Whenever I hear about D&D more often than not it seems like people go to great lengths to stay in character and roleplay
This is great and makes for some very interesting stories but I tend to find myself more interested in just going on an adventure with a group of friends, solve a few puzzles win a few fights, complete a few quests etc
I’m also a big fan of character optimisation and mechanics but get the feeling that can be frowned upon by much of the community
Difficult to describe what I mean here but as an example in baldur’s gate I barely roleplay at all, my character has no personality except for the fact they make the decisions I would make, but I find that more fun, not having to worry about what my character would do and just making the decision I want to make
I realise not having a fleshed out character in D&D detracts from the immersiveness of the story because the DM can’t weave your character into the story but at least at the moment that doesn’t sound too bad to me.
Just wondering if there are people out there who run lighter roleplay campaigns
I would argue that most D&D games are roleplay light - it’s MUCH easier to just run a mechanical game than one with lots of roleplay.
I can give you session after session of dungeon crawling, or low level story stuff, but trying to put together a campaign with good (consistent) characters with motivations and personalities is incredibly difficult.
The reason you hear about all the roleplay heavy ones (critical role etc, or even stories from other people’s campaigns) is because they stand out as being special, exceptionally well done games.