assed silly names and little motivation or personality beyond vague 'it would be funny if they were like this huh'

It just irritates me. Sure, they might learn as they go, but I think when you're starting like that it's obvious they don't really care about where they go.

>alignment as a solid game mechanic

>actually using the mists hook with the rogue
Just have them already fucking be there.
Player vistani is fine.

I like the capability to use it as a loose description but it really should not ever be a mechanic.

>players who use phones/tablets for non-game-related shit at the gaming table
>players who try to dominate and boss others around
>groups that insist on making a party document in session 0
>smug DMs who taunt/berate the players for their failures
>players/DMs who constantly shove IRL pop culture references into every game
>players who won't even try to do character voices
>players who make attacks, like area effect attacks or shooting into melee, that have a chance of hitting another player character, and brush off the risk with "lol nah it'll be fine" and then fucking cripple my character

It's a set of training wheels for new players, nothing more. In D&D it was originally more concrete, but it stopped being 'morality based on the middle ages' and became closer to a reflection of modern morality, with all its difficulties and contradictions.

Really, if you left it entirely off and just used your own judgement on when things like Smite would work, the system would work perfectly fine. That's what annoyed me about 5e - the oaths were meant to fix the problem of a tight alignment restriction, when the alignment restriction could have been thrown out at any time. So to me, the oaths feel far more restrictive than just loosely following goodness and perhaps a god's tenants.

Just give paladins their smite damage I depend of what the target is.

The game isn't balanced around smite, so why bother keeping it the same?

Tohou naming convention makes me irrationally hard. I absolutely love when words are mashed around in ways that make my brain stutter. I assume we're talking about the English titles of the games.

The paladin is fine, and the Vistani is interesting because Vistani serve Strahd.

A book on Barovia is beyond retarded and you should ridicule the DM and player

Going out of the way to hide mechanics as part of some elaborate anti-metagaming trap. Things like plants that are resistant to fire with no visual indicator, HP that's described as "luck" so I can't tell how injured someone is after being attacked, undead that look exactly like zombies until you get close and they instantly kill people, and things like that. I feel like it turns into some sort of reverse metagame scenario where the only way to survive is to look shit up. I usually just start making more suicidal decisions if I see that sort of thing and bow out of the game if I die
Do you have many examples of humans not being the average joe race? I think making them the balanced race is a fairly logical place to put them personally, but I can't think of many examples of it not being the case anyway

I don't think I actually have any.

Why would I get worked up by Veeky Forumss? At worst I'll just pick a different one to play or talk to the playing group about the issue.

What would've been better is if the halfling was writing a book on Barovia rather than starting with one. Maybe give him some minor circumstantial bonuses due to prior research but ultimately have him be very excited to find himself right up in his subject matter.

It peeves me when players refuse to let me give them their mandated session blowjobs.

Would have been even better if it was Twilight: Ravenloft Edition. Of course, CoS barely tells the players anything, so at least they know the plot this way.

I fucking hate that screencap. I singlehandedly blame it for taking every bit of adventuring romance of out RT. In every single game I have been a part of players tried to be dastardly manipulative profiteers, failing to realise they actually were penny-pinching dickass glorified murderhobos with no foresight and binary thinking.

>Player Agency

I mean i get it and I wouldn't change for anything, but...

Holy fuck is it frustrating to have to account for your players having "free will". I had to call off a heist simulator campaign because I didnt have time to map out an entire city and I'd rather cut off my own arm than omit daring car chases from a heist game.

I think I get why some DMs just keep the game on rails full time.

But the official system is shit.

Nobody is using a coaster.

Having player agency doesn't omit you from restricting character agency.

My players are the same. They think they're brilliant, suave profiteers but are actually just short-sighted, backstabbing bastards who think that planning to rip off and murder everyone they meet makes them good role players.
>"This guy has been friendly and helpful... Let's kill him and take over his holdings."
>"This far richer and more powerful Rogue Trader has graciously given us a series of lucrative contracts... We should shoot her in the face next chance we get, because then all her employees and crew will join us, because that's how that sort of thing works"
>"The crew of our ship has been here far longer than we have, and have given us great advice about all the little intricacies of the ship and how to keep the crew happy and on side... Fuck that. Stupid peasants, what do they know. We've been on the ship ten minutes, we obviously know better than them."

