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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Grimkrieg" data-source="post: 7329726" data-attributes="member: 6933944">I find this definition of power-gaming being problematic a lot clearer and more acceptable to me than the OPs. If the thread had started with this strong definition, I doubt we'd be seventeen pages in. Oddly that means that more people might see the way you handle it since it is midway through a controversial thread.The problem is that there are many ways to dominate a game. As someone who often gets tagged as a power-gamer because I play optimized characters and have a good grasp of mechanics I often have attitudes like the OPs thrown at me, even when I am not being disruptive.Further clouding the issue is that gaming for power as a goal, is actually quite different than wanting to dominate the game. Having power in the game world can lead to very interesting choices and stories. Dominating the game is just disruptive and disruptive play should be curbed, no matter what the root cause. Often that involves someone splitting from the group.When I first hit high school in the late eighties the older gaming group at my school literally sneered at the way I play because I allowed high level characters in my game. I was labelled a power-gaming player and a monty-haul DM by people who had never played in my games. It hurt, since this was the first group that I had encountered beyond my own, and a few babysitters who played D&D/Paranoia. I understand that they are using a bad definition, but theirs seems more common unfortunately.My question is if power-gaming is just the disruptive, extreme form of things like char op and system mastery then why do we need a special name for it? We don't have a special name for disruption like myopic role-playing dragging the game to a crawl, or people who bring their personal grievances into the game, or people who just try to hog the mainstage no matter what. These are just as disruptive as power-gaming, so why don't they get labels?Rules lawyering does, and that is interesting.I'm not trying to be combative, especially since I think your definition is very clear. It just seems that people throw power-gamer around as a label pretty carelessly, equivocating it with char op and system mastery like OP did, and I am tired of it.</blockquote>

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