Player Seeking Adventure

If you have experience in DMing, why not  start a game or your own?, many people want to play, but nobody wants to DM , this way DM's are scarce..

tell me more, tell me more (Archdukechucola)

I don't want to make any false starts, so it will be at least a month before I actually start up a campaign as I recently purchased a condo and need to deal with all that entails before committing to anything like an online game. That being said, I do want to run a game and fully intend to do so.

I would be very interested, particularly if the Campaign was writing/roleplay heavy as opposed to diceroll heavy.

The campaign will be 2nd edition in all likelyhood, and will be much more focused on roleplaying. Characters would start about 3rd level. I'm not laying out the full rules of character creation yet, and really if you want to cook up a character idea now, that shouldn't be overly relevant. If you want to come up with an idea, just do a concept and a background. Details can be worked out later. I will say this. I value complex character concepts much more than novelty, so when I see things like "psychic ninja sahagin" I am going to be immediately skeptical. Novelty in my experience usually comes coupled with either statistical abuse or a shallow but flashy concept. Naturally there are exceptions, but understand that I like characters that are part of a living, breathing world, not characters that are worlds unto themselves. Thoughtful trumps cool.

As far as how I run games, I very much emphasize roleplaying, story and character development over mechanics and dice rolling. Dice rolling to me is a way to resolve narrative ambiguity, where having an uncertain outcome actually adds something to the story. It shouldn't drive the story. If a rule gets in the way of the story, I simply ignore it. If an outcome to me is more relevant than a game mechanic, I will fudge the mechanic. This may sound dictatorial, but understand that to me this goes both ways. If a player can make a compelling case for why the rules should be ignored as it applies to their character because of story reasons, I am always happy to oblige. I see roleplaying as collective storytelling, not an analog MMORPG.

Overall, the skeleton of the mechanics of 3E is better, without question. It is definitely more streamlined. That being said, 2e is mechanically far more focused on character than 3e, which is focused more on novelty and powergaming, and really, both systems are kinda crap (Im not a fan of hit/miss success systems). I run a skill system more like 3e, basically giving bonus NWPs based on intel, and more points per level than is normally asigned, adding some extra NWPs, and granting autosuccesses when deemed reasonable, as these are the things I actually like about that edition. But beyond that I think 3e is excesively concerned with mechanics, and tends to let it get in the way of concept. The reams of expansion books are mostly empty rules fluff. 2e didn't really have that problem up until they had the whole players option nonsense.

In any case though, I am mostly running 2e because all the materials I use are 2e based, including my planescape collection. I run the world according to 2e cosmology as well. 2e works perfectly fine as a system, even if it has its share of flaws. If mechanics are a big deal to you, you probably wouldt enjoy my gaming style anway. I play mechanics fast and loose and don't much care about dice rolls. As I mentioned, I like telling stories. The mechanics are just a very rigid way of trying to impose some ground rules. I like stories about a guy and his sword. Once you start adding in things like half-dragons and other BS like that, it just becomes a character rules arms race. 3e was like RIFTS in that way. With the proper excercise of restrain, 3E is good, but I don't have hardly any of the books, so I can't actually run it with a clear idea of the rules.

Ideally, I would run a system of my own devising, or perhaps something more like Earthdawn, but that's not really practical. I've got to work with what I have that other people might know. 'Sides, it looks like you are in plenty of games already, so I'm sure you won't miss it. If you change your mind though, feel free to let me know

<em>That imo all depends who DM's and who playes and how the interaction is between the 2. I am very good, if i may say so myself, in making character concepts that have roleplay in the fore, not ROLLplay, however, i like the diversity of the skills you can take now, and imo it helps that the system backs up the fluff you write for your character. taking skills in things the character is supposed to have knowledge is a good fluff thing imo, and 3.0/ 3.5 lends itself for this perfectly.</em>

This is I guess the crux of what I consider to be the problem with 3e. It seeks to model all things mechanically, when a great deal could be left to roleplaying. The desire to model things with dice is, I think, often times a detriment to roleplaying. When you have a mechanical way to resolve actions, people tend to use that as a primary means. For example, 3e tries to model your characters social ability via a set of stats and skills. Personally, I would rather social situations be resolved through pure roleplaying. If your character is written as a suave social player, and you play the part well through roleplaying, then social encounter actions can be resolved organically through roleplaying as well. However, 3e would have you resolve those scenarios through a set of rolls. Similarly, the long list of feats and such surrounding combat encourages elaborate mechanical resolutions to conflicts that could just as well be relegated to very simple mechanics, with the details left to descriptive roleplaying and a flexible GM. You want to pin a guy to a wall with a throwing knife? Fine with me. I make up a target number on teh fly, and you let one fly. I don't really feel the need to have specific mechanics to describe these things.

Now, I know a lot of people like having those kinds of mechanics, but invariably what I have found is that people who are very attached to those kinds of mechanics are attached to them because they like to play with numbers. Even people who aren't inclined in that way tend to be drawn into that to some extent when the system heavily emphasizes that as an aspect of character creation and development. In my opinion, the more that character development is structured according to rules, the less creative a person will be in their development, because they will naturally be inclined to model their character around the mechanics rather than developing their character from a purely conceptual standpoint. I myself have fallen into that trap, particularly with games like Shadowrun, where there is a rule for practically everything. I've seen tons of players fall into that same rut, consciously or not.

Now, do I mind playing 3e? No, I don't, because to me the mechanics arent relevant at all to good roleplaying. Since rolleplaying is the more important feature, the mechanics are a secondary concern to me. Mechanics are really just a convenient aid and occasionally add tension to a conflict by making the outcome uncertain to all parties involved. Elaborate mechanics ultimately I think are a burden. 

If I do run the game, I don't necessarily mind running 3e I guess, since it looks like that is what most people here play, but I would do away with a great deal of the 3e system, such as prestige classes and many of the feats and would probably only use the core books, and would simply resolve unique character features with tailored rules when necessary, and roleplaying whenever possible.

Well, since that is probably the general consensus, that's probably what I will have to run by default. I'll probably use quite a few house rules and throw out most non-core material though, so I will mostly just be using the base mechanics. I really don't much like prestige classes, and prefer granting tailored traits as characters advance that exactly match what is happening in game. Ill try and figure out how to make it all work.

No worries. I sort of get the impression my GMing style wouldn't be up your alley anyway.

You just seem to really like certain mechanics and game concepts and I am more of a free form GM. I have a clear vision of story, but am fairly cavalier about rules, particularly when they get in the way of the story. I get the sense that you really like to understand and use the 3e mechanics as they are, and see the mechanics provided as inseperable from your character visions. At some point, those two different ways of thinking would come in to conflict.