Worst characters you've seen in a roleplaying game

[The Spelunker!]

The thread about people bringing their sheets over got me thinking about some of the awful characters I've seen over the years both PC and NPC my friends have roleplayed.

I once ran a Marvel Super Heroes game that was designed around stones rather than dice with a bunch of my friends from school. That definitely resulted in some of the worst characters I've ever had to play with.

Cuts, a mutant with chainsaws instead of hands. Not could turn their hands into chainsaws, instead of.

The Preventor, a character copied off the back of a fireworks package. Naturally, the powerset for this character was being able to shoot off fireworks like Jubilee, a incredibly mild form of Hulk rage, and a monkey tail.

A guy who threw knives and could turn into butter who I've forgotten the name of over the years.

There were some obvious character clones and a couple pretty well thought out inventive ones too, but the one thing they all decided on was that every single one of them had an adamantium skeleton. Yes, even the buttery one.


My greatest character sin was probably in a Warhammer 40K game where we were playing as Chaos. I thought the game idea was bad so I jokingly pitched Colonel Sanders. My GM held me to it. So I ran Colonel Sanders, having been kept in cryogenic stasis for 38000 years and having woken up on a prison ship by a demon that granted him psyker powers. I scoured the universe looking for a new blend of 11 herbs and spices that I could use to conquer the universe through my chicken once again. I even captured a planet and enslaved people, forming them into Blood Bowl teams, so that people would have sports to watch while they enjoyed my finger lickin' good recipe.

[MrBRulzOK]

My friends and I used to do stupid little roleplay sessions back in high school. We would roleplay as things such as a Boeing 747. Not one being piloted by somebody, mind you, but a living sentient one for whatever reason. There were other silly ones too, but it's been so long I don't recall most of them, perhaps having blocked them out of my memory.

The scenarios weren't any better. For example one time the goal was to successfully steal an item of fifty dollars or less from a Walmart without getting caught.

[Gremlin]

Dec 16, 2015 0:52:36 GMT -5 The Spelunker! said:

A guy who threw knives and could turn into butter who I've forgotten the name of over the years.

That sounds AMAZING! Please tell me his nemesis was a hot biscuit.

[The Spelunker!]

Dec 16, 2015 2:41:30 GMT -5 Gremlin said:

Dec 16, 2015 0:52:36 GMT -5 The Spelunker! said:

A guy who threw knives and could turn into butter who I've forgotten the name of over the years.

That sounds AMAZING! Please tell me his nemesis was a hot biscuit.

His real nemesis was other pcs. He got melted and put on popcorn by the Preventor and another PC because they player was being obnoxious.

[The Spelunker!]

Another classic was Prince Chinaman, an ancient Chinese sorcerer who had been ripped off of Mummy 3 and given an awkwardly racist name. The player absolutely loved him and played him surprisingly well though, despite my misgivings.

I had a roommate run a character who's whole motivation in the WoW rpg was that his family was killed by wild barracuda. He couldn't understand why people made fun of him for that.

Another roommate ran a flying rich guy in a superhero game named Icarus. Icarus' biggest problem was that he always yelled out the name of his finishing move every time he used it: DONKEY PUNCH.

[The Spelunker!]

Another of my favorites over the years was running World of Darkness' Vampire back in the day. The game was set in a city encased in a done to provide eternal night and had become a haven for all the horrible creatures of the dark.

One of my players wanted to run a new character, a normal teenage girl. I explained how in a city that was 99.9% monster that might not be wise, at least without a reason for them not to eat you. The player disregarded my concerns as GM and told me it was nothing to worry about. They proceeded to have reckless and unpleasant encounters with npcs and died. I offered them the embrace to come back as a vampire and they refused, moving on to another new character...

[The Unconquered Sun]

Your classic super intelligent gorilla whose super power is throwing feces at people.
'Cause it hasn't been done a million times before.

