We've all seen them, if we're honest with ourselves we'll probably admit we've played one. What are the worst/obnoxious/disruptive SR characters you've ever dealt with?

My pick:

SR2:
Troll Spider Shaman, with the disadvantage "Has to kill someone every day" (It actually might have been every hour. If so I wish I could go back in time and kick that guy in the jimmy. Again.)
Memorable Moment:
Announced that we had to finish up the meet because he needed to kill someone in the next hour or he'd lose his powers.

Worst Character I've Personally Played:
D&D 2nd ed. Time travelling wizard... When I announed this I could see the DM, sigh deeply and just roll on. God bless that guy.

when I was younger and considerably more spry, I was at one point playing a half-dragon fighter/mage/thief very possibly with some kits on that.

Oh god!!! I totally forgot about that one. The Troll psychokiller in my first example also tacked "Raised by dragons" on to every goddamn character he made.

Ever.

And this wasn't like "Oh I'm a drake and I have to deal with big daddy dragon coming around" it was "I totally get to have access to anything and a get out of jail free card that never expires."

*pounds his face against the Wall of Memory*

It's not a specific character but a character type a friend of mine played in every game she was allowed to. The cat girl lesbian... what business does a shadowrun team have running with a cheery cat girl that tries to hump any girl she sees?!

Honestly that could have it's uses... Especially with a quietly installed, remote activated, totally concealed area bomb.

Pink Mohawks to the max!

Brick. And his SR3 equivalent, Brumby. Both were superly good damage soaks, and kinda hog the show most of the time.

Hey, you get to make that mistake a few times. ideally the in same game everyone has vorpal swords are like level 5 and you're still wearing your blazers because you're playing in your school lunch break.

Vorpal? Nah... we all had talking weapons and unkillable NPC's.

Ah to be young again... Er... wait, those were terrible games.

My worst character wasn't SR, it was Rifts, I was a cyborg, and because of how the damage system worked, I managed to jump out of a space station, fall to earth and only took 3 (mega)damage...
And I had a (mega)damage capacity of over 50...
Oh, and then there was the time we played WEG Star Wars and I had a jedi who did enough damage with a lightsabre to cut the death star in half...
Or a Mishima Samurai in Mutant Chronicles, who was next to useless without his family sword, but with it, could block any and all melee and ranged attacks without spending an action and it counted as if I had rolled a critical without actually having to roll...
Or in AD&D 2nd ed, when we started throwing wishes left and right by the time we were lvl 4 or 5...
[sarcasm]Aaah, good times... [/sarcasm]
Somehow, none of the SR characters I actually played have been this silly...

EDIT: As a disclaimer, this was over 12 years ago...

Hunh. My characters usually were pretty down to earth, but other players' ...

- Kid Sundance, a combat decker who had two core skills: "buy dikote without street index" and "sell stuff with street index", which he used to instantly generate any amount of money. He also was deeply into "Indian Honor Stuff", which frequently included him using his dikote'd Tomahawk on some bypasser in broad daylight because he had somehow nsulted his warrior honor.

- Jake Plissken, a very, very original damage sponge played by a munchkin who once argued that, given that his character's heavy milspec armour with gel paks, which is dikote'd, and his large anti terror shield, and sec helmet, and forearm guards, and FFBA 3, all gel packed and dikote'd, would give him a hardened armour rating of around 30, making the character essentially a supporting column and thus allowing him to stand nder a fallout-ish vault's blast doors, holding them open for everyone just by standing there. the character's hobby was to in-game read out stats of weapons out of Fields of Fire and SSC.

Also these two players used to gift each other frequently when GM duty was upon them (we had rotating GMship back then, mainly because these two players constantly bitched about how the adventures played are lacking). Like, once, Kid Sundance found, when he split from the team, an armed-up Appaloosa scout tank sitting by the road side, keys in the lock and ready to go, and ten dead ares soldiers all equipped with milspec armour and HVAR rifles and about a truckload of APDS ammo. Kid Sundance, of course, took all their stuff, put it into the tank and rode away, not telling other players of his find.

A couple sessions later, when Kid Sundance's player was running a small merc adventure, Jake came across a parked Aquila Ex helo with a Barret 121 stashed inside the cockpit and about half a truckload of bullets. Jake, of course, took off with that helo, leaving my rigger to see for herself just how to get out of that Aztech assault (she did manage, but barely, and of coruse never saw a share in the helo).

