Strangest bans

[Tanuki Tales]

What are the oddest things you've seen banned at a table you played at and/or the strangest rationale given for banning something from play?

[Xefas]

After creating a really infuriating NPC antagonist, both in that she was a genuine moral authority that often made the PCs feel bad for stuff they did, and that she was a bit condescending, and that, after the players changed sides for other plot reasons and came up against her in combat, she had a really frustrating fighting style based on doing very small amounts of damage while being very difficult to harm or hinder, it was voted that I am no longer allowed to use the noblewoman laugh at the table. Which is how she laughed, and how I would always announce her presence. As in, I would describe the scene and the situation, and the players would be like "Alright. Okay. What should we-" and then I'd start doing the laugh, and they'd all immediately begin groaning and cursing. Then I'd introduce her into the scene.

I put multi-sessions gulfs in between her appearances, so it always managed to catch them off guard. They were so happy when they finally killed her. And then she got the last laugh when they found out her motives were all entirely altruistic all along and they felt super horrible. And for the rest of the campaign NPCs would keep bringing her up, like "Man, that lady really was a saint, wasn't she? Before she went off and became a famous warrior, she once saved my dog from a house fire. I wonder what ever happened to her?" And they'd all just groan horribly OOC, and then the NPC would be like "I remember she had this really distinctive laugh. How'd it go again?" and they'd start yelling at me.

Anyway. Good times. Old group in an old city, haven't seen them in a long time. I hope our games together were as memorable to them as they were to me.

tldr; A style of laughter was banned at my table.

[hymer]

Norwegian PCs. It was a joke, though.

[RazorChain]

Kenders and Gungans

Oh wait....it isn't strange that they are banned

[Anonymouswizard]

Hmmm...not sure if I've ever had a particularly strange ban.

I have recently been banned from using my class features (including languages) because I don't know I have them. It's really my fault for taking two levels of Cleric when we're probably several countries away from the closest temple to Bahamut (I've managed to get the GM to agree to an Islamic flavour for his religion, although the dress codes are slightly different because Dragonborn).

I've been banned from minmaxing due to being the only player at the table who new the rules. Partially because the GM helped everyone make characters, but for my second one it turned out that I had read the rules more than he had and arrays were essentially abuse at his table.

Oh, one group I'm in got banned from trying to pimp another player's character. I honestly can't remember why it became a thing, but it started when she was interrogating a suspect (as our face) and he began flirting with her.

[RickAllison]

I am borrowing the system from the Things I am Not Allowed to Do thread. From our Star Wars game that I DMed:

*As a droid, may not steal the bodies of other droids to make myself better.
**I may not manufacture new bodies for myself.

I did this when I was a player before. Ended up with a vehicle-class mecha with so much armor that capital ships couldn't dent him. He ended up despising the Force because that was the one thing in the galaxy that seemed to still pose a threat to him. I learned for when I took up the chair...

*I may not create Grey Jedi
**The session may not be derailed because we aren't sure whether to spell grey with an "a" or an "e"

The lore on this is so prevalent that it seemed like a great idea at the time. Unfortunately, it was highly unbalanced...

*My PC may not be destined to oppose the party in such a way that they only keep him on because he is a PC. He will betray the party, but it won't be surprising.
**My PC can't be a vorarephile and a prostitute, then bring it up whenever possible
***My PC can't be insane and suffer a breakdown when confronted with the fact that he is supposed to endorse freedom, but considers droids as slaves and nothing more. Especially when another party member is a droid revolutionary.
****My PC can't try to push the party members back on the story's rails by blowing up their ship, especially before he has been introduced.
*****My PC can't make the droid into a bomb against his will
******My PC can't make a droid PC his slave, no matter what his slicing skills are
*******Fine, he can set up a programming block so the droid doesn't just shoot him in the face
********Nope, shooting my PC in the face is now allowed and encouraged.

One player. One player did all of this. Eventually, we taught him to be less disruptive, but it took a lot of coaching.

*Yes, the droid can be a revolutionary
**Yes, he can write his Droid Manifesto
***Yes, he can promote proletariat power
****We already get that he is Robo-Lenin.
*****Another player can be a droid follower
******He may act as the muscle of the two
*******No, he cannot murder robo-Lenin, usurp his position, and transform the revolution into a powerhouse where one is only considered worthy of being alive if one is useful to the party
********We are not creating Soviet Russia IN SPAAAAACE!

This happened. I may have encouraged it. It didn't help that the droids already had Star Destroyers.

*As DM, I may not split the party.
**Even if everyone agrees I am rather good at managing split parties
***Preying off the genre-savviness of the players and PCs to cause them to split themselves is not allowed either.

