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Message: <blockquote data-quote="tetrasodium" data-source="post: 9471476" data-attributes="member: 93670">Likewise.  It's a shame that the current edition pretty much looked at symptoms of a problem that mostly only existed as thought experiments & memes then designed in ways that encourage those symptoms.  I think that there were a couple factors that went into the reasoning keeping it away from the table where actual play happened & most of them no longer apply. Most importantly is the fact that most people wanted to play effective characters and it was rare for someone to deliberately sabotage their PC in ways that a simple "Hey GM: I messed up & feel like I should have prepared better so I could take x&y instead of [thing that seemed good], can I rework my pc like so?" → "sure/lets sit down &work this out, might as well include Alice in the talk to help guide you".  That has kinda changed in modern d&d because the bar is set so low it results in almost any PC being more than effective enough to feel reasonably competent. It was easier for players to recognize the need to talk to their gm/party powergamer(s) so they can back up & fix things back then than it is now because of the difference in "ick I messed up.. HALP!" vrs "wow bob is soooo much more effective than me but I guess my PC is still ok".  In fact we even have folks<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIp_p0z4J14" target="_blank"> telling newbies</a> that the bar for a true scottsman/real roleplayer is to deliberately shiv your PC in celebration of <a href="https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/22250/what-is-the-stormwind-fallacy" target="_blank">stormwind</a> to make them even more reluctant to have that "hey GM" talk.Secondly on the optimized end there were a lot of reasons why it was usually considered polite to hold back on the big guns until something went sideways or someone might die (like the ease of designing encounters to dial down or outright block the efficacy of those big guns & the way it felt to sidekickize/minionize fellow teammates/players they needed to rely on). But because death was a very real possibility if things went badly or the party tried to bite off more than they thought they could there was an extra incentive for optimized PCs to hold back the (usually) limited resource <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SuperMode" target="_blank">super mode</a> for when it seems do or die.  Now nobody needs to rely on anyone & even "limited" use abilities at the extreme end of CharOp are rarely things that feel all that limited.IME other than GM granted wishes (ring of 3 wishes/luckblade/NPC sourced/etc) type wishes, spells like wish & simulacrum tended to be deep into MAD territory where both sides  just passively agree to pretend that those are off the table or locked behind a "break glass in case of extreme emergency" while  the MiC provided the hard to source esoteric material component framework &  CoDzilla was handled as above  just like every other extreme edge CharOp build.</blockquote>

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