As I understand it, fa/tg/uys are willing to put up with a lot of bullshit. What's an instant deal breaker for you...

Janky-ass homebrew, especially that Mercer shit for D&D 5e.
It's not that the games I like are necessarily well-balanced or anything--It's that these sorts of homebrews always deviate from the design style of the base game, because they're always made by some cretin who doesn't seem to be capable of understanding patterns when they look at character options. That heterodox design creates terrible grinding in the mechanics of a game system.

It's extra annoying when the system invented is just an objectively worse way to do something the game can already do. Mercer's Gunslinger is the best example. Why use the reasonably balanced, workable firearms from the DMG and the Battlemaster Fighter class so you can do cool maneuver shit, when you could instead be an incredibly overpowered DPS monster who randomly explodes sometimes, as if that was really ever how guns worked? This kind of shit gives me dick tumors. Fuck everyone. I can't escape the bad homebrew, even in "better" game systems, and I hate it. I'm salty.

Games that want you to show up with a character already fully-written, so they can accept or reject you based on the character rather than the player.
This is a really stupid thing since it turns character creation into a game of "try to guess what the GM wants" instead of just being able to ask them to work with you to make a character that fits the world properly.
Plus it means you end up playing with dickholes who guessed right, rather than the cool dudes who guessed wrong. Every time.

A modern day setting. Fuck modern day. I live in the modern day, and it's frankly getting old.

I remember trying to join a text-based AdEva game and it took us like 4 hours to do what would've been like 2 minutes of quick talk in a voice game, tops. Everyone was trying to out-write each other like wankers to such an extreme that I basically checked out about halfway through the first session. Ultimately it went on for a total of like 18 hours. I don't know how people can give up their whole day for a game that plays at such a glacial pace.
Fuck text games, honestly.

Man, it might be because I'm in a good mood, but I can't think of any. Like, at this point I'd play with fucking anyone.

most DM notes and packets aren't well organized well enough. If it goes beyond Government, Religion, cultural make-up, current issue, with more than 3 name drops per section, it has gone too far as front loading.

I recently wrote up a 4ish page document. I had a section on the gods (this was 3/4~ of a page but it was literally just a list of the good and evil ones and two to three things about them and what they stand for). I had a section that talked about major groups/organizations, each with an accompanying NPC, then an overview of the towns that I made (with enough space in between for if a player wanted to make their own hometown) and a history (which is pretty long) that details a basic concept that any citizen of the land would know, plus the general history of the organizations I mentioned previously.

If you think that's too long, I'm open to suggestions Not even sarcastic, I'd actually love for some feedback

Sounds good. 4 pages is very manageable, but just long enough to actually communicate the important concepts of the world. Make sure when you actually run the thing, to frequently remind them of the important details and don't just assume they have it all memorized. I'm a little wary of history, though. It's one of those things you need to know yourself to make the world make sense, rarely comes up in a meaningful way, and where the amount of superfluous detail can quickly spiral out of control. I'd make absolutely sure you condense it down to what the PCs need to know and nothing more

Really, any document is fine as long as you remember that A: Bullet points are your friend and B: Namedrops and tangents about them are cancerous. If a place needs to be dropped with a name, give it a tagline in parenthesis or something the first time and try not to repeat the term ad nausea since it just makes the writing confusing.
Like "[placename], the city of the free men."

Honestly, other than that you should just come up with an interesting world with various tonalities.

>its modern political commentary in historical games.
This but expand it to anything setting or medium. I don't want to hear about the author's or player's or dm's views of gronald grumpf

Already ran into it. My DM has a strange fetish for having our characters be powerless commoners that get beaten down, transformed, or belittled by powerful NPCs that have character levels.

Every time he does this shit, I leave. Now he doesn't bother asking us to roll up commoners, he just relentlessly fucks up perfectly serviceable campaigns by slowly removing class features. Paladins fall, druids get stuck in metal armor by traps, monks end up Chaotic, wizards lose their spellbooks, clerics disappoint their gods, etc.

I hate it and I'm pretty sure he's just trying to get someone else to DM, but I'll be goddamned if I'm going to reward this behavior.

