I meant that those who put more emphasis on roleplay usually dont take time to argue on this forum.
Do we have seen a thread debating which on Linguist or Actor is the best feat?
Yeah, that's, that's the social/interaction pillar. All three pillars are still roleplay.
Otherwise, yeah, you don't see a lot of that - for whatever reasons.
I mostly played 1e AD&D. Skipped 2e entirely. Dabbled with 3e and skipped 3.5. Two sessions of 4e...
We took characters with suboptimal stats at times.
Well, sure, we rolled stats back then. But, if you got to arrange them, you could put them in the most 'optimal' order you could come up with, and it would certainly have been a very good idea to do so...
For example, I had a wood elf thief with an 18 (sans exceptional!) Str.
IIRC, wood elves got a +1 STR back in the day, so that would hardly be odd or sub-optimal...
We did take odd combinations including dwarven thieves.
Not odd at all, a little odd not to /also/ be a fighter, but they were U in Thief (like several races), so single class non-human thieves got the superior racial perks at low level, and didn't suffer from split exp or level limits at high level - an 'optimal' choice, except, of course, for being a Theif, but it was the best of a few bad choices (considering higher levels, that is).
I did have a Half Orc Cleric, single classed.
My condolences.
I knew few people that got much beyond name level and even if they did, they got a whopping 3 hit points a level if they were fighters!
Human wizards were another story.
Indeed. I was always struck, when running a one-off game at a convention back in the day. How low-level games would attract many elves and half-elves and the like, and the odd human fighter or Paladin or the like, and very few human magic-users. But, offer to run a high-level game, and wow, a lot of high-level magic-users.
So I hear you, but I still do not see total optimization as required at most tables or in most published works. If death awaits it is usually by overkill.
And back in the day, I took a half-orc fighter with the belief that 10th or 12th (whatever the single class cap was in UA of that edition) was OK. Really high levels as you may know were a total grind, hard to earn and not seen by all people.
Yep, once they started raising the level caps non/demi-humans became increasingly attractive. I never cared for those changes, as a DM, for that very reason.
I mostly played 1e AD&D. Skipped 2e entirely. Dabbled with 3e and skipped 3.5. Two sessions of 4e...
OK, so the culture you're noticing is 'new to you,' but to the community it really peaked in 3.5/PF. You still see it in 5e, but it is on it's way out, not an up-and-coming 'new' thing.