Okay. okay I give! I'm inflexible and snippy and it's better to see my group as 'special people that saw things my way and I was really lucky to have them.'
I don't know if I'd go that far, but... GMing is the hardest job, because you're trying to keep round about a half dozen people (including yourself) entertained and happy. And I'll be the first to admit that keeping yourself happy is just as important as keeping the players happy. I've had groups in which I tried it both ways... One group I had had players with picky gaming habits -- I was always bending over backwards to cater the game to them, and I was miserable because I never got to run the game the way I wanted. The very next campaign I ran, I said "Screw it!" and just ran want I wanted to run, without regard for the players' interests, and I was still miserable because no one was having fun and no one "grokked" the setting they way I hoped they would.
About that time, I floated around to a few other gaming groups just to see what things were like, and ended up coming back thinking, "Holy Cow... My group isn't nearly as bad as I thought they were."
In the end, I ended up loosening up a little as a DM, and they relaxed a little as players. Now, when we start a new game, I toss out a few suggestions that I'm interested in, they point out which ones they might like to play in, and we negotiate it all out, until we find something everybody canbe happy with. It does take time, trust and communication, but our games have gotten a LOT better.
Pbartender pointed me to the GM guide for dungeons and dragons fourth edition (or am I supposed to say 4.0?) and I can see how it makes sense. It's also super creepy and wrong to make a meta class system to describe players in like you describe characters, (but even a bad systematic understanding of the world you can test and improve and train yourself to recognize patterns with is better than nothing, yadda yadda.)
Yeah, I know... I don't think the intent was to emulate D&D character Classes, but it's not unlike those personality tests that try to put people into neat little categories. In reality, most gamers are complex mixes of those categories. Nevertheless, I've personally seen enough players stereotypically fulfilling these roles (and can identify with a few of them myself) to say that are some good insights into player motivations, there.
I will continue to be shocked by players characters with refresh zero, arbitrary rainbows of jade court vampires and people that play without ever having read the books. I will not pull a gun on the table, I'll just wear a tinfoil hat and put their names on my enemies list.
Now see, I think that this sort of behavior could be less a problem with differing play styles and more of a problem with misunderstanding the genre and setting ("without ever having read the books" is a big red flag). I've run into the exact same problem running Star Wars RPGs, and sometimes even in my homebrew setting for D&D. Players come up with a cool idea for a character, before they even know what kind of game they'll be playing in, and then they don't bother to do the homework to make that character fit in.
For example, in a more recent homebrewed D&D game, one of my player wanted to play a stereotypical Southern hillbilly hick Half-Elf Bard who was a former pig farmer, played a banjo and had a flying pig for a familiar. I had to explain to him, that while we tend to take our games a little lightly, that was just a bit too silly and that regardless, Elves and Half-Elves in this campaign setting were, as previously mentioned, patterned after Native American tribes. In the end, after a few months of playing with him, he was one of the players we had to "gently" let go.
On the other hand, we've got another player, who was a inveterate power-gamer from the start... He were the first table-top game he played in, and he came from a background of Baldur's Gate and World of Warcraft. He had some terribly annoying habits. We razzed him and hazed him mercilessly over it. However, he learned a lot, he adjusted his style a bit and so did the rest of us. He's still a power gamer, though he's dipping his toes more into the role playing aspects more. (FATE actually had a big impact on him... He's realized that it's "conflict" that he enjoys, not just combat, and in FATE non-combat conflict play just like combat in most ways.) He's been with our group for nearly ten years now.
Sometimes, you do need to switch players or games, but before you get to that do what you can work things out first.
