Somara showed me a a pretty funny D&D flow chart courtesy of Boing Boing (a rather hit-or-miss site) but the source link is completely down for reasons I can only guess. I wasn’t completely discouraged. With a bit of mental elbow grease, I did come across a flow chart that exposes the mental workings of the types of players I try to avoid having in my campaign.
I do remember the mantra of my gaming sensei Lester, “if they’re having fun, then they’re playing it correctly.” However, “if they’re playing it the same way Baldur’s Gate works on my PS2, they’re wasting everyone’s time” is the addendum to his wisdom because consoles and computers have closed the gap on what D&D aspired to on the electronic front.
As I look over this again, it does seem applicable to other great role-playing games: Star Wars, Call of Cthulhu and DC Heroes.
The only style of D&D play that translates accurately to video games.
Update Jul. 21, 2007: The elaborate D&D flowchart promoted by Boing Boing finally became available again. The originator was swamped by so many hits due to the referral from Boing Boing his Web host cut it off due to the traffic allowance being exceeded. So I downloaded the PDF, converted it to a JPG for my friends and readers to see it without contributing to the creator’s usage bill. It’s rather large so you’ll have to scroll around to see it.