What will you not allow?

[AlexanderHowl]

I was curious what you will not allow in your games? What type of characters, behaviors, traits, etc will you not allow regardless of genre or setting? In my own case, I will not allow players to play 'evil' characters such as slavers or rapists, and I will not allow players to commit 'evil' actions without having their characters suffer an appropriately cruel and ironic punishment. I also will not allow characters that possess persistent abilities that give other players permanent advantages, and I loathe time travel (paratronic travel is fine though).

[Phantasm]

Weirdness Magnet, potentially the most campaign-disruptive disad out there. I will reject all characters that have it, though usually in a "replace it with something else" manner

[Kalzazz]

Dual wielding automatic grenade launchers . . . . . death by 10 million fragmentation, hit location, damage rolls etc? No

[talonthehand]

Not me, but my first GM had a hard ban on the spell Rive. He felt it was too easy to use it to circumvent any plans he had made.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Phantasm

Weirdness Magnet, potentially the most.campaign-disruptive disad out there. I will reject all characters that have it, though usually in a "replace it with something else" manner

I'm not fond of the RAW version either, but I think it just needs a better interpretation - one that ditches the talking dogs, groupies and witch hunters. Since I've replaced the reaction modifiers with "includes Unluckiness, but the guaranteed failure each session will fail in a *weird* way", only one player has been interested, and it wasn't any more disruptive than Unluckiness. A couple extra seconds of description of that failure and it earned its points that session, so I didn't feel I needed to force anything else in, plus the bonus that if the plot needed a bit of unlikely oddness it could just happen to him with no need to worry about whether it was plausible, or even made sense. If it needed more, you can simply change the descriptions you give for a few ordinarily rolled failures too. A technique I recommend for Unluckiness as well - there's no *practical* difference between "you miss" and "your foot slipped just as you made your lunge and you barely managed to recover your balance", but the one goes a long way toward making the player *feel* Unlucky.

The other major change I recommend is including in the description that a good source of weirdness is stuff only the victim can see, even if from his perspective it should be visible to others. That's weird in itself even if the event isn't that odd, and there's usually no need to even decide if is it real - suffering from random hallucinations is fairly strange too.... This sort of thing goes a long way toward explaining why people might hesitate to trust him.

[Bicorn]

Originally Posted by malloyd

A technique I recommend for Unluckiness as well - there's no *practical* difference between "you miss" and "your foot slipped just as you made your lunge and you barely managed to recover your balance", but the one goes a long way toward making the player *feel* Unlucky.

I feel the rulebook description of Unluckiness kind of messes up by giving missing a die roll as an example of bad stuff that could happen. It's about the most boring possible way to implement "things go wrong for the character" - there are plenty of much more interesting ways to make Unluckiness come into play.

[Captain Joy]

As a rule, I don’t allow players to play not-their-sex. For some reason, that just takes me out it.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Captain Joy

As a rule, I don’t allow players to play not-their-sex. For some reason, that just takes me out it.

When I first started running campaigns that players had chosen by filling out prospectuses, I held a character creation for my first RuneQuest campaign. One of the players asked me, "You allow people to play characters of the other sex?" in tones that suggested surprise and perhaps concern. And I looked at him blankly and said, "Allow?" I really had never thought of disallowing it.

I've never restricted this, and really it's never been a problem. Except with the one player I refer to, who went on to play in a lot of my campaigns, but who has been observed (a) to roleplay attraction to female characters played by female players he finds appealing and (b) not to roleplay attraction to similar characters played by male players. This has caused reactions ranging from amusement to irony to irritation, especially among my many women players.

In the last analysis, though, since I have NPCs of both sexes, and as GM I have to play all the NPCs, my players are having to see my play female roles, so I don't see why players who want to play cross-gender shouldn't be allowed to.

[Lup3rcal]

Originally Posted by Captain Joy

As a rule, I don’t allow players to play not-their-sex. For some reason, that just takes me out it.

Interesting. Is it because of the voices? Or do you play in person and not manage to separate visuals from imagination?

I play online, and we've had plenty of people play the opposite gender, with and without accents. Hell, we've had people sleep together (in the classy, fade to black way of course) and/or marry as the opposite gender in our campaigns before.

[Culture20]

Originally Posted by Captain Joy

As a rule, I don’t allow players to play not-their-sex. For some reason, that just takes me out it.

Do you expect all NPCs to be the sex of the GM?