PDA

View Full Version : Worst Character You've Ever Played?



Rhaegar14
2011-06-13, 05:41 AM
Just an interesting topic, I thought. We've all had that one character we disliked playing for one reason or another, right? Any system works, but name it first.

Mine was my D&D 4e Changeling Assassin, Kathala. I ended up hating her mostly because of my group. Because the thing is, Assassins are Strikers. They're supposed to deal damage. So it would really suck when I spent four rounds preparing and then do 100 damage, only for the Barbarian to come back, drop an encounter power, and do 120. But Assassins have lots of utility, right? Except my DM at the time hates how they do skill challenges in 4e, especially traps. So there goes my Thievery training's usefulness. My absurd Bluff check ended up marginalized by the only other Changeling (an Ardent) in the party with an even MORE absurd Bluff check. And last, but not least, whenever I tried to bring my stealth utility to bear, halfway into planning the Battlemind would go "Screw this, I'm breaking down the door."

As the icing on the cake, I took a gamble to see if I can crossplay. I cannot. At all.

137beth
2011-06-13, 06:22 AM
A 3.5 core-only fighter. WITHOUT using a homebrewed "fixed" fighter. Never doing that again.

Iceforge
2011-06-13, 06:36 AM
Pen and Paper - Mounted combat oriented fighter, was under the impression the world was going to be open ended and the game style very sandbox-like and catered to the players.
After 6-7 sessions, I had a total of 1 combat while mounted, and I was delayed to enter it so I basicly charged in, missed (unlucky roll) and then the enemy died before I could do anything else.
Besides that, the others gamed differently from me in many other aspects, like almost no in-character talks between the PCs, if you started an ingame conversation they would simply reply in ways which was clearly OOC

LARPing - First time I ever tried to LARP was in a Vampire game which was played at night in the entire city (which was a lot more functional than it may sound), I was rushed in, a friend who played called me the night before and said they was missing many players who couldn't play anyway and they was starting a new campaign, so I agreed to join and a ST emailed me a character, which was designed around the wishes of someone else and I was assigned to the group he had been supposed to play with; The character was a class-a bastard who was mean to his friend, belittled them often, talked down to them and who abused their trust whenever he could get away with it, and I was supposed to play that in the home of someone I didn't know (who I should also behave towards in that manner) with 4 other strangers (besides the host).
I simply could not play that character and have any enjoyment from it, played him two times and then simply requested a new character, which I in hindsight regret, should just have quit that mess in the first place

Totally Guy
2011-06-13, 06:36 AM
I once brought a Fochlucan Lyrist to a D&D 3.5 one shot at level 15.

Dual casting progression, full BAB! In my head he was awesome. I didn't use any tricks to meet requirements of the class beyond Contacts and Favoured to get the skill needed to get in a level early.

It turned out not to be so hot in play. He was maybe 2nd or 3rd best at everything.

peacenlove
2011-06-13, 06:47 AM
An exalted neutral good rogue in a (thankfully) short lived 3.5 edition campaign. Coupled with a "paladin" (really arrogant and self centered player, eternally thankful that we ditched him) and a DM that thought that by locking the doors the baddies were going to open and attack us (thus giving us additional preparation time) was "metagaming".
But the most annoying thing is that in actual play a rogue can be shut down in a variety of ways. High strength melees? Rogue paste. Vs spellcasters? Dominated.

Sir Homeslice
2011-06-13, 07:23 AM
So this one time I decided to play a Monk. You know, to test it out, especially since the DM was being merciful to everyone and giving us ridonkulous stats.

Worst. D&D. Experience. Ever.

For me, at least.

Kurald Galain
2011-06-13, 07:37 AM
A 4E ranger. Sure, he was effective, but playing him was so. extremely. boring. This was a dungeon crawl with little else to it than combat; so every turn I would just point at one enemy, it would take a bunch of damage, and that was it. Yawn!

Throgg
2011-06-13, 08:01 AM
Back when I was a wee beginner, I thought it would be a good idea to play a half-ogre Grappler. Needless to say... It was painful. He was big, dumb, and even though he was built to be ruthlessly efficient against "one" opponent, he still failed. It was just sad and awful.

In the end he got possessed by an intelligent magic sword and tried to fly off with it... The party gunned him down with no hesitation. Shows how much they liked him.

Totally Guy
2011-06-13, 08:07 AM
Yawn!

I love the juxtaposition between "Yawn" and the "!". :smallbiggrin:

Sdonourg
2011-06-13, 08:22 AM
I played once as a paladin. Then he falls due to some moral problems. I decided to go fighter next. And this fallen paladin/fighter (who atoned later, but it doesn't changes anything) couldn't do anything good.