This rule happened after I lured away two PCs using a pretty lady, then filled their limo with sleeping gas (she was an Inquisitor). Meanwhile, two other PCs were trying to track them down using the ship, but really the traitor was going to steal their priceless artifact. He enlisted the help of a shadowy thug who one-punched the droid diplomat, he betrayed the traitor, everyone loses. Oh, and the last member of the party was drinking.

*May not play intelligent enemies who actually know tactics. The PCs will rush in headfirst and get themselves killed without trying to find alternate paths.

Swoop gang who took over a military compound and were terrorizing the population. Not only ran into fire from their turrets, but also split so they were fighting two different emplacements at the same time. Also, they already got the droid onto the premises where he was distributing pamphlets on how the droid revolution also would improve the lives of non-droid workers.

[TheYell]

Luchador mariachi cohorts.

Salaams.

Leroy Jenkins.

[mikeejimbo]

I'm no longer allowed to abuse the Alternate Forms rules in GURPS.

I'm no longer allowed to abuse the improving skills from default rules in GURPS.

[JellyPooga]

I'm no longer allowed to abuse the improving skills from default rules in GURPS.

Hey, that's just standard GURPS optimisation!

I've put a ban on Alternate Form as GM myself; that Advantage is all sorts of broken.

[Arbane]

Antimony, dolphins, and possibly neutrons.

[ComaVision]

The strangest ban I've seen is no druids (in 3.5) because they are overpowered. That may not seem odd but the same DM also allowed Clerics to have spontaneous casting off their entire spell list.

[Honest Tiefling]

I've banned crowbars before. The moment certain players get those in their grubby little paws, they run off to the nearest building to dismantle it for gold regardless of habitation, law enforcement, common sense, or profit margins.

[Inevitability]

The strangest ban I've seen is no druids (in 3.5) because they are overpowered. That may not seem odd but the same DM also allowed Clerics to have spontaneous casting off their entire spell list.

Why is that overpowered? Clerics are only good at healing, you might as well throw them a bone.

They better get spontaneous casting of all domain lists, too, though. Why force the poor clerics to severely restrict themselves with their only class feature?

[mikeejimbo]

Hey, that's just standard GURPS optimisation!

I've put a ban on Alternate Form as GM myself; that Advantage is all sorts of broken.

Probably the best way to handle it is for the GM to design all the Alternate Forms and for the players to have to stick to those. Also set a minimum shift time, that is, you cannot take Reduced Time above a certain level.

[erikun]

My group was banned from purchasing Thermal Grenades in a Star Wars campaign after having a habit of tossing them at the vampire jedi (it was a strange campaign) and after completely destroying an enemy base by bringing in several crates of them and posing as a maintenance crew to set them all in the airducts.

[Jormengand]

You'd be surprised to see how many DMs will ban monk and/or truenamer on the basis that they're overpowered. Don't let them know about the Disciple of the Word optimisation thread, whatever you do.

[Anonymouswizard]

My group was banned from purchasing Thermal Grenades in a Star Wars campaign after having a habit of tossing them at the vampire jedi (it was a strange campaign) and after completely destroying an enemy base by bringing in several crates of them and posing as a maintenance crew to set them all in the airducts.

I've actually banned myself from both high power electronics and microelectronics, because once we get there I can basically out invent any GM. Heck, I'm bad enough with just standard ultra-tech (my first question is 'can I get an actual, speed of light, man portable solid state beam laser' and I generally end with sticking an AI in the spaceship to make it fly better. I tend to avoid forking AIs, just to save the GM major headaches). I've only met one GM who can out electronics me, and I just can't compete in any other areas of science.

I'm also trying to get FTL travel and teleportation banned, but I haven't managed to play in a game with them yet.

On an unrelated note, I'm trying to get my current GM to ban mercenaries as PCs, seeing as my character might end up leaving the party if more than about a month happens and my retainer hasn't been increased (...because there's people who will pay lots of money for a Dragonborn Fighter/Cleric, especially now I've hit 5th level).

EDIT: also, I'm not surprised that lots of people think monk and truenamer are overpowered. I've known people who consider them awesome class, and people who'll refuse to admit that the Fighter and Wizard aren't balanced (or that 5e prepared casters are just so much more versatile than Sorcerers, with the person 'proving' sorcerers were just as versatile using proficiencies they'd trained in in-game).

[JellyPooga]

You'd be surprised to see how many DMs will ban monk and/or truenamer on the basis that they're overpowered. Don't let them know about the Disciple of the Word optimisation thread, whatever you do.

I've banned Monks, Tome of Battle, all Spellcasters and more on the grounds of being settimg inappropriate, but nothing in 3.5 D&D was worth banning on the grounds of being overpowered. If a player brought something poweful to the table, that was them giving you, the GM, licence to bring the pain. 3.5 always had a bigger fish.

