Which, in different ways, Saelorn and Tony Vargas each did. The first by claiming a fighter who raises his charisma is actively a bad player, and the later by claiming everyone optimizes.
I made no such claim.
It's only the "there is only one way to play the game, and if you claim you play different than the one way then you're either a bad person or you just don't understand you are playing it this one way," attitude that gets to me.
Which makes you continuing to do exactly that in this thread ...odd.
The first by claiming a fighter who raises his charisma is actively a bad player, and the later by claiming everyone optimizes. There is nothing wrong with being gamist, but not everyone is gamist, and not everyone must be gamist to be a "good" player at D&D.
Not everyone you want to label 'gamist' so you can discount everything they say /is/ gamist, either. GNS is just a set of three arbitrary boxes. People & games don't actually neatly and exclusively fit in one or another of them.
The idea is that its a group setting, you can't go through the game world with "no one speaks except the PC with the highest charisma, no one touches anything without the rogue searching everything for traps
Maybe not the whole world in theory 24/7, but you can be Teller to the face's Penn when social checks are being made if you really want to, I suppose.
Having a 'point man' in many situations isn't exactly unreasonable, either.
It's not great for actual play, though, because it's like a mini version of netrunner syndrome: you have the specialized/niche-protected character doing stuff and everyone else more or less left out.
The single-check resolution generally employed by D&D out of combat definitely encourages that, which is unfortunate. In combat, D&D switches to turn-based initiative and, simply, more roles to resolve the conflict. One reason D&D is unfairly characterized as a violent game is that its combat mechanics are its most participative.
The idea is to reward the players for being creative with a PC idea that isn't just a direct optimization of a PC, often using the forums here. CREATIVITY will be rewarded, you can actually play whatever you want.
Optimization, itself, can be quite a creative exercise, especially the concept part of a build-to-concept. Simply lifting an optimized build from someone else may not be, but that's not an indictment of system mastery in general, let alone everyone who might have acquired some.
And this isn't a Fighter Optimization thread - its about how the fighter is UP compared to other options in the game and needs to be improved. However it still got derailed, of which I am somewhat at fault.
I'm not sure how it went off the rails, nor where it's heading, now. Optimized fighters came up to illustrate that the fighter wasn't necessarily under-powered in terms of DPR, now people are railing against optimization ...in defense(?) of the fighter..?
:shrug:
But it also had to include beautiful (possibly evil) women- Morgan LeFay, Circe, Polgara. Sure the implication could be that they use magic to look young and pretty...
As 'LeFay' suggests, Morgan was at most half-human, so like a D&D elf, might be 'young' but had centuries to study magic. Circe wasn't even human, but the daughter of a deity & an nymph.
But, it's mostly just the questionable aesthetics of are our culture that makes wizards old and sorceresses young.
... you see this with characters who are obviously "Fighters" as well. I could list examples of young warriors for days (Parn, Mark, Arthur Pendragon, Rand Al Thor, etc. etc.). Sure, they don't have the experience of a veteran, and that's never ignored, but they have enough raw talent (or backup) to survive and become great warriors. Again, it's strange to have the game tell us that Bruenor Battlehammer, an aged dwarf and Tika Wayland, a teenaged girl are both valid 1st-level Fighters, but since D&D is a game that allows you to play (within reason) whatever kind of character you want, then yes, "Warrior Princess Jenny" and "Oldfist MacOldbeard" can both be 1st-level Fighters in the same party.
A really active adventurer can zip from 1 to 20 in hardly more than a month, by the exp tables and expected encounters/day given in 5e. So, yeah.
OTOH, when you throw in detailed aging rules, you might find other choices being made.
Wow, um, we have strayed a bit from the "bonus Feats" argument. And I'm partially to blame, my apologies. Something I think we need to consider is the Rogue. So the Fighter has mostly combat class features, and a few extra ASI's to round him out. But the Rogue has all kinds of class features that cover all three pillars of play- a Rogue can throw a bucket of dice at you, withdraw or hide as a bonus action in combat, have expertise on any skill they like, reduce damage taken from sword or spell, even get proficiency in an extra save (eventually)! And yet, they ALSO get bonus ASI's...
The fighter gets two and the Rogue one, IIRC. They also both got two non-casting archetypes and one wizard-lite archetype in the PH. There's some parallels in their design.
If the bonus ASI/Feat argument says that's enough to make the Fighter able to contribute outside of combat, then what's the Rogue doing with bonus ASI's/Feat's? They're already able to contribute in all three pillars of play (and that's not even taking subclasses into account).
...IDK. I suspect the bonus ASIs for the fighter was a small nod to the bonus feats of the 3.x fighter... and the bonus ASI for the rogue? maybe a matter of it being a non-caster class, so throw it that same bone?
