D&D 5E The "Powergamers (Min/maxer)" vs "Alpha Gamers" vs "Role Play Gamers" vs "GM" balance mismatch "problem(s)"

lowkey13 said:

There are four types of posters on enworld-

A. Those that care too much.
B. Those that care too little.
C. Those that care deeply, but only about things no one else cares about.
D. Those that don't care at all, except that they care that you know how much they don't care.
E. The innumerate.

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I think I feel a poll coming on...!

lowkey13 said:

I need to let you know ... just how much I don't care.

They say you can find out anything on the internet, but some things ... you just can't unlearn.

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It's your own fault for putting "Paladin-curious" and "PEW PEW PEW!" in the same post.

All the brainbleach in the world won't wash your memory clean of that filth - though if you want to try I've got a stockpile of the stuff. I'll sell you some for 50 bucks a bottle.

*Deleted by user*

lowkey13 said:

My fault? Put the blame where it belongs.

Gnomes. Gnomes made me do it. I know a life of crime has led me to this sorry fate, and yet, I blame gnomes. Gnomes are responsible for that.

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You can't blame them. They don't gnome any better.

lowkey13 said:

My fault? Put the blame where it belongs.

Gnomes. Gnomes made me do it. I know a life of crime has led me to this sorry fate, and yet, I blame gnomes. Gnomes are responsible for that.

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Gnomes, eh? Gnomes made you do it. What, did they hold a rapier to your head? Ridiculous!




They can't reach that high.

*Deleted by user*

*Deleted by user*

iserith said:

I think it fails because it's based on the assumption that if you're not playing, at least sometimes, sub-optimally then you are not a roleplayer. How optimally one plays has nothing to do with whether or not the player is roleplaying. If you're determining how your character thinks, acts, and what he or she says - which we have to do in order to play the game at all - then you're roleplaying.

Man, it would be great if the hobby as a whole could get that sorted out so we can move past it. It doesn't help when people refer to social interaction as "roleplay" either.

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Ah, but you see, it's not about playing the game - it's about making the character. Can the player take a hit from the optimal in order to support something else - fluff/narrative/etc that supports the role they wish to portray/explore/present.

I agree with @Satyrn that grouping folks rarely works out for the best and from my experience at least, if someone is so focused on squeezing the best out of the system that they'd pass on a choice that would add flavour/fluff that supports the concept of character they wish to portray then yeah, I'd say they're a power-gamer.

I've met one person, maybe two, that might fail such test throughout my life, truth be told.

And to be clear - I have no problem with power-gamers. If the table wants to roll that way, so be it. I'd say many of us have been there but perhaps, like myself and the folks at our tables, we've come to realise that 'optimal efficiency' is actually kinda easy to achieve and 'winning' a group-based collaborative game is overrated, if not impossible. On the flip-side, a quality narrative, a character that resonates as a living being, is a heck of a lot trickier to achieve.

Each to their own, I say!

Gardens & Goblins said:

Ah, but you see, it's not about playing the game - it's about making the character. Can the player take a hit from the optimal in order to support something else - fluff/narrative/etc that supports the role they wish to portray/explore/present.

I agree with @Satyrn that grouping folks rarely works out for the best and from my experience at least, if someone is so focused on squeezing the best out of the system that they'd pass on a choice that would add flavour/fluff that supports the concept of character they wish to portray then yeah, I'd say they're a power-gamer.

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I wouldn't. I don't see how it helps. I wish the hobby could get past this stuff.

lowkey13 said:

Because you presented something as true (with the link) which you also believe is true, which is not.

First, this isn't some "Stormwind Fallacy." This is just someone trying to argue that this is a false dichotomy (sometimes referred to as a false dilemma, but in this case, it's really a false dichotomy).

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Nod. In that sense, 'Stormwind Fallacy' is just a cute hobby-specific label for the excluded-middle/false-dilemma/etc informal fallacy.

Just someone putting fluff first. ;P

Argument-

You have to be either a roleplayer, or an optimizer.
(You must be A, or B.)

The premise is false, because you it presents two opposite, when there are other avenues possible.

....People don't say that the two are always mutually exclusive; that you cannot engage in any roleplaying if you optimize, or that you cannot care about the rules at all if roleplay; instead, it's a question of what emphasis you put on the game. Because an emphasis on optimization and rules will eventually come at the expense of roleplaying, and vice versa.

By creating that post, and the fallacious fallacy, the poster was engaged in some rhetorical slight of hand. Which is deeply annoying.

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I think I see some rhetorical slight of hand, in that bolded bit. Aren't you just coming back around to asserting that two perfectly compatible things - 'roleplaying'* and 'optimization' are incompatible by nature? That they must conflict, even if only 'eventually?'

Gardens & Goblins said:

The acid test is:

Would the player take a sub-optimal option/make a sub-optimal build choice in favour of adding fluff/flavour to their character.

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Or, to put it another way, is the player convinced that the "optimal" build choice can never be taken for fluff/flavor reasons...

;P

You can just not care about fluff/flavor and make choices based only on some mechanical goal, and make ridiculous fluff choices.

You can be totally into the minutia of your character's fluff, and make terrible build choices.

You can have a very definite concept, and make choices to optimally model that concept mechanically and thus realize it in play to the fullest extent possible in the system.


The better the design of the system - the more intuitive, balanced, consistent, clear & flavorful the game - the closer the character produced by each of those three approaches will be to the others. In a hypothetical 'perfect' system, all three attitudes could yield the exact same character.






* another big, bright, violently-waving red flag in any of these false dichotomies is if the extreme on one side of the excluded middle gets labeled 'Roleplaying.' It's in the context of an RPG, it's all roleplaying.