Posters: The how's and why's of our gaming.

[Silverblaze]

Question 17: role play vs roll play. 

Rarr! Stormwind Fallacy !  Rarr !

It's a stupid question.  Yeah, it is a stupid question.  One I assumned I had to include.

 I hadn't heard of any of those above terms (bolded) until I started using RPG forums.  I think it is stupid also, but plenty of gamers subscribe to the false dichotomy.  Apperently I offended many of the gamers here.  I didn't mean to.  Just ignore it. 

I use both roleplay and dice to solve most things.  I just try to avoid hte dice if I can talk it out instead.

[admiralducksauce]

1. How did you start gaming?
Honestly? Probably Choose Your Own Adventure, which led to the Fighting Fantasy books (Deathtrap Dungeon and Space Assassin FTW). My neighbors growing up had the Talisman board game and Dragon magazines and we would make up our own little Talisman cards. Then I found Gamma World 3rd edition in the back of the local toy store. It had a badass cyborg riding a badass cyborg... otter... thing. I was sold, and my brother and I puzzled our way through it on a family camping trip.

2. What system did you start with?
As mentioned, Gamma World 3rd edition followed closely by Marvel FASERIP. It's some edition of D&D for most people I know, but my gaming genesis was all about color-coded charts.

3. What systems have you played?
Not as many as sinker. 
Gamma World 3rd and 4th, Marvel FASERIP, Top Secret S.I., Star Wars d6, d20, and Saga, HERO 4th, Mutants & Masterminds 2nd and 3rd, Savage Worlds, Palladium (TMNT and Rifts), ORE (Wild Talents and REIGN), AD&D 2nd, D&D 3, 3.5, and 4, oWOD (Mage/Werewolf/Vampire), Spycraft 1 and 2, Unknown Armies, Burning Empires, Shadowrun 2nd, Serenity, DFRPG. Some homebrew systems as well.

4. What system/s are your favorite?
FATE, for bringing tactics to the narrative side of gaming and making Aspects an indispenable part of my group's preferences.
Mutants & Masterminds, for being such a great toolbox without reaching HERO's complexity.
Top Secret S.I., for being my go-to system for action movie games for decades.
ORE, for its "system engineering" of sorts, and its beautiful headshot circuses. In some ways it's an evolution of what I liked about Top Secret SI.

5. Is this your first system?
Nope.

6. What caused you to try DFRPG?
I had Spirit of the Century based on rpg.net groupthink opinion, I am a Dresden Files and Evil Hat fan, and so when I learned DFRPG was Evil Hat's next iteration/evolution of FATE, I was sold.

7. What is your preference in gaming group size?
1 GM, 2-5 players. Probably 4 players is my favorite group size, and allows full niche/role coverage in most systems. Fighter/Wizard/Cleric/Thief and all that.

8. How open are you to gaming with people you don't know or hardly know?
I don't reach out for more gamers, but I also try to get over my initial stranger-danger awkwardness when we DO have a new person and try to make them feel welcome.  Chances are they're feeling just as or even more uncomfortable than I am. Groups that try to "initiate" the "fresh meat" or whatever die off because they come off as insular pricks.

9. What is your best quality as a player?
I'm down for whatever. As a player, I will happily ride your plot railroad and bite your story hooks and jump into those pits with the spikes. I'm not attached to my characters, I'm there to see what happens to them.

10. What is your worst quality as a player?
I'm not picky about what we play but I'm picky about GMing style. I look at what the GM is doing and think how I would do it differently. Get too enamored of your "plot", show too much interest in NPCs over PCs, and you'll hit my pet peeves really fast.

11. What is you best quality as a GM?
I back the players. I'm on their side, even when I try to "play hard" I'm still rooting for them. And I can usually come up with scenario ideas fairly quickly, so I'm a good pinch-hitter GM if we have a cancellation or something falls through.

12. What is your worst quality as a GM?
I often have no idea how LONG something will take, and I'm consistently inconsistent when it comes to gauging how dangerous threats are. I usually end up falling too far on the "pushover" scale.

