cmad1977
Hero
Sometimes people make the suboptimal choice to be overly sensitive!
Rude and inconsiderate to be unoptimized.
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Sometimes people make the suboptimal choice to be overly sensitive!
Hiya!
The problem here is that you may consider a Fighter with a 12 Strength "Inept", while I consider a Fighter with a 12 Strength "above average".
Answering your question(s) isn't so much a "answer" so much as a "my style". The old saying still stands: The devil is in the details. A character that is 'optimized' for melee damage has a lot of other short comings. A character that is 'optimized' for versatility in battle has short comings as well. But both are just as viable in to fill their role; fighting.
One could flip the tables on you and say the same thing, but their version of "inept" relates to versatility. They look at your character who is optimized for melee damage with large weapons and think "Why are you making such an incompetent fighter? When you have a two-handed sword you are great...but the moment you loose that weapon, you suck. You rely on heavy armor, which is great, until the moment when you are sleeping, or at sea, or climbing a rope, or walking through a desert, or a million other likely scenarios for an adventurer. When these situations happen, we will all need to keep *you* alive...you won't be doing your job as fighter, effectively".
Anyway, that's all I really wanted to point out. One persons "optimized" is another persons "inept".
^_^
Paul L. Ming
Except, that's demonstrably not true in practice. The fighter with Strength 20 and Int 8, when paired up with a wizard who has Int 20 and Strength 8, is going to be a far more effective group than the fighter with Strength 16 and Int 12 who is paired up with a wizard that has Strength 12 and Int 16. The nature of the challenges which adventurers face in a D&D world rewards individual specialization over versatility; you make up for the lack of individual versatility by having 3-6 individuals in each group.Yes, you are absolutely right. Realistically, the most competent adventurers should have a mix of moderate stats. Versatility is the key to survival, in my opinion.
The fighter with Strength 20 and Int 8, when paired up with a wizard who has Int 20 and Strength 8, is going to be a far more effective group than the fighter with Strength 16 and Int 12 who is paired up with a wizard that has Strength 12 and Int 16. .
Sure, just look at the sheer page count D&D has historically devoted to combat rules. The emphasis is obvious.We can look at how the rules are structured, how they have been structured in various editions, and easily identify what type expected playstyle those rules support.
Entirely depends upon pacing. You could also get yourselves killed grinding against a trap-filled dungeon with no combat opportunities whatsoever. You could keep raiding the same cavern complex indefinitely, if you had a safe enough place to retreat to and refresh spells for healing, just by the rules - unless the DM intervened.If you focuses on fighting all (or even most) of the time in AD&D, both 1e and 2e, you would die without some sort of DM intervention.
Which also applies to the trap-filled dungeon. It's not showing the game is designed to discourage combat, just that it modeled risk in a rather swingy manner. Heck, there were enough save-or-die (or just die-no-save) cursed items, that even collecting treasure could be pretty lethal.This is evidenced by the save or die mechanic
That assumes combat is balanced, but there's no guarantee that you'll ever get a fair fight. And I would argue that their suggested balance assumes you start with a 16, rather than that you maintain a 16 and never improve it, but that's somewhat tangential to the point at hand.While it is certainly more effective I'm not sure it's far more effective. 8-9 points of extra damage a round in mid levels may make a difference at deadly or deadly++, but will have almost no effect on normal or hard combats. Combat is balanced on the assumption of a +2 in your primary attack stat, so an Int 16 Wizard or Str 16 Fighter is already ahead of the expected curve.
Remember, there is no winning or losing in an RPG, at least not in the traditional sense. It's not a board game, where you win by killing the monsters and getting the loot. If everyone dies to the dragon, but you all played your characters with integrity and made the decisions that they would make, then you've won; together, you have crafted a meaningful story! Contrariwise if you kill the dragon, but you have to resort to out-of-character information and playing the character inauthentically, then you've failed; it doesn't matter whether it had a happy ending, because you had to cheat to get there - it's pointless.
It's a game with no actual consequences. You don't even get a prize. Nobody loses anything if somebody doesn't "pull their weight", and flawed characters can add an extra dimension to those who enjoy such things.
Why is it ridiculous?I consider the notion of people being upset about ineffectual characters in a fantasy rpg game with absolutely 0 real world consequences to be absolutely ridiculous.
It seems like the proper correlation with your analogy is if I were to fail to bring my character sheet, dice and a pencil. But that's not what you are implying, is it?If I turn up to play a team sport with you and don't bring my shorts and runners, you might reasonably be upset.