Thanks for the welcome! And what can I say, I tend to get a bit enthusiastic about my RPGS! ;) And DieRuhe I do this more often than not myself (create a "character" that is sort of a version of me and what I would do) - though there are times where I set out with a concept that ISN'T what I would do, were I in that world ("The callous, rough and tumble gunslinger wanders into town, credits on his mind, justice judged by the dollar and damn those who get in his way" - yes I've been using Fallout 3 as a template far too often in this thread ;) )

As an aside, how do I quote two different posts in one reply thread?

mostly a ruthless power player , even if its in team based rpg , i tend to focus on maxing out the main character with best equips skill focus to take out the enemy asap . I generally try to complete every quest with good outcome choice if available but the main focus is on building up the main character so much that , his one blow should make a huge difference in the battle.

if its kinda a rpg where there too many masses of enemies always and the game favors ranged/magic users over melee then i change the tactics otherwise its power player

um...neither? seriously I wouldn't say I'm a roleplayer, & is it powergaming if you add a handicap

(example: in Fallout 3 I often use a mod that allows me to play as a child, to go with that I made a mod that limited the SPECIAL points)

I always try and roleplay, even in non-cRPGs. I'm all about narratives. A game design teacher once told me "All games have story telling, even online shooters. Who hasn't retold the story about that one time in Battlefield when their chopper was shot down, you bail out and watch your chopper crash land on top of the guy who shot you down, or retold the story of how your team turned a certain defeat into an impossible last minute win".

Any game I play I put myself in the shoes of my character(s). If the character is a blank slate I will still try and do things that seem to make sense to him. My characters are driven by self-preservation which means no min-maxing and save scumming to get the best rewards from highly unlikely situations (100% stealth or going through dangerous situations with bare minimum protection required). My characters see "followers" as human beings (or whichever sympathetic species they may be) rather than extended inventory screens or other gamey use they may serve. My characters have some form of life philosophy and set of morals which can only change in exceptional circumstances, not on a case-by-case basis based on what I as the player sees as the most beneficial.

Unfortunately, too many writers of cRPGs seem to think having a "good" option and an "evil" option is the mark of great roleplaying, and often times these options get moralised in strange ways. I'm usually pragmatic about violence so I will shoot and stab to protect myself from people who are trying to kill me (ie 99% of all cRPG guards ever). Designers of cRPGs on the other hand tend to be idealists when it comes to violence and the line between "good" and "evil" becomes "either you save scum and do the nearly impossible by not killing anyone, or everyone is going to hate you for being a murderer who killed two or more people (in self-defence).

I wish cRPGs would give up on the idea of telling the player what is right or wrong, especially when the game can not understand the player's true intentions (necessary self defense or gleeful sadistic murder?). This is actually why I prefer roleplaying in non-cRPGs because those games usually do not have any book keeping or polarising reactions from NPCs. Some of the more open shooters like Far Cry 2 may task you with finding an object guarded by tens of hostile guards. The game does not care if you kill them all, kill a few out of necessity or exploit the AI to infiltrate with 100% stealth. It is up to you as the player to decide if your actions were right for the kind of character you want to play.

Powergaming and math-hammering is the bane of roleplaying games, both P&P or cRPG. All those GameFAQs writers detailing which skills and stats are "useless" are missing the point of telling interactive stories.

Good question.

I think one of the problems with modern gaming is the achievements and victory screens are so imbedded into the framework of the games themselves that the mystery of figuring out how to play the game and how to play it well has largely been eradicated, especially with shooters and RPGS.

Part of the problem is also on us gamers. We've become too smart for our own good. We know how manipulate stories, characters, game mechanics... hit the ESC key to end boring cut scenes that are at least trying to convey the plot, etc... that sort of thing. Throw in cheats, beta tests, and mods and you basically have an entire industry that has done so well it has effectively reverse engineered itself back to its simplest form. Perhaps that's why the 8 bit java and micro games are so in fashion right now. We've basically un-gamed our ability to enjoy games.

