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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chaosmancer" data-source="post: 6709094" data-attributes="member: 6801228">Wow, a lot of back and forth with little progress. Towards the "nine-year old" comment, I'm a substitute teacher so I get where it came from originally, young kids go a things with a lot of enthusiasm, little skill, and no care in the world if someone does it better than them, because they are doing what they want to do. It is a rare little kid who would draw a picture, then complain or get upset that their picture is not as good as their neighbors. However, for the conversation moving forward, I think this example needs to be dropped.What we seem to have here is a center-ish position defending their position while trying to acknowledge those who take it too far, while being told by the people on the other side they are, at a minimum, more likely to be selfish jerks than the average player. At the same time they are trying to get acknowledge from those people that people in their fringe group would accuse them of the same things. Both sides have a point in that running a character that aggravates the party and being a jerk at the table is bad. But, as a DM, I think I'm more likely to see the group rally behind an more optimized character that aggravates me than get angry at the optimized player, because unless that player is playing only to show up the other players they tend to enjoy making me tear my hair out in frustration. Also, the goalposts for "optimized" move too much for us to nail them down and say that here is the line you must cross to ruin my fun. Is it dipping? Spell Choice? Weapon Choice? Using feats? Not grabbing feats until you've got a 20 in you man stats? Choosing to play a synergized class/race combo? I've heard all of these called "optimizing" at one point or another.In conclusion, if the only reason you post going on is to either prove optimizing is good or bad or evil or divine or whatever, just stop, because no matter how you try and explain it the nuances of human relationships do not translate well into words and we're just arguing in circles at this point</blockquote>

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