At least they eventually go into the evil wizards tower, that way you can leave breadcrumbs for them to follow to the next evil base. I used to run for some people who would have gone so far and got to the evil wizard tower and then said "nah fuck that"

Especially if you haven't opened the bottle yet.

Was the real treasure friendship all along?

I'm not sure I have one.

I got really upset about a month ago when someone had objectively the wrong opinion, believing something objectively shit was actually good in some way, and justifying it by "subjectivity"
No, subjectivity does not make something good. Personal tastes may differ, but personal tastes can be WRONG. Especially when they desire something harmful to themselves and everyone around them.

At the same time, it takes 2 people for one to ruin the other's fun.
Don't put all the responsibility on other people.
If someone ruins your fun, maybe your fun was too easy to ruin.
Work on improving yourself so you can have fun in a wider variety of situations. Make your fun more robust, so it can't be ruined by 1 action by 1 chucklefuck.
A bit of exercise and prevention goes a long way towards having a good time.

>Tell him to just make a character and not a statblock

What if someone wants to play just a statblock, they don't give a shit for the ARR PEE and Muh Narrative and the backstory fluff settingdressing Zzzz, they wanna roll some numbers and #rek some kobolds?

Does this make them objectively not deserving of entertainment, or something?
Put some obvious combat encounters in your game and trust the statsheets to just sort of idle outside of it, they'll have more fun than if you try to force them into the story.

Or just drop him from the game.

If you don't care about rp and just wanna kill shit go play a video game

What if the party enjoys fighting the random encounters so they just hang around and wait for random encounters so they can fight them?

It might be a waste of resources IC but if OOC all they wanna do is fight some enemydoods then they might just idle in one spot and fight random encounters all day erryday

It surely makes them incompatible with a normal group. Now if you have an entire group of rollplayers, there wouldn't be a problem.

>smug DMs who taunt/berate the players for their failures
I am this.
How do I stop?

"If you don't wanna rp get out of my game"

k.

So how would you lads react if someone said "If you don't wanna build powerful characters, get out of my game"?

I'd either build a powerful character with expectation of that type of game or leave and find a game more suited to what I wanted to play .

Probably get out of the game if I didn't fancy that. I don't mind though.

>So how would you lads react if someone said "If you don't wanna build powerful characters, get out of my game"?
I'd feel like I don't belong to this group because we don't have the same interests.

Wonder how entire group of rollplayers would work.

At least you wouldn't have to worry about building a setting, or describing enemies beyond "32HP, AC13, does 2d6 (x2 on 19-20)" and placing a flat white token down on the board.

Perhaps you could just make a branching graph with rooms containing varied encounters + varied loot, with the idea that the players take on whatever encounters they're best suited for, and use the loot effectively to get a bit stronger and take on more encounters.

Might be a bit tricky to balance. If too much loot but not enough difficulty, the players will just start steamrolling everything by having too many consumables to worry and attackmoving through the entire place. If too much difficulty, the players will eventually be stuck in a situation where EVERY encounter is too hard for them and will end up with them losing more than they gain.

Still, might be cool.

Oh. Well that works I suppose.

Makes me wonder tho. What happens if you're expected to RP, -and- you're also expected to build your character well? Like, you have to both worldbuild/storywrite, AND killdudeswell?

It's not that difficult, you just need to be a little flexible. You can come up for justifications for most things.

If you let a female PC be Tatyana, you will ALWAYS get Ravenloft: Twilight Edition. As DM, your challenge will be to stop the two of them from fucking each other.

Found that guy.

Hello. :)

...

I'd leave the game. It sounds plebby as fuck.

All games are plebby as fuck tho

If they're not willing to play to my group's high standards, they're not welcome. End of.

Doesn't really matter if you're just bullshitting with friends. If you're annoying players though then just don't do it. Take a more relaxed, sit-back approach to GMing.

If you think that, you're the pleb. Try not playing DnD.

Human PCs with fantasy names.

>Hi I'm Etnthir Stormrider and I used to be a lowly pesant farmer before I took up adventuring

I just give my humies names that would fit in a western movie. Jonathan Hicks. Amelia Walsh. Jack Moore.