[Prefect Blart]

I was banned from ever making characters that are based on the GM when we were in college over 25 years ago, particularly when our wives are both playing and the GM's wife has never heard the college stories I am reenacting in game.

The one that put him over the edge was when I had the character drink too much and puke on his blind date's dress. The GM's wife couldnt figure out why the rest of us were laughing and the GM was fuming, and he finally blurted out " it didn't happen that way..."

[Calen]

I was banned from ever making characters that are based on the GM when we were in college over 25 years ago, particularly when our wives are both playing and the GM's wife has never heard the college stories I am reenacting in game.

The one that put him over the edge was when I had the character drink too much and puke on his blind date's dress. The GM's wife couldnt figure out why the rest of us were laughing and the GM was fuming, and he finally blurted out " it didn't happen that way..."

You made me spit ice cream on my desk. I demand you come clean it up.

Not sure how common it is but my DM and me when I DM have banned resurrection type magic. I have also "banned" teleportation in that it is criminal magic so that players cant just avoid all the plot, at least not without some consequences.

[Anonymouswizard]

Oh, I completely forgot this one, one of my groups managed to get alcohol retconed. No, not drinking alcohol at the table, alcohol in any form suddenly stopped existing in the setting. Before the game began.

It all began with us essentially playing Scion with the Mutants and Masterminds system. We had a demigod of death (player picked Thanatos as their dad), a demigod of ice and death (yeah, I picked Hel as my divine parent), a trickster demigod (child of Loki, my character had an aunt), and a few others. Then one player picked a child of Dionysus, focused on wine, and asked if we could start in a brewery. This escalated into an argument (somehow), I think I at one point asked if I could have Expertise: Brewing, and suddenly alcohol no longer existed and we hadn't even made characters.

I still wish to play that character sometime. He was an intelligent guy with no combat skills but the ability to summon objects of ice from thin air (I believe up to 1000 cubic feet of ice) and a small squad of ghosts he could call up from the underworld (summon power). I had originally wanted to make him 400 years old, but this got cut down to in his 20s as the GM didn't want PCs with any experience.

[Jallorn]

Psions, not because the DM didn't know the subsystem, but because of a single power: Death Urge. We were staying at level one, Wizards were kosher (and I was tempted to run an SoD Wizard to show that Psions weren't any worse, but I didn't really want to b be a ****).

Same game, no Warlocks because they eventually get DR.

Ended up going Dragonfire Shaman, and despite everyone having fun with the story, the DM was unprepared for the breath weapon, and I think felt my character's desire to found a church to Bahamut in a setting where dragons were dead was derailing. He ended up resenting me but never said anything because he knew I wasn't trying to be a jerk. So his girlfriend (whose missing brother character arc did not seem to bother him despite being just as large a piece of her character) internalized his frustration and behaved like a brat towards me because she didn't appreciate that I wasnt being a jerk and no one had come to me like an adult and said, "This isn't working."

[Inevitability]

Same game, no Warlocks because they eventually get DR.

Were barbarians and favored souls banned too?

[Pex]

Magic items in 5E.

I don't care that PCs don't need as much or even specific items as they did in previous editions. I'll shout the greatness of that on the mountaintops with you if you'd like. That lack of need is not the same thing as no magic items at all, and I don't just mean consumables like the occasional potion. Magic weapons. Magic armor. Magic rings. Magic miscellaneous stuff. Magic wands. All of it. The game does not forbid them. The game does not fall apart when PCs have them, even those of the +1 variety though I'm perfectly fine with +0 and a cool effect. I don't care how dismissive you want to be with your accusation of "entitlement". Magic items are apart of the game, and PCs should have them and not their first one at some level above 10.

[Xefas]

Same game, no Warlocks because they eventually get DR.

I did briefly play in a game where Warlocks were banned. I was new to the group and, after asking if there were any houserules beforehand and being told there weren't any, drafted up a Warlock tinkerer-type character built to use Imbue Item to craft magic items for the party (two Fighters and a Ranger; I figured they could use some magic item help). After showing up, I was told that - whoops, Warlocks are banned, come back next session with something different.

The reason wasn't damage reduction, though. The reason I was given was "at-will spells are broken". What I found out a few sessions later was that the actual reason was that everyone in the group was incapable of reading spell descriptions properly and thought that Darkness made everyone inside the area completely invincible and immune to everything. (Not a hyperbole; that's exactly what they thought.) So having that one Least Invocation with at-will Darkness made the class broken.

