And the corollary, overbuilt min-max character based solely on researching the meta for hours but only rolls good at things they're not built to do

I have done all of these except 13

Sounds like he could be the next Ash Williams who works on over in housewares at S-Mart!

Sure but what's your TTRPG character?

I feel like there should be a “6.1: Definitely my fursona”

Dead. cackles

Number 1: my barbarian idea was just "funny Russian man with pet bear", who dual weilds a hammer and sickle. I chose totem barbarian with a bear totem, and little did I realize that would make me practically invincible

I think there's also a pair:

• Takes the setting and theme very seriously. Reads the lore. Knows the details. Can tell you why the Lancea Sanctum and Invictus are traditionally allies
• Absolutely does not take the setting and theme seriously. Wants to play Barney the Dinosaur in your game of Vampire, and Punisher in your game about running a bakery.

I'm old and tired and generally am super tired of "wacky" ideas like the second one there. I feel like I've come full circle. As a youth, I thought like "let's play vampires and struggle with humanity!" was cool . Then there was a bit where i wanted to flip it- "let's play vampires but like go to theme parks and don't do anything sad or deep!". Now I'm back around to wanting to just play the theme as intended.

This is especially true if it comes up after session 0. Like, if you want to do a D&D game about running a BBQ shop, fine. Let's do it. Let's kill, cook, and sell some weird monster parts. But please don't derail the whole game on session 3 when you insist on going back to town to cook the monster meat when it was clearly a random encounter and everyone else wants to continue the dungeon dive pitched in session 0.

One of my favorites that I ever played was a character I where I rolled my stats first and ended up getting a -3 modifier even with mulligan rolls. Every other stat was anywhere from decent to fuckin ballin'. I sat and thought about it for a minute: what stat would be fun, interesting, and challenging to have as a -3? STR would suck, INT and CHA would be anything from really annoying to insufferable or ablist to play (every VERY low int character ever in D&D podcasts is extremely cringe to listen to), so that leaves WIS and DEX. I chose DEX and said that it was because my human fighter was a war veteran with an Above Knee Amputation from the war. From there, I arrived at him using pole arms because they help him to steady himself on his peg leg outside of combat, and that he's deeply uncomfortable with magic, since magic cost him his leg and many comrades in war.

It led to one of my all time favorite moments in an RP where he and the paladin were dining in a Giant's great hall, having a disagreement about how to proceed, when the Paladin cast a spell on him (I can't remember which, I want to say it was silence or Zone of Truth, but it can't be because it specifically targeted him). My character stared him down, slugged down the rest of the drink, then flipped the table and commenced to trying to murder the paladin. It was a pretty nuts PvP fight, since we both ended up successfully avoiding the party members who were trying to restrain us, landed a few solid blows on each other, and it only ended when the Giants had had enough of our shit.

MORE FLAWS

MORE

Can you guess what is the basic flaw for me in AD&D, which eventually led me to walk away from it? How the game builds up expectations for the player.

The average person just flips open a player's book, a monster manual or some other tome on the game lore and instantly the person thinks their character will be, from the start, like the model characters they're reading upon, which they never will or even can be, as the game does not permit it, in my understanding and experience.

As a player, it was extremely frustrating to handle DMs that expected a newbie mage/ranger/fighter/whatever to take risks as if they were seasoned veterans and had high capabilities from the start. That is nonsense.

No class in AD&D is (or was; I speak from years of distance) capable of great feats from the get go, as the way the characters are built forces a level 0/1 into basically discarding any capabilities a trained individual into a specific profession would already have. It would be better to just say the characters are slightly above average commoners.

As a DM, I was quick to get fed up with players that wanted to pull stunts that would be barely feaseable to high level characters/professionals, regardless me going through the basics as I did above.

People are idiots but the game was set up by morons and others just tried to build on top of it to improve it, with mixed results at best.