Quote from: gleichman;575582It's been a rough week.

Especially since every thread is the same discussion.

Quote from: Rum Cove;575586Especially since every thread is the same discussion.

That's rather typically IME.

And the Thunderdomes didn't help. Those sound like fun, but were a bad idea from the beginning.

Quote from: One Horse Town;575576Thunder-fucking-dome!

There was an anti-Pun-Pun build, which is possibly even more hilarious.  Both are obvious jokes, and are unintended exploits though.  

The Pun-Pun counter character didn't actually have any abilities to counter Pun-Pun, but it was another infinite loop exploit that gave an infinitely high bonus to generic, cosmic knowledge checks, meaning that if there was a way to defeat Pun-Pun this character would know it.

Quote from: gleichman;575269I'll repeat my answer there, here with some additions:


HERO talks about the issue directly and at length in the rulebook itself. It's always been an issue. You don't see it here as I think I'm the only current player of HERO on the whole board (or at least the only one who talks about it).


The rulebook advice is that the GM keeps a firm eye on the construction (and later XP use) of the character. HERO is a rather special case in that *anything* can be built, and thus the character of the whole setting depends upon what and how everything is built.


In my own case, all characters are generally created by the GM himself with player input. This is due to few people having an interest in HERO's construction methods (which is detailed and for an RPG rather complex) and the GM's interest in keeping everything consistent in the setting.

You're not the only one, I play HERO as well, not as often anymore but here and there.  I also touch GURPS every so often as well.  I would discuss more but I am really tired, catch you guys later.

Quote from: Lord Mistborn;575573

Quote from: Panzerkraken;5755363) The GM who would let it happen is a moron.

I thought that went without saying

So there. If both sides could just agree on what the fuck they were talking about we'd have a considerably shorter thread. Instead we had 4000+ posts of angry nerds shouting at each other about totally different things.

Quote from: gleichman;575575Don't you think that this is setting up a strawman and stapling it to the back of anyone who happens to say "I like doing character builds"?

I mean, would anyone here defend such an extreme example?

It is an extreme yet also very illustrative example on why CharOp can be disruptive, and needs to be regulated by the GM. A GM who cracks down on Pun-Pun and similar builds is not "a dick" and it doesn't make his game a "magical tea party" of "mother may I". Ugly stereotypes and fringe cases were paraded around on both sides.

Quote from: The Butcher;575637It is an extreme yet also very illustrative example on why CharOp can be disruptive, and needs to be regulated by the GM. A GM who cracks down on Pun-Pun and similar builds is not "a dick" and it doesn't make his game a "magical tea party" of "mother may I". Ugly stereotypes and fringe cases were paraded around on both sides.

Playing coy? I don't understand.

Quote from: gleichman;575579I'm not sure what you mean here...

What he means is that everyone is sick to death of your fucking 'contradict everyone and everything' routine that has become the only reason you post anything.

Quote from: beejazz;575267A little of both. Also the sort of attitude pre-3 had towards chargen was already pretty rare outside of D&D when 3e showed up. There may have been some half-legitimate fear of the playstyle dying.

Outside of that, the existence of exploits, necessary feats/spells/whatever, and trap feats/spells/whatever left a bad taste in a lot of peoples' mouths. GURPS and the rest were at least perceived as being better balanced, and balance does start mattering when players have more say in chargen.

Nowadays, I'm not really sure why the animosity persists, given the existence of the OSR/clones/spinoffs.

But you can reign that in pretty well by limiting points, right?  I am sure there are people out there that will squeeze every last drop of optimization out of any number of points, but I have to imagine it's a damn sight harder (in Hero, for example) with 75-100pts than with 400-500+.

Quote from: The Butcher;575495Of course there is room for some character optimization, in the loosest sense of the word, in pre-3e D&D, every time a player makes a choice about his character (e.g. which weapon to use, which spell to memorize). But when most people mention CharOp, it's Pun-Pun and the like that they're thinking of.

This kind of CharOp abuse is what you get when the company relies on player option splatbook production to fund their development department. It creates an environment in which players are empowered to "chase the supplement", which generally tends to create power creep even at tables that aren't experiencing the CharOp abuse.

This was a model that was actually created by TSR for AD&D 2nd Edition before being gleefully adopted by White Wolf, Pinnacle, AEG, and a dozen others in the '90s. And those of who were active on Usenet or Fidonet or other message networks back in the day can tell you that, yes, there was a lot of CharOp back then.

1st Edition wasn't really immune to it, either. There was just a lot less of it, especially if your DM banned Dragon magazine. (Although the stuff that came out in supplements tended to be a lot more broken.)

3rd Edition isn't actually a particularly radical leap if you compare it to where the D&D game was in 1999. It's a very radical leap compared to where the game was in 1979. But where the game was in 1989 was also a pretty radical leap compared to 1974. Up until 2008, there was a slow accretion of more and more new stuff onto a basic core that was pretty much unaltered.

