This comic, while meant to be a gag, actually got me thinking. It seems that gimmick characters either wear out their welcome, or their gimmick eventually becomes far less important and is just subsumed into the narrative.
It doesn't matter if you're an actual clown, or a weird fuck like a crossdresser. If you're playing the campaign, you're going to go through the same heroic fantasy beats.
Your gimmick throughout it all is basically irrelevant, it's like how no-one comments on what you're wearing in a JRPG's cutscenes.
(I stress that I find most gimmick characters to be supremely lame, and badly gimped outside of their 'thing'.)
A gimmick can't carry a character long term is why. If you give a guy a silly 'fish fear me, women fear me, men turn their gaze from my sight' hat, you've added a slight touch of flavor to get people to pay attention to them, but if there's nothing to them but the hat, it's not going to hold interest.
Which is why people complain about the sexuality or gender identity of a hero being a sole selling point.
The story itself doesn’t change so adding the flair of a different gender identity doesn’t make the story new or more exciting.
The gimmicks always fade into the obscurity of the story at large.
A gimmick should be strong enough to define how you're going to roleplay. Honestly, that's the basis of all good roleplaying; you need a quick shortcut to tell you how to roleplay strongly in the moment. For example, one of our players was a robot who had very little personal desires and would simply do whatever anyone in the group had told him to, sometimes holding onto long obsolete orders given a session or two ago if there weren't any newer orders to default to. That was fun. That was very memorable, and it genuinely changed the entire way that character interacted with the world. The story we made was different because of it.
Nowadays people don't complain about that. Many on this site have moved on to disliking them for their gender or sexuality outright.
Exactly.
There's nothing wrong with a gimmick, but there needs to be something more.
That's literally just Bon Clay from One Piece
Why would that make it any better?
Literally what I was thinking
Bon Clay is so fucking rad
This comic looks like it was drawn by someone who's never played a 40 session campaign but wholeheartedly believes obvioysly-fake bullshit stories they read about them on plebbit.
no it's seriously just the story of Bon Clay but allegedly taking place in an RPG
Turbo virgin grog detected, who’s entire game is “huzzah i caste fireball at the skeleton dealing 24.23543 damage!!”
>d-did you just speak in character… STORYSHITTTERRRRRRR STORY SHIT STORY SHITTTED
No retard it’s because people who make dogshit characters like a firbolg clown can’t roleplay and have typically room temp IQs, they don’t develop serious storylines
>He doesn't know
It is obviously meant to be a gross exaggeration. You know, for comedy?
I'm not saying it is particularly funny, and if I could I would kick the artist of the comic in the balls, but what is with this kneejerk reaction of yours that apparently no one ever actually plays anything?
....Why is that furry being confused for a Firbolg?
>....Why is that furry being confused for a Firbolg?
5e happened. And then Critical Role happened.
My assumption is that whatever character you're referring to is more three-dimensional that you give them credit for because you're hyper-fixated on their "gimmick" which is really just the one thing you care about. Not that annoying characters don't wear out their welcome, of course- but when you make a Ganker thread on /tg/ it's probably because your problem is imaginary
The fundamental issue with playing a gimmick is that unless it provides a meaningful mechanical change in how your character works at the table it's gonna be overlooked or handwaved- which means that the player needs a high degree of system mastery AND still want to play a gimmicky bullshit guy.
That being said it's rare but it can work, systems that encourage going wide like Shadowrun are good for it because powergaming naturally leads to concepts that read as unhinged like "guy who does all his on-site work via doombot" and "brain damaged zombie being puppeted by seizure wires" because they function and provide concrete advantages to a heist.
I spent a year and a half as a Valley Girl Sister of Battle who went "OME" and made all social interactions a challenge of restraining her.
I spend a year in a shadowrun campaign as an average /cgl/ poster. But as a bizarre mystic adept decker which was just supposed to be a oneshot experimental build based on sitting in a ritual circle to jack up logic and reflexes, but was then in a nomadic campaign.
The trick with gimmicks is to recall you are part of a party.
In both of these cases, their gimmicks eventually came back around to plot relevancy. A cosplay favoring mercenary can be rather useful at times. To where she was eventually able to seduce the Crown Prince of Japan.
The sister of battle was so annoying to be around, it was revealed she had been an untouchable.
The trick is to make sure your gimmick matches the setting you are in. Helps the gimmick last longer under the story beats.
this guy posted while I was posting the above but he super gets it
commit to the bit, make sure the gimmick matches the game
I tip my hat to this man
>dude I made an epic annoying character
>and then I revealed my epic backstory!
Nobody liked you at the table, your embarassing meme you made only proves it more
I don't think you have anyone to play with, so you're just lashing out at other anons because you're a seething homosexual.
The untouchable thing was an afterthought.
The GM had trouble balancing XP growth. Gave out WAY too much too quickly. The untouchable thing came out from having nothing else to spend on. I idly mentioned it while looking for things to grab... and the party and GM found it hilarious...
The funny part was that the planned character was supposed to be 'normal' in personality. Like an elderly Minnesotan school nurse. With the actual 'epic backstory' being that her home planet was actually Fenris. [Like how you got all those Swedes in the northern Midwest]. The whole thing changed for unintended reasons because I could not maintain both a Midwestern accent and a falsetto at the same time. The GM suggested a Cali one and regretted it for many moons.
And when Fenris entered the plot. Made the whole thing worse by adding those wolf-girls with the deviantart accounts to the mix of parody.
generally, it basically requires people to either commit to the bit, including accepting downsides
to take one of your examples, clown character could be really good at sleight of hand and performance but not taken seriously in most instances (which can be a positive or a negative) as well as potentially having an impulse to humor over survival
this relies on the player as much as the GM and rulebooks are frequently shit at supporting it
you're essentially making an additional character trait/rule
another point is that games with tons and tons of content do allow for gimmicky characters with mechanical impact but, as others have said, require a lot of knowledge of the system
pathfinder 1e is an example here (even if you don't like it, it is possible to build some weird shit there)
>HURRR GIMMICK DURRR
Double tap of bleach for you, on the house.
It's always fun to watch people battle their mind-demons in meatspace.
Keep on trucking.
Hey.
Shut up.
It helps if the gimmick is flexible or there's more then just the gimmick to the character.
Like I played one space game where my character was just a swarm of nanobots, equipped with an experimental holographic projection system. He had two uses: "illusions" and hacking computers. Being a cloud of nanomachines, he couldn't really do much of anything beyond those two, but he was really fucking good at those two things so he didn't NEED anything else.