13. Importance of game balance 1 - 10 (1 being lowest 10 besing highest)
8 or 9. Balance doesn't have to mean stats, but I do like to see equal opportunities given to each player.

14. Importance of setting/canon of universe 1 - 10 (1 being lowest 10 besing highest)
6 for the genre tropes and basic background of a setting, 1 for already-established plot, people, or events. If I play Star Wars, I want Jedi to use lightsabers, not guns, but I would actually prefer if Luke, Vader, etc. weren't even mentioned. I certainly wouldn't want to interact with them.

15. Custom setting or established setting?
Custom "meatloaf" setting, made from easily-recognizable bits pulled from other sources. You lose all the baggage that comes with trying to adhere to "canon" but still have easy-to-grok hooks.

16. During character creation are freedom of powers more important or the character concept and the powers and skills fitting that concept? EDIT: FIXED!?
Concept, all the way.

18. Other: anything notable to volunteer that could explain your view of gaming or your posts on here (obviously mood, upbringing and personality has an affect here, but lets not get too personal eh?)
Sometimes the rules are there to be broken. Sometimes they're there to protect the players from the GM. Sometimes they're there so you CAN be competitive.

I don't like it when people compare stuff to D&D where, in their argument, D&D is obviously the Wrong Way to do things. D&D is fun, guys. FATE is fun, too. You can love them both.

I like humans with guns more than I like fancy supernatural monsters, I like defiance, grit, and determination winning out more than I like seeing stories about chosen ones and special snowflakes. I believe in More Dakka and Balls Out. I think a character should be more than just the superpowers on their sheet or the list of magic shit they wear.

[Richard_Chilton]

I use both roleplay and dice to solve most things.  I just try to avoid hte dice if I can talk it out instead.

I know some Role Players who have played 3 - 5 years in a LARP and never Rolled.  They have never been involved in a challenge where the outcome was decided by chance as opposed to role playing it out.

I also know some who can barely go 5 minutes without throwing a challenge.

Different strokes for different folks.  The fun part? Both groups are playing at the same game.

Richard

[sinker]

Indeed. It's not as much of a fallacy as you might think. I know plenty of people who treat role-playing like a more flexible board game that doesn't end. And like I mentioned I started out gaming with absolutely no dice or stats and it worked fine (provided that everyone was more interested in having fun and making a great story rather than "winning").

3. What systems have you played?
Not as many as sinker. 

It's not as good as you might think. I get bored with systems really easily so we have to switch a lot...

10. What is your worst qulity as a player?

Oh, I forgot, I have a tendency to accidentally break systems. I come up with a neat concept, find powers that support it, and then realize that for whatever reason those powers combined make me several times more powerful than everyone else...  I even do it for friends when I help them make a character. One of my friends refuses to run BESM anymore because of the number of times I have broken it.

[Viatos]

1. How did you start gaming?

I was 11 and into Neopets. They had a freeform roleplaying thing (which, years later, got its own forum) that I fell into.

2. What system did you start with?

Freeform in the truest sense, wherein anyone may show up with anything and the only rule is don't annoy people so much that they don't want to play with you.

3. What systems have you played?

DnD 3.5 and 4, nWoD (all lines and most minor splats, as well as Leviathan, Princess, and Genius), Exalted, SIFRPG, SotC, DFRPG, Buffy, Scion, Houses of the Blooded, All Flesh Must Be Eaten, Nobilis, Unknown Armies, maybe a dozen homebrew systems.

4. What system/s are your favorite?

The nWoD, even though it's only a moderate improvement on the oWoD and has like a hundred terrible problems compared to the thousand of its predecessor. Changeling is my favorite. Mage would be my favorite but I have to weight the likelihood of someone running it really well, which isn't great, because you need to have read a couple thousand pages of material to even have the whole picture. I'm excited for Mummy.

5. What caused you to try DFRPG?

Dresden Files is pretty good, and FATE rocks.

6. What is your preference in gaming group size?

Four players and one ST.