This.
Even if it's pro-/myguy/ I don't want it in the game, for the same reason I don't want anime shit in my D&D even though I, too, am a weeb.
Some shit don't fit.

Fucking seconded. Politics being shoved into games/books is fucking cancer.

Just make a Fighter who lives only to SMASH

Or just make the world's most paranoid fucker Wizard whose idea of 'spell security' is to keep dozens of copies of his spellbook hidden in insane places.

I remember once my Wizard with a lame leg went out of his way to have a special version of his spellbook hidden inside his cane as a big ol sheaf of rolled-up parchment. Nobody saw it coming when we ended up captured, but one quick and cheeky Mage Hand and a rest later and we're free and clear. Another good one is to have your spells meticulously etched into small adamantine plates about the size of a deck of cards using a tiny, tiny font. Then you just use magic to, y'know, duplicate those cards ad infinitum and leave the originals locked right the fuck up and warded to shit, so that the only way anyone's getting them is via that one spell that lets you crush a magic gem to summon the item to you.
Either that or just have a wooden leg, because nobody is gonna take that from you unless your DM is just the most obvious kinda guy ever.

Another fun one is being the kind of Rogue who obsessively hides things in various places. At one point, with the help of the party Cleric, my last Rogue flayed off part of his arm to hide a set of lockpicks in flat, sharpish-ended metal envelopes under his skin. You know, so that if he were ever captured and the lockpicks on his toolbelt, in his boots, sewn into his cloak, hidden in the braid in his hair and tucked into the wrapped fabric he wore as underwear were somehow all discovered.
You wouldn't believe the kind of shenanigans I got into with that character and knives, as well. Good times, good times.

Personally I'm just sick of the way people fetishize grimdark "you're worthless and stupid and bad at everything" shit, as if that's somehow inherently "smarter" or "more realistic." There's a whole wide spectrum between that "Reality is my bitch, for I am A PROTAGONIST." Wouldn't be neat if we actually used it?

Wait wait, one more for the spellbook thing--iirc, in most or all editions of D&D the Secret Chest spell is really convenient. Move it one step back and have a bunch of Secret Chests that are effectively puzzle-locked. Your first Secret Chest is an adamantine brick with an insane codepuzzletimedgenelockedetc security system on it, and inside THAT chest are some basic supplies and the miniature figurine that gets you to the real chest with the good shit.
Haha just kidding that one is just a decoy and has a false spellbook full of exploding runes times a thousand. The real one is in a hidden compartment that you can only access with three keys, one of which is hidden in the mechanism of the puzzle lock, another that is hidden inside a mundane object in the decoy chest via teleportation magic, and the third which is disguised as a seemingly ordinary ring until it is pulled apart to reveal that half of it is merely the cover for the key's teeth.
Only with all three keys can you access the miniature compartment, and in that compartment there are three miniature chest figurines. Two of them are chests whose entire contents are one massive and horrific trap, each a tactical nuke in it's own right. Only one of three is the real chest, and that one is adamantine as well with it's own, separate overly complicated puzzle lock (but that puzzle lock is just a decoy, the real way to open it is a mundane little latch switch hidden under a sliding panel under the heavy chest, because they won't believe it's just that easy)
Also if any of your tactical nukes go off, you have at least 10 clones hidden in various dungeons you've cleared with the party--seal off side rooms and store one there, put one in a secret room off a tavern basement, entrust another in an opaque container to a primitive society as the egg of their to-be-reborn deity under a prophecy, etc.
With enough paranoia and magic, you will go far.

demonization of humans
Several times I've been in a game where either a) plot twist in the end reveals the humans have been behind all the bad nasties in the campaign (and I don't mean like regular cults of evil, but the local european-type human civ is %100 ugly and on-board with genocide)
or b) the party is compelled to play nonhumans and the humans are the big nasties from session 1.

I could tolerate it a few times for the sake of novelty, but now if I even get a whiff of this Ferngully shit brewing, I hang the group.

