What kind of game do you/your players prefer?
>Light hearted high-flying action?
>Gritty immersive role playing
>Jokes and socializing while dungeon crawling?
>Rags to riches style campaigns in a magic world?
>(insert your example here)?
My players and I prefer detective style superhero games. There's lots of mind games while also letting loose at times to see the dice fall and throw car sized spears at building sized scorpions.
>>46575521
>Me
Light-hearted intra-party roleplay between bouts of gritty urban detective work and deadly dungeon crawls.
>My group
Pretty much just the dungeon crawls.
>>46575521
A campaign that takes itself moderately seriously. Nobel Dark setting. Probably something out of the 1980s It's always night and there are neon lights everwhere.
I.E. Dark Future where corporations rule and the players are cyber punks fighting against the man (see image)
Other option: Combine the following settings into one game: Mad max, Shadowrun,Vampire The (masquerade/requiem), Tank girl, Deus Ex. (basically 80s to early 90s)
Dice fall where they may.
I like a range of tones and themes, and so do most of my players.
Generally, when I run fantasy games I do lighthearted with infrequent moments of dark and serious.
For Sci-fi, I mostly do Warhammer 40k, so I prefer fairly grim and gritty.
Normally the sessions are all cracking jokes and rolling dice, and I don't mind that, as long as they all understand that it's all out of character.
What I don't like is when my players try to play against the theme in-character.
Joking about your Dark Heresy Arbites getting drunk and trying to chat up an Adepta Sororitas is fine, but actually having your character do that is just annoying. Or a Pathfinder character who refuses to act serious or dignified, even in the presence of a witch who has the power and will to kill you in an instant is irritating.
In short, RPG's are meant to be fun and I run them that way, but I expect the players to actually roleplay in addition to all the jokes.
>>46575521
>Setting
I can play in anything, and while I'd love to play in a setting that's a little bit original, most are cliched as fuck.
Would love to play in Orion's Arm but even I think it's impractical.
>Gameplay
I like problem-solving oriented gameplay with minimal railroading. I like a mixture of social, combat, and non-combat problems to solve That's what keeps me coming back to Shadowrun despite my issues with the setting.
Our DM sets up a run and it's up to us, the players, to get it done. We have to scope the target's defences and weak spots out and do all the prep work, we have to come up with our plan of attack, we have to plan our own escape route. We have to make sure we've got all the angles covered (the Matrix, meatspace and the astral shit) and make our own contingency plans in case we get double-crossed or something else goes wrong unexpectedly. It's all on us and we get a lot of freedom, but it's not aimless sandbox because we have a clearly defined goal. It also has a strong cooperative angle because party roles are well-defined.
I just hardly ever see this in fantasy RPGs. It's usually a handful of minor set-piece combats with a few dungeon crawls, and you basically go in blind (unless you have an autistic wizard player who scrys every square millimeter for weeks beforehand). I always feel like I have to do less and think less in DnD.
>>46575634
Pretty much this.
>Me:
Noblebright low fantasy rules-light roleplaying punctuated by combat with real risk and clearly defined rules
>Everyone I've ever played with
Rolling dice and achieving ridiculous power levels with minimum effort.
>>46576332
Sometimes having ridiculous power is fun. Like a guy who can manipulate probability just waltzing into a casino and winning the $2 million jackpot and having the best party week of his life.
>>46575521
>jokes and socializing while dungeon crawling
It would seem that everyone comes to the table with one of the others in mind but inevitably just ends up swapping banter.
>>46575521
Anything that doesn't call for extensive suspension of disbelief. Fighting humanoid robots? Ok, I guess. >1 km tall fighting humanoid robots? Nah.
>>46575521
Things are mostly pretty good, then the supernatural world gets gummed up somehow, and someone has to step up and fix it.
>>46575521
light hearted rags to riches.
We all have really over the top senses of humor so it's kind of hard for us not to make jokes all the time. The DM is a big fan of these really big complicated stories, but even he can't stop himself from joking around. Good thing is that we can all get really serious in serious situations, which is what differs good players from lolrandom That Guys.
Light-hearted banter mixed with high-flying animu action. As "weeb" as it is it's fun as hell.
>>46575521
I personally prefer gritty immersive role playing instead of light-hearted banter. But, my group is the complete opposite and I can barely get one other person to spend more than one minute total per session playing in-character.
>Me:
Rolling dice and achieving ridiculous power levels with minimum effort.
>Everyone I've ever played with:
Roleplaying preferences have varied by group, the two constants are high-lethality combat and low player power levels.
>>46579168
>high-lethality combat and low player power levels.
I never got why this was fun.
>Okay so I just made my level 2 bard and I'm so excited to join the party!
>Bard dies first encounter from getting hit twice.
>Okay I'll make a level 2 sorcerer this time.
>Proceed to get killed by a single crossbowman who flanked the party.
I just don't get how you can have fun when here's 0 attachment to your characters.
>>46575521
>>sandbox actions and reactions
>no rules of cool
>no plot armor
>no rules of comedy
>[....] whateaver the hell tv tropes decided to invent related those tropes
A mix of light hearted with gritty and immersive.
Pretty much noblebright fairy tale type stuff and if serious combat is happening, then it just got super serious.
>>46579241
>I never got why this was fun.
>I just don't get how you can have fun when here's 0 attachment to your characters.
Agreed. Admittedly, I lean toward the opposite extreme myself - I'd be happiest in a game where it was mutually agreed that player characters absolutely do not die. But expecting to die in every round of combat is not my idea of an engaging game.
>>46579241
>>high-lethality combat and low player power levels.
>I never got why this was fun.
People play free form roleplaying on forums when they're young, and everything is stupidly overpowered mary sues and nothing has consequences. They pick up an actual RPG system because rules should help, and Dungeons And Dragons has the biggest name recognition so they pick that. D&D solves that problem, and also has the conceit that low-level characters die in a stiff breeze (for most editions), so this is now The Solution To That in their minds.
>>46579381
>>46580017
I'm incapable of feeling invested in combat if there aren't real stakes. An easy way to do that is if there's a chance of death. If I'm just doing some dungeon crawling and there's no chance of my character dying, then what's the point of playing intelligently? It's not like playing dumb will get my character killed or something.
For a game where character death isn't likely to happen, have a game where combat doesn't happen as often is what I'd prefer.
Though people really, really, really overstate how likely characters are to die. A lot of new players have common character deaths but once you're used to it and start gitting gud, character death becomes fairly rare.
Mine is a combination of 3 of those 4
>46575521
>Light hearted high-flying action?
>Jokes and socializing while dungeon crawling?
>Rags to riches style campaigns in a magic world?
I leave the Gritty Immersive Role Playing to other GM's.