7. How open are you to gaming with people you don't know or hardly know?

Open, although it does complicate things. If I can't be friends with people I tabletop with, I stop tabletopping with them because it defeats the purpose for me. Online it's the opposite, I have 0 interest in any OOC connection with other players. I stay IC, I don't talk about my life, I don't want to hear about yours.

8. What is you best quality as a GM?

I'm awesome. I don't know, I never get (critical) complaints and only very general praise to that tune ("Wow, that rocked!" "Great! Which part?" "The whole thing!") so I can't really pin this down. Whatever it is it works for my groups.

9. What is your worst quality as a GM?

I procrastinate a lot of the stuff I know I shouldn't try to improvise.

10. Importance of game balance 1 - 10 (1 being lowest 10 besing highest)

8. I'm willing to let players get ahead of the system if they really want, but parity between players is paramount, and a system that can challenge them tends to be more exciting then one that can't.

11. Importance of setting/canon of universe 1 - 10 (1 being lowest 10 besing highest)

1. I would never voluntarily play with something that makes the group OOC-unhappy just because a book said so. It always blows my mind that there are people who care so much they'll try to "fix" someone else's game to align more with another writer's ideas. The ST is the writer that matters.

12. Custom setting or established setting?

A good established setting is fine, although I tend to start rewriting anything dumb that bothers me. Custom settings are great as long as you know your players and remember to write what they care about; no point in detailing the cultural variances of a nomadic desert civilization, for instance, if you don't expect the troupe to have any interest in going over to check them out.

13. During character creation are freedom of powers more important or the chracter concept and the powers and skills fitting that concept?

False dichotomy. During character creation, concept and powers will pretty much always fit together if the player knows what she's doing. I find that this goes much smoother and creates far more cohesive characters if I have a sheet built before I have more then two lines down about the character, and then build a narrative to fit what I want to play. Starting from the concept can be a problem because mechanics are typically less flexible and you might end up stretching too far to try and put together a sheet that fits what you've written.

14. Roll play or roleplay?

People say "oh, it's a logical fallacy" but I'm not a fan of that. What it is is a way to legitimatize sour grapes, developed by people bitter about their own inadequacies and desperate for a weapon they could use to bludgeon others who are smarter then them. In a hobby composed of intelligent and creative folk, it is a form of intelligence-and-creativity shaming that devalues everything except how wordy your magical superhero fanfic is.

15. Other: anything notable to volunteer that could explain your view of gaming or your posts on here (obviously mood, upbringing and personality has an affect here, but lets not get too personal eh?)

I have awesome friends who I run games for; when I write in general, it's with people I like in mind as my audience. I also have an interest in game design and mechanics, and what I've come to realize is the people who write games are not really doing rocket science. The most important thing is that everyone at the table has fun, and I no longer have any qualms about running roughshod over a setting or rulebook to achieve that. I tend to take a players-first view based on troupe happiness and, when I can rewrite something to work better, I do so.

[sinker]

Oh, I forgot one of my favorites. Anyone ever play Mutant Chronicles? It had a really interesting character creation system in that you would actually play the character's backstory, first determining childhood stuff all the way through high school, and then after that by increments of two years. Roll for random events and to see if they held work gaining skills/advantages/disadvantages/wealth based on the results. It was kinda fun in and of itself. I'm told Traveller is similar (though I've never played it) and I think Fuzion had something like it too (though it's been more than a decade since I've looked at that one).

[UmbraLux]

