Don't lie to me Veeky Forums, you were at one point a group's That Guy. Maybe you did it on purpose...

> Donald. Donald D'orc.
> DM : user. I hate you.

I kek'd.

The way you described it, it sounded like you were telling the DM in great detail how to run their game. Even if you were numerically right, nobody likes playing with somebody who comes prepared with a lecture about how shitty you are.

And that's what I see in retrospect. I see a DM who, really, just wanted her players to have fun, but might not have had all the right ideas about design. Along I come, a new player, who, innocently enough at first, was absorbing a lot of information about the game; and then I started to have my own opinions. And believe me, there were some truly confounding decisions on her part that I could talk about, but I won't digress in this post.

Truth be told, I don't know how things would have gone if I had just rolled with it. Would the skill check and HP penalties have fucked my character over? Maybe. Would the requirement to kill any dragon I come across have ended up killing me instead? Quite possibly. Could it have been fun anyway? It might have been. And maybe, if I at least had tried things her way for a while, I could have made a better case if it really wasn't working out. Instead, I didn't even indulge her, and I essentially gave her a dissertation on why her design was shit. Bad on me.

I built a dragon slayer suit for my players, who then had a mercenary NPC don it.

>Force Shield Ring on the left gauntlet for blocking against fire
>Immovable Rods grafted into arms, legs, and spine with simple toggles
>+25 Resistance to the last element it was damaged by
>Can fly for 10 minutes a day
>Priapt of Clean Air provides... well, air
>Increases Str and Con by 6 points when donned, but lowers Cha and Dex by as much

They leave the merc to solo a dragon, after promising a large payment if he succeeded.

I drone on in detail about how the merc laid traps, pitfalls, etc.

>Fight starts with the merc on an open field, greatsword in one hand
>Dragon swoops by breathing fire
>Merc dodges and triggers an explosive, launching a chain net into the air
>Dragon tears through it, but is forced to land
>Merc attempts to fight the dragon, but is woefully unprepared for a direct fight
>Dragon swallows them whole and flies off
>After about a minute or two of flight the merc triggers the immovable rods, mortally wounding the dragon
>It takes him two days to cut his way out and then travel to the party
>Is paid his money and promptly retires with his armor

>First campaign as an adult at 22, haven't touched it since I was 7, 3.5 game with like 8 players run by a douchebag on a power trip.
>no class restrictions or anything like that, I barely understand the system or role-playing in much of a practical sense and yet I go for a caster.
>find a Dragon Compendium class, the Jester, roll up a CN Wood-Elf Jester. No tragic backstory, just a guy that didn't fit in with his people since he was kind of a jerk and ran off to the big city to get paid for it. Or try.
>Introductory session, I completely subvert an NPC Bard's performance by pretending to be his cousin and part of the show, blatantly insult our "parentage", dodge him hip-checking me off the stage but acrobatic pratfall across the stage
>after I sleight-of-handed a rope around his ankle. Pulled his ass across the stage with me, ruining his effect on the audience.
>use Create Water to make the Bard look like he pissed himself because hey, DM wasn't sure how everything worked either.
>Take a bow while Bard recovers, collect coin thrown at stage and steal the fuck out of the Bard's bag backstage, hawk nearly everything at nearby shop, ready to peace out of town.
>whole party ends up fighting a Great Wyrm Gold Dragon at around level 7 or something stupid early. We somehow beat it due to DM being stupid, but it somehow had Death Throes and exploded, killing everyone but the ninja who blew every power point to avoid the damage. He Ress'd us all from the hoard and we elect to start a collective business.
>I write up a huge business plan involving recipes from the ground up, wheat yield per acreage, wage payments by month, projected profit yield, giving myself a much larger percentage than the others, and kinda breaking character a bit to do so. I do this on my own time and don't really bring it up in play until we find a town to basically purchase and turn into a brewery.
Cont.d

>DM handles negotiations poorly, group has whittled down to 4 because he sucks and scheduling.
>mayor is dwarf so negotiations over drinks.
>DM: make a Fort save. Nevermind, you're an elf, you're passed out in the corner.
>Stuck sitting there for the next hour or so while Ninja with no charisma plays grab-ass with dwarf and aces negotiations because he's immune to poisons, alcohol included, and the DM wanted to suck the ninja's dick anyway.
>my character "walks off into the sunset, to search for his brewer cousin" after that, because I was just so frustrated with the whole experience.

It was a valuable learning experience all around, for what I should hold for behavioral standards for myself and what I am prepared to tolerate from a DM and other group members.

Christ, I'd have never thought of that with the immovable rods... imagine something in your stomach was suddenly fixed to a point in space, and you were moving 70 miles an hour.

That armor sounds like it actually helps get the job done. I didn't understand the abilities I was supposed to get. I just managed to find the sheet for it.

>Cause Fear 5/day
>+2 Dex
>Fly 1/day
>Cunning (never flat-footed)

At what level was your campaign?

They were around level 17ish, NPC was stated at 15.

I'd hoped the armor would have been a fun addition to the party, but they tend to set everything to the wayside that doesn't actually cause damage.

I was mostly a "my character would do this" kind of guy, until another of our party explicitly said to our group "doing my character would do this is a shitty thing for the party"

The games been awesome since. It's great to have friends who are the "cruel to be kind" kind of people

I have trouble understanding what you're meaning.

Do you mean having a reason for your character to help the party or going against what your character would want or need because the party doesn't want it?

