The Ballad of Insane Eddie
Many years ago, I was DMing a Pathfinder 1e group. It was a great campaign, or at least it had the potential to be—until Eddie came along. Eddie was that guy—the embodiment of Hot Topic shirts, questionable hygiene, and a misplaced sense of main character energy. Picture the kind of person who thinks just standing in the shower counts as "clean" and whose personality is 80% 2nd rate anime protagonist (cringey one liners included), 20% "rules lawyer." He would lecture me (and everyone else) at every opportunity. (Ex: If i said: “You're level 6, so your fireball will deal 6d6 damage” he would feel compelled to interject that “actually its 1d6 per caster level”) any chance he got to insert himself into a situation to show how clever he thought he was, he'd jump on other like a hungry dog on a pork chop, even if was clear he had no idea what he was talking about. He just couldn't help himself.
At best people tolerated him, but the vast majority of people found him weird, off putting, and genuinely insufferable to be around. Myself included if that wasn't obvious by now. The only reason Eddie was at my table was because his brother, my best friend at the time, begged me to let him join. "Give him a chance" and "He's not always like this. Let me talk to him." were things that were frequently said.
His attitude in game was arguably worse as every negative straight was turned up to 11.
Some of Eddie's greatest hits include:
Dice Shenanigans: I had a house rule that you had to roll stats in front of me. Eddie brought a pre-made sheet saying he rolled 5 18's in a row. An argument broke out when I told him he'd have to re-roll but could keep 1 of the supposed 18's he rolled as a compromise.
Rules for thee, but not for me: Anything cool shit he wanted to do was a-ok but anything that was negative or went against him was “unrealistic and stupid”
Projecting: Insulted one of my players on being unoriginal and boring despite the fact he himself was playing a human barbarian wielding a great axe.
4: I dodge!: Would try to tell me attacks shouldn't hit him because “I would doge out the way.” Or he should instantly kill whatever he had managed to hit because “He was aiming for the head/neck”
Dice Shenanigans Part 2: Would lie about his rolls. I would frequently watch him roll low. Only for him to either straight up lie about it or try to adjust the dice quickly.
Backseat DMing: Tried to dictate to me the DM what loot he found in a chest. As you might guess it was always some ridiculously powerful or broken item.
Murderhobo Vibes: Eddie's character was a human barbarian with the personality depth of a potato. His in-game dialogue was a mix of brooding grunts, crude jokes, and constant demands for loot. He ignored NPCs, skipped roleplay, and only cared about swinging his axe.
Making us Nomads: Got us collectively kicked out of the game store we were playing at because of multiple complaints about comments he made to other customers.
Drunken douchebag: Would frequently get drunk at the table, which only made his little temper tantrums worse.
Yet all of that would pale in comparison to the incident that led to him getting the moniker of Insane Eddie. (Keep in mind we're playing at my grandfather's house when this goes down.)
The campaign's story revolved around a rebellion. The party was trying to recruit allies for a second uprising after their first attempt failed. The group was negotiating with an NPC faction leader when Eddie, in true Eddie fashion, called them "cowards" for not handling their own problems. The trouble started when Sarah who was playing a swashbuckler started trying to smooth things over. Sarah, a swashbuckler in the group, tried to smooth things over with a joke, quipping that Eddie’s behavior was the result of a donkey kick to the head in his youth. The group laughed.
Eddie did not.
He is livid both in and out of character and immediately swings his axe at Sarah and just barely misses. After this he challenges her to PvP because she has “insulted him for the last time” and will literally not let us continue until she accepts.
My rules for PvP were simple: you dip at or below half your half your HP and whatever hit is considered a decisive but ultimately non lethal blow. They can also forfeit at any time. In the unlikely event and attack would deal lethal damage, there would be some type of arbiter to intervene. I explain everything to everyone, all parties are in agreement and PvP Is underway.
(Please excuse me for this next part as I get overly analytical.)
