ITT: Things your players do that drive you nuts

>build a character that fills basically the same party roll as another character in the group
This should be forbidden. Even if characters have the same classes they should have different roles.

Garbage DM detected.

No u

f none of the players are interested in your options, odds are good that the options aren’t interesting.

Why? Even if two players are fulfilling the same roles, it doesn't mean their characters will be the same.

The problem here is none of the players are offering any hints as to what they might find interesting

The thing is it's not always immediately obvious.

For example, one time when I was playing (rather than DMing), it was a 5e game and I built a drow elf thief. I was all about speed, sneakiness, and agility; on top of that since I was a drow I had 120 ft. darkvision, so I was the master of doing stuff at night. And of course being a Rogue I also had the best Perception checks so as to find traps.

When the Powergamer came in, he was initially playing a War Domain cleric, and so had his own party roll. By the halfway point of the campaign, however, he had grown bored with the character and wanted to build a new one, which the DM okayed.

So he builds a Shadow Monk/Undying Warlock wood elf.

- He's faster than me thanks to Wood Elf + Monk abilities. Like, A LOT faster.
- His Darkvision is as good as mine (120 ft) thanks to Shadow Monk, AND he can additionally see through magical darkness, something my drow can't.
- Speaking of, being a Shadow Monk lets him cast Darkness, which had been my schtick
- He has no sunlight sensitivity
- Better at agility thanks to, again, Monk.
- Had more reliable damage thank my Sneak Attack via his ki point flurries
- Has magic spells via Warlock that blow my special abilities from Thief out of the water
- As his primary ability is Wisdom, he's better at Perception than me and therefore trapfinding.
- Oh, and he has an Imp familiar too.
- And his warlock patron was Larloch whom he was serving as a gopher and had been since he was a kid. Why Larloch didn't kill him is beyond me.

So my drow thief lost her main party roll for the entire second half of the campaign and was forced instead to rely on secondary characteristics to keep contributing to the party, like her underworld contacts and the fact that, as an expy of Disney's Aladdin, she was the only decent person in the group and so the only person that people tended to like (if/when they got past the drow thing).

>So he builds a Shadow Monk/Undying Warlock wood elf.

Sounds immediately obvious to me, m8.
You should have voiced concern then and there.

Not that I claim to be some superb GM, but only a single group I ran for had this issue and I'm pretty sure that majority of players in it, with two of them at the helm, took a "let's fuck with the GM just because and subvert all his expectations" attitude. And it's not the fact that they turn my options down which irritates me - this can be annoying, but understandable. It's that they do so just because, while apparently not knowing what the fuck do they want to do themselves.
I absolutely do not have to railroad you or enforce anything, but if you want us to play your way, show some fucking initiative. Give me something to work with, some goals, motivations, don't just sit around waiting for me to throw plot hooks at you only to respond with "meh, why should I care"

>tfw am an orphan so have no idea how a normal filial dynamic is supposed to work in the first place, let alone in your specific setting

Of course it's going to drive you nuts, the backstory is only three words! Now if he had some other notable influences and connections in his environment as a result of being an orphan, then we'd have something to work with! Of course, sometimes having no backstory can be a backstory unto itself.

>guards find PCs on a crime scene
>tell them to drop their weapons and be arrested for questioning
>PCs refuse and attack the guards
>guards defeat them and arrest them
>RRRAILLLROOADIIIIIINGGGGG

>guy makes edgy loner character in Pathfinder
>guy starts a shitload of drama in the game and out (we're all IRL friends as well as a gaming group)
>in-game, his character doesn't fit the party's dynamic, doesn't like anybody in it, nobody likes him, and he repeatedly wants to leave
>but since he's a PC he can't quite leave without making a new character, which he vehemently fucking doesn't want to do
>we literally have an entire fucking session of in-character therapy to try and get him to accept the group and tell us his backstory that accomplishes nothing
>eventually the campaign finishes and we take a break to do some Rogue Trader for a bit
>we just started a Deadlands campaign where he's a bounty hunter that travels alone, dislikes the two other players that could make it to the session yesterday for interfering in his business, and after some roleplaying over Discord he has beef with our huckster as well
>he still gets assmad when we tell him that he makes the same character over and over again and that he needs to at least mildly change him this time or he's going to have to make a new character entirely

What about orphans with happy and alive adoptive parents?

This was my first 5e game. I wasn't extraordinarily familiar with the system yet outside of what I wanted for my own character, and to be blunt I heard "warlock" more than "monk" and thought he would have been going more for the magic than the assassination. I didn't know Warlock was only going to be a three-level dip.

