Hi everyone! I'm a 31 years old italian player, new to Roll 20 but not to roleplayng, I have 8+ years of experience both as a player and as a DM I played (and enjoy playing) D&D 3.0 - 3.5 and Pathfinder, but I'm also willing to play other systems if you have the patience to explain them to me I'm from italy so my time zone, I think, is CET (I never really understood those time zones, so I could be wrong here). Italian time zone anyway, we'll figure out what it is. I'm somewhat flexible with time anyway, since I'm not working at the moment. Here are some informations about me, I apologize for the wall of text here but I'm the kind of person who likes to clarify everything from the start to avoid misunderstandings that could ruin the experience both for me, the other players or the DM. Me as a player: I define myself as a "picky roleplayer". What I mean is that I specifically like a way of roleplaying. I like games focused on roleplaying, not on minmaxing characters for combat and just rolling dice and adding numbers and statistics. This doesn't mean that I think other ways are wrong, everyone plays (and should play) what he enjoys, it just means that I can't seem to enjoy the combat or casual oriented campaigns, I know I'm not the most open minded person but I just do not have fun playing that way, I'm not the kind of guy who just adapts and "oh, ok, let's just play a dungeon crawler hacking down monsters and just building our characters to optimize combat, who cares about lore or story!", no, I can't do that. I enjoy campaigns focused on the story, on the background of the characters, what happens to their lives, their hopes and dreams, their desire for adventure, I don't care if builds aren't optimized, if this class could be better than the other class, if I should use that weapon instead of the other one because it does more damage... What I care about is the story. If my characters wants to be a knight but has a strenght penalty, who cares, he'll take his sword and go to combat even with his minus to hit. Even if I seem to be able to read and understand english just fine, I'm italian, so english is not my main language. What I mean is that I'm bound to make mistakes, to not understand some words and to have an accent (which will be not the stereotypical super mario it's a me mamma mia accent, but there will be one nonetheless). So I guess you'll just have to be patient with me if I sometimes do not understand and ask for details. I also figured I could play some kind of "exotic" character, maybe a human from a distant land or, I don't know, an half-orc? So if I sometimes mispronounce something or if I talk funny or if I have an accent... it's still in character! What I like: - Roleplaying focused (really focused) adventures. I think that story, narration, character interaction and atmosphere are the best thing when roleplaying, stats and numbers are not important to me, a good story is. - Talking and planning with the DM even before the campaign, I don't like the idea of just bringing a ready character to the table, I like more to discuss what could be appropriate for the campaign and what could better "complete" the party (both in terms of class and characterization of my pc). In my experience as a DM, the campaigns where I discussed things with the players before we began, about the characters they wanted to play, their backstory and everything, worked so much better than those where some guys just came to the table saying "I will play this dwarf barbarian with a 2 hand axe who likes to drink a lot!" regardless of the campaign setting, story and all... (*1) - Keeping things simple but interesting. Some of the characters I enjoyed playing the most were simple human warriors. Plain human warriors. No fancy prestige class from the new manual, no strange obscure talents from the nearly unknown book published only in a parallel dimension... just warriors, plain and simple, from the Player's handbook. I had a lot of fun with them and I played them very differently from one another. I strongly believe that characters do not have to be strange to be interesting. Their backstory, the way they are roleplayed, even just the way they talk or fight or think is what defines them. (*2) What I dislike: - Combat oriented campaigns where the story is just a quick excuse to get to the next dungeon crawl. Again, I'm not saying that those are wrong, I know a lot of people enjoys them, I'm just saying that I can't. (*3) - Rule lawyers, both on the DM and on the player side. Don't get me wrong, rules are of extreme importance, I just don't like those who nitpick about every single paragraph. Once again, if a rule has to be ignored or bypassed in some minor way to benefit the story, so it should be in my opinion. Also, I totally dislike those who bend the rules in their favour just to min-max even more (*4) - Campaigns where the DM sees himself as the enemy of the players. This, I encountered a lot of times whan talking with other players in my city or on the internet. DMs just bragging about this super strong monster they put against the players for no apparent reason other than to kill one or two of them while laughing behind the screen, usually backing the thing up with some meme-like phrase such as "Who's the strongest D&D monster? The DM!"... I'm sorry, but to me this is just wrong. The DM is the narrator, the storyteller, he should live the campaign together with the players, not opposing them as their enemy trying at every second to just thwart their plans and kill them all. (*5) - Groups where one (or more) of the players, if not the DM, is constantly laughing, cracking jokes and interrupting the flow of the narration. I'm not a super serius person, I can enjoy lighthearted games, but throwing an ooc joke thrice a minute just breaks the immersion for me... Examples: You are not required to also read those, but they are some real examples that happened to me during my roleplaying and dm "career", so you can understand why I seem so picky and annoying. I'm not (or at least I hope so), I just want to have fun, and things like these prevent me from having fun. (*1) = One time I was invited to play in a group where everyone was asked to bring their character to the table ready to play. We were four players and Three of them brought a Monk. They also wanted to roleplay that monk in the same, exact way. We basically had three identical characters in a party of four. It was awful. (*2) = Once there was this guy who wanted to play a character of a made up race (of which he was the only one left in the entire multiverse), a made up class (which was a combination of a lot of things, he was somewhat a warrior but also a mage but also had backstab but also had some paladin abilities and so on), he had red skin, green hair and yellow bright eyes. So he was basically a reverse traffic light with no personality whatsoever. He literally was a combination of numbers, talents and characteristic who added nothing to the story and had no personality to be remembered for. (*3) = I tried to play with a group who only wanted to fight monsters in a dungeon with no backstory... even the Dm was like "Ok, so you guys enter the room and there are four skeletons, roll initiative". We fought the skeleton and then "Ok, so the skeletons are dead, now you go into the next room and you find 6 orcs, roll initiative" and so on. No story, no nothing, just one room after another of seemingly random monsters of increasing difficulty, like a videogame (there even was the occasional room with the healing fountain every now and then!). They seemingly had a lot of fun but, for me? It was really really boring. (*4) = We once had this guy who just spent every point in his climbing and jumping abilities, claiming that since it's not written on the manual that you can't do it, if you reach a score high enough you can just (as a normal human, or elf, or whatever) jump over castles, climb vertical glass walls and such. He just wouldn't shut up about those things and the DM was not strong enough to just say no to those absurdities. (*5) = I once played in a group with a DM who just liked to make monster appear out of thin air as a punishment when some player didn't do what he wanted to. "Oh, so you don't want to go ahead with the story and are just wasting time in the tavern? Ok, a dragon appears and attacks the city, roll initiative..."