D&D shit forced in other games. Especially alignment and paladin falling related. Or arguing how undead are always evil because of "negative energy"

You're probably going to regret saying that, user

Agree.
The opposite, too.
D&D games that remove all that D&D stuff because the people want to not play D&D but they refuse to learn systems other than D&D.
I like D&D, so when I see a game listed online for D&D, that's what I expect when I open it. Hate that shit.

blow by blow combat systems. Why does combat take 2 hours? Maybe we don't need to break things down to the individual swing on each turn.

...

please do as user request i want this for reasons

>He doesn't like effeminate cyber punk whores

>Fur fags
>Elf fags
>PCs who backstab the party
>Obvious Min Maxing
>Being an SJW.
>A DM who cripples players or forces DMPCs.
>Jews.
>Anime shit at a certain point
>A group who enjoys Natural 20s way to much
>People who aurgements are based on unbased shit talk or people who will aurge even when their clearly wrong.
If the game is more lose I'll consider playing with a furry Character as long as his fetish isn't a character traits. I don't have a problem who someone playing an elf, just people who are Elf fags even out of game. I don't need to explain why I hate PCs who backstab a party, but if they do it with the DM and with good RP then it's ight. I can handle anime shit, but I got a limit. I can handle people who get excited about a Natural 20, but the people who demand a Natural 20 should make them Literally God for the next 6 seconds need to tone it down (yes I've played with one). And I'm willing to discuss and even aurge but if you clearly lose an aurgement but try to "derail" it or just start getting fighty then you got a personal problem and you need to learn to move on.

>fa/tg/uys are willing to put up with a lot of bullshit.
Really? Most everyone I know from here is a fucking bitch who Reeee's at the drop of a (fedora) hat.

Wait wait wait
One of these things is not like the others.
What's wrong with Jews?

You took the bait.

whenever a kingdom exists in the setting, the other players see themselves as freedom fighters, trying to abolish the monarchy and install a democracy

Oi Vey! You gotta be kidding me! You can't just going around being anti-Semitic! 12 billion Jews died! You best give me special privilege so those poor folks over there don't hurt you for Jew bashing. *Points at sheepole SJWs and Niggers.*

I don't have this one Jew in my group, but he is only like 1/16 Jewish and it only shows sometimes.

I guess i don't like the way they keep us devalued as "niggers" and use us for their gain. Or the way they try to control how people think, in effect dehumanizing everyone that isn't a Jew.

I hate smug, nothing-personal-kiddo levels of dickish omnipotent dudes with a passion. I have no qualms with other omnipotent dudes.

Mercer's gunslinger is actually kind of weak.

any mention of "realism"

Logic is perfectly fine and expected, but any argument or selling point based on realism bothers the shit out of me.

"Realism" basically boils down to "tedious" because reality is a complex thing that has numerous factors. There are reasons why scientists exist and anything that touts realism as a selling point clearly does not have any real understanding of reality as any understanding of it would've made them rage quit at trying to put all that into writing.

Not really RPG related but "Fast paced and tactical/strategic" as selling point for any game also makes me angry. You can either think deep or play it fast. You don't do both. Miniature games are especially guilty of this shit and I can't stand it. It basically advertises to me that the developer have no self awareness and should be avoided at all cost

>Anyone trying to be realistic couldn't possibly understand reality as something that can't be understood.
I live in reality and I promise it isn't that difficult to comprehend.

>Either think deep or play it fast.
You can't do both? It's a successful mass market product, meaning no one else really has a problem with thinking deep at a fast pass.

>You can either think deep or play it fast. You don't do both.

I've done far, far worse with the Secret Chest spell and some careful use/abuse of Wish and an artifact, by creating a stable time loop nuke.
One time I'd a secret chest that was also enchanted to stop time when the lid was closed, and so I set off a huge magical nuke inside while it's shut, such that the explosion was frozen a split second before it could happen as a singularity of infinitely-growing energy that violated all physical laws. To create this magical nuke I needed an ungodly amount of energy in a specific point, so I created a great arcane machine that harnessed the orbit of the moon and some other nonsense to gather energy and shunt it via magic into this timestop box. (side effect, the moon's orbit will decay and end all life at some point, but that becomes a minor issue a few levels later.)
I also pulled some other timey-wimey shenanigans using some pretty complex math and horrific and repeated abuses of a timeless demiplane and planes where time's flow was inconsistent to jury-rig travel back in time through brute force.

