D&D 5E Stormwind Fallacy and Vonklaude's observation on limitations

[Dragonsbane]

The difference for me and my games, over the last 20+ years:

A player who rocks at role-playing usually enhances the game.

A player who rocks at optimizing sometimes makes the game better, but more often than not it upsets other players who didn't optimize, and often disrupts the game, especially at high levels.

My experience, after running dozens of campaigns and hundreds upon hundreds of sessions.

I wish I was wrong. Yet, just three sessions ago, while playing Pathfinder, the rogue finally stopped showing up after the optimized wizard showed he can do everything the rogue can do, in addition to dozens of other things the wizard can do. His DCs make it hard to challenge the whole group, and his cherry-picking of spells and powers makes me want to go back to just core rules.

Oh yeah! Its my last PF campaign, and my current 5e games have strict house rules on numbers and bounded accuracy, no classes with less than 5 levels before 20th level, GWM set to -3/+6, and so on.

I wish the two were compatible. In my experience, sadly, they rarely are.

 

[Li Shenron]

In video games, this style isn't just encouraged, it's essentially mandatory in MMOs and action RPGs.

A player who rocks at optimizing sometimes makes the game better, but more often than not it upsets other players who didn't optimize, and often disrupts the game, especially at high levels.

I can't speak for everyone but I had similar experiences as you two.

It's one reason why I never ever enjoyed online gaming. I enjoyed playing Blizzard games like Warcraft and Starcraft, but I cannot stand them as a competitive sport. Similarly with WoW it was immediately obvious to me that I shouldn't play with others, neither in PvP nor raiding as a team, because I was not interested in "investing" countless hours and nights just to keep up with others.

Min-maxing pretty much feels like a competitive sport to me.

The problem is that min-maxers don't find themselves a min-maxing gaming group, but instead just assume everybody likes min-maxing or thinks they are cool, and will join any gaming group without asking first. Well here's a useful clue to all min-maxers: you are not cool for those who don't min-max. At best, they will tolerate you.

You shouldn't know how your character is going to turn out at level 20.

With regard to that, of course you should! "Dead" is my suggestion

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

I wish I was wrong.

I've got some good new for you then; you are attributing one problem (that wizard player choosing to step on another player character's toes) to a different cause (that's "jerk player" behavior, not something inherent to "optimizer" behavior).

You also seem to be folowing the mistaken assumption that you need to try and challenge the optimized character, but that way is the way to the unsatisfying arms race that has you clearly in its grasp. What you should do is set up your challenges so that all the characters in the party have a fairly good chance of success, which means the optimized character will have outstanding chance of sucess and will likely steam-roll things within their optimized wheel-house - but that's what they want, so just give it to them. Worst case scenario is that the player has fun. Best case scenario is that the player gets bored being that much more powerful than the challenges they are put against and tones their character down until they hit their "sweet spot" and have fun.

At least, that's been my experience over thousands of sessions, in hundreds of campaigns, with hundreds of different players.

 

[JackOfAllTirades]

Simply put, char op and role play are never incompatible, for reasons which should be obvious.

Char op takes place prior to the beginning of actual play; one's ability to role-play (or lack thereof) has absolutely nothing to do with the optimization process.

Likewise, role-playing takes place after play begins; whether the character one is playing is optimized (or not) has absolutely nothing to do with role-playing ability.

Why is this still an issue?

 

[ExploderWizard]

Simply put, char op and role play are never incompatible, for reasons which should be obvious.

Char op takes place prior to the beginning of actual play; one's ability to role-play (or lack thereof) has absolutely nothing to do with the optimization process.

Likewise, role-playing takes place after play begins; whether the character one is playing is optimized (or not) has absolutely nothing to do with role-playing ability.

Why is this still an issue?

If only things were that cut and dried.

Quite often, an optimized character will be played differently than a regular character. Everything depends upon the player and what they are looking for to get their fun out of play. A player who optimizes a character to dominate at one specific thing may attempt to heavily influence courses of action that bring such abilities to the fore, regardless of how much sense such actions would make in the game world.

Even worse, when characters are built to do their stupid pet tricks and then don't work out to be as overpowered as the optimizer thought they would so the player is constantly trying to redesign or change characters until the "winning" combo is unlocked. The character isn't important to the player as anything but a set of tweaked performance equations to get desired results-which usually involve upstaging all other players in one aspect of play, or else the optimizer isn't satisfied and once again wants to change characters.

You can pretend that optimization has no effect on actual play if you like, but actual experience has taught me otherwise.

 

[Uchawi]

It the same sense, a character developed with a specific backstory or motivation, will tend to drive the story and/or game to meet the character's objectives. A classic example is the loner, the high and mighty paladin, etc.

 

[Iosue]

IMXP, optimizers give as good role-play as anyone, outside of combat. Once combat is enjoined, though, in-character role-play is typically abandoned for optimal execution of their character abilities. And sometimes, that extends to other players, too. I can't count how many times another player has told me what to do with my character after I endeavored to do something I thought was in-character, but was a less than tactically optimal use of my turn.

Also, as a caveat to the above, you have to make sure party roles are diverse if playing with optimizers. If you've created, say, a rogue, and you're playing with an optimizer who's playing a rogue, than there is a good chance you'll be rendered redundant.

On the whole, optimizing is all about leveraging the rules. The degree of an effect optimizers have on the game is commensurate with the degree one uses rules and mechanics to engage the game.

 

[Galendril]

I had a guy in my group who is a char-op player to the extreme. After playing a 5e campaign for a bit, he realized he had assigned his stats 'wrong' and therefore could not multi-class. So, of course, he had to create a new char-op character. Except, this time the optimization was around the magic items his first character had acquired. And his old character was going to hand this complete stranger new character all of his loot before walking off into the sunset.

This of course, raised the ire of the rest of the party...

 

[JohnLynch]

if you get a choice of a rules item of some sort and you can either choose "+5 damage on all attacks" and "+5 to checks when dealing with dwarves", it's almost always a better optimized decision to choose the first one.

This is incomplete. If you are optimising for combat than yes you are correct, +5 damage on all attacks is almost always the better choice. If however you are optimising as the party face and will have minimal contribution to combat than this is a terrible optimisation choice. I had a wizard who was going to become the king of a country (we as players knew a bit about where the game was heading so that we could make characters who would be interested in that goal). I optimised to have the biggest scores for the face skills. I hunted down every single spell and feat from every single supplement I could find to make sure that I was the most charismatic I could be without severely impacting my ability to function in other ways (the parameters were a functional wizard that could meet a minimum threshold of usefulness in non-social situations). This character was optimised (within the parameters), but a +5 bonus to all damage would have not contributed to his optimisation.

For me it's a case of where's the fun? If you're players are only spending all of their resources on combat than either that means they really enjoy combat, that they absolutely hate combat and want to steamroll all fights to get over it as quickly as possible (this became me in 4th edition) or that as a GM you're throwing a lot of combat situations at the players. Rather than getting upset over optimisation, I'd ask your players what they actually enjoy and discuss how their choices help them achieve that enjoyment.

 

[JackOfAllTirades]

<snip>

Everything depends upon the player and what they are looking for to get their fun out of play.

<snip>

See, that's the only important thing right there. (The rest was snipped for emphasis.)

There's nothing that makes optimization and role-playing inherently incompatible; it's just that some players are more interested in one or the other to some degree. And yes, many players are actually capable of both, which is why this whole "incompatibility" argument is a fallacy to begin with.