Just_Ice
2011-06-13, 08:23 AM
A 3.5 unarmed fighter with incredible diplomacy, hitpoints and an irritating verbal tic. Couldn't really fight, so he just shouted advice to other characters as if he was a boxing coach and munched on sugarcane while laughing.

DontEatRawHagis
2011-06-13, 10:46 AM
Two, but one I keep reworking every time I start a new campaign, so its just a work in progress.

My worst character was in my first Spycraft Campaign, a Hacker. Because the way I played him was not much like a hacker. Part of it could have been that our party increased to about five or six players by the end. Typical team in spycraft has a Soldier, Wheelman, Infiltrator, and Hacker. We had a sniper, gunslinger, infiltrator, faceman(James Bond), wheelman(driver), and hacker. In the end we were geared towards combat more than espionage, so my character had one moment of actual hacking.

Kol Korran
2011-06-13, 11:46 AM
hhhmmmm... it think my Ad&d character, long ago takes the cake. our DM liked to have things "realistic", and made all kinds of tables for injuries and so on. I did not have good luck. it was a halfling rogue, and into the second encounter he lost one of his eyes. but adventuring is dangerous, right, so i continued.
next meeting he got his leg poisoned, and to save him the leg was cut off. but i wouldn't let such a small thing deter me! a few shed tears, and a makeshift crutch and we continued on.
in the city i tried to pickpocked someone, posing as an injured beggar, but rolled poorly. the judgment was to cut off the thieving hand.

this sort of continued until we were captured and i managed to insult the villain, and he had my tongue cut off. not being able to speak bit the cake for me, and i finally changed character.

why did it took me so long? it was my second character, and i was really attached to it. i was sad to let it go. :smallfrown:

Dusk Eclipse
2011-06-13, 11:48 AM
A Psion 3/Quori Knightmare 3/Soulknife 9 in a party with a Wizard, a Druid and a Cleric... we fought a Dracolich..... guess who only did 1d10 points of damage in a three hour long fight.....

Anxe
2011-06-13, 02:18 PM
Back when I was a wee beginner, I thought it would be a good idea to play a half-ogre Grappler. Needless to say... It was painful. He was big, dumb, and even though he was built to be ruthlessly efficient against "one" opponent, he still failed. It was just sad and awful.

In the end he got possessed by an intelligent magic sword and tried to fly off with it... The party gunned him down with no hesitation. Shows how much they liked him.

You suicided that character and begged the party to get rid of him. It only took one session to figure out he wasn't fun.

Silus
2011-06-13, 03:28 PM
Tiefling Swashbuckler, D&D 3.5 near the tail end of a pirate campaign.

Things started out pretty well though. Statted her up to be a merchant, so she had a high Diplomacy, Sense Motive, Bluff and Appraise. So a few session in, we bring in a new player, and what did he decide to play? A very, very social based character. Not really his fault, just a lack of communication. But everything seemed to go down from there. A party with two "Faces" doesn't really work IMO.

GeekGirl
2011-06-13, 04:46 PM
I made a soulknife/ninja once... The idea sounded awesome in my head, in practicality... not so much.

The_Ebolanator
2011-06-13, 05:23 PM
In a gestalt game I once played a barbarian troll. The shtick was that the character was functionally retarded and his "rage" was basically him getting really happy and enthusiastic a la Lenny from Of Mice and Men fame. Anyway the party had to escort a young prince back to his land and we came across a lone statue brandishing a wand. The rest of the party proceeded with caution but my character just ran right on through like a Ritalin-deprived ADHD child in a candy store, and wouldn't you know it? The statue Power word: kill-ed my happy bum.
The party had to spend half of all their money just to resurrect my character.
Now the players didn't hate on me, we're all really close friends. In fact, they thought it was quite in-character of me to pull such a stunt, but it still cost them a pretty penny.
It was this lovely experience that taught me the value of a character with proper cerebral functions.

Vemynal
2011-06-13, 05:31 PM
I played a dwarven defender once =x

bad, bad idea >.>

Ravens_cry
2011-06-13, 05:32 PM
Pathfinder
Holy Warrior (Full BAB cleric with no domains and Heavy armour)/ Rogue. Yeah, that didn't go so well. I liked the character, he was a drunken, swashbuckling lout who worshipped the god of alcohol,a lot of fun to role play, but terrible in anything like combat. Retired when he got strength scored to nil by Shadows. He was replaced by a gypsy-analogue Witch with an obsession with the stars. Think Trelawney, but scarier when angry. Now that, that was fun.

Notreallyhere77
2011-06-13, 05:52 PM
I once played a halfling rogue. But I played him like a fighter.
He was knocked unconcious in each encounter. The cleric spent all of his healing on me. He was fun outside of combat, sure, but we were in the sunless citadel taking on goblins. The only reason he didn't die was because the game was cut short.