Ditto the DM; this was our first 5e game. Actually I would like to take the time to point out that this was my first game of D&D EVER as a player; I had been forever DM'd before this (that is, I'd played in different games, but they were always Star Wars or Vampire: the Masquerade or SpyCraft or so on. I'd just never actually played D&D from the other side of the DM's screen until this)

I don't want to give the impression that the entire campaign was ruined. It just meant that I went a bit more into roleplaying than I had before and had to rely on the fact that I was better at driving the plot than the powergamer (I'm NEVER like or , I always have stuff for my characters to do, so that helped).

>when the guards are more capable than adventurers and could easily just solve all the problems themselves but don't

What's worse, the party with no motivations IC or OOC, or the party with numerous directly conflicting motivations that are whimsical and contrarian?

>Be me
>Question validity of the Killer DM meme
>Join a game at my FLGS
>Decide to stop being edgy for once and finally give my character a good, loving family
>Game begins as normal
>Five sessions in and my mother and father have been killed, my sister lynched for witchcraft, and my aunt assassinated in courtly politics
>Leave the game
There is a reason over 90% of PCs are either Orphans or Amnesiacs.

Hey, they're guards, sitting around, never getting shit done and being more trouble than help is basically a part of the job description

The former. I can't speak as to other DMs, but I can always make in-character motivations work if they're their.

I can make do with shit for clay, but I can't sculpt if I don't have any clay at all.

Only the best ones get the comfy positions as guards. Inept people get thrown out and have to risk their lives in moldy dungeons for livelihood.

>they're their

*they're there.

I AM FURIOUS WITH MYSELF NOW.

Example poster here, I agree with . Contradiction might add to drama, maybe the party splitting up and realizing that they're better off together (or not). Not doing anything or not getting invested in or out of character is just a fucking dead end for the whole adventure. because you basically start streamlining them until its finally over. Nothing memorable comes out of it.

Second one can actually be pretty good if the players can roleplay well and are open to some character development and compromising from time to time
First one is crap, but can be half decent if the players are at least easy to railroad and aren't bothered with being railroaded. Just write a good story and run them through it, players like that should usually be satisfied with having their epic adventure, even if they didn't have much input in creating it

holy shit cut it loose

>uhh which dice do I roll?
>how much do I add to my attack?
YOU'VE BEEN PLAYING THIS CHARACTER FOR SIX FUCKING MONTHS

I have to agree. I'm also surprised, I have been led to believe that Veeky Forums would think the opposite, but that's what happens when bait outnumbers legitimate posts (or they may be satire, I don't lurk enough to know).

Veeky Forums - come for the bait, stay for the discussions

Trust me, I fucking know. Our group just has a pretty bad case of pic related, and the fact that he's an IRL friend and is in a lot of our classes complicates matters further.
Our GM for Deadlands *is* gonna give him that ultimatum if by three sessions' time he doesn't improve, I just hope that I won't suck-start a shotgun before that point.

Try six years.

To be fair the guards were pretty competent and half the party did as were asked.
Coincidentally the one who surrendered are the only one that are not going to jail

The latter. I just ran a Rogue Trader campaign where a third of the party was self-interested capitalists, two were working to ascend to Daemonhood, and a third was selling the party's intel to their chief rival. That utter clusterfuck led to everybody having a ton of fun every session.

> Come to the end of negotiations
> Me: "This concludes our negotiations in which I will pay your group a sum of 100 gold trade bars."
> "Player: "Yes, we agree to do this job for 100 gold bars each. Toodles!"

Marisha Ray is that you?

The former*, fuck.

FWIW, it's not just geeks that do this, there are a number of social sectors with the exact same dynamic.

This. It's (very) unfortunate but a lot of the time telling the DM that your character has a loving wife/family back home and maybe a farm or whatever will just lead to it/them being "burned down/slaughtered" as soon as the DM needs to show how ebil the big bad is. Althought I don't do it myself I honestly can't fault players for having a character with no ties because a family is just "easy drama" dollar signs in most DM's eyes.

>have anyone/thing with a pulse in your backstory
>just to have DM kill them off for """drama""" and """plot reasons"""

Yeah, no, fuck you.

>"My paladin worships ideals."

What, that thing that Paladins have almost always had in almost every edition? Here's your (You), mongoloid.

What's wrong with that?

