We deny everything.

Okay. So, I've been playing tabletop RPGs since I was 5 or 6 years old, but I never was one to make 3edgy5you characters.

...I made the 3silly5you characters.

When I first started RPing on the WoW forums at 12 years old or so, my character (which I used EVERYWHERE) was some dumb troll engineer whose grand entrance into the world of roleplaying was as follows: he crashed in Northrend and started making mechanical squirrels out of zombie flesh and wire. Then he threw the mechanical squirrel army at bad guys.

Yep.

...Oh. And he was in love with a gnome. And then he was in love with a night elf. And then he kind'a just disappeared because I realized that was a horrible character.

Ironically, I then made an even worse character.

There's nothing wrong with the odd unusual obsession in a character.

and of course there's the classics like this one:

Tabletop gaming gets fun in Texas.

We got the chance last sunday to do the obvious.

We came across a beholder (undead). Instead of eyes on all the stalks, it has mouths. Thus it only has one eye. As a ranger, there was but one logical choice: Stick a couple of arrows in the eye of the beholder.

@ClocktowerEchos Once again, you made me laugh.

There's nothing wrong with the odd unusual obsession in a character.

and of course there's the classics like this one:

DM: You come to a fork in the road.
Player: I pick it up.

I did that once. ^.^

I'm not sure the Enoby Archetype is limited to novice players. Then again, if that's what they wanna do, that's what they wanna do, so who am I to judge?

Unless I'm the GM, in which case I do get to judge, and those sorts of characters wouldn't be welcome. I file them under 'my game is being used as a vehicle for a character to fulfil their power-tripping wishes' which doesn't indicate the 'let's all tell the best story we can together' attitude that I like to see.

But yes, I've also been 2edgy4u. How about a guy with punk hair who randomly kidnaps a queen so as to get leverage to bargain for the object of his desires, a plot-trinket that I'd dreamed up basically to give my dreadful piece of asshole something assholey to do - in the first post. I then spent the rest of the game making up arbitrary nonsense to explain how my character could get away with being pointlessly antagonistic to everybody else and get away with it. My favourite was that the aforementioned plot-trinket kind of cast an aura of pacifism around it so my guy literally couldn't be hurt unless he himself had the intent to harm the person who was trying to hurt him (sometimes: I kinda forgot he had it or something). This plot-trinket was supposed to give him like super water elemental powers and had nothing to do with whatever gibberish I later spewed to justify my character's drivel. He was officially what I was calling a Grand Magistrial (legit might still use that as a term for something) without ever really clarifying whether that was his race or his rank or his religion or what. He was just so badass it didn't matter.

Fortunately, the whole thing was garbage and was at one point interrupted by a character who then randomly turned out to be literally goddamn canonically omnipotent and was once treated to "in 1 swing [Jig's Character's] head got chopped off loljk" as a random aside in another player's post, so I'm glad I didn't spoil a good game for anybody else and I do remember all three players being really excited to see how badass we could be and where the 'story' would go.

Unfortunately, I wheeled out the same crock of nonsense in a different game where two player characters were having an official duel in front of crowds and shit and without so much as posting a sheet I swept in, used crazy water magic to kill one of them and walk off, cool af, being like "you people are assholes". In my defence, I hadn't realised who was a player character and who wasn't, though I subsequently found that actually reading an IC or properly joining a game with sheets and such rather than waltzing in on your own personal red carpet kinda stops you from straight-up walking into somebody else's game and wrecking it. It had a happy ending: a mod tidied up my mess and I learned a valuable lesson about, well, about how RP's actually function outside that specific subgenre of dribble where you can be basically immortal just because you feel like it at the time.

I like to think I've improved since then.

I've tried avoiding the edgy stuff from day one, but looking back on my earliest rp's I've done it a few times... Or if not edgy, at least cliché. After 13~14 or so years of roleplay I'd like to think I've at least improved on that aspect though. In fact, I like to mix things up a little these days, sometimes specifically making a character that's weaker than my partner's (I only keep to 1x1 rp's) and see how that goes. Makes for some interesting rping at times.

With respect to RPs and my own characters I had many more characters like shorticus has than I did edgy-types.

When I was 14 I RP'd in a couple forum RPs as a angry man made of gold who is angry because he is angry and beats up people to become emperor of a galactic empire full of aliens. Or a alien species that uses giant cannons to go to space or a alien cyborg that is actually a demigod working for a god to cause chaos in this universe because the God in the other universe is jealous of us. And a space gangster who wanted to go t Neptune for some pizza. I still don't understand why I was denied at the time given the other characters in the RP, but whatever that's ancient history. Needless to say the reception of my characters was very mixed.

Edgiest I got was making a alien with exploding sperm that reproduces with stabbing people at some point. Never used it in any RPs though.

And it's hard for me to think negative of any of these ideas given what I dislike. They all are great concepts that everyone should try at some point. And I don't see them as any worse than elf #57 and fandom characters. Those are the worst. Id still take my giant golden men who wrestle their way to the title of emperor or a robot man that's a missile who has six arms to shoot lasers with over a fucking elf or a fandom OC any day.

And a space gangster who wanted to go t Neptune for some pizza.

Lobo? Lobo, is that you?

No, I didn't have a lobotony when I made that character.

No, I didn't have a lobotony when I made that character.

You didn't have a lobotony, but you DID have a lobotomy, right?

No.

I think the problem is that you get people who make characters based around powers instead of characters based around well, character. Instead of taking the role of a character, they take the role of themselves with super powers. This is why you get those OCs the OP mentions. You get a kid who gets a hard on for some kind of power (like magic or the biggest gun/sword ever that does 999999999 damage, or in some cases you get the person who decides he wants to be a dragon that eats people... Don't be that person), wants the powers and makes up a character that has lots of powers without regard for context or setting. And from there you get a total mess. I've been in RPs where that pretty much describes literally every character within and it's actually really boring since all the conflicts get resolved by everyone spamming super abilities at anything remotely threatening.

Ideally most people who decide to get better at fiction writing grow out of the mentality, but you also get quite a few people who don't.

My first character was less about darkness & despair and more about “generic gary stu that was basically the canon character but black and had fire powers and guns.” His name was Mike Speed Hedgehog. I even made him a cousin to Sonic and gave him an analogue of Tails for kicks.

It was September 2001 and I was… 11.

It was terrible.

Makes me think of a certain Roleplay in Free. Not that I really judge that type of thing unless it's trying to make insanity look "cool" or it's in my Roleplay. Never really did it much myself, having an edgy character. My characters were atrocious when starting out, but the closest I got to being 2edgy4u is when I gave one of my characters a scythe as a weapon.

My formative roleplaying years were spent mainly in Harry Potter, so my 2edgy4u phase also came with a heaping side of long lost relations...that are also American. They were basically Diet Enoby--all the darkness and plot derailing bullshit taste with none of the goffik calories.

But my OCs weren't Mary Sue's, I told myself, because I didn't use popular celebrities for their PBs. That totally makes up for the needlessly tragic back stories and dramatic adventures that always seemed to end with the Totally-Not-a-Mary-Sue single handedly saving Hogwarts. Totally.

Good times. I mean, I look back and cringe now, but I had a blast with those terrible characters.

I honestly think I purposely locked away that dark, dark part of my roleplaying life under lock and key in the deepest part of my subconscious.

I honestly think I purposely locked away that dark, dark part of my roleplaying life under lock and key in the deepest part of my subconscious.

Don't we all?