Are you sane?

[Avor]

I was thinking about past games, and I was reminded "this is not how normal people act" This leds to my question, how sane is the paranoid, murdering thief that is your character?

sll common

ADD
Anxiety disorder
Binge drinling
Bipolarr
Delusional
PTSD
psychopath
sociopath
Schizophrenia


Personaly, my half orc samurai believed he was on holy mission from Heironeous to bring orde and goodnes to all orc kind.

[penbed400]

Favorite character to play ever was a halfling rogue with a dark past and ancestry in thievery. I actually planned out the family tree. He was a:

womanizing
binge drinking
clepto maniac
sex addict

whos entire goal in life is to stay completely drunk and steal as much stuff as possible until he settles down in the family mansion, finds one of his many bastard children that is a halfling and raises him as a son to be just like his dad. It's gone on for 3 generations now. Oh Boggle, my favorite character. How I miss thee.

[Piedmon_Sama]

I think my Psychic Warrior's ability to dispassionately kill people (in their face with a sword, no less) and not get worked up about it might be considered some kind of Anti-Social Disorder by modern psychology. Aside from that, my Half-Orc Druid is a pretty normal, even sheltered, guy.... he wants to be an adventurer, but at level 3 he still hasn't quite grasped that this requires fighting to the death without hesitation. And my Neanderthal Barbarian.... he's not a sociopath, although my DM and fellow player would think so. He's almost completely Hobbesian in outlook, but some of it is that he can't communicate easily with humans (Neanderthal language was largely hand-gestures, he can't quite master the complexity of a 100% verbal language).

[HamsterOfTheGod]

This leds to my question, how sane is the paranoid, murdering thief

Just because you're paranoid, murdering thief, it does not mean the people who are out to get the stuff you rightfully took don't deserve death...

[Starscream]

One of my recent characters had Cotard's Syndrome.

Of course he was a vampire, but still.

[Knaight]

Delusional prophet of Nerull. Not only was he not a prophet, he didn't have any divine magic at all. And he was a good guy. T'was fun.

[Yukitsu]

Not really. Many of my characters never kill anything, and most are decent enough. The only thing they may have is some kind of apathy disorder, where the fear of death holds no sway over them.

[9mm]

meh, just a drunken brawler... who really needs to learn when NOT to start a fight.


Protip: when its quite obvious that the main villian can kill you in a single stroke, don't stand in the middle of the room, insult his man-hood, and then charge.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

Just because you're paranoid, murdering thief, it does not mean the people who are out to get the stuff you rightfully took don't deserve death...

Beat me to it.


My last character was a somewhat genre-savvy LE warblade of noble birth who tried to avoid as many villainous cliches as possible while still serving evil. A sample interrogation:

"You're mad! Mad, I say!"

"Impossible. I have been psychoanalyzed by the finest wizard in this nation--well, this room at least, aren't you, Alric--and pronounced to possess a clean bill of health. I find that delusions of grandeur and megalomaniacal tendencies inhibit my capabilities."

"...no maniacal laughter, then?"

"No."

"No random explosions and burning down villages?"

"Certainly not. Waste of good resources, both raw goods and slaves."

"So...you're not going to kill us in a painful manner just because you can?"

"Oh, I didn't say that."

*stab*

*stab* *stab* *stab* *stab* *stab* *stab*

"Hmm...two minutes to bleed to death. I'm getting rusty. Record, Jeeves?"

"Three minutes, twenty-seven seconds, sir."

"Thank you, Jeeves. I'll work on that. Next victim?"


Is that insane? You decide.

[RandomNPC]

my characters have all snapped in one way or another.

My epic half dragon vassal of bahamut dreams of settiling down and being king somewhere evil so he can turn the place around. he may actually pull it off.

