I don't like vancian casting at all. I tolerate it because it's in the rules. My ideal form of magic would be somthing like spell points
I do use alignment, but our groups transcend traditional alignments as they are really too vague and not broad enough to portray or classify the magnitude that is human(oid) ethics, idealisms, beliefs and emotions. Especially when you base this on an interesting character story. Alignment doesn't really limit our decisions. Character as a construct does. So, no "I kill you because my detect evil says you're eeeevol!" unless you're a (self-)righteous zealot.
I am not too fond of Planescape, even if one of our longest standing campaigns was PS. Sorry. I also don't need teleport to be happy. But if the setting or the campaign says it exists, then so be it.
Also thanks for implying that "my philosophies" are stupid. No need to get this ad hominem. And yes, I do like ideological conflicts far more than good vs evil. Because I like complicated and complex storylines, thank you.
You can have your opinion on MMORPGs, but guess what? They are not really made to do creative roleplay in. They are made as games first, everything else second. And of course they'd have to be balanced. Otherwise all players who'd want to compete on the highest "levels" (read: top notch difficulties or competitive PvP) would simply play the race/class combos that are flavour of the month.
We've seen this in early WoW and it was really bad for the game. But I guess we can agree that comparing TTRPGs to MMORPGs is a bit nonsensical. Even if some of the MMO gameworlds have TTRPG adaptions and very lore-rich settings
( I still have a very shy, young priestess of the Light and her grief-stricken page guardian as well as their "I'm totally not a Paladin cause the Light failed me" warrior who has seen too much horrors in the Third War companion waiting somewhere. One day...)
"not for intellectual people" again, who are you trying to insult here? There are really intelligent and educated people playing MMORPGs and they spend lots of their time doing and writing sims for many aspects of said games. They develop strategies collaboratively and perform them as a team. Some others do high quality machinimas to tell ingame stories as short movies. Others base their sociological research on game structures like guilds. soft-skill development etc. Just because your levels stat your attributes (and really, I guess that all wizards in D&D max out INT anyway as well...) this doesn't mean that all characters or their strategies are the same. Stat distribution is influenced by magic items (again, a very different incentive to play a MMORPG than a TTRPG) and these can vary heavily depending on build.
and I *do* like fluff. But as a designer, I'd try to find out where fluff should be just fluff and where it can and should influence crunch. 4e had too little fluff influence. But these arbitrary 2e limitations are... well, I don't see why any fluff should demand that. Or why we could not simply re-write the fluff. Or why we cannot create ingame fluff which does hinder your character if he/she's race X because you're in a society where half-orcs might have a social stigma.
I also *do* like challenges and obstacles and dangers and all that. But I'd like to have all this thrown at my characters in my storyline. What I really love most about TTRPGs is the possibility to solve problems or oversome (maybe seemingly impossible) obstacles by creativity and clever planning. I'd rather spend a whole session in RP discourse without throwing a single die and resolve everything based on fluff and player ideas and interaction rather than Diplomacy check DC 25, then Bluff Check vs Sense motive, then Athletics and Gather information DC 20 and have all of these modifies by flat racial/circumstance/attribute boni.
But what kind of challenges do you like? And which do seem too easy nowadays in comparison to ye olde days?