Instead, I played an Artificer and just crafted 50-charge wands of everything I would've had as a Warlock, and more, as well as being better at the actual magic item tinkering that I wanted to do. And had better proficiencies and skills. And had the entire Infusion subsystem which is so much goddamn overkill for that class.

Wands actually kind of take forever to go empty.

Anyway, I was perfectly willing to play in a group where Warlocks were the height of overpowered, Monks skirted the line of being banned because all good saves, and Druids and Artificers were considered the bottom of the barrel. I was perfectly willing to sit in the back and buff and craft and play support. But the group eventually started complaining that I was dead weight on the party. They didn't really see the value of throwing down an Evard's Black Tentacles and a Glitterdust, crippling an entire encounter so that the fighters could mop up everyone without taking any damage. After handing out some command word items with 8th level spell effects on them, at level 13, because Artificers craft with a caster level of their class level +2 (because that's balanced), they just shook their heads and told me to come back next session with a proper fighter that could hold his weight on the front line and stop messing around with this 'sissy magic ****' or don't come back at all.

I was in two other groups at the time. It wasn't a hard choice. I wasn't a jerk about it or anything. I just politely declined and went on my way. It gave me some neat perspective, if nothing else.

[Anonymouswizard]

they just shook their heads and told me to come back next session with a proper fighter that could hold his weight on the front line and stop messing around with this 'sissy magic ****' or don't come back at all.

Yeah, I've met this sort of player. I've seen one refuse to play a non evocation wizard (while I was playing a dex-based front line fighter, and then later on a summon-focused Sorcerer, he complained about not being able to use cone spells on every enemy), and his standard character is the biggest bruiser he can (or occasionally a rogue who's abused the skill system so much he can't be seen).

At the exact same time they generally see my preferred plot-based games as completely stupid. I mean, it's not like anyone's enjoyed a game with about one combat every three sessions before. The annoying thing is that they tend to have the strangest non-bans ever when running a game. Combat focused game? They won't stop you from putting all your character points into science, charisma, investigation, and resources.

Oh, that's the strangest ban I've had. We were playing an All Flesh Must Be Eaten game, and I had made an investigative science character, with the plan to research the zombies. To that end I put four points in resources with the plan to cash in the money before the game started for various scientific tools and electrical apparatus. I was immediately banned from having starting equipment or spending money (the idea was that it was supposed to be a scavenging game, but the GM forgot that we knew his chosen setting well enough that if he didn't stop us we'd have turned one of the industrial estates into a fortress by the second session*). No refunds either, so I was left with useless money and a good number of skills I didn't have the equipment to use.

* Never run such a game in the players' home town.

[arclance]

Cannibalism is banned at my local game store.
One player kept getting into loooong arguments about the inherent Neutrality of cannibalism as a life choice (not a survival tactic) on the Good/Evil alignment axis until the Manager banned references to cannibalism from the store.
It caused in game problems as well but that was because he handled the in game ramifications of eating dead bodies in front of other Player Characters poorly.

My group was banned from purchasing Thermal Grenades in a Star Wars campaign after having a habit of tossing them at the vampire jedi (it was a strange campaign) and after completely destroying an enemy base by bringing in several crates of them and posing as a maintenance crew to set them all in the airducts.

Thermal Detonators were also banned in a FFG Star Wars (EotE) game I played in (they effectively no longer exist).
Every time the players or NPCs had a thermal detonator something wildly unexpected happened that usually vaporized (often literally) large parts of the GMs planed plot lines.
They were finally banned after a Wookie PC tied in a game of thermal detonator chicken.

[Requiem_Jeer]

Interesting. Personally, I draw the evil line vis a vis consumption of the flesh of sentient creatures at the point where you kill someone specifically to eat them, or just as an intensifier to an already evil killing. Even then, that operates under the assumption that you are something that can eat that flesh without undue stress on your digestive system (like, say, if you were a Half-dragon).

As for unusual bans, I've seen Monk banned for being overpowered, and more reasonably for the fluff not fitting. Anything else I've seen was more deliberate handicap kind of thing, like the no-full casters gestalt or the no-casting-at-all-period-not-even-SLAs one.

[RickAllison]

Accents were banned, and I am not allowed to play little girl PCs.

This was a preemptive ban after I traumatized the players when I was the villain in a game of Betrayal At House On Haunted Hill. After the repeated chiming of "Do you want to be my dolly?", they preemptively banned me from doing the same in RPGs...

[Belac93]

Accents were banned, and I am not allowed to play little girl PCs.

This was a preemptive ban after I traumatized the players when I was the villain in a game of Betrayal At House On Haunted Hill. After the repeated chiming of "Do you want to be my dolly?", they preemptively banned me from doing the same in RPGs...

I got banned from having any creepy children as NPCs.