My cleric theif doesn't want to be a hero, freaked out, and on the middle of a platform on a lake curled up around his bow, rocking back and forth "im not a hero, im not a hero...." then when we could hear the villan but not see him i decided it was a dream and started calling him sancho. because dreams cant hurt you.

i've got a bard tucked away who assigns notes to peoples feet and trys to play as many different peoples walking patterns as he can. I love it, but it gets annoying.

i've got plenty more, something's wrong with each one of them.

[valadil]

I played a cleric who thought he was a wizard. By the end of the campaign he was talking to trees and it made sense within the context of the character. Actually he had to be retired from the party long before the game ended.

[Oracle_Hunter]

Considering the sort of world they live in, most D&D adventures could be considered well-adjusted.

Haley Explains It All

As for sanity... well, my oWoD Malkavians needed to be insane, of course. Bothersome, of course, but I have fond memories of the Malk who was a former member of the French Royal Guard with growing megalomania; he never took off his hat. Not, not even then

[Callista]

I've played characters that could've been diagnosed before, but not generally anything extreme.

Playing a mentally ill D&D character:
http://chaoticidealism.livejournal.com/25381.html
http://chaoticidealism.livejournal.com/25614.html
http://chaoticidealism.livejournal.com/25947.html

[Forbiddenwar]

My favorite was a Monk named Jenny. She KNEW there was no such thing as Gods. Divine magic is a scam, where wizards use Arcane magic and pass it off as a miracle "from the gods" to fleece the gullible. Note this was in a typical campaign where this wasn't actually true. Her favorite pass time was to engage in physical theological discussions in bars. With priests. And her fists. (Prove to me your magic comes from a god and not from you. I've seen some pretty good illusions, so it'll be hard)
actually, I would still call her Sane, so yeah she's sane

[Blackjackg]

Let's see. I had a wizard with serious daddy issues, if that counts.

Also an Abyssal with severe mental retardation.

[Anxe]

Kleptomaniac thief, duh.

[Raum]

Of course I'm sane! Who's trying to have me committed this time?! I'll kill 'em and take their stuff!
-----

One of my favorite characters was a fighter / thief (AD&D) with homicidal tendencies who collected swords and cursed items. Told one team member that a pit causing cold damage was "...a little cool." Said associate almost didn't make it back out...

[SurlySeraph]

I've played enough paladins and others with extreme fanaticism about their beliefs. Most of my characters tend to be mostly sane, just really, really obsessive about what they care about.

[EmperorSarda]

Let's see. I had a wizard with serious daddy issues, if that counts.

Red Mage? He counts. He counts big time.

[Gralamin]

You're an Adventurer. If you're not insane (or sometimes Super-sane), you're doing something wrong.

[TheLibrarian]

I only got to play him a few times before the group split up over summer vacation, but a relatively insane Avariel Duskblade/Swashbuckler (He lost his wings) pirate captain named Eskellen D’reg (Esk for short) who staffed the crew of his ship by getting people drunk and coercing them to the ship by dragging them along good naturedly. He refused to call people by their actual names instead referring to them as Mappy or Gimpy, which was good, because the “unnamed” crew had a tendency to die, not that he would go out of his way to kill them, he just didn’t see them as actual people.
He was somewhat dumb tactically and almost died in the first encounter when he used expeditous retreat (swashbuckler variant) to run freakishly fast and leap from his boat to the other one, and take on a crew of 20 by himself.
He might have done well if the sorcerer didn't just magic missile him to unconsciousness.

Originally he wasn’t going to have any spell casting, but after Mappy (who has tricked him and escaped the boat in the past, and returned as a focused conjuerer that Esk shanghaied into the plot) showed up and cast some spells, Esk decided that he wanted to be able to use magic as well.

All in all he was like a demented Malcolm Reynolds

Erm, that was rather long...
I also had a Lawful Good Binder who really detested fighting despite being somewhat optimized for it (his justification was trying to end the fight as quickly as possible), and ended up beating the Chaotic Neutral Sorcerer unconscious (killed him actually, but when I realized that he was going to die from one attack my DM let me switch it to a non-lethal attack) when he tried to start a fight with some guards.