[A Platypus Rave]

Dec 16, 2015 0:52:36 GMT -5 The Spelunker! said:

My greatest character sin was probably in a Warhammer 40K game where we were playing as Chaos. I thought the game idea was bad so I jokingly pitched Colonel Sanders. My GM held me to it. So I ran Colonel Sanders, having been kept in cryogenic stasis for 38000 years and having woken up on a prison ship by a demon that granted him psyker powers. I scoured the universe looking for a new blend of 11 herbs and spices that I could use to conquer the universe through my chicken once again. I even captured a planet and enslaved people, forming them into Blood Bowl teams, so that people would have sports to watch while they enjoyed my finger lickin' good recipe.

I thought this was for worst characters not best...

I can't think of any epicly bad characters right now...

[Dr. T is an alien]

Well, I mentioned my friend's Sheamus character, the barbarian whose favorite hobby was to determine which foods produced the smelliest farts, in the other thread.

I ran an Undertaker-inspired character. He was a member of a homebrew giant race (this was AD&D, so 7 ft tall were listed as smallish giants). One of their primary features was that their society was really, really, really into the lawful good thing (essentially, we were the only people who PREFERRED to hang out with paladins on a regular basis). My guy was a little off kilter for his race (which is why he was a PC in the first place), so instead he was the dark, broody giant with a heart of gold. His look was a 7 ft tall wall of muscle, shaved head, face painted to look like a skull, dressed in all black, wore the skull of a hill giant as a helm (it fit just right), a ton of skulls dangling from his belt and neck. In addition to the scary look he almost never spoke. To seal the creepy vibe off I bought a simple glammer talisman that make the lights go out whenever I entered a place, shined a blood-red spotlight on me, and out of nowhere the Undertaker's theme would play (the talisman could be made to not go off if I wished to be inconspicuous, though I rarely did).

I made a kobold character that I, believe it or not, rolled all 17's and 18's for his stats. I played this guy as the most arrogant 3 ft tall dragonboy you will have ever seen. His name was Xexanthanor Xenarius Xornithicus the Great and his mouth was even bigger than his name would suggest (his really high charisma rating was the average of a grating personality with some very, very, very regal dragonlike looks. You really could belief he was dragon-decended, and that was before he started taking the dragonborne feats that Kobolds can take). It was so fun playing the most obnoxious asshole you could ever dream of playing. Oh, and he eventually did establish XXX's House of Love, an establishment that employed a bunch of very good illusionists to essentially remake Quark's holosuite brothel option. The best part? I got the local Temple of Pelor to pay for much of the construction (I demonstrated to them that in the long term they saved money and effort that was normally dedicated to treating for the various VD epidemics that non-illusionary hookers brought to the community, as well as cutting down on the actual sex trafficking that the local crime syndicates profited from).

I also played a half-gold dragon dragonslayer named Kellistrixis. As you might imagine, he was a beast. His primary goal in life was to track down his father.......and kill him very, very dead. See, his father was one of the few not-so-good gold dragons to exist (this character started in AD&D before getting ported to 3.0, so this was long before evil metallics was a thing). His father annexed the territory of a rival gold, killed the rival and her children, pillaged the territory, and raped a number of women just because. He was the product of one of those rapes and being the hate-spawn of the beast that rampaged the land did not make him or his mother popular. His mother was killed defending him when he was still a child and he was forced to fend for himself. Io himself came to my character, helped him along, and granted him the power of the dragonslayer. Remember, the character started in AD&D, where dragonslayers were a character class unique to humans where Io, god of all dragons, granted some humans the ability to slay his children in an effort to force them to stop fighting and get along with each other in a common defense. The rules for half-dragons stated any class open to a half dragon's mortal half was open to the half dragon, so my character easily became the abso-f***ing-lutely deadliest dragonslayer in existence because he combined the power of a half dragon (it got neutered a little in 3.0 to make it a +3 level adj) with the power of a dragonslayer (I suppose it is worth mentioning that dragonslayers received massive, massive divine-granted bonuses when attacking dragons, in addition to the really nice traits of general resistance to all breath weapons and immunity to fear effects). The character was actually quite awesome, but he was a massive detriment to the party as dragons tended to put out massive bounties for him and they were frequent collateral damage.

