Quote from: Piestrio;694248Is it that CharOpers buy more books or that WOTC really has only made books for CharOPers?

Clearly under their 3e-4e business model that's who they made product for but then concluding that those people are the ones that will always buy the most books strikes me as a good example of the streetlight effect.

Which sold better Wilderness Survival Guide or Unearthed Arcana?

you could do a survey on the Wizards board or TBP and I reckon if you listed

i) DM advice, tools and campaing ideas
ii) Settings
iii) New character classes, feats, spells and customisation options
iv) Monsters
v) Alternate play styles

Character options would get abut 50%

But lets see if Next releases these expansions I am betting that the Char Op one gets the most focus and ships most product.

Quote from: Bill;694250No guarantee, but wouldn't the most likely scenario be businessmen pushing the types of books that sell the best?

Possible but that's assuming a world in which businessmen always make the more rational decisions or that good decisions made in one context (surviving the "fad" bubble) remain good policy in other contexts or don't have negative repercussions when contexts change.

Which is far from given.

Quote from: jibbajibba;694252Which sold better Wilderness Survival Guide or Unearthed Arcana?

you could do a survey on the Wizards board or TBP and I reckon if you listed

i) DM advice, tools and campaing ideas
ii) Settings
iii) New character classes, feats, spells and customisation options
iv) Monsters
v) Alternate play styles

Character options would get abut 50%

But lets see if Next releases these expansions I am betting that the Char Op one gets the most focus and ships most product.

We'll see. But the current fan base is a result of a series of business decisions that have emphasised CharOP so it should be no surprise that the current fanbase likes CharOP. Hence the streetlight effect.

Quote from: jibbajibba;694245You see I would love to think that but that doesn't explain the development of D&D very well.



Whereas this does .....

I agree that the D&D game as developed over the years has constantly added more and more charop until it became the focus of the game.  D&D didn't begin that way, so 'always has been' is incorrect.

UA in 1E was huge launching point for charop in development. It was huge seller so it is no wonder that 2E splat started very soon after the core with numerous kit books for all the classes,and even the races.

More crunch could be sold so we get all the wahoo stuff in late 2E.

3E took this strategy to the next level and marketed even more to the player base.

The fail point in their strategy was that D&D still needed a DM and a DM could decide what materials a given campaign would be using, so a player with a huge library of material and system mastery might not get to use all the shiny toys he/she wanted in actual play.

It is my hope that WOTC learned a valuable lesson. Without DMs running your game there will be no players to sell splat material to.

Quote from: jibbajibba;694245You see I would love to think that but that doesn't explain the development of D&D very well.


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I don't think 4e was more char op than 3e.  Not even close, actually.

Quote from: Bill;694239Do CharOP fans buy more books?

I bought every book released for AD&D 1e and 2e.  Not because I was a char opper, but because I was a D&D nerd and wanted to read them all.  Just like anyone else who collects things.  

Gotta collect them all...

Quote from: jibbajibba;694124Again a familiar topic spills into vitriol and personal attacks.

D&D has always been about Charop and the development of D&D has been the development of Charop posibilities.

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I know we've had this discussion a million times already and we probably aren't saying anything new here, but I still find this argument to be a stretch. Sure, it is true, you could optimize to a degree in older editions (you mention the dart master and that is something people could exploit). There were also a few wonky kits that gave characters too much power. But it is a matter of degree and what the books advised. 3E is oriented around builds. This is its strength in many ways. You can conceive of a character concept and execute it mechanically if you understand the system well enough. Buy beyond that, what you can do with the builds leaves previous editions in the dust. Even with just the core books, you can do all kinds of crazy stuff in 3E that you couldn't do in earlier editions.

But more than that, earlier editions specifically warned against char-op (which was just called min/maxing at the time). It was not considered in the spirit of the game to min/max. By the time 3E was in full swing, there was an explosion of min/maxing culture being actively supported by the books they were releasing. If you compare the complete books of 2E to the Complete books of 3E, they just are not the same. There is some brokenness in the 2E books, but mostly you get NWPS and some circumstantial bonuses, you don't get the kind of stuff you can make using the 3E complete books (which if you know what you are doing can really stretch the system).

