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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ptolemy18" data-source="post: 3751040" data-attributes="member: 24970">Oh, now you're hitting below the belt! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> Well, everyone has their own preferred style of gaming.Quirkiness is good. Weirdness, variety, character acting is good. Detailed backstories are good too. Depth is good too -- unless by "deep" you mean self-importantly serious and becoming so attached to a particular character that you'll quit the game if they die.On the other hand, I would certainly consider all my characters "deep" in that they all fit into the campaign setting and have worked-out backgrounds and personalities based on their background, like any good fictional character. I do tend to run characters who have a melodramatic and over-the-top and bizarre element, because that's the kind of fantasy I like, as opposed to trying to go completely serious all the time. I like that too, but I prefer my D&D to have a certain bizarreness. (Maybe this goes back to the Jack Vance element? In addition to his much hated spell mechanics, his books are certainly bizarre, a lot more bizarre than self-serious Tolkien.)I remember once a newbie player asking me after I had just run a game, "Are there any comedy RPGs?" And I said "Well, obviously, every RPG is sort of a comedy RPG," and she laughed. Meaning because of the level of in-game banter and silliness which is inherent to 95% of RPGs. All RPGs, except the most hardcore and psychological (which is an acceptable type of RPG too) are to a certain extent self-referential and winking.Now, obviously there's a limit to this, which varies from campaign to campaign. I wasn't playing characters whose sole function was to break the story and provide anarchy. We've all known (or been) gamers like that. But when my DM called for characters for a ninja game, I made a loyal ninja. But on the other hand, there is an inherent element of anarchy in RPGs. A large number of people play RPGs in order to get away from reality's restrictions and do crazy things ("crazy", of course, can range from quirky and interesting to obnoxious and attention-getting, just as "gamist" can range from practical to "uninterested in roleplaying and mean to the other players if they do the less-than-optimal thing for roleplaying purposes"). So I tend to be less interested in games where the character roles are firmly tied down by the game setting itself -- whether it be "all of you must be heroes and attempt to kick as much ass as possible" (D&D4e) or "all of you must be enforcers of a religious sect" (Dogs in the Vineyard). Those games can be really fun, and I do really like playing a serious psychological RPG or a RPG about some very particular obscure subject once in awhile. (Variety is important.) If all the players can agree to play a particular type of campaign, and you can run a game set in Ancient Jerusalem or the New York mafia, then that is awesome. But for long-term campaigns, rather than one-shots, I prefer a setting with a lot of flexibility, where I have a lot of character options.To me, the best RPGs start with a rich setting. Within that setting, certain types of roles suggest themselves, but the characters' roles aren't narrowly defined. Then the players make their characters, and (extreme example) if they want to play a cook, a thief, an aristocrat, a wizard and a sailor, it's the DM's job to make an adventure which is fun and suited for a cook, a thief, an aristocrat, a wizard, and a sailor. After all, the main point of a game is to make the players happy.So -- yes, I like a lot of flexibility in D&D. And flexibility means being open to the weird and bizarre and quirky, as well as the serious and hardcore-heroic.</blockquote>

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