Quote Originally Posted by Pex View Post
Yes, and I've long since lost tolerance of them. "It's what my character would do." or "I'm just roleplaying"
My response to "It's what my character would do" is that my character is a member of a gang that breaks into the homes of people they think are guilty of some offense, kills them, and takes their stuff. My character is quite sure your character is guilty of a rather serious offense, plus he's annoying so I don't give him a pass. DIE! (What? I'm just acting in character and role-playing. What in the world did you expect a bunch of murder-hobos to do?)

That's the thing about people who "role-play" jerks, they don't want to role-play the obvious logical consequence if everyone else is also allowed to role-play their characters.

Character design is inherently meta-game: Make a character who has some reason to work with the rest of the party, and who could plausibly live past the age of five. That or go home. THEN you can role-play your character even if it leads to intraparty conflict, but start with a character designed to be functional in an adventuring party.

I've got a player in my current game who ADMITS he's made a deliberate jerk character in his other game, and that he doesn't do that with us because he's quite sure that his character would die if he did.