Both players then, after Kid had bought himself the two core skills, pooled ressources to bus a NC Bergen supertruck and refitted it to be their mobile superhero base.

Oh yes, these days. Yeah, we had insane, inane AD&D games that devolved into this. Superpowered stuff, i think one campaign had airships and war elephants getting dropped out and opera house fighting tournaments and somehow robots from the future and gods knows what else.

As for Shadowrun, somehow we managed to stay more sane, generally, with this.

One really bad character, though, was a friend of mine a few years ago, when his one decker(whom was killed in duty after a short distaster adventure), came back with the phrase of what we now coin as ''F&#! that, killing hands!''

This is when you just throw your hands up and made an Adept with lots of level of killing hands. However, the character was so stuffed with Wangst he would have made Shinji Ikari tell him to grow a pair before punching him in the face. He had a habit of whinily explaining his background to Everyone. He. Met. In. Detail, which we all know is good in SR. Not to mention the character was made with 15 Power Points(since he thought you get Force for Power Points). Yeah.

And a buddy of mine once noticed on this guy's shelf Shadowrun books. He said ''Oh, you play?'

The guy answered ''Oh yeah. I have a street sam that killed a tank with a katana'.

Yeah.

Oh yeah ... people whose mighty dikote'd katana could slice T-Birds in half (blade length: approx. 80 cm; T-Bird diameter: approx. 3 Meters), or who operated rotary laser weapons (they rotate, so they do more damage! Whee!) ...

And such whiny characters I know too. Especially the kind that purposely mimics other player characters' problems, and bitches when getting slapped for being stupid. Usually, it's the player, not the character, that'S the problem though.

Oh, I do have obnoxious characters too, my Kyle series of poser streetsams (They're all named Kyle and have the same stats, but aren't the same person. Kyles rarely make it through a run). I do warn of them, though, and just have fun being stupid and essentially causing the fun kind of havoc. I wouldn't play a Kyle if not everyone agreed they could take them, though.

Obnoxious characters I have played (that I remember) are both in D&D 3.5

Armitage: Fighter/Warlock - ALWAYS charged into combat, with an insanely high initiative. She was the reason our sorcerer took Improved Initiative, and the Spell Shaping Archmage ability. She also very frequently used Darkness, despite her being the only one in the group that could ignore it's effects. And lastly, she had a habit of using Use Magic Device on everything magical the group found, resulting in at least half of our party deaths, and a few more interesting incidents. This last quickly resulted in the rest of the group forbidding her to touch anything until after it was identified. Didn't work to well : )

Eve: Put simply, highly arrogant noble. Also my current character on Wednesday's game.

Only character other than mine I remember was a Shadowrun sniper, without any ranks in Perception or Stealth skills. We assumed he had our back during a run. He was jumped by the Star after crit glitching a perception check...

Rifts brings back memories. I had a cheesed out weasel mutant, fully human looking, female (lesbian of course), and I think she had some shit out of Rifts Atlantis like extra arms and shit like that. Our whole team flew around in those transforming airplanes from the anime which I can't remember how we got, reward from some quest or something I imagine. The GM was about the most monty haul one I've ever played with.

Head -> desk

Back when I was in college (Junior year of high school for you USians I believe) I ran a game of Werewolf. Being young and inexperienced I trusted my players not to be silly, but one guy made a character he seemed to be rolling massive numbers of dice for everything. I asked him how and he told me he'd taken 40 odd points of flaws, and neglected to tell me, or write them down. I gave him two weeks to provide them, but he never did, so I ended up selecting them for him, after which he stopped coming. It's hard to play a blind, quadriplegic, deaf mute, allergic to pollen and car fumes, with the magical imperative to howl at the moon whenever he saw it, among other things.

This is way too easy....

Lets see when we used to be big into rifts we had one player who always had to play something big bad and flashy ie: cosmo knight, Vampire ect..

The there was Champions though that game was made to have stupid silly characters in it from the looks of it...im guilty of having made the Shadowrun Icon of Slamm-0! as a champions character. Complete with goofy Chevy Nova with barb wire force field and hooker launcher in the back. ( No hookers were harmed in the making of this character)

AD&D: We really didn't try our gm was kinda of an ass so we made dime a dozen characters for that.