>not giving your GM a chance to play your hot milf mom

>players that have to make any moment, no matter how serious the tone of the moment and no matter how much the other players are also taking a serious tone, into a silly, meme-ridden mess

>My paladin follows the rules of the game we're playing

The worse I've had this was when some 17 year-old was the DM. My level 1 character's parents were

>Father impaled by a demon on a demonic spear to the wall of his house
>Mother torn asunder, by demons
>Father in trapped in some weird limbo where he dies, ressurects, dies over and over in horrific agony
>Little sister (that the DM added without asking) kidnapped by demons, of course.

This happened in the middle of hte night, and my character, who was 16, witnessed the little sister part at the very end before the same demons decided to just knock him out by pulling the kitchen door off its hinges and knocking him out with it immediately.

My character had no idea who or what even happened, and was promptly arrested by the medieval po-po for obviously being the one who did all this. Again, at the age of 16

>paladin applys modern morals to a medieval society

There is nothing strictly Medieval about D&D, and there never has been.

>my setting is a geographical, ideological, and technological clone of an IRL time and culture

There are almost no settings actually like this and your silly reaction image implying that it's boring is dumb.

>"My character's motivation is getting money"
>Translation: "I will take absolutely no initiative, I'll only do something if it's a job. I will haggle relentlessly for every payment for every job, and will get excessively frustrated whenever I need to spend any amount of money."

Not him, but i've had that before when players repeatedly failed to pick up on adventure hooks. Like, there was literally 3 different occasions where NPCs DIRECTLY mentioned the issue to the characters and the players out of game just didn't take the hint. At one point I literally said "It would be great if there were some people to take care of this, I'm sure they'd be rewarded".

Granted it was after finals week and they may have been burnt out.

Leave them to me.

Agreed, no motivations just makes me basically playing solitaire as no one does anything. Id rather people tried to be kings or do stuff I didnt plan for than nothing at all, if given time I can make it work usually.

Serfs and slaves are everywhere but im worried about them bullying the half demon tiefling.

not show up
"jokes" aside: they do little to no research on what they're up against, and they never act stealthy. EVER.

>this fucking pic
frenchman here, can confirm. if someone forced me to read this shit until i could pronounce everything right i'd commit sudoku instead.

i don't see the problem with that, he'll just have a god talk to him and claim to be the embodiment of his ideal (which is more or less true in my setting).

Ah-hah, but what if my character, a dark elf thief, has only STATED that as her motivation, but in fact a careful examination reveals that she tends to only conduct huge acts of theft that make for great stories to be passed around by the common folk? Things like robbing a giant's castle, pilfering a dragon's horde, delving a famous dungeon, etc. Likewise no matter how fantastically wealthy she gets she has a tendency to spend it all fast and hard on parties but also charities and other acts of philanthropy in order to get herself noticed and famous?

And likewise, for someone who's so determined to "get rich", she seems to spend an awful lot of her time trying to help save the world and is always the first to jump at chances to do "the right thing", even if it's not profitable?

Such that it swiftly becomes obvious that her goal is not, in fact, the money itself, although she might not realize this or admit it to herself. No, her goal is to become so famous as a thief that people identify her as THAT first, and not as a dark elf.

I loved playing Iliira.

City Guards are good at hitting things, not being detectives.

> DMs keep killing families for cheap drama or using them to railroad
> players get smart about it
> DMs complain that players aren't crippling themselves anymore
You have no one to blame but yourselves.

>frenchman here
But French is a fucking epitome of random and messed up pronunciation. At least from my experience.

>frenchman here, can confirm.

In the interest of fairness, French has words like "Versailles", where the last four letters don't seem to actually DO anything or be strictly necessary. English has silent letters on occasion too, but not usually four in a row.

This is probably the best argument in favor of having your group build your characters together as a group.

I never kill but I MAY threaten.

Why does this read like the beginning of a youtube video?

oh, absolutely. the real issue is knowing a bullshit language full of messed up pronunciation and exceptions... and having to learn another one.

>DM applying medieval morals to a weird fantasy society.

I prefer the overbearing jewish mom who has a grave misunderstanding of what her child is doing.

>player is wanna-be necromancer
>gets a bunch of books and start practicing necromancy, as necromancers are want to do
>mom finds his spell books
>"MY BABY IS GOING TO WIZARD SCHOOL :DDDD"
>Finds out he has a circle of necromancers
>"Oh you boys must be his fraternity at the Wizard college!"

It's played for laughs and they like at, as dumb as it sounds

Unless it’s a British town. Worcestershire is bullshit. At least in the States it’s because it’s often the same word from a different language.

If another person does the same thing but another, but better, it leaves one of the players with little to do because why would they do it when the other character can just do it better instead?

