LOL. My friend's 3 year old says this all the time. It's cute as hell
I'm the DM, so yes.
Your way is selfish and comes at the cost of other people's enjoyment and makes the DM's life difficult. I find that repugnant. It's a social game, not a single-player game. What is ironic about your stance is that you're doing the exact same thing that you're criticising me for: my way or the highway. The only difference is that my way considers everyone's enjoyment at the table. Your's is solely focused on you.
No, what's ironic is you saying you care about everyone's enjoyment in the same sentence inferring you
don't care about everyone's enjoyment. Clearly you only care about the enjoyment of players who want to optimize because you're actively hostile to anyone who doesn't.
We started rolling stats and then I noticed that we started to see things like Dwarf sorcerers start turning up and being built as melee characters or some of the more MAD classes being picked more like Valor Bards over lore bards using the default array.
We also had or 1st theme party turn up where everyone has built a dex based character vs the more common built one with overlapping support /buffing type party build.
Current party. Played today with 8 bottles of a wine/cider mix. They just hit level 5.
1 High Elf Battlemaster fighter
1 Wood Elf Monk (Shadowdancer)
1 Human Rogue (Mastermind)
1 Light Cleric
1 Human Ranger (Hunter)
The Monk found a staff of striking (+3 weapon grrr) and the Ranger is having a holiday on the Plane of Shadow so is functionally dead and need replaced (1st session as well).
They all went dex based so they could use stealth togather
Player issues, nothing to do with the game. And if I were you, I'd seriously question who you game with to have that many disruptive players, let alone in such a short window. In 35 years of gaming, I can count on one hand the number of disruptive players I've seen on that level, and they were all very short lived in the group
Deliberately making a bad character is counter-productive play.
That's completely subjective for one. Secondly, I get the impression that you think anyone who doesn't optimize is making a bad character. Ergo, anyone who doesn't optimize is engaging in counter productive play. And let's just say I don't agree.
Back to the OP, and this is especially true with 5e, is that optimization really doesn't have that much of an impact in the game. How a player plays is WAY more important and impactful. We have a guy in our group who just can't seem to get all the rules down. You have to remind him of some of his class abilities fairly often. When we played our HotDQ/RoT (started a long time ago, finished relatively recently), he brought his character to the table. A rogue. With all of his stats between 16-20.
Naturally our reactions were "Wait, what???" Turns out he decided to use 4d6 method without dropping the lowest die. You'd think his character would kick butt compared to everyone elses, and the DM actually let him keep it. Turns out it was one of the most ineffective PCs of the group in combat. Why? Because he didn't position himself to take advantage of sneak attack, so almost all of his attacks were just one weapon+mod. He kept forgetting how to take proper advantage of disengage, and often took a lot of damage because he didn't move away far enough. Stuff like that.
Some of you may be asking why we allowed that? Because he is our friend and a nice guy. Two things way more important than a game. Just slow when it comes to things like learning rules. And since none of our players in my group get all worked up if another player has a higher stat in something, it didn't take away from our fun at all.
