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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7877260" data-attributes="member: 996">Anything but antisocial:   System mastery is a reality of any complex game system, and it can be part of the social aspect.  A tremendous amount of the on-line community's interactions in the 3e era, for instance, were discussing and debating finer (and grosser) points of system mastery or 'optimization.'  Trap, chaff, optimal & sub-optimal, choices - builds, synergies, combos & exploits - they're all part of that.  M:tG as a competitive CCG is all about the system in way and to a degree no RPG could be, but D&D, especially 3e, has taken pages (cards?) from it, when it comes to perking it up from the system mastery angle. One way to think of it is that games also have meta-games.  In D&D, for instance, chargen & level-up are meta-games relative to the play of the resulting characters in a session.   3e strongly emphasized those meta-games, including building in intentional rewards for system mastery, which well could include intentional 'traps' (and the opposite, options that were superior, but didn't necessarily look it at first).</blockquote>