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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 5914050" data-attributes="member: 5143">No game forces you to play a certain way.  Though I can name many, many games that when you play in a way other than the optimal way you lose.There ARE other ways to play those games, but those ways will not help you win.  And many of them are team games where the people on your team will get very mad at you if your unoptimal play causes the whole team to lose.Take, for example, the MOBA online games(Heroes of Newerth, League of Legends, Defense of the Ancients).  These games are often really hard to learn for new people because there are so many ways to play but most of them cause your team to lose.  It can be very frustrating in all of them because the games are balanced around the high end players who have honed their item selection/skill selection/strategy to a high degree.  This means that if even one player on their team plays less than optimal that gives a benefit to the opposing team.The same thing tends to happen in D&D games.  At least, that's been my experience.  One player optimizes their character a lot...then the other players feel like they aren't contributing AND the DM gets frustrated because the PCs stomp over enemies the DM expected to be especially hard or even had intended the PCs to run from.So, the DM says "That's fine, they want to powergame, I'll make the monsters harder so that there's some challenge in this game.  It's more fun for me if I don't have to run constant one sided combats."Then the other players become more and more frustrated that their characters are contributing less and less to combat because of the harder monsters.  They hit less often, they require more hits to kill monsters, they get hit more often.  They spend more time unconscious and waiting to be healed and less time up and fighting.So, the inevitable happens and someone dies due to the power ramp.  They roll up a new character who is better at combat and optimized since they don't want it to happen again.  Now there are TWO optimized characters in the group...so combats become 1 sided again and the DM gets frustrated and increases their power.Rinse and repeat until the entire group is pretty much as optimized as they can get.  Anyone who walks into one of these groups with any character not played optimally will get criticized and downright yelled at for playing poorly because it results in the death of the entire party when things go wrong.You aren't "forced" to play optimally, but you can expect to die if you don't.  And you can expect that the rest of the group may die with you.  Why shouldn't they get annoyed at you if you contribute to their death?</blockquote>

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