My character was an obsessively paranoid gnome, and would sometimes do things that would go against the party. For example:

>new player comes in with a wizard
>we're introducing himself and he deeper slumbers me
>there's combat that follows immediately after, and my character thinks the new character is an enemy, so starts attacking him

Out of character I knew he wasn't an enemy, but it was logical for my character. A dick move in hindsight.

We stopped at 12th level. Your players missed a real opportunity there, but I guess it gave your NPC a chance to be a huge badass. That's pretty much all I wanted the armor to be, have defense mechanisms against dragons and some utilities. You don't get everything at once with a Legacy item, but as you level up and complete "rituals" you unlock more. I couldn't see how my armor was supposed to help me 1v1 a CR18+ dragon, the final ritual. Of course, even your well-equipped mercenary played it smart and laid traps and made preparations.

See, an explicit message from someone in your party set you straight. You have good friends. I feel too often people's solution to That Guy is avoidance, passive aggression, or capitulation.

Sometimes, a player doesn't necessarily know they're doing anything wrong until it's become a serious problem. The only thing I wanted was to have fun, same as my DM, same as my fellow players, and if someone set me straight, that would have ended things.

That's just clever

I was a That Guy in a group of them. I was blessed to get it out of my system around a bunch of other ones. Then I grew up and left that group.

I had an old friend from highschool who a couple of years ago invited me to play PF with his group when we got back in touch randomly.

Turns out that whole group was honest to god convinced that casters were underpowered in Pathfinder. No, I'm not kidding. Apparently no one in their group ever bothered to make arcane casters who did anything but direct damage or divine casters who did anything but heal. They even had a stupid houserule where spell save DCs went up by 1/2 your level. Not even kidding.

So, I made a control wizard.

From level 1 I was already dominating every encounter with just fucking Grease. By level 7 every encounter ended on my initiative and the rest of the party were little more than meatshields for me. By level 11 I completely destroyed the campaign.

It wasn't all bad, though. They actually learned how magic doesn't actually suck if you focus on control and save-or-suck/die spells over direct damage, and the DM actually listened to my tips on how not to let casters dominate the game, even ditching that stupid fucking save DC rule.

I eventually had to move away for work, but I still get messages from the DM and group members talking about gaming.

So was I That Guy? Probably, but I like to think I was a benevolent That Guy.

Totally. The second character I ever made, the first one in a modern setting, was named James "Kamakaze" Kyler. He was a chaotic neutral, trenchcoat wearing, Motorcycle riding daredevil turned mercenary, who duel-wielded katanas that he got while training with his sensei in Japan, and had a superhuman healing factor (No one else in the party had powers).
To keep him constantly in the spotlight, I gave him some little joke, remark, or bad pun in response to EVERY little thing any PC or NPC ever said. At the time I had no idea why everyone found him so annoying.

I have been that guy on no less than two occasions

The first, I was younger and stupider and hadn't developed a sense of shame yet, and magical realmed breddy hard. I'll spare the details.

The second, I thought I had learned my lesson, but That Guys gonna That Guy. I played a half-orc barbarian cleric who refused to let defeated enemies die. I would stabilize every thing I clubbed unconscious, sometimes using spells that should have been saved for allies. The chaotic evil sorceress who was obsessed with ritually immolating defeated enemies did not like this. She talked to the GM, and though he didn't want to take sides, the group consensus was that they didn't like me doing this, so they arranged her to purchase a mercenary several levels higher than me to help her kill me. Both she and the GM were sort of newer to the game than me, and didn't really know how to use their abilities to their fullest. I survived her alpha strike, flew into a righteous rage at this betrayal and splattered her in one hit with a crit, then fled from her merc. Father Grumbles is still out there somewhere, fighting the good fight. I was that guy, but I regret nothing.

I was that guy that who was left behind in a village to choose a weapon, because I wanted a "cool one", which in turn made me miss a good chunk of the dungeon crawl.

>Playing Mortals: Dark ages
>Roll a dickish, arrogant german knight
>Get contacted by some Ventrue jew
>Do a mission, inimicating most of the party with my dickish ways
>At the end of the mission, that we ar all in because of different reasons, we all get turned into vampire
>I get turned into a ventrue against my will
>I quit the game then and there

I add that i quit purely because i didn't like ventrues and wanted to be a Brujah like the others

>I'll spare the details.
That isn't in the spirit of this thread...

>I survived her alpha strike, flew into a righteous rage at this betrayal and splattered her in one hit with a crit, then fled from her merc. Father Grumbles is still out there somewhere, fighting the good fight. I was that guy, but I regret nothing.
kek

>The group sided with Ms. burny-evil over the warrior with a no-kill rule.
Were they all just as shitty, or was it just because she was a girl?

I ran a DMPC my first game, which taught the other new guys that it was normal. They then went on to run them with other groups, making me the That Guy for a bunch of people I still haven't met.

I regret it to this day.

Are you my first DM? She did that. A lot actually. She had so many that she started delegating them to other players. One of us had two at one point. They especially became a problem when they started stepping on the toes of the actual PCs skill wise

>She
Definitely not your first DM then.

I think I'm That Guy right now.

>was running a campaign everyone seemed to enjoy
>player wanted to run his own
>every time he runs one it's the same thing, a bunch of dmpcs and over the top bullshit
>literally the same plot, same characters with different names
>he's started a new campaign several times now and not even gotten to the first session with it
>told our new player to not even bother making a character because we wouldn't make it to 1 session
>we're on the 5th session now
>everyone else loves this campaign
>it's the same fucking thing we've done three times before
>i havent taken anything seriously because i know exactly what is and isnt safe to do
>i dont even know what to feel