1. How did you start gaming?
- Got together with a couple friends in grade school.
2. What system did you start with?
- Gamma World (original boxed set)
3. What systems have you played?
- I'll probably forget a few but Gamma World, every version of D&D except 4, d20 (if it counts as a separate system), Traveller, Shadowrun, Earthdawn, Over the Edge, Savage Worlds, Champions, Rolemaster, WoD (old and new), Classic Unisystem, True 20, Exalted, Warhammer FRP, Dark Heresy, and a few one off games like My Life with Master.  Edit:  Forgot Cyberpunk 2020 and WEG d6 Star Wars. 
4. What system/s are your favorite?
- Hmm...favorites change over time but Shadowrun, Savage Worlds, and FATE are consistently in the top five recently.
5. Is this your first system?
- <cough> umm, yes. 
6. What caused you to try DFRPG?
- Liked the books, like urban fantasy settings, decided to try it.
7. What is your preference in gaming group size?
- Four to six.
8. How open are you to gaming with people you don't know or hardly know?
- It's how most games have started.  Now I keep in touch with friends I met via gaming years ago. 
9. What is your best quality as a player?
- Creativity.
10. What is your worst quality as a player?
- Occasional impatience.
11. What is you best quality as a GM?
- Creativity.
12. What is your worst quality as a GM?
- Occasional impatience.  (I think there's a pattern here. )
13. Importance of game balance 1 - 10 (1 being lowest 10 being highest)
- Define "game balance".  Balancing screen time and narrative influence among players is a primary goal for me while GMing.  Balancing mechanical power is secondary - and mostly important because it affects the primary goals.
14. Importance of setting/canon of universe 1 - 10 (1 being lowest 10 being highest)
- Depends on the group. 
15. Custom setting or established setting?
- Published framework, custom details. 
16. During character creation are freedom of powers more important or the character concept and the powers and skills fitting that concept?
- Concept.
17. Roll play or role play?  Something in between? ( Role playing skills vs dice for resolving things in game)
- Both are important.  We're playing a game.  We're also creating a narrative.  The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
18. Other: anything notable to volunteer that could explain your view of gaming or your posts on here (obviously mood, upbringing and personality has an affect here, but lets not get too personal eh?)
- I have a wide variety of interests / hobbies covering the spectrum from geopolitics and military history to philosophy and gaming to weightlifting.  I work in Information Security and Network Engineering and, more often than I like, end up writing or editing technical documents. 

[devonapple]

Oh, I forgot one of my favorites. Anyone ever play Mutant Chronicles? It had a really interesting character creation system in that you would actually play the character's backstory, first determining childhood stuff all the way through high school, and then after that by increments of two years. Roll for random events and to see if they held work gaining skills/advantages/disadvantages/wealth based on the results. It was kinda fun in and of itself. I'm told Traveler is similar (though I've never played it) and I think Fuzion had something like it too (though it's been more than a decade since I've looked at that one).

If you really want to be traumatized by a character background generator, try Central Casting:
http://www.thistledownap.com/?p=143

We used Heroes of Legend, I believe, and boy howdy... was there a wide variety of child abuse in our collected randomly determined backgrounds.

[admiralducksauce]

Oh, I forgot one of my favorites. Anyone ever play Mutant Chronicles? It had a really interesting character creation system in that you would actually play the character's backstory, first determining childhood stuff all the way through high school, and then after that by increments of two years. Roll for random events and to see if they held work gaining skills/advantages/disadvantages/wealth based on the results. It was kinda fun in and of itself. I'm told Traveller is similar (though I've never played it) and I think Fuzion had something like it too (though it's been more than a decade since I've looked at that one).

Never played Mutant Chronicles, although I read one of the tie-in novels and have a few minis. Always struck me as a nearer-future Warhammer alternative, more like DOOM than Dune.

Burning Empires uses a lifepath system, although it's not randomized. It's more of a tree where you follow a limited set of branches. REIGN (fantasy ORE variant) uses a one-roll lifepath system that I've modified since (as well as other people) to also work with sci-fi and modern games. Lifepaths can be a lot of fun if you're in the right mindset, and despite some occasional bending-over-backwards to make sense of the results, at least all the lifepaths should at least mesh with the setting.  You won't have a stripper ninja Jedi rolled up for a Lovecraftian investigation game.    Although that last sentence sounds like "challenge accepted".

Heh. Really, the Phases of FATE character creation are lifepaths too. You just get to pick them is all.

