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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 6959256" data-attributes="member: 6787650">Spending time isn't really the issue--optimization is quite fast. At least, in 5E it is. (I'm not talking about games with lots of fiddly little mechanics; I suspect I'd find such games tedious and gamist, and wouldn't play them.) The question is whether the options are sufficiently differentiated.The only way I know to answer your question is to give an example:Life Cleric Healers are somewhat better than average at healing, and averageish at other tasks. They can heal 34.5 HP with a single Cure Wounds V spell, plus another 7 HP to the cleric himself. Marginal utility, not interesting. (Plus, I hate clerics.) Lore Bards who steal Aura of Vitality are superior to all pure clerics at healing. They can heal 70 HP with a single Aura of Vitality spell--twice the output for about 2/3 the cost. That's interesting enough to want to play, especially considering the rest of the Lore Bard package. Life Cleric/Sorcerer/Lore Bard hybrids are superior to everyone at healing. They can heal 240 HP with a single Extended Aura of Vitality spell--less than the Life Cleric Healer spends on Cure Wounds V. That's an order of magnitude improvement, and extremely interesting. It turns out that this hybrid is also surprisingly gishy and versatile to play, especially when combined with Warlock levels. It's counterintuitive, quirky, and powerful--I would love to play one.Life Clerics would be worsened, not improved, if you had to spend a lot of time to get the marginal benefit that they give.On the other hand, Necromancers give a lot of benefit, in a fairly obvious way, just by exploiting Animate Dead's fantastic concentration and action economies. Necromancers are fun, for a while, but then it's just too easy and I look for something more challenging, such as a melee necromancer who is his own tank, or a 3d6-in-order necromancer with the worst stats I could get in fifty rerolls and a personality based on Giuseppe Zengara. So having a huge easy benefit is not necessarily fun either, any more than a difficult tiny benefit is.It seems to be the case that I enjoy finding counterintuitive, non-obvious tactics and builds that provide a large benefit over the obvious strategies. E.g. just the other day I realized that you can get about twice as much effect out of caltrops when you're retreating from monsters if you drop them at a specific point halfway through your move.To me, that's what makes powergaming fun. And like any creative exercise, it's only fun as long as you continue to discover new things. At some point I'll have mined all the fun I can out of powergaming 5E and will stop.I think you may have changed the subject there. I'm a natural powergamer; I notice powerful combinations in 5E as easily as other people recognize colors in real life, and I'm often tempted to exploit them even when they conflict with my roleplaying instincts. (Case in point: I hate clerics with a burning passion, yet I still want to play the above-mentioned Sorcerer 3/Life Cleric 1/Lore Bard 6 superhealer someday and just rationalize away the "cleric" part as "not really like those other clerics that I hate. Barely a cleric at all really." It's a clear case of powergaming desires overcoming roleplaying desires.) From what I've seen, I think "optimizer" refers to something different. I'm about 80% sure that optimizers seem to focus mostly on chargen-time activities, whereas powergamers as I use the term are equally interested in analyzing and occasionally exploiting all facets of mechanical effectiveness (you can think of it as a subset of wargaming). Also, optimizers often seem to shortsightedly focus on easily-measured metrics like DPR instead of operational effectiveness. They do stupid, pointless things like analyze what the maximum theoretical AC for a 5E character is. Therefore, for me at least, "optimizer" has a bad connotation, as if you'd written "munchkin" or "talentless hack with no imagination."</blockquote>

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