It is also a matter of flavor to crunch ratio. Just glance at one of the 3E complete books, then look at one of the 2E books. The 2E books are predominantly flavor text with some mechanics mixed in, while the 3E books were structured around providing new mechanical elements to the game (feats, spells, class powers, etc). I think it is disingenuous to suggest that the game has always been about char-op. That just isn't true. Char-op has always been present in the game to a degree (as long as there are choices that produce different mechanical results, you will have some amount of char-op), but that isn't the same as the game being about char-op. I think with 3E, char-op took on a much more central role in the game.

Quote from: Exploderwizard;694257I agree that the D&D game as developed over the years has constantly added more and more charop until it became the focus of the game.  D&D didn't begin that way, so 'always has been' is incorrect.

.

Are you sure?
Wasn't the addition of the ranger splat, just play a fighter and call yourself a ranger. Assassin? Druid? Illusionist?
What about the races aren't they all about charop. Just play an elf you don't need a page of abilities to make you better than everyone else.
The cleric develops as a reaction to a PC that was playing a vampire "build" that was tougher than everyone else.

Dragon was full of unoffical offical classes through out the life of AD&D all of them with cool powerz....

I have hardly read any maybe we can ask UnReason how many articles there were trying to explain how a paladin is just a fighter played in a certain way compared to the number of articles explaining how you can add more cool options to your PC to make him Kewl

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;694262I know we've had this discussion a million times already and we probably aren't saying anything new here, but I still find this argument to be a stretch. Sure, it is true, you could optimize to a degree in older editions (you mention the dart master and that is something people could exploit). There were also a few wonky kits that gave characters too much power. But it is a matter of degree and what the books advised. 3E is oriented around builds. This is its strength in many ways. You can conceive of a character concept and execute it mechanically if you understand the system well enough. Buy beyond that, what you can do with the builds leaves previous editions in the dust. Even with just the core books, you can do all kinds of crazy stuff in 3E that you couldn't do in earlier editions.

But more than that, earlier editions specifically warned against char-op (which was just called min/maxing at the time). It was not considered in the spirit of the game to min/max. By the time 3E was in full swing, there was an explosion of min/maxing culture being actively supported by the books they were releasing. If you compare the complete books of 2E to the Complete books of 3E, they just are not the same. There is some brokenness in the 2E books, but mostly you get NWPS and some circumstantial bonuses, you don't get the kind of stuff you can make using the 3E complete books (which if you know what you are doing can really stretch the system).

It is also a matter of flavor to crunch ratio. Just glance at one of the 3E complete books, then look at one of the 2E books. The 2E books are predominantly flavor text with some mechanics mixed in, while the 3E books were structured around providing new mechanical elements to the game (feats, spells, class powers, etc). I think it is disingenuous to suggest that the game has always been about char-op. That just isn't true. Char-op has always been present in the game to a degree (as long as there are choices that produce different mechanical results, you will have some amount of char-op), but that isn't the same as the game being about char-op. I think with 3E, char-op took on a much more central role in the game.

Look I am not saying that the tools for Charop in 3e and OD&D are equivalent, that woudl be daft. I am saying the say desire for Charop existed and the same guy that would in 3.5 terms want to play a cleric that worshiped a god of magic and polymored himself to a multi-armed arrow demon in combat woudl be the guy pushing the DM to let him play a vampire.

As the game develops it reveals the desire of the play base for more options more power, more exploits.
The seed is there from the get go.
In late 1e it was there in full swing with all sorts of stuff coming out of Dragon. Some of which ended up in UA, I mean the alternate stat rolling options alone .....
2e tried to stop it and the kits as you say were really just flavour. I am sure someone said in the early 2e design meetings lets just get rid of all the clases and have Fighter, Wizard, Priest, Rogue but that wasn't going to happen and the later 2e bloat sees kits becoming subclasses complete with the typical range of new powers.

Quote from: jibbajibba;694263Are you sure?
Wasn't the addition of the ranger splat, just play a fighter and call yourself a ranger. Assassin? Druid? Illusionist?
What about the races aren't they all about charop. Just play an elf you don't need a page of abilities to make you better than everyone else.
The cleric develops as a reaction to a PC that was playing a vampire "build" that was tougher than everyone else.

Dragon was full of unoffical offical classes through out the life of AD&D all of them with cool powerz....

I have hardly read any maybe we can ask UnReason how many articles there were trying to explain how a paladin is just a fighter played in a certain way compared to the number of articles explaining how you can add more cool options to your PC to make him Kewl

"cool powerz" does not mean optimized.  The Dragon magazine Death Master has cool powers, but it wasn't nearly as powerful as many core classes.