Shadowrun: Hmm over the years we have had our fair share of characters who were annoying and some how cheated death( for the most part). One of the more annoying but some times amusing characters was Linkk ( He always added the extra "K" and said it stood for "Kick ass" *shrug*. He was always getting into trouble doing dumb ass things but that finally caught up with him. He brought down another character with him in the process but he did jail time while..well lets just say Linkk ended up on the express line to the electric chair.

The next one I wouldnt say is a bad idea for a character as a GM I like new and unique ideas but this one has to take the cake. One player who we currently play with has a character named Reggie who claims him self to be a gadgeteer. In game terms hes a mage with lots of foci and such who doesn't believe in magic as so much as he can create things to make him self fly, shoot a laser beam ect.. Oh did I mention he thinks its 1942? LOL

There are probly others but I cant think of them atm so ill leave it at that.

Oh where should i even begin? ^^
let see.. the D&D ones

Xian son of Furst Sushi Slashi: Half elf (and later Half gold dragon.. long story) Monk, and.. uh shitloads of PrC's
He was rather amazing actually, kinda like superman.. Ran faster than a speeding train, could scale buildings in a single bound and possessed superhuman strength, and oh.. his saves and AC was in the 30's (at lvl 10..) got kinda wacked out when we hit epic and the GM allowed a PrC that transformed me into an Full dragon with 28 HD (without LA or losing Class levels)

"The boogieman" (cannot remember the name) now people always complained that I played far to evil, so I decided to show them how I played when I actually was evil.. this character wasn't evil.. he was Vile! A true sociopathic psycho, he lived of sentient beings souls and had no compassion what so ever, held the group in a iron grip with threats of eating their souls (and he could indeed slay most monsters in a single round with his overpowered level drain capabilities) lost intrest in him after the GM started using monsters immune vs. lvl drain

Rakh'zur: Orc berserker, now this is one of the most insane damage monsters I've ever played, his strength was in 3 digits while he raged and through violently raping the system for stacking up damage modifiers his charges was so devastating that he eventually became famous for killin' a fullgrown dragon on the surprise round, I think his average damage per round ranged around 2k, yes this was D&D 3,5.. after Rakh I lost the taste for making overmaxed characters and slid back to only use a non-game breaking level of my powergaming builds.

And the SR ones, hell.. I just realised.. Haven't had a single SR char that I've played for more than one session

A lot of my Characters are borderline jokes, but then our game is a little towards the pink mohawk end of the spectrum. The characters aren't hugely annoying in the context of our game, but could be pretty bad in some games.

Major Havoc is an Orc, out some division of the Czech Military (no one ever gets a straight answer) who can soak damage pretty well. Unfortunately his plans revolve around heavy weaponry and the theory that if brute force isn't working you just didn't use enough. Throw in a Public Awareness of 8 (largely from stupidly newsworthy plans) and a bad Russian Accent to complete the package. He's good for laughs though.

Kubiak is a troll who is built around the ability to consume anything organic. That's pretty much the whole point of the character, anyone who watched Parker Lewis Can't Lose when they were younger will pretty much get the joke.

Mercury created and named before Jak Koke wrote that horrendous trilogy and ruined the name forever, this guys is a spike baby elf mage who grew up in Northern Ireland fighting the Protestants, and then the Tir when it took over Ireland. His thing is fire, the flame thrower spell, fireball, carries a Shiawase Blazer, dresses in flame pattern clothes, etc. Pretty much exists to swear, drink, smoke, and set fire to things.

I'll edit in a few more when I have time, watch this space

We had a GM who named the villan St. Diablo and was perplexed how we figured out he was the bad guy so quick.

Mine? Not really. I'm refreshingly normal somehow. Lord knows I try and try, but somehow even the most whacked out 'fuck this game, I'm doing something stupid' moments wind up leading to fairly average dudes given the situations.

That said: Aside from the numberless comic book clones (Gambit, the Highlander Vampire is pretty much king of that crowd...)

The one goto 'players needed a kick in the jimmy' character (duo) that comes to my mind were the Vampire 'crazies' that showed up one night and wouldn't.go.away.until.they'd.killed.the.campaign.

Obviously: Vampire. Malkavians, because, well... Malks are crazy, right? And there were two of them, best buds, twins, it doesn't matter. Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dumber.

