The player who will inevitably have his character do the stupidest, most harmful thing possible in any critical juncture. Not because the player is deliberately trying to sabotage the action or to be a wiseass, but because the player has a preconceived notion of their character that they simply will not let go of, or adapt to what’s happening in the game at all.
Here’s a hypothetical example: your party has been stripped of all your weapons and armor in a previous encounter, and you’re now trying to cross a forbidden valley in safety. Suddenly you encounter an 11-foot tall ogre, with a shaped tree trunk as a huge club. But the dice are with you; the ogre just finished gorging himself recently so he’s not hungry, and your leader has extremely high charisma stats. So the ogre is bemusedly holding off on attacking you while your leader tries to negotiate with him. Suddenly:
-Too Stupid To Live: “We’re not gonna’ let this guy push us around! I run up to him and hit him in the balls as hard as I can!”
-GM: “Everyone roll initiative”
The phrase “It’s what my character would do!” is closely associated with that sort of player, but I don’t know of any particular term for someone who creates a bad team player and then uses that character’s personality (that they created) as an excuse to act like a jerk.
(Seriously, it always seems to be paladins played like this since it’s so cheap & easy to say “But the Demon Prince is EEEEVIL!!! so I HAVE to immediately rush him with my sword despite a zero percent chance of success rather than playing the long game in any fashion…”)
My understanding is that a “Munchkin” is a player who’s single-minded goal is to become omnipotent and invulnerable in the shortest possible time, by gaming his stats and rules-lawyering.
Seconding “Paladin” with a close second of “the gamer no one can talk about without a deep heartfelt sigh and/or forehead smack.”
I have to say that in my personal experience, there are three levels of this:
First, the gamer who does stupid shit that gets the party killed because it’s ACTUALLY in character for their character to do that. They usually get the sigh, but no one really holds it too much against them as a gamer.
Next on the list is the gamer who does stupid shit because they’re playing Angry Birds or Bejeweled on their laptop and not tracking what’s actually happening in the game. They usually get dice thrown at them, and pleas to the GM to discount their actions because they weren’t paying attention. If that doesn’t work, they get hassled for a while out of character.
Finally there is the gamer who does stupid shit because they’re raging assholes (or bored) and like fucking over the other gamers by purposefully doing stupid crap to get us all killed “because it’s more interesting now!/because I was boooored.” Those people usually have their characters strangely and unaccountably showing up on their group’s favored enemy lists.
It’s not clear in the OP, but I’m presuming Too Stupid To Live is not the negotiating leader, just one of the teammates. If that’s the case, realistically that wouldn’t happen, at least not with a reasonable GM. If a player did try that, either the GM would give him a weird look and say, “You sure about that? <List off reasons why it’s a STUPID idea>” and/or the rest of the team would jump his ass in-game and hold him back. Even if it was the leader, there are ways of keeping him in check.
It’s a collaborative game, and there are ways of not letting one idiot ruin it for the rest of the group.
That said, that kind of player is usually called “That idiot who ruins the game for the rest of us.”
On the other hand, a bit of play like this is really fun. For years I was the “plan everything to the last detail” type of gamer. If there was a trap, I’d take 20 on a search roll, then try knowledge dungeoneering, then pull a hamster out of my bag of tricks and make it go sniff the trap, then…
I ran a game at Dragoncon, and there was an alarm-trap: when the PCs passed by, a pile of severed heads opened their eyes and began to scream. I expected the players to fall back, eye the heads, make Spellcraft rolls, pull a hamster out of their bag of tricks…
Instead, one of the players in the pick-up game said, “I grab one of the heads, tuck it under my arm like a football, and start running.”
I was goggle-eyed, and asked him if he was serious, and he said “yes.” So we all watched him score a screaming-severed-head touchdown in the waterfall at the end of the chamber.
It was AMAZING.
That guy, I don’t know his name, taught me an important lesson. You don’t want to be the jerk who screws over the group by doing the stupidest possible thing. But you totally want to be the dude who tucks the severed head under his arm like a football.
I’ve seen lists that divide up gamers into Real Men, Real Roleplayers, Loonies, and Munchkins. What you’re describing isn’t quite classic Loonie, but it’s close.
