Yea, I've seen that kind of behavior too. It's like a D&D version of the Dunning-Kruger effect, where people who aren't very good at stuff think they're way more competent than they are. (And then judge you for not playing up to their non-existent skill level.)
Yeah, certainly. In this case, though, it wasn't even that. He didn't think he had high system mastery, he just assumed he knew min/maxing when he saw it, and the fact that I was tinkering the mechanical choices to do what I wanted the character to do meant I was "munchkining". He wasn't even a douche about it, really, he just gave me a bit of a hard time.
I mean, I did give the character one of the highest "main stat" values I've given a character, but mostly because I saw the character as one of those guys that excercises virtue of living an active life, but puts no special effort into it, and still seems to be extremely good looking and quite fit, so his strength was 10, his Dex was 12, his con was 14, and his int and charisma were high. I used his race bonus to make his wis not terrible, bc he isn't a dolt, but the main things that defined him were being very skilled/adept at learning new skills, and being very intelligent and charismatic/strong of will. And I will never buy the supposed relationship between wisdom and a strong will. Being wise doesn't make your will stronger. They are separate things.
But, even though those are all thoughts about modeling a roleplaying concept in the game world, to enhance my own immersion and help the character look and feel the way I want from the outside, etc, ie they are roleplaying choices, it is munchkining....because I'm thinking mechanically to accomplish it? What?
And this is why I don't understand the "play with a group that also optimizes" mindset. Have you guys seriously not had roleplayers with high system knowledge in your groups? I've never played in a group that was all one way or another.
When I get to the table, and actually also when making the haracter bc we do that as a group activity, I am roleplaying, absolutely the whole time. I mean, we aren't actors, we don't exclusively talk in character or whatever, but my focus is the characters and the world and all that, not the numbers. I crunch the numbers outside of play to make sure that when it makes sense for my character to skillfully buckle some swashes, he can do so with the finesse, panache, and cheesy wit, that I imagine him doing.
I am 99% sure that if I were in most groups of posters in this thread, we'd have a great time, and you would t walk away thinking of me as a min/maxer, unless you spent the session staring at my sheet looking for signs of a munchkin.
Idk, the whole discussion very much baffles me.