Their first act in game was to break into a hardware store. For barbed wire, christmas lights, chainsaws and... er... flamethrowers.

So: Each vampire is carrying a flamethrower with an underslung chainsaw, wrapped up in barbed wire so they can't be grappled or something, and the christmas lights (powered by car batteries attached to their fuel tanks I think...) were used for decoration.

Let me just skip to their third act: There was no third act.

What do you think their second act was? If you said "walk around town alternately burning or chainsawing ever living and unliving thing they encountered up to and including fellow PC's?"....

You win a brand new CAR!


Yeah. Nothing tops that for character/player behavior in my book. Not even 'Gambit' the vampire saying 'there can be only one' just before using a magical coat katana to cut off a fellow PC's head from behind just because.

Which, now that I think about it, was the same group. They deserved the malk twins... verily and muchly.

A couple comments first.

Rifts was a stupid system that essentially made you make stupid terrible characters. And that was almost the point. Seriously you could play a super cyborg or a dragon but you're still starting at level 1. Meaning you don't use computers to good if you want to be a hacker and so on.

Also, just let the girl be a freaking catgirl. One of the wisest things a GM told me was always let the girls be pretty if they want to be.



In my experience we had a guy who had some issues with not working behind the teams back with bad guys to improve his character. I killed him, it was fun.

Oh geez, where to begin...

There was a guy that played in our gaming group during the college years that always made the samae character: about 6'0" with black hair, a black trenchcoat (and the way he said trenchcoat was just funny), jeans, concert t-shirt (about the only thing that ever changed). The character was always quiet, attentive, blah blah blah. One of our GMs used to love forcing that guy into social situations... which in retrospect was kind of mean.

Our Shadowrun group in (early) high school was more like a club. There were 15-20 of us, split into 4-6 groups. I had just started playing a decker (actually, my first SR character). Of ALL those people, I was the only decker. I asked a one of the GMs if I could sell copies of some of the programs I'd coded for myself. He said yes, and we made some BS rolls to determine how many copies I sold. Long and the short of it, I ended up with a million or so nuyen, basically for free. At the time, I didn't think it was a big deal, until I started looking at what I could buy with that... And it kind of all went downhill from there...

Also in that club - in the "prime runners" team - was the (might as well have been Immortal) Elf physical adept. He was stupidly borked, with at least 800 Karma (he'd been through every module at the time at least once, plus many, many homebrewed ones). And despite the fact that he had almost every adept power, he still used a machine pistol. Not that it was needed the pistol at all because the combat sorcerer in the group could just about level buildings with a single cast of fireball.

And yet another from that club was the psychotic elf street samurai / assassin: security armor, form fitting, panther assault cannon with reactive trigger, wired reflexes 3, fingertip monowhip, lots of Deathrattle toxin, etc., and a very, very itchy trigger finger. He was named Nex (and incidentally the use of that name preceeded Nex appearing in Paranormal Animals, thought the use of poisons was an afterthought).

In Champions 4th ed we had a player who made variations on the same character over and over again. They all controlled gravity (or teleported) and they all couldn't control their powers if they took off their "containment suit," which they never took off, of course. The character invariably had some kind of attack that bypassed almost every defense you could come up with and did killing damage.

And I'm not even going to get started on the stupidity that came out of Rifts... It seemed to breed it stupid, really.

Oh I forgot my dumb ass pally from AD&D I nicked named Sir Garry Penn back in the days when I was obsessed with the original Grand Theft Auto.

anybody know what a kender is?
now imagine somebody playing EVERY SINGLE CHARACTER IN SHADOWRUN JUST LIKE THAT . .
Dwarves, Elfs, Humans, Orks, Trolls . . EVERYTHING . .

obsessive compulsive liar cleptomaniac?

add ADS and hyper-energetic to that and you're coming close . .
figure in high IQ on both character and player and you have a the obsessive compulsive liar cleptomaniac knowitall who is on a constant sugar/caffeeine Rush . .

What's wrong with that?

(Okay, okay, I admit, I generally fall into the category of 'loon' when I'm a player. Maybe that's why everyone prefers I just GM.)

you know it's not very hard to be a know-it-all when you're a compulsive liar

no, he DID know it all . . problem was figuring out when the hell he was telling the truth -.-
and imagine a TROLL being played that way . . there's some things that are just plain wrong ._.

