Captain Anorak's Guide to Gaming
Ridiculous Scenario Hooks
There's a widespread assumption among roleplayers that when you create characters, you can create any character you like and then that character will work in any scenario.

This is supposed to work in practise because the players are expected to go along with what the scenario needs them to do in order to work. This includes seeing a scenario hook that their charcaters would never go along with in real life and following it blindly. Here's an example that particularly stuck in my throat, a tournament Call of Cthulhu scenario I played in at CthulhuCon 2002:

We players were playing a group of wealthy gentlemen who were having dinner at my house. A telegram arrived from an old friend of mine (whom none of the other characters knew) saying 'Come at once! There's terrible danger in Such-and-such-a-place!' Immediately all the other players said 'I say! We'll have to help this chap out!' and so we all piled up to a small village. Once we were there there were some mysterious events and all the player characters except mine set about zealously investigating them.

I was very reluctant about this because I was trying to play my character as a normal respectable gentleman of his era. But if I did this, it meant I was simply inactive. This basic problem ruined the whole scenario for me.

Bear in mind that I did not create my character; it was handed to me at the start of the scenario. I was given a character who was a respectable gentleman with no particularly heroic leanings, and so that was what I tried to play. If all the players had done this then the scenario would have gone nowhere. As it was, I was left being miserable on my own while the rest of the party got the job done.

Lots of gamers think that this sort of thing is perfectly alright. These people are wankers and should be boiled in toxic industrial waste. If you have to do what is expected in the scenario against the normal motivation of your character, what is the point of having that character?

I wouldn't have minded if I'd been given a character who would do the sort of things that the scenario expected. If the motivation of the characters marries up with the requirements of the scenario, that's great. In fact, this to me is one of the centrally important parts of scenario writing. But if you're forced to forget that your character has a personailty of his own and simply get pulled along on a string by the plot instead, then what's the fucking point of playing?

See also:
Forced Plots.
Character Purpose.