Another character that started out lame and became really fun was my first ever character, a paladin in AD&D who I managed to get killed in his first battle (though he fought valiantly and honorably). Instead of having him resurrected (which would have been free at the temple since, you know, paladin), another party member instead paid to have him resurrected.....as a minotaur. That's right, I played a paladin, the embodiment of all that is good and just, stuck in the body of a minotaur, the embodiment of evil and corruption (again, this was AD&D where the race was a curse on humans, not an actual giant race).


Actually, these were all awesome characters.

[Push R Truth]

Wait... I thought making purposefully shitty roleplaying characters was half the fun of roleplaying.

[The Spelunker!]

In the same game as Prince Chinaman, I had Spencer McCoy, who was a player wanting to run a Supernatural style hunter in a superhero game. He decided to nickname himself Canada's Third Greatest Monster Hunter. Why he picked third greatest or just of Canada, I don't know.

To go with that, the player's father was in the same game, running The Cadaver Man, a mad scientist who would put his brain in the body of different fallen heroes and villains he'd collected, and that'd be the character powers he would have that session. (What a weird pitch for a hero, right? But I'm not in the habit of refusing pitches if I think they're workable) One of his starting bodies was Canada's second greatest monster hunter, just to torture his son.

Then there was The Indivisible Man, who had the amazing power of not being able to be divided and a weakness to gas attacks for some reason. He was a tank with ridiculous defenses and no movement powers or offense really. He'd routinely get dropped by the party's super spy in fights who'd throw area of effect sleeping gas pellets that he wouldn't be fast enough to get out of the way of.

The worst by FAR was Black Dagger. The same guy who played the knives and butter character ran a girl who threw knives who could never stop talking about how her family raped her, even bringing it up out of the blue in casual conversation. In a comic book style super hero game. Where he knew that at least 2 of the players had been sexually assaulted before. It wasn't even anything he wrote up ahead of time for me to veto. Just shit he kept blurting out at the table like it was no big deal over and over. Eventually I worked it out with him that we'd cripple his character and retire her after a bad fight and him not being able to stop making everyone at the table uncomfortable.

The rest of the characters for that game were pretty legit though. An Arab who could dance to control the weather, a doctor that could turn into a giant atomic dinosaur, a 6 inch Silver Surfer type, a Doctor who could open up portals to anywhere, a gentleman vampire, a precognitive martial artist, a psychiatrist who controlled people's minds through fear, and a Swedish super spy bent on freeing her husband from the mental enslavery of the world's most powerful mentalist.

That was also the game where I unleashed the Electric Boogaloo on them, a static electricity powered speedster who ran around in wool. Also, the terribleness that was MIND Inc, a self help organization who mind controlled it's clients, leading to them fighting the organizations gym trainers as reoccurring villains, Biff Ripkins and Amy Aerobix. The Red Dust, malevolent dust from Mars gained sentience, Also, Wang Johnson, an evil Asian Confederate bayou plantation owner with a pet albino alligator named Jefferson Davis. Those are all cringeworthy I would say.

[The Spelunker!]

Dec 16, 2015 14:33:20 GMT -5 A Platypus Rave said:

Dec 16, 2015 0:52:36 GMT -5 The Spelunker! said:

My greatest character sin was probably in a Warhammer 40K game where we were playing as Chaos. I thought the game idea was bad so I jokingly pitched Colonel Sanders. My GM held me to it. So I ran Colonel Sanders, having been kept in cryogenic stasis for 38000 years and having woken up on a prison ship by a demon that granted him psyker powers. I scoured the universe looking for a new blend of 11 herbs and spices that I could use to conquer the universe through my chicken once again. I even captured a planet and enslaved people, forming them into Blood Bowl teams, so that people would have sports to watch while they enjoyed my finger lickin' good recipe.

I thought this was for worst characters not best...

I can't think of any epicly bad characters right now...

Don't get me wrong, running Colonel Sanders was a blast, but there I was, continually derailing a mostly serious game yelling about spices or gravy or summoning demonic chickens to do my bidding.

