I haven't done more than skim a few posts here, so expect repeats. It's gonna be a long list though, so there might be something new and exciting there too, who knows. There will also be cursing, because I like cursing, so now you are forewarned.
-People who violate the obvious rules that are usually stated in the rule list of every roleplay: godmoding, auto-hitting, hijacking, metagaming, etc. Super obvious one, but worth listing.
-People who drop from a roleplay without saying anything. This is especially annoying when they're clearly still active on the site, so you know it's just the one roleplay they're trying to slow fade out of. Just fucking say something in the OOC instead of being a little shit, seriously. If they're worried about people thinking poorly about them dropping out, I can guarantee that they're gonna get a whole lot more hate for the silent drop that might stall out the roleplay and cause it to die instead of just shedding a member and moving on. Ugh.
-People who express interest in a roleplay and talk about making a character for a month or more, maybe even getting so far as posting a barebones sheet, but never actually put anything up. Shit or get off the toilet, seriously. If you can't manage to work up a basic CS in a couple weeks then you either don't have the free time to be joining a new roleplay or you're not actually interested enough to put for the effort, so just drop out and leave. Doubly aggravating in roleplays with player limits where this kind of person uselessly takes up one of the slots that could otherwise be filled by someone who'll actually make a character.
-People who join a roleplay with a clearly listed minimum posting length and writing skill expectation, then proceed to fail to meet them. Maybe I shouldn't be surprised that their reading comprehension is also shoddy, but seriously, most of these requirements are things like "one paragraph minimum, be coherent, and move the plot or action forward with your posts." That's real minimal stuff, so when people join such games and then post confusing one liners that do nothing I get rather irate.
-People who have problems marking the difference between player and character. Holy fuck, the amount of stupid drama I've seen come from this... I've had a few times when I played an asshole character that was rude to another player's character, because durr he's an asshole, and then I got a private message from that player chewing me out about the personal attack and insults I supposedly gave them by doing that. Just fucking ridiculous. Oh, and then there are all those sad cases of people taking roleplayed romance or intimacy to mean some kind of real connection between the two players. I saw a looooooooot of this back when I was roleplaying in the MMO World of Warcraft, in which I was involved in the smutty roleplaying community of one RP server. Hearing about someone getting all creepy and pushy and stalkery because they apparently thought there was more going on than two characters mashing their pixels together via text simulation was a once a month minimum, sometimes multiple times a week, event in the community. Maybe it all comes down to people making self insert characters and confusing themselves, I dunno. Whatever the cause, it's weird and I wish it would stop.
-People who have a small number of characters they make over and over and forcefully shove into every roleplay they join. That "forcefully shove" part is important here. I've seen people play the same few characters over and over with no problems, but there are some out there who insist on keeping their character exactly as conceived in the void of Imaginationland without making any alterations to suit the world. This can range from small inconsistencies like their character history mentioning something that doesn't exist in the world, to middling problems like the character being well educated and multi-lingual despite the premise of the RP being about peasants or similar types going off on adventure, to major things like that character being some race (almost always one of those furry anthropomorphized animal things, in my experience) that doesn't exist in the world. The type of people who piss me off are the ones who try to force that stuff into the roleplay instead of altering their character to fit. Look, I get that you're a special snowflake and that your character is also a special snowflake, but if they don't fit in the fucking world then they don't fit in the fucking world. Either change it or don't join. Seriously.
-People who play the same personality and archetype of character over and over and over again... and suck at it. I don't mind the ones who are good at it, but the people who do things like play charming thief guys all the time but couldn't charm their way out of a wet paper bag and try only the dumbest of ways to steal things? Try something new, please.
-People who don't understand how roleplaying works and stall scenes out by failing to provide any action or dialogue for others to use. This is roleplaying 101 level stuff: GM provides a scene with some form of action to start things off, Character A responds to that and does some action, Character B responds to the preceding things and performs an action, Character C does the same, so on and so forth. Then you get Character Derp who comes in and screws it up by ignoring those previous things and perhaps failing to perform any kind of action. Maybe they'll just walk in and stand there wondering what's going on, or maybe they'll come in an attack some guy who Character B already attacked, or maybe they'll come in and make some inaccurate remark about what's going on and then stand there waiting for someone to respond to their useless bit of speech. Whatever form it may take, these people are a primary cause of roleplays stalling and dying, and for that I dislike them.
-People who fail at grammar. I am, in fact, a Grammar Nazi at heart. Many things annoy the fuck out of me in this regard. A short list of these offenses include: people who swap between first and third person, people who mix up those homophones that you get drilled into your head in elementary school, people who don't know how to properly use apostrophes, people who abuse commas, people who try to use semicolons despite clearly having no idea what they're going, people who can't spell worth a damn, and people whose sentences look like they were built by translating a real sentence back and forth a few times between other languages via Google Translate.
-People who take constructive criticism as a personal attack, especially related to my attempts to help people with the above two peeves. If I point out that your post ignored other actions or didn't do anything useful, it's not the same as saying you're a worthless piece of shit. If I mention that "your" is possessive while "you're" means you are, I'm not pissing in your grandfather's ashes. I've gotten so annoyed with people acting like these things are horrible insults to their person that now I usually don't bother trying to help people out with roleplaying issues unless they explicitly ask for advice.
-People who put OOC chatter in an IC thread. I don't care if you're using brackets or whatever, we have a fucking thread for that stuff.