So anyway after my character was shamed by a former friend and kicked out of Wizard School, the school exploded in a gigantic mushroom cloud, instantly vaporizing like 10 square miles and causing shockwaves that permanently altered the geology in a huge area in ways that would not be felt for generations, inspiring the character to some day seek the ultimate power of explosive magic.

At level 20 he found a way, using an artifact and the loop that started him out as a little level 1 Evoker, to exponentially increase the power of that first explosion retroactively through mass human sacrifice in an act of megalomania so extreme that he actually got retconned out by several greater deities working together 'cause things were out of hand and would soon destroy all of creation, permanently, by breaking the causal loop.
Best character ending ever.

>heavy handing your political views into a game
>people who eat in an obnoxious manner at the table
>people who come to the game smelling like they haven't showered
>games where the first 2 hours are spent with the dm helping the one person who didn't prepare ahead of time to chargen and to catch them up on the setting
>compulsive whiners and passive-aggressivists

I just hate that it's janky and full of abuseable cheese.
Plus the class is basically worthless when your gun breaks--and it WILL break, because it has a 5, 10, 15% chance to break EVERY TIME YOU USE IT and you ALWAYS USE IT because your class shit ONLY WORKS WITH IT

It's just so bad. Nobody would trust their life to an unreliable weapon that randomly blows their fingers off and leaves them unarmed to be chewed to death by Gnolls.

DMG firearms and the Battlemaster Fighter is way more interesting, more practical, and more believable.

>playing an in person game with laptops
Sure, I get that not everyone likes using minis
Or that setting up maps takes time and effort
But when we are all sitting within a 5 ft radius, staring at a laptop tp do everything makes me wonder why I bother coming over to play

A laptop is convenient, but if you don't like it just offer to bring your own sets and draw the scenes since it bothers you so much.

lso try a tablet it'll help.

Also who the fuck can remember all 200somthing pages of rules or whatever? A laptop is just my handy magic wizzard book. Fuck a literal paper spell list.

...

Holy shit dude. I played in a star wars and LOTR campaign with a guy that showered, literally, about once a month. Greasy hair, dry skin and he smelled like BO to the point we had to open fucking doors in the middle of winter.

This is probably just an issue with my group, but players not going along with a lie when telling the truth makes no sense in character, and negatively effects the party.

>Players whose reasons for doing things are "it's what my character would do". No, you fucking idiot: tell me AT CHARACTER CREATION what personality your character has or you can consider yourself out of my game.
>GMs who take control of PCs, as in "your character feels like they can trust this person". No way fag. Tell me WHY my character would think that, give me SOMETHING less abstract.
>GMs who think that it's OH SO FUNNY to have the characters act foolishly and stupidly in the game because of bad dice rolls. SCREW YOU KEVIN, my PC is not inept at swordfighting, he wouldn't just let go of his weapon. And the acrobat js good at tumbling and acrobatics, ITS NOT FUN IF HE IS TRYING TO ACT COOL TO HAVE HIM FACEPLANT LIKE A NOVICE AND HAVE EVERYONE LAUGH AT HIM.
>Seductive PCs and NPCs. I scream internally when someone rolls to seduce someone else. 95% of the time it's cringy shit, and 4% of the time the situation could be approached better in another way. And for the love of God, do not have NPCs seducing PCs. Same thing applies as before.
>GMPCs (the meaning of the word is bad. I have nothing against NPCs, for all you newfaggy twits out there)
>self inserts
>weaboos
>westaboos in L5R
>child characters (unless you can give me a perfectly good reason and great story inspiration, I'll shoot the concept down)
>powergamers
>"playing an evil character in a good party and vice-versa": my games are collaborative games, usually. If I don't know you well and the rest of the party also doesn't know you, DO NOT approach me with a character concept like [my character is a sleeping agent for such-and-such-antagonist, who will become active after a year and try to help such-and-such-antagonist (of the group) to defeat the group] No, you are not smart, you are not witty, you are stupid. You have a nasty case of idiocy. I won't allow it. My game is not a game you can "win", you absolute moron!
>entitled players.

