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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jester David" data-source="post: 7328543" data-attributes="member: 37579">Which works if the offending player is the one punished. Typically, the character who dies is one less optimized to handle combat.From my experiences, it's the rest of the table who suffers the consequences. They're the ones irritated when their diplomatic overtures cut short when the bored power gamer says "screw this, I draw my sword."Meeting that NPC is a scene. It's a moment or random roleplaying, like interacting with a merchant or traveller on the road. It doesn't advance the plot, but it's a shot in the montage denoting the passage of time. That fight where you kill the NPC with your well executed and optimized attack is boring. It's boring and forgettable. (Like most fights that go exactly like plan.) That moment where the rogue sneaks back to the toll bridge and pickpockets their money back replacing the purse with a pouch of live scorpions… that's a moment that will be retold and laughed at for years.The catch being, the power gamer who just wants to win and thinks beating combat is the way to do so isn't going to care about the other aspects of the game. They're going to make that primary, whether the DM wants to or not. But even if the power gamer IS one of the few that is also a solid roleplaying and cares about more than survival, there's still the disruptive influence of them owning combat. It's not fun for the other people at the table if everything is dead before they get a turn. It's not fun to be the sidekick. And from a DM perspective, an optimizer makes it hard to balance encounters. The difficulty needs to be increased to accommodate that one player, which can be unfair on the rest of the table as well, making it even harder for them to contribute or vulnerable to being squished. After all, if the DM was giving just one player super cool magic items that made them better than everyone else, we'd be tripping over ourselves to call that unfair behaviour. But when someone does it themselves through careful reading the the rulebooks, that's okay?</blockquote>

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