[Orladdin]

This sounds like fun!
Also, for anyone who wants a questions-included BBcode cut+paste form, check inside this spoiler:

(click to show/hide)

Code: [Select]

[tt]1. How did you start gaming?[/tt]

[tt]2. What system did you start with?[/tt]

[tt]3. What systems have you played?[/tt]

[tt]4. What system/s are your favorite?[/tt]

[tt]5. Is this your first system?[/tt]

[tt]6. What caused you to try DFRPG?[/tt]

[tt]7. What is your preference in gaming group size?[/tt]

[tt]8. How open are you to gaming with people you don't know or hardly know?[/tt]

[tt]9. What is your best quality as a player?[/tt]

[tt]10. What is your worst qulity as a player?[/tt]

[tt]11. What is you best quality as a GM?[/tt]

[tt]12. What is your worst quality as a GM?[/tt]

[tt]13. Importance of game balance 1 - 10 (1 being lowest 10 besing highest)[/tt]

[tt]14. Importance of setting/canon of universe 1 - 10 (1 being lowest 10 besing highest)[/tt]

[tt]15. Custom setting or established setting?[/tt]

[tt]16. During character creation are freedom of powers more important or the chracter concept and the powers and skills fitting that concept? EDIT: FIXED!?[/tt]

[tt]17. Roll play or role play?  Something inbetween? ( Role playing skills vs dice for resolving things in game)[/tt]

[tt]18. Other: anything notable to volunteer that could explain your view of gaming or your posts on here (obviously mood, upbringing and personality has an affect here, but lets not get too personal eh?)[/tt]

1. How did you start gaming?
As far as any kind of game goes, I started playing video games when I was 6 or so.  I was writing BASIC games on my parents' Commodore 64 when I was around 10.
As far as tabletop goes, I started with my high school friends in our parents' basements in Freshman year.

2. What system did you start with?
Dungeons and Dragons, 2nd edition.  It still has the best, realistic high fantasy feel of any D&D game.

3. What systems have you played?
As far as those played; far too many to list-- my paragraph would be at least as large as yours, Silver.

I've GM'd these, however:
D&D 2nd, 3rd, 3.5, 4.0
Hunter: both The Reconing and The Vigil
Big Eyes, Small Mouths d20 (the anime roleplaying game)
D20 Modern
The Marvel Comics RPG (the diceless one)
Ninja Burger
The Dresden Files RPG
Custom FATE variants

4. What system/s are your favorite?
FATE-based games are my new favorite, but D&D 4.0 is second runner up, followed by Fireborn and BESM.

5. Is this your first system?
LOL

6. What caused you to try DFRPG?
The Novels, naturally... and I'm glad I did.

7. What is your preference in gaming group size?
(3 to 5) + GM

8. How open are you to gaming with people you don't know or hardly know?
Very open.  I even invite people (significant others, friends, coworkers) to observe games.  What better way to remove the gamining stigma?

9. What is your best quality as a player?
Incredible diplomat, fast critical thinker and puzzle solver

10. What is your worst qulity as a player?
I can turn antagonistic when railroaded

11. What is you best quality as a GM?
My NPCs are legendary amongst our circles.  Other GMs invite me in to cameo as various NPCs in their games.
I'm also incredible at making challenging puzzles.  Players never miss one of my puzzle-dungeons.

12. What is your worst quality as a GM?
I am not good at keeping track of more than 5 players.  If someone doesn't speak up once you get to 5 or more, they might get less spotlight time.  I try to keep my games smaller for this reason, but it's a tough thing to do.

13. Importance of game balance 1 - 10 (1 being lowest 10 besing highest)
---> 9
Though, if something is imbalanced, I've homebrewed enough to know how to fix it.

14. Importance of setting/canon of universe 1 - 10 (1 being lowest 10 besing highest)
---> 7

15. Custom setting or established setting?
Custom; almost exclusively.  DFRPG is the notable exception.

16. During character creation are freedom of powers more important or the chracter concept and the powers and skills fitting that concept? EDIT: FIXED!?
Neither is more important.  The fun of the overall group is more important.

17. Roll play or role play?  Something inbetween? ( Role playing skills vs dice for resolving things in game)
Depends on the game and the group that's playing. 
4e D&D is better suited for roLL, but I've got one roLE group with it. 
Dresden and BESM are better suited to roLE, but I've had a Dresden group do the kick-down-the-door thing; you never know.

