NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wik" data-source="post: 6680399" data-attributes="member: 40177">I am not convinced that this analogy really works.  I don't think part of the game is building your character.  It can be fun for some people, but it's not really a "part" of the game.  To me, that's like saying setting up the monopoly board is part of the game. I wouldn't be saying you have to run pre-gens.  I'm just saying that, if you sit at my table, one small optional rule is not allowed.  We use other rules.  My table has a different flavour than yours.  this is a strength of D&D, not a bug.  Sure.  I was just drawing upon things off the top of my head.  You get what I was trying to reference, though, I hope.  Was she having fun?  Was the rest of the group having fun?  Because some players don't want rules granularity.  It doesn't mean they're doing it wrong.  For what it's worth, most of the fun I've had playing D&D was with BECMI, for almost precisely the reason you hate it. Having the ability to choose what rules go in and out in 5e is great, because it lets people like me have fun in our way, and people like you have fun in your way, without having us play entirely different games.   There are few better products than that one, and if you don't want it, send it my way.  I've wanted a print one for years. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> Interestingly, most players of BECMI I know refuse to use those rules.  They hate them.   So we've established BECMI isn't for you.  I'm sorry, but if you're playing in a game I GM, you're not playing the game "your own way".  You're playing it MY way.  You want to play it your way?  Run your own game.  I don't want the headache of the rules.  I don't want player discrepancies.  And I don't want rules lawyers taking apart the rather weak rules texts for loopholes.  The game works better (for me!) without them.  I GM.  We play it *my* way.    Technically, they were "Delmiondias' Boots", Delmiondas being an old 1e illusionist I played who wore a tiger stripe jacket, a feather boa, and those boots.  His name, by the way, is an anagram of a famous 70s singer.  I'll let someone else figure out who.  But what I was saying, and what you're ignoring, is that if there were rules elements attached to those boots, they would have been at the forefront of the treasure division.  Since there were no rules, they became an RP object that wound up being a lot more fun than any pair of magical boots I gave out in, say, Pathfinder. Likewise, with Multi-classing, if that rule is in play, it gets one more thing that will take precedence in some players' minds over characterization.  Ie, "I want to be a two weapon barbarian criminal guy, but the best mechanical choice for that says I need a few levels of fighter, so I guess I need to go build path X" instead...."I don't really like that.  I've seen it happen.  I'm not a fan.  No.  You said in an earlier paragraph that optimization does not mean you don't roleplay.  I agreed.  In your next paragraph, you said that people that optimize are more likely to care about their PCs and put more work into them.  Basically, you argued the exact same thing as your fallacy, just the inverse.  And it's just as untrue.  It hurts the fighter.  And if it makes every other player feel less powerful, it hurts them.  If it turns the game into a mechanical one instead of the game I want, it hurts me.  Sure.  But you can see how I'd get an opposite reading from how you wrote it originally.  Yeah.  And that effect is that we are having a lot of fun.  I still don't see why you feel the need to tell me I'm wrong for playing the game the way *I* like to play it.  Where do you get that?  I limit the rules to allow all players to have more fun.  All players ARE having more fun.  The only guy that wanted to multi-class said to me "I wish I could multiclass, but I understand why you did it.  There are a LOT of ways to abuse the system.  The game's better without it."In other words, I listened to my players. Also, why are the "good" players optimizers, and the "poor" ones those who don't like that style of play?  Because, that's not how I see the game.  The good players are the ones who show up, have fun, and contribute to everyone else having fun.  The bad ones are the guys who get in the way of everyone else having fun.Those bad guys are often also the ones who "check the math" on someone else's character and point out that they're doing it wrong.  Then play Skyrim.  Or another computer game.  In an RPG, the adventures you go on should shape your character.  Who your character becomes shouldn't be known to you when you start playing at first level.  If you KNOW that at 10th level you're going to be awesome at killing giants and have all your feats and classes picked out... well, that's not the game I like running.  I like to be surprised by who my characters become.  Sure.  Funnily enough, none of that involves multiclassing!  So it's just as doable in my own game.  And you can absolutely make characters that way as well (although I don't allow feats at first level right now... as a result of a group vote).  A lot of my players do.    See, in my games, players kind of actually swashbuckle.  They take on actions as they need to be performed, and we figure out the mechanics as we go.  Players that plan for specific action types get asked by me not to focus on just that move, or they'll be sorry.  I don't like having players, for example, that trip a foe in every round of combat.  It's frustrating.  Instead, my players have general ideas of what they're capable of, and act broadly within that scope.  It's AWESOME when a player throws a crowbar at a goblin, kills it with a crit, and then finishes the fight using a door as a shield and the crowbar (with goblin bits on one end) as a club.  I tend to encourage that sort of "spur of the moment" thinking.  If the player had come up to me with a bunch of feats that allowed the same thing, I'd have yawned, let them do it once, and groaned every time they did something similar in play. Loose mechanics, for me, are always better than tightly defined mechanics.  Loose mechanics mean you can be imaginative and events are more open to interpretation.  If I want a game with tight mechanics, I'll play a board game.   Well, feats are allowed in my game.  So fill your boots.  But if you're playing in a game that bars them, oh well.  You knew what you were getting into.  And let's look at the inverse?  How does it really hurt YOU if you're instead taking +2 Dex?  It achieves a similar end, is simpler, and is more open to interpretation.  Some GMs love to run games in that vein.</blockquote>

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