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<blockquote data-quote="Mustrum_Ridcully" data-source="post: 9230449" data-attributes="member: 710">One thing to consider IMO is that 3E might have been the first edition to really fall so heavily under &quot;digital scrutiny&quot;. It's not that powergaming, rules-lawyering and character optimization didn't happen before, or don't happen in other games. But it was maybe the first edition of D&amp;D, and thus the first edition of a really, really big and succesful RPG franchise, to build an internet forum culture. It might be that the charOp development was mostly due to the game, but it could also be that charOp was just something that would always happen once players across the world could connect.That said... It seems to me that D&amp;D 3E was also a very &quot;crunchy&quot; game compared to D&amp;D 5, so maybe that played a role. Monte Cook (one of the designers of 3E) once suggested that rewarding &quot;system mastery&quot; was a goal during the design - a feat like Toughness wasn't bad because they didn't know better, they put it in so people that figured out the system would know not to pick it and pick some of the stronger feats instead, making their character more powerful than that of someone that didn't know and just put it because they wanted more hit points and that was the only feat that did it. But still, this didn't seem so unique to D&amp;D 3. I also played Shadowrun 3E, and while it was never as popular and big on the net (in my estimation), I know it had a lot of charOp potential, too.What I definitely felt comparing 3E and 4E was that 3E was played a lot at home, when you were tinkering your multiclass, feat and prestige class options, spells, wild shape options, magic items and what not to make an optimized build that might use a pre-established routine of buff spells in the morning and at the start of combat to beat whatever would be thrown at them, while 4E felt that more decision-amking happened at the game table, when to decide who to stun, daze, weaken, push, slide, which group to blast, which power to sustain, which target to mark, which creature to put a target on for the rest of the team, who to lend an action to and whatever else your options were. But it still retained a fair amount of charOp mechanics, too.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Mustrum_Ridcully, post: 9230449, member: 710"] One thing to consider IMO is that 3E might have been the first edition to really fall so heavily under "digital scrutiny". It's not that powergaming, rules-lawyering and character optimization didn't happen before, or don't happen in other games. But it was maybe the first edition of D&D, and thus the first edition of a really, really big and succesful RPG franchise, to build an internet forum culture. It might be that the charOp development was mostly due to the game, but it could also be that charOp was just something that would always happen once players across the world could connect. That said... It seems to me that D&D 3E was also a very "crunchy" game compared to D&D 5, so maybe that played a role. Monte Cook (one of the designers of 3E) once suggested that rewarding "system mastery" was a goal during the design - a feat like Toughness wasn't bad because they didn't know better, they put it in so people that figured out the system would know not to pick it and pick some of the stronger feats instead, making their character more powerful than that of someone that didn't know and just put it because they wanted more hit points and that was the only feat that did it. But still, this didn't seem so unique to D&D 3. I also played Shadowrun 3E, and while it was never as popular and big on the net (in my estimation), I know it had a lot of charOp potential, too. What I definitely felt comparing 3E and 4E was that 3E was played a lot at home, when you were tinkering your multiclass, feat and prestige class options, spells, wild shape options, magic items and what not to make an optimized build that might use a pre-established routine of buff spells in the morning and at the start of combat to beat whatever would be thrown at them, while 4E felt that more decision-amking happened at the game table, when to decide who to stun, daze, weaken, push, slide, which group to blast, which power to sustain, which target to mark, which creature to put a target on for the rest of the team, who to lend an action to and whatever else your options were. But it still retained a fair amount of charOp mechanics, too. [/QUOTE]

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