18. Other: anything notable to volunteer that could explain your view of gaming or your posts on here (obviously mood, upbringing and personality has an affect here, but lets not get too personal eh?)

Games are made to provide fun.  The fun of the group should be paramount.

A new edition of a game does not "ruin" or "invalidate" the previous edition you've grown to love.  You can always get out your old books and play.  Believe me, I just played in a 1st edition D&D Tomb of Horrors about 2 years ago (painful, but fun).

Players will almost always hate the next edition of a game.  Understanding why this happens is the first step in gowing as a gamer.



[Edit]  Just got caught up on the first page of responses.
Wow, we've got most of the heavy hitters on the RPG forum weighing in here.

I'm 28 next month.

[Silverblaze]

I never got to play Deadlands.  I always wanted to.

[sinker]

Come to Colorado and I'll run you one, Silverblaze.   Seriously my favorite setting of all time (did someone say Steampunk Western Horror?), and one of my favorite systems. Hell on Earth was even better setting wise (Sci-fi post nuclear war western horror).

It's not too hard to get classic Deadlands digitally these days here but if you want the actual physical books it's a bit harder.

[Wilder]

1. How did you start gaming?
About 14-15

2. What system did you start with?
WoD: VtM

3. What systems have you played?
AD&D, D&D 3, D&D 3.5 D&D 4, Exalted, Gurps, Rifts, D20 Wheel of Time, Magic, obviously DFRPG

4. What system/s are your favorite?
D&D 3.5, Rifts, DFRPG

5. Is this your first system?
No

6. What caused you to try DFRPG?
Love the books, the world is captivating and I had heard good things about the FATE system

7. What is your preference in gaming group size?
5-6, enough for everyone to have a role without too much overlap while still letting everyone specialize if they want

8. How open are you to gaming with people you don't know or hardly know?
As long as eveyone is friendly and helpful, I love new people

9. What is your best quality as a player?
Creative and collaborative

10. What is your worst quality as a player?
I can sometimes have problems with meta-gaming as I love the subject matter and thus know too much about the world or creatures than my character should

11. What is you best quality as a GM?
I give lots of detail and believability

12. What is your worst quality as a GM?
Not very flexible, aka I'm a railroader

13. Importance of game balance 1 - 10 (1 being lowest 10 being highest)
If its a good group and people self censor: 3
If you have munchkins/power gamers who can control themselves: 8

14. Importance of setting/canon of universe 1 - 10 (1 being lowest 10 being highest)
10

15. Custom setting or established setting?
Established

16. During character creation are freedom of powers more important or the character concept and the powers and skills fitting that concept? EDIT: FIXED!?
Concept! Build the story, then figure out how.

17. Roll play or role play?  Something inbetween? ( Role playing skills vs dice for resolving things in game)
Role with story lines, Roll for action. If its audacious enough, let it fly! (Within reason of course)

18. Other: anything notable to volunteer that could explain your view of gaming or your posts on here (obviously mood, upbringing and personality has an affect here, but lets not get too personal eh?)
I'm twelve years and counting in the Army, so for me, I can be a bit of a pain figuring out how to win tactically before a fight. However, I love playing non-glass cannon/bruisers. I love playing intrigue and social situations. Possibly because I work public affairs.

[Tsunami]

1. How did you start gaming?
How do you start something like that... a friend had a rulebook, borrowed it, bought my own.
I was 12 or 13

2. What system did you start with?
"The Dark Eye" or rather "Das Schwarze Auge"... at the time everyone started up with DSA here in germany... At least in the circles i moved in *g*.

3. What systems have you played?
From the top of my head: DSA3, DSA4, Shadowrun, "Plüsch, Power & Plunder", Mutants and Masterminds, Starwars D6, Dresden Files

4. What system/s are your favorite?
Hard to pinpoint one...Most Systems have merit one way or another. But i've pretty much fallen in love with Fate in general since i started DF.