A bit meta there. More to the point, I usually like to start out playing in a typical RP role, but as the game moves forward, I find myself using the buffs and tanking effects that allow me to 1+UP myself past the end level bosses and challenges. It's not usually because I HAVE to win, but because by late game I've usually figured out where the story is going and just want to get to the finish line. Few RPGs really have the ability to build into itself a longevity factor that is strong enough to stop that sort of leap frogging to the end. Sadly, the big AAA studios seem to like that sort of game design, as the quicker a gamer finishes a game, the quicker he's ready to go spend his money on the next new shiny title that is coming soon.

Thank you for a great topic and very interesting posts.
Especially stuff like experiencing or even creating your own stories in games is something to think about.

I've always been thinking that a (good) game is half the experience and the other half is in gamer's head.
But really, a lot depends on a game itself. I won't do role-playing if a game doesn't give me enough freedom.

Yet, if I can, funny and interesting things can happen. E.g. I loved to create characters in TES IV: Oblivion. Once I told myself: this character will be a thief, she won't be going into wilderness at all, but only robbing houses of citizens and pickpocketing all the time. Another time I created a character who had always wanted to be invisible. All my actions, whole character development was to get that spell and use it to have fun.
Now when I play it like that, only my imagination and what can be done in the game, are limiting me.

It's funny though, as someone mentioned, that in cRPGs we can rarely have that. usually the main character is designed by game developers (like in Gothic or The Witcher) which means that one either identifies with it or not. In the second case, it ends with power-playing and enjoying the game more like a movie than your self-created experience.

I definitely prefer role-playing, though whether I do so depends to some extent on the structure the game sets up - many cRPGs already impose a personality on the characters (in which case I just roll with it), while in others there's really no opportunity to define the characters beyond their combat proficiency. However, for RPGs that hit that "sweet spot" right in the middle, I'll often think up elaborate character backstories and personalities and will interpret the game's events through the lens of those imagined elements. One of my favourite moments in any RPG (computer or tabletop) is when I "discover" something new about a character I've made up, based on how they react to a novel situation.

For example, in a recent playthrough of Arcanum, I created a half-orc businessman named Bartholomew Cromwell (I like to play against type). "Barty" had been adopted and raised by human shopkeepers who instilled in him a strong sense of propriety and the value of social order and "knowing your place". At the same time, it wasn't long before the disdain and cruelty he received at the hands of members of other races exposed to him the inherent hypocrisy of the civilized world - particularly as he was smarter than most of them, and knew it. The result was that Barty was a deeply conflicted protagonist - he generally chose to be helpful and heroic where possible, and eventually became a renowned inventor and "science hero", but his motives were a violent mixture of the values he was raised with, a desperate need to be accepted by society, and a searing contempt and hatred for his social "betters" whom he wanted to outperform so that he could rub it in their smug, condescending faces. His discovery of the orc slums in Tarant was a crisis point for him - he found the conditions his brethren worked in appalling, but at the same time, his upbringing wouldn't allow him to support armed insurrection. I honestly wasn't sure how he was going to react, and without getting into spoiler territory, I'll just say that the "orcs of Tarant" subplot ended up being a far more dramatic climax for the character than the game's main storyline.

Yeah, setting some house rules for yourself can be fun. It can also make you slam your head into the keyboard or chuck your computer into the garbage. I've house ruled myself as well in Morrowind and Oblivion, only to discover that I've created a sociopathic loner character who lives alone in the woods and survives by robbing people with imperial steel, only to have enough to dough to buy bread and other things that the game doesn't even require me to consume. I know the vampire and werewolf aspects to those games would also drive gamers crazy. As cool as it sounds to be a vampire running around in Morrowind, the idea of not being able to be outside in the daylight or being hunted as a werewolf in Bloodmoon was too much for a lot people... one of those 'good ideas on paper' concepts. Sometimes those game ideas are actually better off left as ideas than actual game mechanics. Sometimes it's best to just let a frog jump than trying to teach him to fly.

