To you, I'm sure, yes.

Quote from: CRKrueger;989190To you, I'm sure, yes.

Gotcha, thanks. Just wanted to make sure before I delved into 5 pages of bickering about onetruewayisms

Quote from: Batman;989188Is this just a long winded " get off my lawn, amiright?" thread?

Considering there are opponents/proponents of "optimization" presented throughout, I'd say it's a fairly balanced response to the question, overall.  

But, you're right, so...."Charop is the suckiest suckage suckers have ever sucked in their sucking suckiness.:-)

(P.S. It's a rather tame thread, tbh, with some well-considered answers on both sides [not mine, of course, but they're there]).:-)

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;989084Well, the whole field seems rather abstruse to those of us used to "Roll 3d6 in order six times and get on with it!"

It probably helps that we grew up and got used to systems, O and BX, where stats were allso not as important to gameplay. AD&D bumped that up a notch and I think its there that we started to see the min/maxers and stat cheaters, and stat bitching really start to crop up.

Quote from: rgrove0172;988844This may sound like a rant but I dont intend it as one. As I have mentioned many times on this site I have been gaming for decades but admittedly havent been exposed to the hobby at large for the most part until very recently. As a result I find myself discovering what is old news and clearly obvious to many of you. Forgive me if I sound completely uninformed and naive when I choose to comment on one of these discoveries.

Recently I have come across various discussions that seem to be centered around a ridiculous amount of effort in a characters stats, abilities, skills, feats or what have you. Players are comparing this skill with another one and complain they arent balanced or that this character type is disadvantage because of this ability v.s. another one. A tremendous amount of discussion surrounds why a character should be made this way v.s. another way, how it may limit their combat options or force them to be played in a given manner to take advantage of this or that trait.

I will admit Im reading these and thinking WTF? We are talking about a Roleplaying game right? The rules are there to emulate the character, they govern and regulate the actions of an imagined individual, not a block of mechanics. This isnt a boardgame or wargame afterall.

I cant remember a time where I, or anyone at my table, assigned a trait, skill, ability, stat or anything else to a character for any other reason than that is how how we envisioned the character! If I imagine my character as having a certain ability its seems crazy to drop that ability because by thumbing through the book I found one that will perform a bit better. Better, Worse, Good, Bad - these are all relative terms and I dont see how they should influence the building of an individual with a background, personality, habits etc.

If a choice of a skill or something was discovered to be a disadvantage to a character, thats simply what that person has to deal with in life. They can work around it, learn something else eventually or whatever but the very notion of spending a long periods, min-maxing over what abilities to choose and how they, mechanically, relate is so foreign to me I find it hard to grasp.

Am I a rarity in this?

I am of multiple minds on responding to this. Part of me, like Sureshot and Batman, just want to call out bullshit we can imagine grognards patting themselves on the back about how much more mature people played 'back-in-the-day.' And part of me wants to agree with Gronan that 3e is the apex of this trend (for D&D and D&D-alikes) and that it just doesn't work as well for D&D than it does for point buy systems (and then I want to point out to him that 5e does a really good job of reigning it back in, and how most 'optimal' builds end up as traps). And then I want to go back and point out how people are right that before character builds, it was magic item builds (and ship builds for Traveller) and how there's nothing new under the sun. And then back to the frustration I have with online discussions and people using terms like RAW and white-room-analysis and when did this become tactical analytic amateur hour, emphasis on amateur? ...and then I calm myself. Because rolling my eyes at people pretending they were better than other, usually hypothetical, others is where I started and I've just become what I hate. :-P

Truly, the one takeaway that I have is this: People spend a whole lot of time talking about optimal builds ONLINE. A significant part of that is because it is a common language, and because coming up with the perfect combination is a form of one-upmanship that can be communicated on a forum. That does not mean that the average 'modern' gamer sits down with a character concept that they took from a character optimization forum, and plays-to-win with their perfect combo. As far as I can tell, most players still decide on character concepts, and play close to that. They just then go to their computers and debate for hours whether it is better to use a two-handed weapon or weapon-and-shield, or other, more complex character build debates.

Right. The internet and fora are not the general public.

Players and ESPECIALLY designers seem to far too often think that the internet is some sort of vital representation. It is far far far from that.

I've discussed this elsewhere, but I think focus on 'builds' can be traced back to bad GMing. Here's the steps.

-Play a fairly light RPG with few mechanical levers for players. B/X counts here. Alternatively a game where nobody really understands the rules (due to kids having poor reading comprehension or the game being a complicated mess). The game runs largely off 'GM Fiat'/'Rulings not Rules'.
-GM is a powertripping bastard who siezes control of the flow of the game, kills you unfairly, has stuff happen with you having no input, and generally removes your agency.
-You have no recourse against this, since the rules are basically 'whatever the GM says'
-It sucks.
-Now. Play a new game with lots of mechanical levers for players. Alternatively, actually read and understand the game system. Skills and feats and special abilities and powers. All of them mechanically defined.
-Now you can point at the rules, and the dice rolls, and tell your GM 'no, the rules say this thing happens'.
-You can therefore get agency back by applying your mechanical abilities successfully.
-However, 'successfully' means you need to succeed at the mechanic;
-Shitty GM tries to pull back control by making everything too difficult for you.
-You try to pull back control back again by having a character strong enough that you can mechanically beat your GM's artificially inflated difficulty.
-hense the need to be a powerful character, hense builds.