[Starscream]

According to Terry Pratchett rich people are never insane, they are eccentric.

By mid-level adventurers tend to own more coins made out of solid gold than a normal person could carry, so they are clearly just very eccentric.

[Tharivol123]

I played a Ranger all the way up to epic that suffered from dissociative identity disorder. He had a lawful good (personal/legal protector) personality, a true neutral (nature's guardian, at any costs) personality, and a chaotic evil (anti-social, no regard for law/social norms) personality. Every day I had to make a DC15 + number of days present personality in control will save or change personalities (change would be one of the other two, as determined by a coin flip).
All the changes were handled away from the rest of the group, so they never knew which one was going to show up until the day started. Made for a fun situation where one day we helped the constable solve a murder in town (lawful good personality) only for me to kill him the next day when he attempted to question my chaotic evil personality on something unrelated.
It was also fun because of the rest of the party. A lawful good cleric, a true neutral druid, lawful neutral fighter, and a chaotic neutral sorcerer. My character would essentially jump between the personalities of the rest of the party, seemingly at random to them.

[Irreverent Fool]

My favorite character currently is one Melriach Morimundus, Wizard of the Order of the Arcane Eye, Personal Advisor to Sir Sedgewick the Mighty, and Mechanomancer of Sambria.

He's an amoral crackpot who gives life to automatons (golems and effigy creatures) with abandon, caught up in the novelty of granting life to the lifeless. He studies captured elemental portals and the outlawed practice of necromancy not for personal gain, but simply because the knowledge is there. He is also about the least-effective wizard in combat in the world as far as his fellow PCs are concerned. Combats involving Melriach frequently involve castings of grease strewn about the battlefield and crumpled notes covered in explosive runes resisting dispel magic (and exploding) after being thrown toward the enemies while he holds his grinding war-machines back from the melee for fear of his precious creations getting damaged or destroyed.

obnoxious
sig

[bosssmiley]

"Rogue Trader" (the original version) answered this one years back with the dictum that:

"Only the insane have the strength to prosper; only those who prosper judge truly what is sane."

What applies to GRIMDARK applies to D&D-land.

[Kaiyanwang]

As a DM, I roleplayed an NPC inspired by the same villain of 3x3 eyes that names my avatar, Kaiyanwang.

My K was like Parvati/Pai in the manga. Clearly a Schizophrenic. FUN.

[Captain Alien]

Protip: when its quite obvious that the main villian can kill you in a single stroke, don't stand in the middle of the room, insult his man-hood, and then charge.

It could have worked. Could.

[Hunter Noventa]

My current character is an extremely genki girl who loves to hit things with axes. Big axes. That are covered in electricity and force, and could really almost be called Power Axes. She also thinks she got a vision from the Goddess she worships more closely than others that she would end up falling in love with the Princess. This hasn't happened yet, but she did get to make out with her to break the domination spell on her after her first true Crowning Moment of Awesome.

Currently, she's somehow become second in command on a retrofitted airship that's about to go on a very suicidal mission in order to keep the country and continent safe from invaders. We'll see how that plays out.

But I think she counts as just a little crazy.

[random11]

Well, most characters are delusional.

If they meet an orphan, they are sure he must have some sort of lost heritage.
If they enter a town, they are convinced the town is in deep trouble, and they are the only ones around that can solve it.
If they read a prophecy about "chosen ones", they will be sure it is about them or at least someone they know personally (like the orphan from the example above).
They will be convinced that strong bad guys are personally after them, even when stronger good guys are around.
They will also believe that they are the only ones that can stop that bad guy, never seriously seeking help beyond casual hints and funding.
Basically, they think the world revolves around them.

Of course, more often than not, they are right.

[Renegade Paladin]

Beat me to it.


My last character was a somewhat genre-savvy LE warblade of noble birth who tried to avoid as many villainous cliches as possible while still serving evil. A sample interrogation:

<snip>

Is that insane? You decide.

Yeah, because he didn't actually interrogate the guy.