Everyone loves dragons in Skyrim, but it wasn't Skyrim that first showcased dragons in the Elder Scrolls world. There was a monsters mod that someone made years ago for Morrowind. There were dragons. And they looked ridiculous. They didn't feature moving parts, only a static texture that would float around and make scary noises. It was both frightening and hilarious at the same time. Again, maybe implementing dragons into a game that couldn't cope with those sort of dimensions wasn't the best idea. The best way to role play a game is often with imagination rather than with stick figure textures bouncing around a skybox with no animated moving parts.

If you make two or more posts to the same thread in quick succession the forum software automatically puts them into the same message as a guard against trolls flooding threads but has the side effect of putting multiple reply posts together into the same message
Advanced users CAN get fancy and write the tags in manually but something always seems to go wrong whenever I try and its pretty long winded too...
As a tip though, if you mouse over any reply, right after it says 'Posted {time}' a little chain symbol will appear with a number - this tells you what the post number is
It is also a link so you can post links to specific posts within thread as well as threads generally (I think you need more rep than you currently have to post links at all though)
Hope that makes sense!

*edit* for illustration here's a link to your post I'm replying to:
http://www.gog.com/forum/general/role_player_or_power_player/post31
That's not the answer to your question but I think its kinda cool...

Well, I never plan ahead in a game that I don't know yet. If it's a first play-through then I just go along usually try to do all the quests, power-play if possible and if there are choices, then I often put myself in the shoes of my character. Only when I know a little about the game and what can be done in it, I start to experiment.
And when I know even more, I start to imagine my own stories and weird things I would like to achieve.
TES games are great for that. They allow lots of interesting things to do. Not to mention what one can do with moddding.

What I've been thinking more and more lately, are so called rogue-like games. What I have in mind are games with random generated stuff (locations, monster spawns, treasures and other findings). They usually include perma-death as well. I don't have much experience with them, but it seems like they can create very interesting stories. And , when mastered to some degree, can also allow to create your own stories .

Any other games good for that?

I'm more of a Role Player, as I am a damn slow person in everything.. Power at the end game if possible but not my primary concern for sure as I start a game, I look first about the structure of the environment and characters, then the plot unfolding..

Hey, hasn't anybody seen the NerfNow comic link I added in my previous post ?
It's perfect and funny, go check it! (and give me a lol!)

I typically pick the class which looks most interesting (bard, ...), which typically means it's more complicated to play, and I often end up frustrated with that and reroll a fighter. I tend to pick up race/looks based on what's appealing to me, which tends to depend on the art style (for example in EQ2 that's the animal-like races).

Most CRPG's limit the player's freedom in creating character backgrounds and behaviour. One game where I did create a background for most characters was City of Heroes. I also sometimes roleplayed, but that's something that's easier to do in an MMO. I do sometimes roleplay to an extent in a single player CRPG, for example I wouldn't have a paladin pick up money and objects from street barrels or people's houses even though the game doesn't care (and usually the game assumes that you'd take everything which makes playing this way more difficult).

I never build a character for "efficiency". I'd rather choose a lower difficulty for the game than try to optimise my character. That doesn't mean that I don't dedicate time to advancing the character, but here also I would take something which fits the concept or looks interesting more than what's most powerful.

<-- Utter munchkin.

A little roleplaying, a lot of rollplaying. What most attracts me to RPGs are the systems and mechanics, so I love RPGs with lots of stats and party builds to play with. However, I still create a party that I find entertaining to play. That means not necessarily min-maxing every little number and decision. If I decide that I want an elf warrior, a half-orc paladin, and a dwarf wizard, then that is what I will make, stat penalties be damned. If the game doesn't punish your group of epic heroes from stealing the charity box, that doesn't mean I'll do it.