Does anybody here play D&D?

[Wyrm]

Ugh, not to belittle your achievement (taking a look right now) But I have *always* hated the assumption that someone who wants to optimize their character automatically dosent want to roleplay. Wanting a character who dosen't get his butt handed to him by a CR 1/8 Arthritic Kobold does not imply that the only thing I care about is being a combat monster. Hell, the moment you decide as a player that "Hmm, I guess I'll put my highest stat in INT for this Wizard" your optimizing/roll-playing.

The two things have almost nothing to do with each other, and any deficiency on "role-playing" is on the fault of the player, not the system he uses.

I've always gone under the assumption that roll-playing meant doing a dice check for every little thing. Stuff like:
player: "I'm walking through the woods"
dm: "spot check"
player rolls d20
dm: "listen check"
etc. -- and you take about 2 minutes to walk 5 feet and realise you hear the wind blowing through the leaves. It's never had anything to do with how much a character is tweaked; whereas role-playing meant you spend time telling your story and the dm basically does a judgement call on whether they want someone to hear something or whatever.

On a side note, I used to be a part of a 3e campaign (several, actually) that was conducted via an AIM chatroom. Maybe if there's enough interest we might be able to start a casual one of those (i.e. meeting once a week for a few hours).