#shitty characters

[shittydndideas]

your character is an inanimate object being held by a creature, you can control the creature but you have to roll against their will everytime you make them do something. if you fail the creature will do whatever it normally would (attack party members,run away depends on creature) and if you get picked up by someone/or something else you control them now so you can order your goblin to give your object to a stronger creature but it would have a much stronger will

It's a lovely morning in Middle Earth and you are a horrible all-powerful ring.

[bookphile]

I saw someone romanticizing Cardan from The Cruel Prince and it pissed me off so badly because up until the 3rd book Holly Black did not even attempt to make Cardan in any way redeemable. In fact, half the draw of the character and his relationship with Jude was the fact that it was fucked up and the author wasn’t trying to romanticize it. It was ugly and toxic and the utter appeal of it was just the incredible chemistry between them. You were supposed to like them because they were good characters, not because they were good. 

And then fandom comes in and fucks it all up trying to make them good, but the thing is you can like these characters without redeeming them. Let them be shitty. Stop being all uwu Cardan did nothing wrong in his life, he’s just a broken boy in need of love and he didn’t mean it cause he loves Jude. No, Cardan is an absolute nightmare of a romantic interest, he’s toxicity personified. AND THAT”S FINE. That doesn’t mean you can’t like him. He doesn’t have to be good for you to like him, or even to ship him with Jude. 

People did the same thing with Loki and Sherlock, acting like they were above any criticism and that’s how we ended up with characters like Kylo Ren that was given to us completely unironically and told here’s your love interest, you don’t mind that he’s potentially guilty of genocide and is a Nazi stand-in right? You all seem to like shit like that. And guess what, they were right!! I just wish you’d all let bad people be bad people in fiction without pretending that they’re anything but bad, let villains be villains. That’s all I ask. 

[powerfulsinner]

When shitty characters get a back story right after they did something fucked up

[gaybullies]

i know we r sick of the but it was all a bad dream trope but i really hope they say s3 of stranger things was all a bad dream bc its the only thing that would make anything better

[shittydndideas]

A Barbarian who only communicates through the speed of the bongo drums he plays. It turns out that he came from a long line of Bards and wanted to buck the trend without disappointing his family, hence his bongos being withered with time by beating them too quickly.

[shittydndideas]

A bard that's just a kid who loves telling animal facts

Good, yes, but don't stop there. A young fighter who loves giving people those story problems you got in elementary school math. A ranger who likes to sing about various geographical regions and features. Make your party into the cast of Schoolhouse Rock.

[shittydndideas]

healer wizard. now normally this wouldn't be a shitty idea, but it is made shitty by the fact that wizards do not have access to cure wounds. like at all. which is one of the necessary spells for a healer. so yea

What are wizards but magical grad students? What are doctors but science wizards? Basically you've proposed the rpg-world equivalent of a doctor who completed med school and everything but is somehow not as good at healing as like, the equivalent 80 year old grandma down the street who said she'd pray for your broken leg to get better.

Exquisite.

[shittydndideas]

Idea: A Sorcerer with like, a 7 in intelligence who thinks they’re a wizard.

This wouldn't necessarily work since the source of magic for sorcerers and wizards is fundamentally different, and even the dimmest of wits would eventually come to understand that the way a real wizard does magic is not the same as how a sorcerer does it (especially since wizard magic requires books and I doubt this sorcerer can read.)

Now, a more plausible take might be "Sorcerer thinks they're a warlock whose patron is just really uncommunicative." A lot of sorcerous bloodlines do tie back to powerful creatures, and by definition a warlock's magic comes from a powerful entity. So a sorcerer who's not the sharpest dagger in the armory might decide to go on a quest to track down their wayward patron, during which shenanigans would ensue.