[Preferences] How strong are yours?

[Kalirren]

I really don't think you're alone, Kiero. I think you're probably about as inflexible as most people are, but that you are more keenly aware of your own inflexibility. From what I've seen of people, it's common for someone to says that they're "open-minded about roleplaying", yet upon questioning be completely unwilling to step outside the one or two systems they know; on the other hand, when I hear someone who says, "I have rather inflexible preferences," they have likely experienced enough different role-playing methods and gaming social contracts that they actually know what they demand from a game, and know what aspects they are willing to compromise on to achieve what they demand in a manner courteous to other players.

I have my own inflexibilities; system-wise, my most important demand is that I do not like to play under rules systems that don't model effectively people as people. For example, a system like D&D 3.5 cannot effectively deal with a person being both an optimized combatant and a leader of people without extensive modification. This is a problem for me. But if I can bargain the DM into an understanding over things like this, involving concessions in the form of separating combat advancement from social advancement and skill advancement, then it's less of a problem.

My greatest narrative inflexibility is that I don't like participating in games where the PCs are the heroes. And I do mean to put the emphasis on "the". I'm greatly disturbed by games where everything on stage revolves around the PCs and little attention is given to other people in the world around them. Heroes and villains alike are made from their actions, and the PCs aren't the only agents out there.

I don't like worlds that don't make sense. I don't like railroaded plots (more accurately: I don't like it when character are deprived of IC agency by means of OOC-based decisions). I don't like jerkwad players who don't understand the difference between OOC and IC. I don't like gamism when gamist concerns starts overriding more meaningful narrative or explorative concerns. I have a long list of inflexiblities. But I think I'm probably one of the more flexible roleplayers out there, in that I'm willing to work through and adapt (to) almost any system and almost any partition of narrative privilege to further the goals of having a meaningful and intellectually stimulating game.