Branching off, but I feel it is worthy of note:
The session I played him in was in memoriam of Gary Gygax, and we played it the day he died. Everyone felt a little reckless and nostalgic and mournful, and we knew we wouldn't be playing those characters again, so perhaps this is only the worst character because of the circumstances. I could have made him great, but my heart just wasn't in it.

Eric Tolle
2011-06-13, 05:57 PM
A LARP character in the More-Goth-Than-WoD game Victoriana setting. I played a corrupt industrialist who only cared about the welfare of his daughter, trapped on a zeppelin infested by vampires. All in all, not a bad situation, right?

Well, the GM was a massive flake; he had half the number of referees that a game of 40 people needed, and he showed up twenty minutes late for the LARP. My character sheet was incomplete, and the player of the daughter was given a character sheet that had somebody else listed as father. I basically ran around competing with the other players for a moment of a ref's time, couldn't get anything accomplished, and eventually the vampire players got bored and went on a munching spree, and I ended up getting shoved into a lifeboat.

And the sad thing is? I didn't have the worst experience. A friend of mine got a "character sheet" that literally just said "You are the cook."

CakeTown
2011-06-13, 07:40 PM
During the last campaign I played(4e), another player's character died, and we were unable to revive him(his goddess refused to give his soul back). So, in order to insert his new character into our group and have it make sense, there was a tournament, where the winners joined our group. In addition to the characters we were playing at the moment, we created "back up characters", so if one of us died, we could just use our back up, and it would make sense.

Anyway, my back up character was a bard; I don't quite remember the race. I just had the idea to have my character play a bass guitar, and play my own bass whenever I cast a spell. The main problem was that I had not come up with a personality for the character, so when it came time to use him to negotiate with some invading pirates(he had the highest CHA), the roleplaying was awkward and the negotiations didn't go so well(the DM required us to roleplay, in combination with our rolls). After that session, I scrapped the character and created a new one.

My new character was even worse. He was a dragonborn sorceror that happened to be extremely creepy. I never even played him, other than a few roleplayed conversations with other players, where he managed to creep
them out quite successfully. I was really uncomfortable with him, so I had him killed and brought in a new character; this one lasting til the end of the campaign.

Nothing was mechanically wrong with these characters; they weren't optimized, but they were capable in combat(at least in theory). The only reason I hated them is because I couldn't roleplay them.

Grendus
2011-06-13, 08:13 PM
I tried to play a dwarvish tank once in a homebrew system my family is working on. The problem is, in this system armor reduces your accuracy, and dwarves are already clumsier than average, so I could only afford a little armor to begin with. The end result was a character who had trouble hitting anything, didn't hit very hard when he did, and didn't absorb enough damage to be a good tank. Very frustrating indeed. He was fun to roleplay, since about half the party was either elf or half elf, but since the campaign was heavy on the combat I ended up retiring him after the first game, replacing him with a prootwaddle tank (very stupid birdlike creatures, they have an int cap that's lower than most races base int... he had the uncanny habit of spotting hidden doors through sheer dumb luck) who did much better by virtue of not needing to spend any of his point buy on thinking.

I also had a chaotic evil halfling assassin that was difficult, for me anyways. Evil doesn't come naturally to me, except for the Lawful Evil take-over-the-world types, so I usually roleplayed him as more neutral evil, super racist against drow. Didn't fit the concept though, so it was a little frustrating.

Jude_H
2011-06-14, 03:44 AM
I built a Binder with an emphasis on characterization and what I thought was an interesting RP concept over the character's mechanical build. I hadn't dug too deep into the vestiges section before building the character, assumed the class's magic was all it would need, then mostly dumped physical attributes. The campaign was very slashy and rules-constrained. The result was a character who had one attack to fire off, then to run away/hide for 4 rounds, then maybe fire the attack off again.

It became clear pretty quickly that my best ability was a remote-control bird that could be summoned and replaced repeatedly at no cost. I spent pretty much the whole game frustrating myself and everyone else by abusing the limitless scout summons and charting everything before the party even approached a zone, because it was the only thing I could do that didn't involve being devoured by goblins.

Ceaon
2011-06-14, 03:53 AM
Dwarven fighter with 6 charisma in a roleplay-heavy 3.5 campaign. And I decided to play him like I had imagined someone with such a bad charisma would behave. Everyone (PCs and NPCs) hated him, but not as much as I did.

Honest Tiefling
2011-06-14, 03:53 AM
Lawful Good aasimar paladin. For some reason, I just cannot get the knack of lawful unless it is lawful evil or neutral.