I do kinda like the idea of unique/differing politics based on whatever nation the party is in, but I'd never want one to seem superior or as a good guy/bad guy feel. Sort of like one area has a more militaristic approach, one is industrial, one is protect-the-environment driven ect and leave any actual political debate to stupid one off arguments between leaders. And when I mean stupid I mean shit like
>"Ok, we are gathered her to discuss the distribution of eggs"
>"I demand that the rich should have the highest stock, they have the funds to sustain it so!"
>"That's bollocks, the poor should have more, they need the extra food!"
>"EQUAL DISTRIBUTION, you guys are enabling class segregation!"
>"I'm a king in my country, I should have ALL the eggs!"
>The sixth leader, the one who brought you here, sighs and looks at the party, clearly not into this shitty debate. "So, your next mission is to retrieve the gilded sword of Allencia, it will help with your travels..."

Telling characters what the think/feel
Hard Railroading

nobody gives a shit about your BotW/MLP crossover transhuman post apocalyptic real robot setting. short of paying attention at the table, the PCs should not be subject to learning some tripe you shat out for verisimilitude in a play pretend game.

Something similar has only happened to me once, but it ended up being the complete opposite. The GM told us that he'd made an original setting that he was very proud of and wanted us to read through his primer before making our characters. I was pretty excited about seeing what kind of strange and foreign lands he had created, so when I got the pdf I didn't hesitate to open it. Rather than getting 10+ pages describing different cultures and races and their relationship with one another, however, I got, and I shit you not, like four pages that read like this:
>There's an empire. It's called The Empire. No other countries exist. They have one religion. It's called The Religion. They worship one goddess. She's called The Goddess.

That was when I remembered that this guy had done similar things before: constantly talking about how creative he was and how proud he was of what he had created only to then show something that could at best be described as childlike in its execution. I told him to never invite me to a game again.

But I'd play in a grey, monocultured land. Especially if they play up how homogenous the whole area is before somethingis introduced to shake the place up.

Funny enough, I was working on something sort of like that with the very specific intention that boredomland is something the PCs will want to... y'know, terrorist upon.

This was not intentionally homogenous on his part. This was just the best he could do. Remember, I said there were like four pages of this. Some of those pages actually tried to describe cultural varieties within the Empire, though it was still just "here's the western culture, and here's the northern culture, and here's the eastern culture and here's the southern culture."

I'm pretty sure the guy was mentally impaired in some way and literally incapable of creating anything more complex.

Oh, yeah. That sucks.

Modern morals in historical settings or fantasy settings that are transparently quasi-historical, eg typical fantasy.

>What's an instant deal breaker for you, Veeky Forums?
Lulrandumbness and other colossal wastes of time.
I am not there to pass time or kill time.
I set the time aside for gaming, let's game!
I don't mind a joke or two, but fucking around as a general approach pisses me off.
Especially when it's combined with shit that's not intended to be funny like "Goofing on Shoggoths" or "lolrape".
(Both are probably in development for tv sitcoms)

>Start at a crawl
Two sessions in we started actually doing anything. Checks out.
>Continue at a snail pace
It is now six months and we're only technically up to the third arc. Checks out.
>Die ingloriously
Not yet, but looking that way.
>Few sessions at best
Coming up on session 15, arc 3.

Agreed. If you just left my group, good luck out there, and sorry for shitting on your characters.

Check out Cryptomancer.

I am in a text game that's been going on for about 4 months. It's slower than a normal game but not terribly so. The trick is to not play with pretentious losers who try to write a fucking novel every time they type. Though sadly those kind of people are hard to avoid in any kind of text-based RP.

People who want realism in a game setting have no imagination and don't read books for fun.

Not because realism is bad, but people asking for it is a red flag that they want everything to "make rational sense" by their own weird and strict view of things, and if anything goes against their unimaginative world you are required to spend an hour 'debating' the point with them using solid well defined reasons they demand you have ready, while everything they use is an asspull or fallacy.

You go into a roleplaying game, of imagination and most likely fantasy, and you expect more realism than most movies but to still have fun? Nah. You should probably be playing something else.

and legalise homo marriage

>pecs
>not legs

Instant deal-breaker:
>Modern IRL politics, especially Puritanical SJWs, in any non-modern game.

