Special Snowflake Syndrome


 * This Troper used to be oh, so very guilty of this. She has played a half-nymph bard, a fairy dragon mage, a cursed magical artifact, and werecat thief, just to name a few. She got better. Eventually.
 * This troper, not content with the standard player character races from 2E Dungeons And Dragons invented a race of insect-men from whole cloth for his character to be from. And the GM actually let me get away with it. That said, within the context of the story, the character wasn't an unusual member of his race.
 * What was wrong with the Thri'kreen, Formians, or multiple other already existing insect races?
 * My old fanfic characters were this in spades. Psychic sprites created to be Guardians! A good-hearted if rebellious Slytherin girl with a made-up name! The female thief spirit of the eighth Millennium Item! Yeaaaah, there's a reason all of this stuff is my Old Shame.
 * This troper was so tired of mail-roleplaying for Harry Potter in a group so full of Special Snowflakes (and I ended playing one against my will), that when the master opened another game, I went by the inversion route: I wrote a sheet with a unnasuming, Ã¼ber normal character who (I specifically and repeatadly insisted) didn't have any kind of special power and had no potential of ever developing one. Sadly, I never sent the application, but it would have been interesting to play it...
 * This Troper is a Sue-thor in recovery. That is all.
 * This Troper is currently working on a Solar working for a Deathlord for an Exalted game. In addition, an NPC for a game I'm running is a runaway Dynastic mortal who is going to Exalt (as a Solar or Sidereal, haven't decided), and may end up becoming the new Maiden of Journeys.
 * This Troper has always subverted this in any roleplay I participate in. Notable characters include, Mortimer Mouse in a Kingdom Hearts roleplay (no special abilities. Basic wizard on par with Donald), A completely normal Ministry of Magic employee named Gaius Flufflebump who had no dark secrets and was just a genuinely nice old guy in a Harry Potter roleplay, and a completely stereotypical Drow wizard who everyone just assumed was a chaotic good rebel from his race (he wasn't).
 * This Troper doesn't pull this himself, but is in two tabletop games with people who do. In both cases, it's the GM doing it, meaning it's a crossover with the GMPC trope (and the Mary Sue, for that matter). In a Shadowrun game, one of the co-G Ms pulled out his former PC to use as an NPC. This character is part-vampire, a super awesome physical adept with mysterious powers, and both a legal bounty hunter and most infamous shadowrunner ever all at the same time. Any player trying this combination would be killed immediately. In character creation. In Star Wars, our GM regularly pulls out NP Cs who have uber-rare lightsaber crystals, like the black and white color crystal from The Force Unleashed or the rare crystal which can reflect sonic attacks that normal lightsabers can't.
 * This troper is pleased to say that he more or less managed to pull this off without Suedom, and tie it into the story as well. The character was an erinyes, a type of devil (who are always Lawful Evil). However, in order to equalize her, it so happened that this particular erinyes hated magic, and thus willingly divested herself of special abilities, making it up through the course of the game with technology. Also, while she was still in fact somewhat evil, it was more of an "Obstructive Bureaucrat" than "World Conqueror" type, thus making her Lawful Neutral.
 * This troper and fellow poketwitterers have had to put up with an ever so special snowflake human, turned into a green eyed Meowth, with a "tristar" birthmark on one of her ears, who is raising an orphaned Pichu as her son, while also being a pokemon trainer with her own team. Did I mention that she was raped by a Zangoose? Well she was. And she was impregnated. She laid an egg from whence was born a Meowth with her birthmark but on the opposite ear and Zangoose eye marks, I'm sorry, a zangscar. And we're just scratching the surface here.
 * Oh dear God. Kill it. Kill it dead.
 * This Troper, when a player in D&D, saw this and The Loonie happening so much among his co-players that now that he's about to become a DM, he limited players to the base races and forbade Chaotic Neutral and all evil alignments. I may be a tyrant, but at least I'm a tyrant of sensible PCs.
 * This Troper, in his younger days, spent time in an RP/Chatroom ... thingy, surrounded by the atypical "Demon queen of the undead", "Immortal vampire prince", "Angelic warrior of the light" and other such overused traits that try to make someone stick out. In his group, he then became the most stand-out and unique character. His character was a piece of expired sushi that had been allowed to go mouldy for so long, the mould had gained a conscienceand could justify coming back to life through the process of the dead body getting a new layer of mould, and thus got to come back. None of it was intentional, as this troper was trying not to be like everybody else, and it was only because they were all suffering from Special Snowflake Syndrome that the he did.
 * This editor used to play in a MUSH based on The Lord Of The Rings that enforced very strict adherence to the book—often to the point that no one besides characters named in the book were allowed to have any adventures, leaving everyone else to (what was in my mind) boring social roleplay. There's only so many pleasant afternoon tea parties in Hobbiton I can take! Largely out of desperation to stand out from the crowd, I ended up playing an evil Hobbit who was basically a 3-foot-tall Moriarty, which pissed a lot of people off. In the end, it wasn't even worth it, because the worst crimes I could commit without grossly violating the theme of the books were things like petty larceny and real estate fraud.
 * In one particular Second Life roleplaying area, most of the active characters are either mundane humans or from magic-based worlds. My character? A Wholesome Crossdresser Gadgeteer Genius-slash-Science Hero-slash-Meido from a hard SF world.
 * This troper would like to point out that everyone who isn't an NPC is a special snwoflake in their own way as far as characters go, because characters who are completely normal are either A) Special because they're so unbelievably normal or unbelievably boring. It's not a question of being unique, it's a question of whether or not your character is interesting in spite of being overly unique.
 * This troper played a Tiefling, a common but nonstandard race with demonic blood, in a game of D&D3.5 where only I and the GM had played a roleplaying game before. Everyone assumed I was some kind of lizard person and derided me for making such an unusual character.
 * In a game of Vampire The Masquerade, the local munchkin wanted to play a True Brujah. True Brujah are explicitly stated to be very rare, intelligent, refined, and special. They also get one of the coolest powers in the game (time control). The GM said fine, but the character will have forgotten his time control abilities during his multicentury coma, (Which the player voluntarily described as flimsy justification for playing a clan that died out ages ago) and would take some time to remember them. At the crucial moment (He ran straight first at a bunch of vampire hunters with machine guns, swinging a katana), the munchkin looks pleadingly at the GM, who gleefully announces, to the surprise of everyone at the table, that my Malkavian with anterograde amnesia suddenly recovers a memory of learning how to stop time. Of course, right after saving the party, I forgot how to do it again.
 * This Troper managed to play a subversion of this trope... in my first D&D game, no less! I was a human fighter (well, my PC was female) in a party full of half-troll rogues, time-mages and the like. It was an awesome game though, don't get me wrong.
 * This troper has seen on many pokemon RPG forums that being a dark type specialists is popular due to the lack of a dark type gym and dark types in the anime characters' teams. However since everyone wants to be a dark type specialist, it's actually unoriginal now.
 * This troper often seeks out niche character types (races, classes, etc) that don't get much attention, partly to be different and partly to give the little-used roles some love. I try not to be stupid about it, though; I pick them because they're interesting, not because they have the coolest powers or whatever, and I don't flaunt my character's specialness or do things like the main page's example where it's just a common combination with a different name and some unusual window dressing.
 * This troper once used one of his own original, non-TF robot pilot characters for a message board's Transformers RPG. Oddly enough, he was somewhat well liked by the Autobot faction players, but some really stupid moments on my part also made me the bane of the Decepticon faction. I retired the character after three episodes and have vowed never to try something that stupid again.