Yora
2011-06-14, 04:33 AM
I don't think I ever played a bad character.
I once played a dwarven fighter who was boring and never reached 2nd level.

Longcat
2011-06-14, 06:39 AM
Well, I once played a Necropolitan Tainted Scholar. Towards the end of the campaign, no one could really justify why the other characters would adventure with someone so repulsive, and RPing him became really awkward.

From a mechanical point-of-view, though, he was awesome, even with the other players all playing T1 classes.

Solaris
2011-06-14, 08:28 AM
I started off playing a mounted fighter in a party with a dwarven cleric, a paladin of absurd stats, and a fighter/sorcerer/dragon disciple who could solo the dungeon. The fighter was fun to play, being a big goofy bastard, but in combat he only sometimes managed to actually kill something.
The one time he managed to get a mounted charge off, though, he ended that fight.

Lucid
2011-06-14, 09:38 AM
First game when we switched to 3ed.
I had a look at the FRCS and decided I wanted to play a tiefling.
A character struggling against his demonic heritage? Cool! +2 dex and some resistances? Great, better defense!
Hey, there's a monk class. An ascetic martial artist who trains his mind and body to resist his natural impulses? Awesome!
What's this, LA? Oh, well I guess I can start a level lower, I've got more speed and an extra attack right?

Come game time...:smalleek::smallfrown:

Just_Ice
2011-06-14, 10:00 AM
Lawful Good aasimar paladin. For some reason, I just cannot get the knack of lawful unless it is lawful evil or neutral.

Is it possible that you can't get the knack of Good?

Lawful Good can be pretty demanding, though. Especially if you don't want to have trouble with the rest of your party.

Choco
2011-06-14, 11:06 AM
A Cerebremancer.

That was back when I thought all the extra spells/powers per day were worth the lost caster levels.

Nevermind that the campaign was from lvl 1, and JUST as I was getting high enough in 1 casting class for it to be useful and fun, I started at the beginning in another one.

randomhero00
2011-06-14, 11:29 AM
worst character: cleric healbot. Talk about boring.

Honest Tiefling
2011-06-14, 12:00 PM
Is it possible that you can't get the knack of Good?

Lawful Good can be pretty demanding, though. Especially if you don't want to have trouble with the rest of your party.

Possibly? When in a good campaign I often go CG or sometimes NG, but even then I find that the character that to make tough choices to remain good while still completing objectives. I just consider that a part of good, however. Also, I despise playing with the paladin's code of honor.

Nidogg
2011-06-14, 12:51 PM
worst? a dwarven knight focused on defense. I had died about 5 times in consecutive sessions and the rule is , in our group, when you die, you can die and wait for a ressurection (not much chance as our games are generally 5-6 level) or make a new character 1 level lower. By this time my characters were 3 levels behind so I thought to make Mr. unkillable. First round of new combat? Critted 5 times by a 6 headed pyrohydra.

gomanfox
2011-06-14, 02:37 PM
My worst character was a VoP Druid that used the variant in Unearthed Arcana that gave it some monk and ranger abilities at the cost of Wild Shape and its weapon and armor proficiency. By playing that character, I realized that part of the fun of watching my character advance included acquiring new things, so playing a character that can't do that made me lose interest really quick. We only played 5 sessions before the game fell apart and by the third game I wanted my character to die so I could make a new one. <.<

Although a close second was a Wu Jen that had "speaking Common" as a taboo... I liked the character concept, but it got annoying playing a character that could only communicate with one other party member... especially once that character died. :P

Remmirath
2011-06-14, 02:40 PM
Once, I had a Githyanki ranger. That was fine and well, but in this particular game the DM was having everyone randomly draw flaws - one base, plus one for every point of level adjustment. There was a reason for this, something to do with an event that had changed the world recently, but I don't recall the details.

I drew 'sickly', 'hunchbacked', and 'monstrous foot'. The sickly left him in a permanently sickened state with all the penalties that entails, the hunchbacked made his armour twice as expensive as it had to be custom made (so he could only afford leather armour) and gave him a further minus to attacks, and the monstrous foot halved his movement speed.

Playing him was mostly just painful. It was fairly merciful that he (and the game, it turned out) only lasted one session.

(I've also had characters where their personality just didn't pan out for varying reasons, but those aren't as interesting to talk about since I don't know why they didn't work out.)

Just_Ice
2011-06-14, 03:22 PM
Possibly? When in a good campaign I often go CG or sometimes NG, but even then I find that the character that to make tough choices to remain good while still completing objectives. I just consider that a part of good, however. Also, I despise playing with the paladin's code of honor.

You need a good team to play Paladin and make it through unfallen. Unless you have incredible foresight and your character is supposed to be very clever, other people are simply going to make some of those decisions for you.