Sorry. English is ultimately the result of Norman men-at-arms trying to pick up Anglo-Saxon tavern wenches. The language that resulted is no more legitimate than any of the other offspring from that union.

>My dad is a blacksmith

>Sorry but no adventure for you, gotta support the family business. Roll a new character.

>Is a male roleplays a female
Neckbeads always make this awkward.

Having internal power struggles among themselves. It's a mix of OOC and IC and really tedious. As a GM and a friend I always do my best to solve it. But it's pretty fucking obvious that two of my players can't stand having the other deciding something or coming with a smart idea. We've spoken about it countless times, but it always shows up sooner or later. Either they play characters that are the leader type, or they go the other way and play some kind of murderautist.

>>"MY BABY IS GOING TO WIZARD SCHOOL :DDDD"

This is neither Jewish nor overbearing.
Where's the guilt? The comparison to other, more successful relatives that you'll never live up to?

Fair enough. But if you have a bit of language skill I honestly don't think English is that bad, it surely may seem so, but despite actually speaking in English pretty much only in school and hearing it only in songs/films(other than that having contact with English only in written form) I am able to get the pronunciation right 99% of time. It just has to "click"

Here's your (You), kid.

Funnily enough I live two towns over from Worcester, MA, which is the second or third largest city in New England after Boston (it trades with Providence, Rhode Island on an annual basis). We pronounce it "Wuhs-ter" in most of Massachusetts, though the Worcester pronunciation is "Woo-stah" (the Worcester accent turns a final "er" into "ah" pretty universally). Anyone not from Massachusetts is likely to pronounce it "War-chest-er" or "War-sehs-ter".

We get a kick out of that.

That's cute and all but you can't tell me fake character motivations, I don't ask about motivations because I'm interested in your character, I ask because having the campaign tie into aspects of your character makes the campaign better

>character is a simple fisherman from a port town
>the second I leave the town it gets nuked
Fuck not having a family, I'm not even allowed to have a hometown.

So if my next character has a family with a history of mutual hatred, will the DM implode?

I mean. I played an "orphan" and my GM still got to do this.

Though it was more that my PC never met his parents before, as he was dropped off at an orphanage, rather than having both parents be dead. Gave free reign for the GM to do whatever he wanted with my PC's parents.

Well, because of him, turns out the other "half" part of my half-elf was half-catfolk. And I had unknowingly been flirting with my own mother.

Thanks GM.

>"Oh sure, you're going to be a necromancer. Lotta calls for that."

"Ma, it's a perfectly legitimate school of magic!"

>"Oh sure, sure, of course it is."

"Thanks, Ma."

>"I'm just saying, your cousin Joshua, he went to that big fancy Transmutation school they built in the city."

"Ma! It's not a competition!"

>"Nah, nah, of course not, dear! You do you, of course. Just answer something for me, dear. After you get there, will you call me, or will I have to DIE first?"

"MA!"

>"I'm not getting any younger, that's all I'm sayin'..."

No. He'll just try to make you feel bad about them dying anyway.

>I'm a prince
Always get me hard as i cut their support.

>playing as a female

I always make sure there are realistic drawback to this. It will be hard to leave your home without your fathers consent. People won't take you seriously. Peasants and bandits will try to rape you. If you buy up your status you'll probably never leave your fathers castle due to being betrothed to some elderly baron. And you'll get -2 to strength and IQ.

>that DM furiously masturbating when one of the players picks a female character

When I had my players put character parents in, it allowed me to craft a wonderfully sad scene where all the players were actually upset.

The Paladin's parent's showed up to their son's funeral. The mother wept while the father stiffly tried to assure the party it wasn't their fault. Which made the Oracle who had been infatuated with the paladin practically break down herself. Good times.

I stopped GMing entirely because the players would argue about EVERYTHING. They were rules lawyers to the max and couldn't ever turn it off. And what's worse is when they started bickering with each other nobody could ever just let things go and invariably somebody would get mad enough to just leave and then game was just done for the night.

I, too, do not allow any fantasy elements in my fantasy game, lest the fantasy elements ruin the realism of my fantasy game.

^This.

Also every time a player picks a nonhuman race they suffer SEVERE racism penalties. Interactions are near impossible and NPCs that do react call them retarded savage subhumans and they'll be killed on the spot.

Also when they play a human that has darker skin or a variant culture than the starting point.

Oh, and NPCs are violently distrustful of any magic using classes, you know, to limit power gamers.

Hey you stole that from me.
And you replied with this same reaction image in the SWG thread. Hows that shit taste?