Again, D&D (at least AD&D) was about character archetype

*Edit*  and how is a race char op if you could only reach level 8 or 9 in a class while the humans went into the teens?

Quote from: jibbajibba;694265Look I am not saying that the tools for Charop in 3e and OD&D are equivalent, that woudl be daft. I am saying the say desire for Charop existed and the same guy that would in 3.5 terms want to play a cleric that worshiped a god of magic and polymored himself to a multi-armed arrow demon in combat woudl be the guy pushing the DM to let him play a vampire.

or rs.

Sure, such players were always part of the base. But they were never exclusively catered to, and min maxing was officially discouraged. My point is, with the exception of a few late 2E products like skills and powers, you go from having a dusting of char op in the game to a snow storm of it in 3E. That isnt a knock at 3E, its largely a byproduct of all the choices the game offered and the easy multiclassing system. But it is a key difference between TSR D&D and WOTC D&D. Granted much of it took what skills and powers had done and cranked it up a notch, but that was very much viewed as optional material in the 2E run, and (in the gaming community where I lived) a very controversial and not widely embraced addition to the game.

Quote from: Benoist;693975Man, it's when you're saying things like this that you're showing just how much you really don't understand what it is you are talking about. Otherwise you wouldn't just keep mixing up things like this like they're the same thing or the same topic of conversation at all. It's really just a telling card. I feel sorry you need to run your mouth and keep saying stupid shit like this.

I would say I am surprised at the deflection, but I'm not.
Nah, you don't get the luxury of making a grand statement in one conversation then an opposing grand statement in another without me being allowed to call the bullshit.

Quote from: Benoist;693975Ooooh yes! I was playing just a few months ago in a game where I was the 1st level Cleric and believe me: I was worried we wouldn't make it out of the dungeon! We ran into some swarms of rats and a bunch of wererats and could only escape after a few of our men died and we used all our oil reserves to carefully block passage ways while we retreated to the exit. And it was down to the wire, and a fair amount of luck (we didn't have a complete layout of the corridors and some of them in our backs connected with an intersection just in front of us - we almost got stuck in a rat pincher move but could make it out with a charge), in the end. But we (and by "we", I mean "the survivors") made it! It was a VERY cool game to me.

How many times have you gone through a scenario so similar to this that you should just call it the same one?

Quote from: Benoist;693975Are you saying that AD&D doesn't have "builds" to nearly the same extent as, say, 3e and 4e would? If that is the case, I agree.

"builds" are done differently between the editions.

Quote from: Benoist;693975Oh, and why didn't you answer to the part where I said you might possibly create "builds" in specific scenarios, like the Tomb of Horrors one shot with 10th level characters, depending on the actual specifics of character generation as determined by the DM?

Why didn't you answer the part where I said rpgsite thinks build = chaop?

Quote from: Benoist;693975I make decisions to equip my character, I choose a class and a race based on the ability scores I roll, I roll my hit points and my starting wealth, I can't choose my spells because I actually roll for them at level 1, and then actually learn them from scrolls and spell books I find in the game (which requires rolls to learn, btw). That's actual play. Contrarily to you, seems to me, I actually played this game, still play it to this day - see above.

Then what happens?  You stop thinking about the character and merely react to the charts the god is rolling on?

Quote from: Benoist;693975So if your definition of "build" is "making decisions at character generation beyond the next die roll" then yes, I did have "builds" in AD&D. But honestly, at this point your definition of a "build" encompasses anything and everything to the point of becoming meaningless. Good show, I guess?

You do realize that 'build' comes from skill-based games?  Where people had a goal in mind for their character. It's people like you who have usurped the original meaning of build(in rpg context) and turned it into a bad word.

I make it a rule not to argue AD&D rules with someone who has admitted they haven't played it.  That's also why you don't see me arguing with 4e players about how 4e plays; because I don't play it.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;694278I make it a rule not to argue AD&D rules with someone who has admitted they haven't played it.

or anyone who thinks this site is a person. 'The RPGsite says' or the 'RPGsite thinks' is a big-old alarm.

Quote from: Sommerjon;694275I would say I am surprised at the deflection, but I'm not.
Nah, you don't get the luxury of making a grand statement in one conversation then an opposing grand statement in another without me being allowed to call the bullshit.