Maybe you all should limit the caffeine consumption at your Shadowrun sessions. That might eliminate a lot of ADD behavior. Just a suggestion.

When I played Shadowrun 1.0 in junior high my friend insisted on naming every character he created "Murphy." Found that a little odd and OCD. Since I've started GMing SR4 I haven't seen too much in the way of irritating character generation... with the exception of a guy who wanted to be the first dwarf to go to law school, an assistant to the Renraku Corporate Court justice... and an explosives expert. That one was a little bit of a headscratcher for me to work with. True frustration would set in when he started whining about how he never got to use his demolition skill in his job as a Face.

My girlfriend likes to play slutty characters. Which I wholly encourage.

HERETIC!
Sugar and Caffeine must flow! *-*
best ideas and most fun this way . .
but i am talking about characters being played that way, without any sugar and caffeine . .

Seriously, if it's actually ADD (or ADHD) then caffeine consumption should actually help, in much the same way that taking speed (or Ritalin) mellows out people who actually have ADHD.

If it's just people being rowdy, though, they're probably over-caffeinated, over-sugared, and/or bored.

The trick is to do a lot of drugs at the same time, that way you can't be sure which one to blame...

probably the most obnox character I've played was also my fave. An Elven MA of the voudoun tradition with natural charisma 7 which she kept boosted to 12 on a regular basis. Add in the channeling and the pheremones and she could out talk anyone, outfight most people and cast really nasty spells. however, she was constantly over the top slutty owning a strip bar and no real sense of decorum. My GM and some of the other players hated her because I thought she should be able to could call people asshole and not have them get po'ed since she rolled ~18d in her social tests while doing it.

Heh...

If I took the time to write them out in detail, it would be a fairly lengthy list. As I play the majority of my Shadowrun on IRC, I've been through what I would consider a larger-than-fair share of Pick-Up adventures -- so I've seen many-a-PC that was uber-munchkin, poorly played, show-stealing, over-powered, dumb, retarded, lazy, tasteless, tactless, and/or skillless.

My PC's would usually get fed up and shoot them in the face, then get kudos from the rest of the team. As a GM, those same types, for the most part, do not get into the game -- or have to shape up fast before getting themselves into a situation where they get geeked.

*Raises his hand*

Oh god... Oh god do I hate kender clones. Both as a PC and a GM.

I have made some pretty disastrous characters. Literally brought GMs to tears. Not in recent years though. Thankfully.

One time in DnD (3.0) a new DM wanted to run a 20th level module, and just told us to bring characters to the next session "using any books we wanted." I took it upon myself to demonstrate to him why this should NEVER be done. I brought in a feral, multi-headed, lyrean, pyro half-copper dragon. The end result was that my body was completely immune to damage, only my heads could be destroyed. When one was destroyed, two heads would grow back unless the stump was sealed with fire or acid damage. I was immune to fire and acid damage. Every time I gained a new head, I would also gain +2 hit dice, +2 consitution, + 2 natural armour, an added natural attack, and I think maybe a point of intelligence as well. Add to that a psion level, and, details aside, the final result was that unless I rolled a 1 I got a critical hit, and all critical hits counted as coup-de-grace. I only did an average of 200 damage per attack, but since it was a coup-de-grace the target needed to make a DC 210 fort save or die.

DnD (3) also had one of my favorite characters who was also universally hated. He was a true neutral necromancer, crawling with charisma, and I actually played him as true neutral. He would try to fast talk anything...and often succeeded. What infuriated the players is that he would try to open dialog and negotiations with anything sentient, when the players just wanted to rush in and kill them. Then when they finally got to fight, he tended to actually use stratagy, and ended up taking the least damage while dealing the most. Moral of the Story: A Good character is Bad in the Kick-In-the-Door-Game.

And then there is Mage the Ascension. For those unfamiliar with the game, the premise is simple. Reality is defined by belief. If you believe you can build a jet-pack, you can. If you believe chanting in tell languages can let you hurl fireballs, you can. If you believe that tantric sex will let you travel through time, it can. If you believe you can hack reality itself, you can. And for each character, you get to invent your own belief system. There have been some nightmarishly incoherent ones. And some wacky ones (these aren't mine).
I remember one character simply believed that if he had a bag big enough, everything he needed would be in it. It was a backpack about 1.5 feet wide, and four feet high, and he had a monkey butler (stupid familiar rules) to help him route through it when he was trying to "find" something.