-People who spam OOC threads with totally irrelevant nonsense. Don't get me wrong, I love chatting with other players and having a good time, and I'm not at all one of those people who think the talk should only be relevant to the roleplay. I'm talking about people who do things like throw up a bunch of links to songs they're listening to lately, or to random goofy websites, or randomly bring up some controversial news story. If a convo with other players happen to wind around to music or funny things or whatever other topic, okay, cool, whatever. Just dropped it at random in the thread though? Fuck off, go make a thread in General Chatting (or the similar applicable section of other forums).
-People who are huge drama queens in the OOC thread. Just.. no.
-People who double or triple (or more) post on purpose. If it's the IC thread and it's all for one character, why? Just put it all in one post. If it's in the IC thread and it's for multiple characters, again, why? Just add some kind of heading deal for each character to indicate which part belongs to which character and to separate them, put the things together in one post, and put it up like that. Using multiple posts is far more annoying than having one massive post. If it's the OOC thread, ain't no good reason for that unless you're the GM reserving posts at the start of the thread for organizational purposes, so make use of that damned edit button if you have more to say.
-People who make painfully dumb posts (IC or OOC) while under the influence of booze or drugs or whilst sleep deprived, then later giving that excuse as if that makes it okay and there should be no problems because of it. Also, people who do really dumb shit and then later use one of the above things as an lying excuse, and also expecting that to make everything okay. Hard to tell whether the real deal or the excuse making version is more common, but I've seen this happen a lot, especially in off-topic sections of forums. Sorry, being intoxicated or tired doesn't absolve you of responsibility for your actions. Next time think before you type, or stay away from your computer when you can't trust yourself to not be an idiot.
-Characters with a grossly unrealistic suite of mental illnesses. I've seen people with multiple depressive disorders and multiple psychotic disorders and a handful of others thrown in for fun. No psychologist would diagnose someone with a fucking alphabet soup of disorders, especially not multiples from the same category, and anyone with that number of disorders would be a non-functioning mess. It's just ridiculous and shows that these people have no idea how any of this works. Bonus rage points for characters with a laundry list of disorders that can somehow function like a normal person with only tiny behavioral quirks as manifestations of their disorders. Double bonus rage points for characters with tons of disorders that outwardly show absolutely zero sign of being a mess despite their thoughts being off the wall crazy.
-Characters that are listed as being "bipolar" or "insane" and have that manifest as an instant 180 degree turn from normal person to bloodlust incarnate. Like.. have you ever seen a bipolar person? Have you ever read a description of the disorder? Are you not aware that "insanity" is now only used in legal contexts in the United States, ont at all in reputable medical contexts because it's a useless and misleading term. Please stop.
-Okay, fuck it, just characters that misrepresent mental illness in general. I could go through a huge list of them and explain how people are dumb about them one by one, but I'll just stop myself here instead.
-Characters that have a bunch of quirks instead of real flaws. These characters generally tread into Mary Sue territory, but this particular form of them is awful because people have this illusions that their character has real flaws because omg look at their list of flaws!!! No, sorry, compulsive hand washing and having test anxiety don't work as flaws to balance out your character's unmatched skills in a couple sports and some language and the fact their they're super hot and popular and so on. Being a dick and a bit of a kleptomaniac doesn't balance out super powerful magic and combat skills. Character flaws are there to give your character weak points and make them more dynamic. Replacing them with quirks makes your character an overpowered and boring mess.
-Characters that have tons of quirks just to try to be interesting. If you need to give your character a bunch of dumb little habits in order to not make them boring, I have some bad news for you: they're probably going to still be boring, at best you might make them annoying as well, and if I wanted to see an annoying quirky pile of garbage I'd just go watch something Zooey Deschanel stars in. I've seen people with a list of quirks longer than the rest of their character bio. They were all terrible boring characters that didn't contribute anything meaningful to the roleplay, just posts with a bunch of pointless little mannerisms thrown in to make them special and unique. Sorry kiddo, twitching a bit and picking your nose when you think nobody is looking and having to fold your socks in a specific way doesn't make your bland character any less bland. Try a real personality next time.
-Characters with a super tragic history that just angst around the place all the time. Now, I make use of the tragic backstory trope a lot (largely because I like killing off my characters' families so I don't have to deal with them being a factor), but you don't need to make sadness and angst the entire being of a damned character. That's one dimensional and boring. It always feels to me like the person set out to make their character, started with the tragedy, then decided that they had to be sad for the rest of their life. I'll grant that some people in reality do indeed end up being depressed wrecks for the rest of their lives after major trauma like that, but come on, why in the fuck would you make a roleplay character like that? How would someone who is just a mopey sad sack actually work up the motivation to join the epic quest or whatever? Why would you make some brooding loner character in a thing where character interaction is vital to the game staying alive? They hit the trifecta of having a boring, annoying, AND useless character. Ugh.
-Characters with strange names (typically Japanese) that don't at all fit the setting of the RP. I get that you love anime and all, but seriously, if you're playing in a fantasy version of medieval England then you should probably give your character an appropriate name. This earns double rage points if their character is not a foreigner but has this name anyway.
Okay, that's probably enough out of me for now, even though it's by no means an all inclusive list of RP things that annoy me. Despite my laid back appearance, I'm actually a boiling cauldron of rage. 8D
