D&D 5E Play Styles and DnD Next

[Ahnehnois]

In a word: Cinematic.

My game is a story; players are primarily responsible for contributing to the story. Dice rolls, rules, and tactics serve much the role that special effects do in movies, they help tell the story and they spice things up. Rules are tools, and I tend to substantially rewrite them before every game I run in order to do what I need. Minatures, props, fancy voices, and the like are distractions. The game is played with people talking to each other in the third person, trying to create a shared reality. The rule is to do what makes sense.

Everything has meaning. There are no "random encounters". If I roll dice, it's because I need to know whether something happened or didn't. Every session has to have enough artistic merit and game-level engagement to be worth the time spent on it. The pace is fast, the themes are adult, and the story goes wherever we take it. I draw influences from all genres of fiction, the news, and personal life. Our personalities are infused into the game, and the stories we carry with us are quite revealing.

In other news, I run 3e.

 

[the Jester]

I would say that my playstyle encompasses all of the following:

-High lethality
-Sandbox-oriented
-Good guys don't always win
-Complex grey morality issues
-Highly detailed homebrew setting with multiple eras of play
-Successful pcs can have lasting impacts on the milieu (Asmodeus was killed by epic pcs during the 3e era, for instance, and remains dead IMC)
-PCs of all alignments work together, but sometimes also work against each other and, rarely, fight each other
-To date, we've always played the most current version of D&D for regular campaign play
-I almost never fudge... probably on one roll every 4-5 sessions.

The out-of-game elements include:

-The game doesn't get cancelled or end just because one player can't make it or needs to go home; we play as long as we have a quorum of 3 players and the dm.
-Beer and pretzels style, sometimes literally- we pretty much always drink a lot while we game. Also some stoners in the group; again, much indulgence is typical.
-Despite the heavy drinking and smoking, we are typically fairly well focused and on target.
-We're all friends outside of gaming too, though this hasn't always been true (but almost all non-friend-gamers we've acquired become good friends over time).