[Bad Moon]

The game was Pathfinder in a homebrew setting of a pirate town, we were playing a crew of freebooters.
The character was a female half-elf ranger (played by a guy, which should have been the first red flag) and prostitute (red flag the second) and the way she was played came off as a ditzy, rude, selfserving, casually evil bitch, on top of being so blatantly ignorant of her surroundings that she probably would have been diagnosed as mentally ill if she had been a real person.
Highlights of her run include:

Trying to steal a bandolier worth of poison vials (which she had no way of identifying or even telling apart) from our alchemist.

Accepting an escort job for a slave transport in exchange for the price of a lockpicking textbook, knowing full well that three quarters of the party were former slaves themselves and were trying to stay in hiding from slavers.

Naming her "pet" wolf animal companion 'Wolfgang'.

[The Spelunker!]

Dec 16, 2015 16:57:59 GMT -5 Bad Moon said:

The game was Pathfinder in a homebrew setting of a pirate town, we were playing a crew of freebooters.
The character was a female half-elf ranger (played by a guy, which should have been the first red flag) and prostitute (red flag the second) and the way she was played came off as a ditzy, rude, selfserving, casually evil bitch, on top of being so blatantly ignorant of her surroundings that she probably would have been diagnosed as mentally ill if she had been a real person.
Highlights of her run include:

Trying to steal a bandolier worth of poison vials (which she had no way of identifying or even telling apart) from our alchemist.

Accepting an escort job for a slave transport in exchange for the price of a lockpicking textbook, knowing full well that three quarters of the party were former slaves themselves and were trying to stay in hiding from slavers.

Naming her "pet" wolf animal companion 'Wolfgang'.

It definitely takes someone not garbage at roleplaying to genderbend and not make it awful.

[Dr. T is an alien]

Dec 16, 2015 17:10:25 GMT -5 The Spelunker! said:

Dec 16, 2015 16:57:59 GMT -5 Bad Moon said:

The game was Pathfinder in a homebrew setting of a pirate town, we were playing a crew of freebooters.
The character was a female half-elf ranger (played by a guy, which should have been the first red flag) and prostitute (red flag the second) and the way she was played came off as a ditzy, rude, selfserving, casually evil bitch, on top of being so blatantly ignorant of her surroundings that she probably would have been diagnosed as mentally ill if she had been a real person.
Highlights of her run include:

Trying to steal a bandolier worth of poison vials (which she had no way of identifying or even telling apart) from our alchemist.

Accepting an escort job for a slave transport in exchange for the price of a lockpicking textbook, knowing full well that three quarters of the party were former slaves themselves and were trying to stay in hiding from slavers.

Naming her "pet" wolf animal companion 'Wolfgang'.

It definitely takes someone not garbage at roleplaying to genderbend and not make it awful.

Adventure Quest was a homebrew gaming system that I played at Purdue (I don't know if they still meet today, but there were well over 100 regular players when I was there). Their line of thinking was that you have no choice in who you were in real life, so you had no choice in your race or sex and had to roll for them when you rolled for the other physical traits (you had even odds of being an elven maiden or a lizard/orc hybid male).

This meant there were a whole lot of people playing against their gender, often to terrible results. I think my cross-gendered character was an acceptable one. She was a fit but plain looking human swordswoman named Misha Worfbane. I played her as serious but compassionate professional who wound up becoming a big-sister figure for some colorful but dim-witted PCs that she regularly adventured with.

[The Spelunker!]

Dec 16, 2015 18:19:05 GMT -5 Dr. T is an alien said:

Dec 16, 2015 17:10:25 GMT -5 The Spelunker! said:

It definitely takes someone not garbage at roleplaying to genderbend and not make it awful.

Adventure Quest was a homebrew gaming system that I played at Purdue (I don't know if they still meet today, but there were well over 100 regular players when I was there). Their line of thinking was that you have no choice in who you were in real life, so you had no choice in your race or sex and had to roll for them when you rolled for the other physical traits (you had even odds of being an elven maiden or a lizard/orc hybid male).

