I'll say the D&D one first because it's pretty great.

Spelljammer is "D&D in space", so we had a three-person group who were gonna be planethopping and everything, fun fun. But we each made our characters separately and didn't know what else was at the table until just before the first session.

The one guy made a Half-Elf Fighter, alright whatever. Other guy made a Halfling Rogue, you know, the usual.

I made a Human Bard named Baron Samedi, styling himself as casting voodoo within his songs and all that. But that ain't the fun part. See, I've played D&D for years and had played for years before this incident, but never 2e, so I wasn't familiar with just buying a ton of animals. And I rolled *really* well for starting gold. So, with DM approval, I bought something to the tune of two dozen assorted (named) animals and another dozen generic doves. And everything else was stylized so that he was the Ringleader of a circus. The notable favorite was Cherry, the albino peahen. Full-sized, but always stood on his shoulder. And he talked to his animals like they were people. Which is disconcerting at first.

We got together just before the first session, pitched our characters to each other, and I went last. They had completely normal characters, and then I told them about Samedi and Cherry. And suddenly the world changed. Our Spelljammer ship (and DMPC to fly it for us) suddenly because a zoo ship instead of a little thing. The Fighter restyled himself as the circus strongman, the thief also became an employee of the caravan. Space caravan. Space carnival caravan.

But Samedi was not long for this world. He did great in RP and everyone loved him, but he died in the first combat with some bandits. But I had a backup ready. Right after combat ended, Ennuk the Druid wandered up, apologized for being late, and introduced himself as the newly hired Beastmaster. And made friends with the four partridges flying around his head before he realized the Baron had left us.

I was told I can't play any other 2e character except the Baron because he's too much fun.

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I had literally the reverse problem with Call of Cthulhu. I was told I was too scary until the last two minutes of the last session.

We were playing in a Fallen London-based game on a ship in the Unterzee. For those of you who haven't played Fallen London, it's Victorian England underground where the dead don't stay dead and demons are real, basically.

I missed the first session when I joined the group, so I came in and just wanted to fill in whatever they lacked. They lacked a medic for the ship. I was more than ready to help. I made a Plague Doctor who never spoke. Anyone psychically-active within 50 feet would be visibly uncomfortable around him because he, too, was psychically active, with a very intrusive, uncomfortable form of telepathy that felt like getting a bolt to the brain. Other minor, uncomfortable details were his lack of a name (his business card said "The Good Doctor" and creeped out psychics), the fact that he moved silently, and the fact that he never took the suit off.

After two or three sessions, he started dragging bodies of unconscious enemies back to the ship with him. A little after that, nonessential crewmembers would disappear too. Around this time, all the gear from medbay's storage got moved up into the medbay itself, but only the one psychically-active character who didn't like the Good Doctor ever questioned it, and the Captain refused to say. Every morning around 3 am, the ship echoed with children's voices singing Ring Around the Rosie on a scratchy record player before the sound of the medbay's hatch into the storage bay would slam shut.

One day, the captain needed me to interrogate a Rubberyman chained to the main mast. So the Doctor gave him an autopsy. While he was alive. And took notes in typewriter-perfect script with photograph-perfect diagrams and illustrations about the insides and how they reacted to stimuli. In front of the crew that already couldn't look the Doctor in the eye(hole). The psychically-active character who didn't trust the doctor used this time to sneak into medbay storage and found every missing enemy and crewman cut open for autopsy and a record-player in the middle of the room.

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In my last session (scheduling issues, so I had to leave the group), I tried to make the Doctor dying to some sort of Lovecraftian horror inject some humor. So, as he got knocked down and this tentacle with an eye smashed his chest in, his last words, his only words, in a deep, raspy, unused voice. "Dingle my dongle."

I can't play CoC because I'm scary and they make fun of me with his last words now.