It's a pattern I've seen repeatedly. Players who are (for want of a better word) traumatized by shitty power-tripping GMs find the best way to have agency in the game is to be mechanically powerful, and so learn to abuse the game mechanics in an arms-race with the GM. This behaviour is infectious, as well. Once a player is wrecking a campaign with a character far stronger than the game expects them to be, the GM is liable to get pissed and respond by smacking them down with overwhelming challenges, which leads to the lack-of-agency-countered-by-mechanical-power behaviours in the whole group. It's a vicious cycle.
I've found the best cure is to get them to play something weird and lethal and funny like paranoia.

I mostly lost interest in video games a long time ago. My brothers are still big into them. Two of my brothers also happen to be extremely smart. They observe "charopers" all around them. They sometimes get told their character doesn't have enough "dps" to join in any reindeer games. Thing is? They absolutely out-perform the charopers on a consistent basis.

How?

Optimization occurs in a bubble. How does one calculate DPS? Rate of attacks, times hit probability, times damage. But how can anyone actually know what these numbers are? Rate of attacks seems pretty straight forward, until you realize mobs don't just stand on conveyor belts that lead right to you. 6 attacks per round isn't 3 times as good as 2 attacks per round if you don't have the movement speed to get to the next guy after you cut down one enemy. It depends on how the "battlefield" is laid out. On the flip side, having the same dps over a greater number of attacks can be more effective than having it over fewer attacks if you're fighting weak creatures, especially ones that go down in one hit either way. As for damage and hit probability, in D&D the latter depends on your opponent's AC. Some RPGs use an armor absorb system instead, so the former would vary. And I suppose some even use both.

And that's only scratching the surface. There can be factors of damage type vs defense type, such as poison damage when enemies may have poison resistance, or lightning damage against someone in full metal armor. Depending how detailed the game is, armor may have different ratings to blunt, piercing, and slashing attacks.

In short, my brothers recognize that there's no such thing as optimal. It's dogma. Everything is situational. So instead, they either cover their bases, or at least recognize they're going to be weak in certain areas and rely on others to handle those cases.

In a tabletop campaign, or perhaps I should clarify, when I run a tabletop campaign, it's even more futile to optimize a character build. In fact, I've become more staunch about having some kind of random element during character creation. Not to thwart optimizers, but as sort of a warning. If you can't hack random chargen without complaining, you're not going to be able to hack the campaign. Things will or may happen to your character through the course of play that disrupt your 10-level plan. Your character might lose an eye and have a penalty to ranged attacks and peripheral vision which may screw up your teh awesum archery build. Or you might stick your arm into a pool up to your elbow and it turns your flesh into iron in permanent fist form. It can function as a buckler, giving you shield protection vs one attack, or give you an additional fist attack for 1d6 damage with no off-hand penalty. But it's going to screw up your two-handed sword build, or your dual-wield build. Maybe even your thief build. Or your rust-monster slayer build.

Quote from: cavegirl;989544It's a pattern I've seen repeatedly. Players who are (for want of a better word) traumatized by shitty power-tripping GMs find the best way to have agency in the game is to be mechanically powerful, and so learn to abuse the game mechanics in an arms-race with the GM. This behaviour is infectious, as well. Once a player is wrecking a campaign with a character far stronger than the game expects them to be, the GM is liable to get pissed and respond by smacking them down with overwhelming challenges, which leads to the lack-of-agency-countered-by-mechanical-power behaviours in the whole group. It's a vicious cycle.
I've found the best cure is to get them to play something weird and lethal and funny like paranoia.

I agree about the cause; hence "Gronan's Three Laws of Gaming" (per Asimov)

1)  The rules can't fix stupid
2)  The rules can't fix asshole
3)  Anything that happened when you, or the referee, were 14, does not constitute a need to change the rules.

But it's amazing how people hold on to things.

Quote from: CRKrueger;989190To you, I'm sure, yes.

As opposed to a "drive-by snarking..."

(him, not you)

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;989591I agree about the cause; hence "Gronan's Three Laws of Gaming" (per Asimov)

1)  The rules can't fix stupid
2)  The rules can't fix asshole
3)  Anything that happened when you, or the referee, were 14, does not constitute a need to change the rules.

But it's amazing how people hold on to things.

Have to +1 that.

Specifically, I think the GM's ability to establish rapport with players makes all the difference and yet it never gets mentioned.

If you're worried about this, just play a game where it's not possible. 1st ed. Ghostbusters or Toon come to mind.

It's interesting to me that "build" and "optimization" are being used interchangeably in this thread. In my experience, people that talk about "character builds" are not merely optimizing, but planning out the entire career of the character ahead of time. It's the difference between deciding to "specialize in longsword" and deciding to "add specialization feat now, uber-specialization at 3rd, gain +1 longsword at 5th, add extra-crit longsword at 6th, etc."

In this sense there's a major leap between "feats" and "feat trees".

I don't mind builds when they're clearly meant for the sake of utility: you want to be a Beastmaster Ranger? take these options. A Fey-Pact Warlock? Start with these. It's a quick way to cover popular archetypes that players will want.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;989593As opposed to a "drive-by snarking..."

(him, not you)

Hahaha, it was an honest question. Especially since the concept of "builds" has been around for a LONG time in TTRPGs. Is it really that jarring of a notion to plan out options in advance considering the massive amount there are in most RPGs today? And to link any causality between players who build their character and their ability to role-play (or lack thereof) is pretty silly.