Bye!

I agree and hate it, but I'm deaf.

A party that Spends 45 minutes musing over every potential choice,

You can do literally anything.
Thats the point of this entire fucking kind of game

Come up with a character with motivations and a god damned personality.

Players who don't turn up. Three strikes and you're out.

Players who refuse to do their homework are an instant dealbreaker. If you haven't read the source material I asked you to, then you're not fucking playing.

People who insist on voice and/or camera.

Rules-lite systems.

I agree with all of these, and they're all instant dealbreakers. Someone walks in smelling like they haven't bathed this month or shat themselves, I pack up and walk out.

Luddites.

Two years.
130 pages long.
I'm sorry you didn't have patient and constant players. It sucks, really.
I was lucky.

anyone who uses the expression SJW is a cunt.

If the game is canceled 4 times in a row, I drop the game, even if it's due to factors that are out of the players'/DM's control.

You come off as a contrarian bitch.

This. I just load up some PDFs for reference on my laptop then disconnect from the wi-fi. Anything more than that and there's no reason to be in the same room as people, which invalidates the point of playing the damn game.

GMs with control issues kill gaming groups

Mind posting it? I'd like to see what you did honestly

>Obvious Min Maxing
Define this. Are you talking "ELF WIZARD REEE MUNCKIN REEEEEEE" or Tod with his variant human hexblade/rogue abusing a broken high stealth to turn invisible and do 50 damage a turn?
>A group who enjoys Natural 20s way to much
Again, define. I enjoy the nat 20 and the ruling that it is a crit for two attacks worth of damage. Is this a problem to you?

>no session 0
I want just once to have cohesion. No more parties where nothing makes sense because we're all randos packing ocdoughnutsteel

>anime characters
I tolerate my dm mate running his retard rwby character because he'll roll for me (abysmal d20 rng) and is teaching me how to dm myself. But jesus fuck I'm sick of seeing scythe and umbrella wielding little girls that make me think "I've seen your character getting raped on >shadbase"

>"I've seen your character getting raped on >shadbase"
why do you go to shadbase?

Hope is the First Step on the road to Disappointment. I keep vainly hoping that one day I'll go there and see a 6 image flipbook of Kim possible getting assfucked instead of another poorly drawn comic where a pindick shota fucks his mother.

I've fallen victim to the Nostalgia I scorn others for user. Nigger used to do everything I love and I keep waiting, thinking it's gonna come back

Because I can fap to it?
Why else?

>I can do whatever I want, it's magic!
>Waah DM what spell is he using to do that?
Any player that makes a character with the sole purpose of gaining phenomenal cosmic power and who's willing to throw teammates under the bus to do it deserves to burn in the depths of Hell. I've found it's almost exclusively casters who try to do this, too.

is there a better phrase to use for those tedious faggots?
t. cunt

Critical role fanboys telling others how to play.
DMs who try to run combat like a video game/MMORPG/WOW Raid.
DMs who try to dictate how others play their characters.

Or you could play with non World of Warcraft players who assume stealth is invisibility.

If you don't want realism play D&D 3.5 were by the rules you can convince any boss to kill themselves with a successful persuasion check and people arguing that "THE RULES SAY I CAN DO THIS RRRREEEE!!!"

Leave your internet memes to the internet, and don't bring them to my fucking game, is that too much to ask?

So the GM has to do homework, and you just get to show up? Fuck right off. If I give you five pages to read in one week you should be able to find time.

>the GM utters the word "realism" or introduces a houserule because it's "more realistic"

t. someone who never played 3.5 and only knows the memes

This is some Mage: The Ascension-tier magical fuckery, but can appreciate the dedication to big explosions

>someone who never played any pnp game and only knows the memes
That is most of the thread, faggot.

Veeky Forums is not willing to put up with a lot of bullshit at all.
Really minor things set them off at the drop of the hat.
Where did you get this ridiculous idea?

its so obvious you've not only never played 3.5 but never played a tt game in your life.

>I don't want anime shit in my D&D game
Well, I was gonna roll up a monk, but they largely subsist on weaboo fightan magic, so I guess I'll play a kender druid who wildshapes into a sergal.