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The asymmetry of the roles helps a lot, here. Things like "winning is meaningless if I can just decide to win" and "the point of play is to see what the PCs do, what stories emerge from their actions and interactions." It helps if I feel constrained by rules--including social contracts--and it...

I am a very competitive person--part of the reason I very much prefer cooperative board games at this point is that I do not like who I am when I'm competing--and almost all of my TRPGing these days is as GM. You know my tastes and preferences well enough, I think, to know that I want...

On some level, this feels like "I've solved being a good archer and now I want some other problem to solve," but that's almost certainly projecting my tastes and preferences onto someone else--it's a POV/headspace thing, in other words, that different people will see differently.

In the case of TRPGs--and relevant to what @Bae'zel said just upthread--what I tell the people at the tables I'm GMing at is that they don't have to wrongfoot me as GM to wrongfoot their opponents in the game/fiction, and if they have some weird edge-case thing they want to do, they'll probably...

My experiences are probably atypical, because at this point the only board games my friend group plays are co-op, but when people get all win/lose at the tables I'm at, it's mostly in the fiction, and it's much more about "characters vs. scenario" than "players vs. GM." But we've been doing...

Yeah, I was thinking there were probably aspects more relevant to video games, but I don't play video games. Better to be thought ignorant than to remove all doubt. :LOL:

I'm not disagreeing, here, but I've come to the conclusion that often when people say something on the lines of "the players have optimized the fun out of the game" what they mean is that the players have solved a specific problem, or set of problems, and aren't interested in the same old...

I don't think anyone has said that the win/loss conditions/states in TRPGs are the same as those found in more conventional games. I think there are people who think they aren't there, and there are people who think they are. (And some of those games you mention do have win/loss conditions, or...

Laugh while you can, monkey boy.

Seems to me there's way more than enough blame and shame to go around, between the two.

It interesting, thanks for sharing! (sorry for the snip) What I'll say is that in the games I run, it's the martials who tend to deal the most damage to single targets, not the casters. And I've run 5e campaigns through level 20. There were extenuating circumstances, though. That said, I'm not...

What the fresh hell? You asked for problems unequal optimization makes at the table, and I pointed at a few I've actually seen, and you needed to come back as though it was some sort of personal attack? You did get that I'm not particularly opposed to players optimizing, yes? You did get that I...

Obviously we have different experiences and opinions and preferences, here, and I'm not going to try to argue you out of yours (and you don't seem to be trying to argue me out of mine, sincerely thank you). I will say I think the players at the tables I'm GMing are thinking about the game a good...

How is discrepancy in optimization a problem, outside of jerk behavior? There's the en passant steamrollering of someone else's niche-toes, which will bother some people more than others, and be more of a problem in some rulesets than others, but it's real. There's the old "what challenges the...

We probably have different opinions on this--which is fine--but my take on 5e is the problems you're talking about are probably more a thing for people that A) came from 3.Pathfinder and/or B) are very online, and see the ... buildy builds. I've always seen 5e as like a streamlined 3e, with much...

In principle, I agree there shouldn't be a cap on how effective a legal PC can be. In practice, a large enough discrepancy can be a problem, even if no one's being a jerk.

And I think there's a good argument that D&D 5e was kinda specifically not to be optimized. I mean, there are some choices that will end up being better than others, but they're pretty easy to suss out--it takes almost willful ignorance (or really bad ability score rolls, if you roll--and why on...

He does seem like a worst-case scenario in many ways, yes. Setting out to optimize hard as GM, then complaining when your players do, is ... pretty crap behavior, I think. While he seems personally impervious to explanation, I do think it's worth pushing back, because there's nothing about...

Yeah. Talking about your own experiences/psychology is almost certainly fine, though probably not generalizable (and you should keep that part in mind). Talking about what you've observed directly can be fine, depending. Talking about something you've clearly never observed in any way you...

My take--and this is just my take, I'm not speaking for anyone else, here--is that having people who are optimized to different extents can be a problem, and it's more likely to be a problem than if everyone is optimized to the same extent. This is especially the case if someone is kinda en...