Favorite weapon:
Real Men: Two-Handed Sword
Real Roleplayers: Lasso, so you can take them alive
Loonies: Arquebus, aimed backwards, because it might misfire
Munchkins: Farslayer
I call people like that “The Sebastian” after a kid in my old roleplaying group who played like that. Regardless of what character he was playing his answer to every enemy and puzzle was HULK SMASH!
And I played a non-crazy paladin for a good year until she died of a horrible disease, thank you very much. She would think that putting the whole group in danger was more wrong than making nice with the enemy if that would all lives concerned. She was also a crabby chain smoker.
We had one of these in the 4E Dark Sun group I’m in. In Lasciel’s breakdown, he’s not quite a One, nor is he a Three, so I have to consider it a distinct type - perhaps a variant of One.
This sort of player is “playing in character”, but has purposefully saddled his or her character with the stupidest possible handicaps - for what reason, only God could say.
Blaine was the group’s Mul (half-dwarf) Barbarian. Blaine had decided that his character was claustrophobic and afraid of the dark. This meant that any time we were indoors, he would either curl up into a fetal position, or grab the nearest metal object and begin banging his head against it like a severely autistic child. Needless to say, claustrophobia is a pretty stupid thing for an adventurer to have, even in Dark Sun, when playing a game called **Dungeons **and Dragons.
Later, we encountered an elemental spirit trapped in mortal flesh that communicated to us with telepathy. Blaine decided this freaked his character out, and the Mul began banging his head against the Warden’s shield. Of course, I’d been paying attention, so I was able to point out that it was silly for him to be afraid of telepathy - considering that his own Wild Talent psionic power was Mental Speech. That logic had no effect.
The icing on the cake was when, after weeks of travel and months of backstory before that as slaves in a caravan, we finally reach a large city that we can spend some time in - whereupon Blaine ‘reveals’ that his character is going off to look for drugs, because he’s addicted. Pointing out that he would have detoxed weeks before had no effect, so we had the Halfling Shaman bluff him into thinking some crabgrass was the fix he was looking for.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg for that character. It probably tells you something that my sneaky Elven assassin-type called him ‘Murderous Coward’.
Him : “I’m not a coward!”
Me : “You’re afraid of ceilings!”
Back in college and shortly after (15-20 years ago) I ran a Fantasy campaign using Champions/HERO System rules. Actually, I took over running it after the first couple sessions (the GM, who was also a reverend, thought I should run it alone).
Good, no, excellent reviews from all the players but one. I had an NPC to kind of steer us in the right direction at the beginning. One player referred to her derisively as a GMPC (Game Master Player Character) and claimed she was too powerful. She was built on the same scale as everyone else. :rolleyes:
But the worst incident was when we were trying to introduce a new character. The new character was from a psuedo-Arabic culture where women kept their faces covered. The problem player had a fit. Said his character could not possibly trust someone who was hiding their face, etc., etc. Finally the new character took off her veil and said something like, “Congratulations. You just ruined my character concept.” :eek:
We didn’t have a lot of sessions after that, as you may imagine, and it turned me off of GM’ing in particular and tabletop RPG’s in general.
I’ve always wanted to have my PC kill on of those characters, and then tell them, “but it’s what my character would do.” Sadly (well not actually) I don’t play with any of those kinds of players anymore!
I was playing my first character in my first-ever round of D&D and we run up against a female “blorgon” (it’s been 30 years, damned if I remember the details), and, acting like the 15 year-old that I was, said something along the lines that maybe we ought to screw her.
So the DM takes my witticism and says The group decides to gang rape… (huh? Is that what I said?) … the Blorgon. Unfortunately she… well, unfortunately she kicked our asses left and right, the group was mad at me, and I never played again.
If the DM took a joke you made and made you actually do it, he was a douche. I mean, it’s acceptable sometimes (I had a player who would always say stuff like, “I tell the giant I slept with his mom. Just kidding!” So one day, after he told a king to f*ck off, I actually made his character say that) but it’s still a douche move. But making the ENTIRE PARTY act against their will because of a joke that you, just you, made? That’s entirely unreasonable.
