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I'm up late this night statting up some NPCs and getting used to the shift of having to dictate what I want to do instead of spending the majority of my free time at extracurriculars or doing schoolwork, and am really, really bored.

Anyways, the charactersheets are printing out on my slow as heck printer, so I am designing this poll?

What is your favorite playstyle/motivation?

There are a wide array of reasons for players to play an open-ended game like D&D, but here is a generally description of some of the motivations/reason to play. The actual names/descriptions are stolen from my DMG II, though I summarized them a bit to make reading somewhat easier and such.

ACCUMULATING COOL POWERS
Somewhat of a key factor for almost any RPG player, your primary motivation is to follow your ambition towards making your character even more godlike than before. You look towards designing the coolest character of a certain type that the system allows, tempered by your morality/sense of sportsmanship on how far you go from power player to powergamer to rules lawyer to just plain munchkin. Magic items and experience points are among your favorite things, and you spend considerable time pouring over the rule books, supplement books, and your various characters you have designed to try to find out how to use your powers to have the coolest powers around. You probably have designed several other characters besides your main character to try to make them as powerful as possible, and also have likely planned your main character's level progression all the way to level 20 already.

KICKING BUTT (similar to cool powers)
D&D offers us the ability to just simply get angry and smash the bad guys that deserve it, be it with sword or arcane fire or double fail. You love feeling in charge and destroying your foes with impunity. You also design characters that are supposed to be very effective at combat, be they martial characters or casters/psions of any sort. You are very similar to the accumulating cool powers types, but the main difference between the two lies in the butt-kicker's enjoyment of the adrenaline of an exciting, tense combat. A cool power amasser looks forward to the experience, gold, and magic awards that comes with defeating enemies, while a butt-kicker really enjoys the process of defeating the enemies itself.

BRILLIANT PLANNING
Maximize our defenses, take advantage of cover, send in the guy with the tower shield first! Keep the supporting bard sheltered from enemy fire! That weather spell will give us just the cover we need to get into the castle and evade their patrols completely! Brilliant planners are combat-focused players who wish to be rewarded for clever, careful play in which the group gains maximum advantage and is exposed to minimum risk. Brilliant planners may be military or historical buffs, or simply cautious and analytical by nature. A brilliant planner is perfectly happy winning in an anticlimatic rout against the foes when it was the player character's strategic planning that caused this victory.

PUZZLE SOLVING
This should be fairly straightforward, you enjoy solving puzzles. Depending on your type of puzzle solving it may be the straight analytical type, such as a puzzling, almost tetris-like puzzle on a dungeon door, a series of mysterious glyphs, pattern identification exercises. You could also be interested in the diplomacy, intrigue, and mystery of the game, wondering about the motives of the NPCs and how to stop the bad guy's machinations before they even get set into play.

FAVORITE ROLE
You really like playing one type of character. Exiled Samurai, Winged Elf, Drizz't Cl...er...dark elf, Ninja, Pirate, or perhaps a role of a television character (IE: Indiana Jones). Or perhaps you focus on extreme quirks for your characters, such as hotheaded philosophers, morose bandits, dumb brutes, antisocial spellcasters.

SUPERCOOLNESS
Many people, especially those who focus on a certain type, also focus an additional incentive: being Icy cool and in command. They envision their characters as the Arnold Schwartzenaggers, James Bonds, Clint Eastwoods, and to a lesser extent Indiana Jones' of D&D, desiring a masterful, in control, formidable, and intimidating character. You desire a character who is a complete badass, and everyone knows it.

STORY
You find your greatest excitement in D&D's narrative aspects.

*cutoff* This is taking too long, I'm getting some sleep. I'll finish this tomorrow. Oh, and the pool doesn't have enough options for everything X_X

I'll assume that you are asking what it is that draws us to D&D. For me, it's the storyline because I can stem my character from what's going on with the plot. In terms of combat, I approach those situations like I would for a Fire Emblem game: Send in the guy(s) who can take the hits, have a healer on hand, and have the rest of the damage be dealt by the weaker players from afar. Powers are not as important to me because with more powers come more options which can both simplify and complicate the game. With the puzzles, granted I enjoy solving any sort of puzzle that's put in front of me (hence why I'm a gamer), but I'm more into analyzing a situation and determining a counter-measure in that situation just like playing chess (seeing a few moves ahead).

At least for now, i think playing the techpriest role is the most fun. On a side note, if I take heavy armor proficiency, can i still use scrolls and othe magic items without the arcane failure chance? I dont actually have a copy of the eberron book.

Now seriously, I like to concentrate on the story and have character quirks add to the fun of the game. Having some power gaming sessions every now and then to get away from heavy role-playing sessions, to relax. Maybe some puzzles every so often.

I'm not gonna lie... I wanna be a Gundam... okay that's half a lie... For me it's a mixture of supercoolness and the ability to do practically whatever you want that makes me wanna play DnD. The part about character development is also another appealing point of DnD for me... I'm completely willing to make a character that sucks as long as I have a cool background for him/her.

In other news... Zhade... your avatar is slowly looking more and more like something out of Zero no Tsukaima...

...don you mean harry trotter?!

you need a whip!!!!