>When you wake up in bed drunk and naked with a skeleton that refuses to tell you her name.
>her name
Double check that pelvic bone, fella.

I just hope you don't use American names in a European fantasy setting.
Also
>peasant
>having surname at all

That's retarded enough that it's probably bait.

>American names
Like what? 90% of white names in the book have European roots.

I mean not the American versions.

I hate this so much. If I'm a PC, I usually have to be the one to decide what to do next, even if other people are the "leader" of the group. I remember back a couple years ago at uni, group had just got done a completely on the rails campaign where everyone was always itching to go and explore shit and head off the rails. So, next semester after a summer of planning, I ask for their characters and get...nothing. Character motivations like "get stronger", "Preach the word of my god", "I'm a bartender". Only one person had a concrete reason to leave the starting town. After that, I had to shove them along in order to do anything that wasn't aimlessly milling about.

>Like having a character practically commit suicide via attacking somebody they shouldn't
B-but my Troll Slayer WOULD do that.

I'd stand up and leave. No drama, just that.

If you like that - ok, but it's not my jam. So I'm stepping out to avoid frustration and not to step on other's fun. But why can't I expect the same courtesy in return?

What's your pet peeve? I only see a well made group meant for the game you're going to play.

>barely tells you anything
Dude, there's literally a book that tells the Strahd plot that you are expected to find by crawling through everything in the module. Along the way you find strange things that don't need explaination, or things that give almost too much - at the cost of being incredibly dangerous.

>pretending to be stupid is funny

No.

My number one pet peeve is games that have more rules than are necessary to present the players with interesting challenges.

Unless the game is specifically about traveling, I don't need 5 pages of rules about modifiers and pitfalls in traveling by various modes. If it is about traveling, then I probably need that and maybe more.

Likewise, if your game always devolves into hack n' slash, I don't need 40 pages of material on social interaction.

Rule lawyers.
>Pulls out dictionary
Thats it, get the fuck out of my house.

This is my pet

Are you me? I get so many complaints that I railroad since when I don't, all the players want to do is sit in a tavern and do nothing.

My PCs are going to give nicknames to just about every NPC in the setting, as well as each other, so this is a pretty good rule of thumb for me too. It doesn't bother me too much that a human PC would have a silly fantasy name, but Ethnir Stormrider would become "Stormy" within 1 gaming session. Maybe this kills RP value but a player being overly attached to their long ass elf name is just inconvenient.

MEN PLAYING GIRLS.

Oh everyones so up to playing a girl because their so unbiased and wew edge. Except they always play them as a cross between animae and lesbians. EVERY TIME.

>play a Paladin because I like the idea of being a noble holy warrior
>fellow PCs constantly arguing about if you make non-LG actions

Or

>play an Evil-aligned character
>fellow PCs constantly bickering about how I'm going to betray them and that having an Evil character in the party won't work out, while not giving the CN Rogue a second thought when he stabs someone in an alley for money

Alignment can be fun I imagine. It has to be capable of being fun, with so many people treasuring it and arguing for its value. But goddamn can it be annoying when your party decides to view the alignment as being more meaningful than the actual personality and actions of the character.

This is mine.

And this is my dog

;_;

I am disproportionately targeted in combat because the GM has learned I'm the only one that doesn't throw a bitchfit when my characters die.

One player mocked my many deaths to crits, then we had to retconn his character's death because if we didn't, he would leave, causing his girlfriend to leave and the game to end.

Adventurers Guilds. It's just a lazy, handwave'y method of gathering players and quests dispensing. Also, it's seriously straining my suspension of disbelief. Am I supposed to belive that there are enough suicidal murderhobos running around that there is a need for specialized workers union? That the world is in grave danger averagely once a week? That every single unpopulated space is littered with ancient ruins that apparently weren't looted at least 10 times since their abandonment? Just play in a superhero setting and be a port of SHIELD, for fucks sake.

>Just play in a superhero setting and be a port of SHIELD, for fucks sake.
Sorry, superhero settings strain my suspension of disbelief too much. Am I supposed to believe that there's people with superpowers running around modern day cities in really terrible spandex costumes?