For me it’s driving while under the influence. If you couldn’t tell, I like me some ganja. However I have long since held the belief that it is utterly insane to drive while under the influence of most substances, with maybe nicotine and caffeine being the exception. All too often I see other stoners smoking and driving, which I simply can’t fathom. I’ve only operated a vehicle once under the influence and it was just to move a U-Haul around the block to a different parking spot, which was such a scary experience while high that I refuse to even consider getting behind the wheel again while high.
Common in the hobby of tabletop RPGs, or especially Larping, is Main Character Syndrome. People think that their character is the most important thing in existence. If things don’t go their way, they complain, claim cheating or bias. If the larp is setup for it they ask for appeals for the decisions and investigations against the person who wronged their character. They spend more time just arguing over what great things should happen (or what bad things should not happen) to their character than they actually do just … playing the game.
I used to play a lot of DnD and other TTRPGs. Another thing that annoyed me was people who took the game too seriously all the time. I think it’s fun to occasionally do things for the sake of comedic relief. Not something you wanna do all the time, but when I was playing a dumb as shit orc or something, it can be fun to do something stupid to make everyone laugh. I didn’t do things that would harm the party or the overall story. But one guy would get so upset and ended up quitting the campaign when people didn’t agree with him and said that it’s ok to be goofy sometimes.
I had a friend running a campaign where a big part of the local kingdom was that it had a constant, annoying bureaucracy. At one point we were set to meet the king, and the party all had to wear ceremonial scarves. As part of the bureaucratic obstacles the DM had it that we’d been given the wrong color of scarves, and therefore the guards weren’t letting us pass.
I instinctively just did the Lionel Hutz “I’m not wearing a tie at all” bit with the scarf. The DM was so speechless that he said the guard was speechless and let us pass out of confusion.
when I used to DM, the rule if cool was king at my table. Like you wanna jump from the airship to the actively rising hot air balloon to sword fight the BBEG? fuck yeah make an acrobatics roll! oh a 19? well you grab onto the edge of the hot air balloon and are barely holding on but he doesn’t notice you. you can climb up next turn and kick his ass.
I know somebody who is running a game currently with the opposite problem. None of his players want to step up and have their spotlight moments. He says it’s maddening to get them to do anything or say anything.