Another player decked himself out like a James Bond style villain. Spent nearly all possible points at character creation on a zepplin battle station that was completely invulnerable to damage, except for one small weak point that could only be reached by crawling through a man-sized air vent.

But at least those people had "relatively" coherent belief systems. A number of people would just sorta be like "shuffling this deck of cards lets me control chance...'cause it does." Or "When incense is burning, I can read your mind. 'Cause incense does that."

As you damn well should!

Actually, that isn't a bad concept.

If I remember correctly, Mind Flayers ruled a vast interstellar and interplanar from the far future very near the heat death of the multiverse and traveled back in time to avoid the inevitable destruction of all things, probably creating an ontological paradox in the process by being their own ancestors. Just imagine how amazingly cool it would be to be a magician who originated in that far-flung future where all of the stars have burned out and the planes themselves are starving to death, where pure chaos has overtaken order and is, in turn, being devoured by something even more chaotic than itself, and where all the myriad of sentient beings that somehow clings to a semblance of life, even the gods themselves, are slaves to a race of brain-eating squids.

No, what you suggested isn't a bad concept. A character who's time traveling consists of "I came back from 1991 to fight dragons in the past because.. because... they totally rock". Now that's a concept that needs some work .

Worse person we had was Gene Ric Oldman an NPC that gave my D&D group all the info we needed

Have you ever seen someone high and wired?

That's pretty silly. Like shooting a gun straight up into the air and saying the bullet should still hit the guy you're fighting because you have 18 dice for shooting.

(Now, using Edge, on the other hand ...)

I don't think its that silly. Its all in the tone and body language. A girl calling someone "asshole" under her breath with a sneer will almost always be a bad thing, but giggling and looking up at the dude and saying "you asshole" with a flirty tone probably will be taken positively.

Sure you can, The Pusher Man.

Good point. Back in college I even had some success with "Nice shoes. Wanna fuck?"

Good times, good times.

Ahh, like D&D the animated series, a young person from the modern world thrown into a universe not his own, forced to fight for survival in a harsh unforgiving multiverse all the while torn between loyalty to his new friends and allies and longing for his friends and family back home. That isn't bad either.

I honestly cant remember what the character was named, but one of the worst ones I've ever run was a 'rigger', overgeneralized to the point of being useless at everything except being a bullet sponge, whose only vehicle was a one-seater Harley. Even with his dual cyberlegs and cybertorso, toughness, and stupid amounts of armor, he got himself geeked trying to score some Jazz on the way to meeting the Johnson. Dumbest slag I've ever had the pleasure to lead to his demise, and that counts all the meatwall trolls.

The other one, run by a buddy of mine, was a meatwall troll by the moniker of 'Hebrew Hammer'. If someone didn't take violent exception to him ignoring their name, they automatically became 'Schlomo', and at the end of the conversation, he always spouted off with 'Hey Schlomo - stay Jewish.' Always. I'd say his best moment was taking a full burst from something (either an AR or an LMG, I can't quite remember) with no damage, beating the offender to death with his bare hands - and no Unarmed Combat skill - then getting downed by a single Narcoject dart.

Back in the day (3rd), there was this one melee-tooled adept who got taken out of the entire run by a rent-a-cop with a full can of Pepper Punch to the eyes. I don't think the player has ever returned to SR since that game.

About the worst one was a character I built for the sole purpose of being able to hurl lightning from his tricked out cyberarms. Aside from punching you in the face, that's about all he could do. Real winner there.

Honestly, never anything this bad.

Of cours there were some characters with hilariously stupid habits, but weren't particularly bad characters.

I always mention Loki and Raven, the Covert Ops/Street Sam duo that would get into fistfights. With eachother. Mid Run.

A friend of mine had Ragnor, who was a greek expat Minotaur combat mage. He had a pretty bad phobia of rats. He never got played, but he actually started one of Loki and Raven's barfights as an NPC, during a robbery at gunpoint. A rat crawled across a table during a tense gun-pointing situation, and then he freaked out, screamed, and blew the shit out of the bar with a fireball spell.