Article:
8 Reasons I Hate Gamers: Character Creation

I'm a gamer, have been for many years. I love the games, the players, the systems, the stories and most of all, the adventures. But every now and then there are things that make me bang my head against a wall. This week, it's Character Creation

(Additionally, I’m talking here about experienced gamers, people who should know better. People new to the games are exempt from any and all anger and rage.)

1. Hogging the books
Right, I brought three books with me for everybody to share, and you’ve been holding onto all three for the past hour, and two of them are copies of the same book. I don’t care if you want to cross-reference damage stats, there are other players here who haven’t even looked at the archetypes yet. Listen, you sound like a four year old in primary school, learn to share or I’m going to have to put you on the naughty step.

2. Get your priorities right
We need to talk about your magical sword, ‘Moon Shining Over Blood Red Mountains’. You’ve spent the past three sessions coming up with it and its magical powers, doodling it and you’ve even named it in three different in-game languages. It’s very impressive, not least of which because you’ve given it fifteen pages of back story. The thing that bothers me most though is that after all that you took ten minutes and threw some dice once to create your actual character and you called it Jim.

3. Mini maxing
You want to play a fighter, I get it. You want your character to be good at fighting, I understand that too. The thing is that you’ve taken a butt-load of disadvantages on your character to get you another forty points worth of character generation and you’ve put all of those into fighting too. Now my question to you is that did you not think that your blind, mute, deaf, literally legless, crack-addicted, cursed warrior might need some other abilities beyond sword-wielding… like breathing or moving or any way of communicating at all? Or do you expect your teammates to drag you round until there’s some chopping to be done?