Quote from: The Butcher;575637It is an extreme yet also very illustrative example on why CharOp can be disruptive, and needs to be regulated by the GM. A GM who cracks down on Pun-Pun and similar builds is not "a dick" and it doesn't make his game a "magical tea party" of "mother may I". Ugly stereotypes and fringe cases were paraded around on both sides.

I don't think Pun-Pun is illustrative of anything because it's not achievable by Core or "RAW".

In addition to requiring either extensive DM cooperation (despite what the thread says, passing a DC 25 Knowledge (The Planes) check isn't sufficient to summon Pazzuzu by RAW, since all DC checks are specifically examples and guidelines and not rules).

The rest of the chain of events is likewise assuming some kind of CRPG environment where NPCs react to your requests robotically.

The other more mechanical method requires very specious interpretations of the rules.  The whole ability hinges on acquiring the Manipulate Form ability of a Forgotten Realms "creator race", and then reinterpreting the constraints of that ability to be different for some reason because the player has acquired it instead of the actual description of the ability as the monster uses it; which is definitively not a Rules As Written scenario.  

Pun-Pun requires a "common sense" reading of what an ability would do if a player had it instead of a monster, while simultaneously suspending your "common sense" rulings on similarly reinterpreting the ability's restrictions to appropriate in another creature's hands than the one it was created for.

On top of that you need a monster template, which in itself isn't available to players.  If you are pulling shit out of the MM you might as well cite my Great Wyrm Red Dragon that I play straight out of the MM as an example of the excesses CharOp.

Pun-Pun was actually meant to be a thumb in the eye of the CharOp boards, so someone could declare that they "won" at D&D and everyone could stop trying to break the system.

There are stupid CharOp builds such as the machine gun-like Hulking Hurler builds that drag around carts of axes to chuck a dozen a round for a thousand damage, and the Leap Attacking charger builds where the character is literally running and jumping past his opponent every single round of combat.

A lot of the CharOp is silly because it's about using extremely unconventional methods, which results in objectively silly gameplay options, where the "physics" of the gameworld result in the best style of swordsmanship in the setting being from the Kangaroo Greatsword School of Fighting, which is when CharOp gets bad.  Adding the Paladin to the game in 1e was "CharOp" in a sense, but it's a deliberate addition to the game to make it cooler, or better, while really no one thinks that that Leap Attack every round, and machine gun axe-chucker being the best options is an improvement to the game.  

Those kinds of things are exactly like the 2e Dart Specialist Fighter.  The unintended consequences of a poorly thought out mechanic resulting in an ability that is only powerful because it is stupid and tasteless, which is why it gets missed by designers in the first place.  Although I can't imagine what the hell they were thinking with the Hulking Hurler even from a purely aesthetic sense, so maybe I'm being too generous.

Pun-Pun just isn't an example of that though, because you can't even do it by either RAW or RAI without the DM giving you lots okays to do things that aren't allowed by default, even before you have to start cheating by pretending that abilities do things they don't say they do.  That's not "CharOp" in any meaningful sense of the word; and if it is, the DM giving his girlfriend's PC cool stuff that's not even in the PHB in 1e was also "CharOp" (which it wasn't).

Quote from: Exploderwizard;575479Are you familiar with OD&D, B/X, and AD&D?

Not exactly charop heaven here (started slightly creeping in with UA for AD&D)

In OD&D and B/X you optimize by choosing the class you rolled the highest stat in. Done.

I agree, but there are some seeds of min/maxing there in tossing out what you have rolled and simply rolling another character.

I was just looking at the 1st Edition AD&D PHB and came across this:

"Furthermore, it is usually essential to the character's survival to be exceptional (with a rating of 15 or above) in no fewer than two ability characteristics."

Your millage will vary but I can see this as interpreted as "if you don't have two stats of 15 or more, toss out the character and make a new one."

Quote from: Exploderwizard;575479Are you familiar with OD&D, B/X, and AD&D?

Not exactly charop heaven here (started slightly creeping in with UA for AD&D)

In OD&D and B/X you optimize by choosing the class you rolled the highest stat in. Done.

Well, it depends. Of course, I can agree with you that the bigger the amount of rules, the more space you have to min/max. But I've seen people doing insane things using BECMI and Dragon articles and the like, and having arguments with the DM about if this or that class/spell/item should be allowed or not.

So it is possible, though I agree it's harder.

Quote from: The Butcher;575495The amount of choices that a player gets creating and leveling up a TSR-era D&D character (with the possible exception of AD&D 2e) is trivial next to the smorgasbord of "builds" available to a 3e character. You can "dip" into a different class, you can play the feat tree, you can join a prestige class, etc.

