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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6959984" data-attributes="member: 4937">What sort of choices are optimal, depends on the game you find yourself playing.   If you optimize to beat things with a stick, and you find yourself playing a game where problems can't be solved just by beating people up, then your character is not that optimal.  If you optimize your character to persuade, trick, and impress, and find yourself in a game where the obstacles are traps, constructs, mindless zombies, and oozes your optimized personality will seem rather pointless.That suggests it's simply not possible to design a system for open ended gameplay, and have all options be equally good.  We could do a better job than we do, but too much of what makes a character optimal are assumptions about how a game will be played.The real problems in RPGs tend to be not so much whether different builds are capable - whether its a meaningful choice to build a Bard, Barbarian or Paladin - but whether there exists builds that are both highly capable and broad or so capable that they render some problems meant to be challenging trivial.   What I think you are really asking is whether power gamers want all possible builds to be on the same 'Tier' (everyone is Tier 3), or whether the game is better when you can use system mastery to build characters that are of higher 'Tier' than usual (a clever build is tier 1 or tier 2).I don't think complete balance is possible because whether your character contributes depends a lot on the situations you find yourself in, but I do want all builds that aren't deliberately suboptimal (a 1e M-U that wears armor, thus negating his ability to cast spells) to be on about the same tier.</blockquote>

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