Oh? Wait for it . . .

Wait for it . . .

Quote from: Sommerjon;694275Why didn't you answer the part where I said rpgsite thinks build = chaop?

Pot. Kettle.

Quote from: Sommerjon;694275How many times have you gone through a scenario so similar to this that you should just call it the same one?

Never happened. Every situation is different in its particulars. I did play in situations that were similar, many a time, and that's something I would refer to as "the thrill of playing a 1st level character and trying to survive going in and out of the dungeon." It might not be your thing, you might be all blasé and "seen it, done that" about it, and I hope you find a game that suits you best. As for me, I have a lot of fun playing situations like this. It's part of a game I like to call "Dungeons & Dragons". I love this game.

Quote from: Sommerjon;694275"builds" are done differently between the editions.

Agreed. And the amount of choices, the particulars of the ways these choices are generated, the approaches and motivations behind these choices may vary.

Quote from: Sommerjon;694275Then what happens?  You stop thinking about the character and merely react to the charts the god is rolling on?

I have a story about that. See, my wife started playing RPGs with D&D 3rd edition and Arcana Evolved. She had a lot of fun playing, along with our friends, in our campaign at the time, around the early/mid-2000s.

Then some time ago, we went to a Red Box D&D meet up in Vancouver. The game was run by a user of the RPG Site, Planet Algol. We started generating 1st level characters on the spot (it was the Moldvay B/X rules, actually), and Planet Algol asked us to roll 3d6 in order.

I gasped inside because, though I was very excited at the idea, I knew my wife had not generated a character like this, ever.

I looked over her and I could see she was surprised. She shrugged and said "okay, let's do this." Stats came up the way they did, and Strength came up fairly decent among the rolls. Up to that point, she had been creating character and assigning scores after generation, and she generally went for middle of the road characters, jack of all trades, bards, thieves, these types of characters.

And she went "what uses strength?" And we were like "fighters, you could play a fighter." She pondered the choice, which she would NEVER have made before rolling the stats, had a grin and said "okay, I'm going to be this fighter who's really bloodthirsty and crazy."

We played the game (I was playing a thief), and good Lord Almighty, my wife had a great time! Her character was hilarious, it was great. Anyway, she was VERY pleased with the experience. As we drove back home, she looked at me and asked me (sic, in those exact terms), "Why don't we roll dice 3d6 in order like this in modern D&D?" I kind of sighed and she continued: "This is awesome! I would never have played a fighter if the dice had not come up that way! It's like you are playing dice with the universe, like your character is born out of the game, and then you grow it into a character to play! It's awesome!"

I think that answers your question. What we do (I completely relate to the way my wife expressed it at the time) is basically that: play dice with the universe, see what comes up out of the dice rolls, think about who that person might be, how she might have shaped up in her initial years, the equipment or whatnot she'd have acquired before the game begins, and then just play. And it's awesome to us, because it keeps things fresh, we're not boxed in our own habits and reflexes, it makes us go for the unexpected, makes us play characters we would not have necessarily come up with that way with a point-buy or semi-random generation system.

When I launched my Hobby Shop Dungeon game, I gave the choice to my wife to generate a First Edition AD&D character using 4d6-drop-lowest-assign-to-taste, 4d6-drop-lowest-in-order OR 3d6-in-order. Her choice. No strings attached, no reward or punishment whatever she chose. She chose 3d6-in-order. I pointed out this was the toughest choice that would come up with the lowest outcomes. She confirmed that's what she wanted to do, BECAUSE of that "playing dice with the universe" aspect of the character generation process. She's very happy with her character (Vanya, a magic user).

Quote from: Sommerjon;694275You do realize that 'build' comes from skill-based games?  Where people had a goal in mind for their character. It's people like you who have usurped the original meaning of build(in rpg context) and turned it into a bad word.

Actually, as far as I can tell, the term "build" originates with card games, where you add cards to each other in order to form a set or sequence. So intrinsically, the term "build" is about building a pattern which, applied to computer games and role playing games, means to assemble disparate sets of rules to form a coherent whole. In the context of the rules system, it means optimizing the outcomes of tasks' resolutions related to a core concept of what it is one wants to achieve in the game (via the character in a role playing game).

You're spending an awful lot of effort responding to a creature whose capacity for basic written communication stops somewhere around "I can string words together if I have seen them in sequence enough times."