5. Is this your first system?
Nope.

6. What caused you to try DFRPG?
It's a small step from a Gamer who reads the Dresden Files, to a Dresden Files Gamer...

7. What is your preference in gaming group size?
GM + 3-5 players is ideal.

8. How open are you to gaming with people you don't know or hardly know?
Sure, why not.

9. What is your best quality as a player?
I make lots of funnies.

10. What is your worst quality as a player?
I make lots of funnies. *g* And sometimes i tend to overthink things.

11. What is you best quality as a GM?
Oh boy... i haven't GMed in so long. I'll have to see what the new group thinks.

12. What is your worst quality as a GM?
See 11.

13. Importance of game balance 1 - 10 (1 being lowest 10 besing highest)
5

14. Importance of setting/canon of universe 1 - 10 (1 being lowest 10 besing highest)
3. And having a fun time trumps it all the time.

15. Custom setting or established setting?
Yes. :-)

16. During character creation are freedom of powers more important or the chracter concept and the powers and skills fitting that concept? EDIT: FIXED!?
Depends on the system. Some systems have fixed classes, others don't. Both can be fun.

17. Roll play or role play?  Something inbetween? ( Role playing skills vs dice for resolving things in game)
Something in between, but leaning towards Role Play.

18. Other: anything notable to volunteer that could explain your view of gaming or your posts on here (obviously mood, upbringing and personality has an affect here, but lets not get too personal eh?)

[JayTee]

1. How did you start gaming?
Depends on how far back you go, but technically I started when I first pretended I was a doctor trying to teach my little brother SCIENCE! (I was 10, good times)

2. What system did you start with?
My first formal system was a freeform website that had no dice or rules beyond character creation, and even then they were pretty lax.

3. What systems have you played?
Just Exalted, fun system.

4. What system/s are your favorite?
Too recent too the party to have a favorite

5. Is this your first system?
Technically no, but I suppose freeforms don't really count.

6. What caused you to try DFRPG?
I like the series, figured I would give the game a shot.

7. What is your preference in gaming group size?
Multitasking is an inherently hard thing for the human brain to do, so I prefer small groups of around 3-4 people.

8. How open are you to gaming with people you don't know or hardly know?
Formally I started off that way, so I have no problems with it at all.

9. What is your best quality as a player?
I have no problems with compromise and working with people, I try to make sure the GM is having fun as well as the players.

10. What is your worst qulity as a player?
I get frustrated whenever things go against my expectations.

11. What is you best quality as a GM?
Hm, haven't GM'ed formally, but in the freeform settings I tended to be pretty good at working with the players.

12. What is your worst quality as a GM?
I rarely plan ahead, this had bitten me in the butt more than once.

13. Importance of game balance 1 - 10 (1 being lowest 10 besing highest)
10 when you're building it, because if you don't at least TRY for a perfectly balanced system, you wont have anything resembling it when you're finished.

14. Importance of setting/canon of universe 1 - 10 (1 being lowest 10 besing highest)
7-8, people tend to play a specific game because they have specific expectations about the setting, going against that irks me. On the other hand if I'm informed that we'll be going off the beaten path beforehand, then 2-3.

15. Custom setting or established setting?
I like the freedom and improve of custom settings, but also enjoy the organized and more thought out nature of established settings.

16. During character creation are freedom of powers more important or the chracter
concept and the powers and skills fitting that concept?
Freedom of powers, I usually look at the options of what I can do within a system as a way to help me think of cool concepts to fit them.

17. Roll play or role play?  Something inbetween? ( Role playing skills vs dice for resolving things in game)
Both, I'm getting in to the habit of minmaxing because I hate inefficient builds, and I don't see the point of not using social skills in game. But I always have a character and I know what he'll think or do in response to a situation, but use the dice to help express that.

18. Other: anything notable to volunteer that could explain your view of gaming or your posts on here (obviously mood, upbringing and personality has an affect here, but lets not get too personal eh?)
I've noticed that gamers, unintentionally or not, tend to divide themselves in to camps or cliques. It's stupid because you're supposed to play and enjoy a game together, not re-enact high school.