Grimrock

I know a lot of people are interested in the Min/Max strategy and getting the best party built for this, but I was wondering if I am alone in preferring to choose race and class based on what I have used in the past, using a roleplaying perspective? Maybe it's my advanced age, I remember buying Dungeon Master and Oids for my Atari ST from a shop in Tottenham Court Road as soon as they were available, and being so utterly consumed by them. To me DM was the first game that I felt could not have been developed on the previous systems, and was the first game I really lost myself in. So I guess that all my party builds after that have had at least a passing resemblance to my original 4 party members from DM, and in particular I seem to be roleplaying xenophobic in preferring Human/Dwarves to Inesctoids/Minotaurs.

What do you mean by role-playing perspective? Do you mean you once role-played some characters that you made up background stories and personalities for and then try to recreate those characters again in Grimrock? Or do you mean like "this dude is a mage, but he worked on the docks for years doing heavy lifting, so he actually has Muscular as a trait?"

I am a freak like that. I made my characters in LOG1. But my mind is a creative storm. So before I got too far, I actually made up a past for each of my characters, and how and why they ended up in Grimrock together. That eventually spawned the creative story I wrote here on the forums called Legend of Grimrock: Destiny's Chance. The story takes a lot of liberties (so it's not a direct story telling of what happens in the game; I also made up some things to explain like why the torches burn forever in Grimrock when connected to the torch holders, explained why there was Giant Snails and such, etc etc; and some fights, I took liberties with. For example, early in the story, the Minotaur {Taren} breaks the chains that binds all four of them, allowing them free movement to walk away from one another, and so on and so on).

As a result, it's the party from the story that I am using in LOG2.

That is cool.

I tend to start out more in RP mode and as I keep playing through the game I become engrossed in mastering it in all forms.

Regardless my characters in all my games have relationships in my mind. They also have dialog together and I spend sometimes hours making the perfect names for them.
Imagination is indeed King and more of it creates greater immersion.

I dont care about statistics and the best party composition either and ignore all these stat-based threads. My party is filled with humans for my first playthrough - i dont like lizards, rats, minotaurs, etc. So i dont really base it on roleplaying or stats - i just do what i like, with whom im comfortable with and not what makes me the most effective killing machine in the game.

I spent a lot of time making my avatars and giving them names.

Very few people do pure min/max strategy. That might mean 4 lizardmen with endure elements. The rule I set for myself was only one character of each class, of each race, and of each weapon build, and one character must be human (sort of a self insert character).

I also dislike relying on limited items, even if they are near infinite. So even though Alchemist is very powerful, I set a rule of no Alchemist, no bombs, and if possible no potions. So far I have only used potions early on before I had the rope, when I would fall and be unable to walk anymore without it. In turn, not using potions means I can't really use a damage mage, but maxed force field has been an efficient way to control battles.

Having an alchemist makes bombs and potions literally infinite, though...