This meant there were a whole lot of people playing against their gender, often to terrible results. I think my cross-gendered character was an acceptable one. She was a fit but plain looking human swordswoman named Misha Worfbane. I played her as serious but compassionate professional who wound up becoming a big-sister figure for some colorful but dim-witted PCs that she regularly adventured with.

There's a D20 post apocalyptic system that works like that from WOTC. You roll everything on charts and you can end up with some weirdass characters. My roleplaying group has had a bunch of people do it over the years, and then we hold a local minicon where people from across the country head over to test their games for Gencon which ends up resulting in a ton of genderbending just due to the randomness of the tables and games, and I've never seen awful genderbending there.

A couple times at Gencon though, ugh, people turning characters with 0 writing like that into mindless vapid sluts hitting on the rest of the party.

That being said, it's probably way worse for LARPing, which is why most of the LARPs I've been to prewrite their characters for both genders to fit the player.

[Cyno]

The worst one I ever personally experienced was someone making an Inara (from Firefly) expy in a medieval fantasy setting. Complete with the character's name just being Inara spelled backwards. I usually don't dismiss character concepts out of hand, since I've seen the most mundane or groan-worthy concepts not only work, but work brilliantly in the hands of a talented player. But the player lacked the creativity needed to make the character work, really just copying the most superficial elements of Inara without any of the character traits that made her more than just a one note character.

[A Platypus Rave]

Thought of one...

my friend rolled a dwarf rogue with a shitty charisma score... the DM let him RP it as basically being a curmudgeonly racist.

He talked smack about the elf, human and other dwarf (he was like a hill dwarf so not really a dwarf in his eyes or something)...

I had a bard... and basically since I had the highest charisma score my job was to basically talk down everyone from killing the party because of him.

[Burst]

In general I'm not a fan of "You MUST play the stats/race/class that you role" since it really can make things more of a chore (trying to work around a bad luck build or a character that just doesn't fit your playing style) than need be for something that's ostensibly escapism. The longest campaign I was ever part of, our GM basically said "f*** that, you're playing yourselves" and basically had us do embellished versions of ourselves for Pathfinder. It wound up working surprisingly well and certainly made tabletop conversations easier. We were also possibly the most hilariously diverse gaming group of all time (especially compared to the rival 3.5 edition group that we were always competing for rooms with), but that's another story for another time.

Moving away from tabletop to forum play-by-post, a million years ago I was in a long-format Sonic RP based on an amalgamation of the Sega and Archie continuities with a heavy military/political intrigue bent. Most of the players had a very good idea of the proper tone of the setting (which was about as 'realistic' as you can get in a Sonic-based setting)... which made it particularly hilarious when a newbie joined the RP and immediately presented himself as a classic Marty Stu. In a setting with Sonic depowered so that you didn't have hedgehog quills busting through metal, this guy blatantly ignored the setting summary and set out busting open tanks with his totally-not-an-orange-colored-Sonic character.

The protocol we had was basically "If you're attacking a character/vehicle/etc, write yourself attacking but let the other person decide if they were hit or not". It was basically honor system, but most of the players had enough common sense to know when it was reasonable for a character to dodge, say, a barrage of heatseeking missiles and when it just wasn't very believable. Orange guy wrote himself slicing through vehicles and basically trying to single-handedly win the mission without really paying any attention to what anyone else was doing, and didn't see anything wrong with it. He also got rather mad when the moderators basically intervened to say "No, you haven't busted open the tank, you've just concussed yourself on the tank".

[Deleted]

I got in a silly mood one time and registered at a Vampires: The Masquerade board just to troll a stupid vampire.

I forget all the particulars, but I remember he was

A.) A nosferatu.
B.) A Nosferatu that came with military hardware, because he actually served while as a Nosferatu.
C.) Since the war ended, had accrued a large amount of cash from the porn industry. Not fetish shit either, mainstream. Big star.
D.) After a time of that gig, he found God and became a well known public figure. Some acting. Some politics.

Most got that I was playing, but the ones that didn't, oh boy...