Eddie wins on initiative and is doing typical barbarian stuff by going into rage and moving to power attack. He made 2 mistakes here the first is that his rage is lowering his AC by -2 and the second is that he keeps power attacking which at level 8 means he's at roughly +14 damage from rage and everything else factored in but at a -3 penalty to hit.
Ordinarily this would be just a small drawback, but since Sarah is playing a swashbuckler it's infinitely worse for Eddie since swashbucklers gain a quite frankly broken ability called Opportune Parry and Riposte. The gist of it is, by burning 1 of a set number of points swashbucklers get called panache and using an attack of opportunity, swashbucklers can potentially block and counterattack on an opponents turn. All Sarah has to do is beat Eddie's attack roll to parry, and then she can roll an attack roll to counter attack. Keep in mind Eddie is at a -3 to hit and -2 his AC while Sarah gets to apply her full bonuses to her parry and attack rolls.
Further adding fuel to the fire us the fact that Sarah has combat reflexes(extra attacks of opportunity) Weapons focus: Rapier (Bonus to hit) Fencing grace (Dex to damage) and Improved Critical (Doubles her crit range meaning she can crit on a 15) and whenever she critically hits she gets 1 of her panache points back. Meaning that she can not only potentially block at least 4 melee attacks per round, but also replenish the panache points she spends.
To Eddie's credit he did hit with his first attack and was very close to winning outright. All he had to do was land one more hit and he would've won, but he never did. I won't bore you with all the details but from that point on Sarah was firmly in the driver's seat. On her first full round attack she ate a decent portion of Eddie's HP. And when it was Eddie's turn she parried him twice and critically hit twice which took an even more substantial amount. The entire time Eddie is on the verge of a meltdown, crying about how unfair and unrealistic it is. The entire duel went about 3-4 rounds before it was over, and of course the second is said that Eddie's character couldn't continue anymore, he proceeded to lose his fucking mind.
He throws all the maps, figurines, soda cans, etc off the table and storms out into the backyard. His brother goes after him, and as we're cleaning up I can hear them yelling through the glass door as we're cleaning up the mess he'd left. Just as we're finishing up and I'm explaining to Sarah and the other player's that he's not gonna be welcome back. I hear more shouting and the snapping of plastic. When I look up Eddie has re-entered and he's holding one of those twirly stick things for window blinds he's ripped from the back door window and an axe he'd stolen from my grandfather's shed during his little temper tantrum.
He throws the stick at Sarah, hitting her right in the face and is yelling/taunting at Sarah to pick it up and try to block with it. His brother is doing his best to get in his way and hold him back, Sarah is crumpled on the ground, I'm yelling at him to get the fuck out, and tje while time he's getting amped up like he's gonna fight a girl half his size.
During all this chaos my grandfather comes in from the living room to see the absolute shitshow this has turned into, and he's moving to pull the axe out of Eddie's hands, along with every other guy there who's now trying to restrain him (except his brother of course). In the commotion my Grandfather ends up falling and hitting the edge of the counter and opening up a laceration on his forehead, but somehow manages to get the axe out of Eddie's hands. What followed next was a full-on brawl, until Eddie’s brother finally dragged him out of the house, with the cops arriving shortly after.
In the aftermath, Eddie was arrested, and my grandfather had to get more than a dozen stitches. Eddie’s parents begged my grandfather not to press charges, and since Sarah refused to file her own, Eddie still ended up with a lesser charge. He was out far sooner than he deserved.
As you might imagine, that was the end of my friendship with Eddie’s brother, and the group didn’t survive the fallout. Sarah was understandably shaken, and didn’t want to talk about it—or accept my apologies. She moved away about a year later, and the rest of us just drifted apart. From what I’ve heard, Sarah’s doing well now—married with a family of her own. Eddie, on the other hand, hasn’t changed much. Last I heard, he was banned from another game store after trashing it during some kind of altercation.