It's the metagameyness of it all that detracts from the experince, for me and for most others. I play with some very clever people, at least one of whom who has an impressive eye for finding and exploiting this sort of thing, but he limits himself to character concepts which fit the game world (or as we say, "uses his powers for good" ) and is never, ever a dick about it.

This matches my experience as well. I have played 3e with normal, well-adjusted people, some of them very good at using the rules to the fullest. We had never a problem with that: simply put, it came to a moment where the game was too complex to GM, and we moved on to other things

Quote from: Justin Alexander;575660This kind of CharOp abuse is what you get when the company relies on player option splatbook production to fund their development department. It creates an environment in which players are empowered to "chase the supplement", which generally tends to create power creep even at tables that aren't experiencing the CharOp abuse.

I think you have a solid point here.

Also, for many persons it depends a lot on how the splat premise is formulated. For example, in nWoD books they go to sometimes painful lengths to make clear that nothing but the core books are core, they include 3 possible explanations for everything so the GM can use, discard and all, and make clear that every bloodline, spell, Discipline or whatnot is strictly optional.

QuoteThis was a model that was actually created by TSR for AD&D 2nd Edition before being gleefully adopted by White Wolf, Pinnacle, AEG, and a dozen others in the '90s. And those of who were active on Usenet or Fidonet or other message networks back in the day can tell you that, yes, there was a lot of CharOp back then.

Again, I agree.

Quote from: Wolf, Richard;575669I don't think Pun-Pun is illustrative of anything because it's not achievable by Core or "RAW".

I have always seen that things as thought experiments, curious and fun things that would never make it into a game table. As you very well note, in building PunPun there are several heavy deviations from the rules.

It was obvious to me very quickly that 3e was going to be a system mastery edition and system mastery leads to charop. This is why we stayed with houseruled 2e and never moved to 3.

And Charop always existed even back in the 1e days. An Elven Fighter/MU in a low level D&D game is a charop choice. The overhead of running that build (additional XP) is clearly outweighed by the power advantages of spells + combat. Demi-humans are nearly always multiclassed in 1e and demi humans get a lot of advantages and in most games the level limits are seldom reached so even if you play RAW its a powerful option.
Likewise I have outlined previously how you can Charop using Human Dual classed PCs. If you roll good numbers. (Take Figther run til 2nd level switch to MU, you are now a MU who has 2d10 hp THACO of a 6th level wizard and can use swords and bows)
It is also arguable that Rangers, and Paladins are a Charop choice. They are clearly superior to Fighters and come with an alignment restriction that are usually fine for the majority of goodly parties. Likewise in an evil party an Assasin is more powerful than a thief, although that is not quite so clear cut especially at lower levels. This is because D&D rewards good stats with access to more powerful classes but at the same time insists that you have 2 good stats (15+) so a ranger is generally an easy class to hit because the rules ensure you hit 2 of your 4 prereq scores, Pretty much by definition any legal PC will be able to be an Assasin

Quote from: Lynn;575671I agree, but there are some seeds of min/maxing there in tossing out what you have rolled and simply rolling another character.

I was just looking at the 1st Edition AD&D PHB and came across this:

"Furthermore, it is usually essential to the character's survival to be exceptional (with a rating of 15 or above) in no fewer than two ability characteristics."

Your millage will vary but I can see this as interpreted as "if you don't have two stats of 15 or more, toss out the character and make a new one."

Stats became more important in AD&D because of the requirements added to play even the base classes. Even B/X had provisions for abandoning 'hopeless' characters even though there were no explicit minimum requirements.

Quote from: Imperator;575683Well, it depends. Of course, I can agree with you that the bigger the amount of rules, the more space you have to min/max. But I've seen people doing insane things using BECMI and Dragon articles and the like, and having arguments with the DM about if this or that class/spell/item should be allowed or not.

So it is possible, though I agree it's harder.

Of course that happens, powergamers are gonna try and powergame with any system.  Earlier editions had a very small core, with largely external options. 3E came with a whole lot of options to start with and many more official additions.

The difference is in the culture of the system. In the examples you gave it is the player who seems like an unreasonable douche for trying to force the inclusion of all the whacked out material.

In 3E its the DM that is made to look like an unreasonable douche if core options are not permitted, no matter how overpowering they may be. The RAW is held in such elevated regard in 3E. From a sales standpoint its nice to have your customer base believe that you know better what's fun for the game than the ones playing it, but it does more harm than good to the hobby overall.

My experience is far too limited to be indicative of anything, but all the 3.x campaigns I ever played in used only the three core manuals.  By comparison, the 2E campaigns I played in used the various kits and Player's Options books, and the 2E campaigns saw many more insane and gamebreakingly bad "builds" than the 3.x campaigns.

Yes, yes, I know that 2E core + supplements vs. 3E core only isn't a "fair" comparison.  I'm not trying to be fair.  I'm pointing out that what 2E was at the end of its lifecycle seemed to me to be significantly "worse" than 3E out of the gate.