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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6934644" data-attributes="member: 42582">What's wrong with Rufus? In Burning Wheel I think Rufus would be a viable character.Or to put it another way - what counts as bad play is very relative to the game being played. It tells us something about D&D (compared to, say, BW) that Rufus counts as an obvious example of deliberate sabotage.That "something" is the platform on which the OP has then been constructed.I don't agree with this.As far as I can tell, from posting on these boards, I am more inclined to "indie-style"/narrativist RPGing than the typical ENworld poster. As far as I know, I am the only regular poster who is also GMing a fairly regular BW game.But in these sorts of threads, I generally find myself more sympathetic to the "optimisers". Because, like "indie" RPGers, optimisers recognise that action resolution, and hence the mechanics of PC building, are pretty central to RPGing. (Without mechanics it's either negotiation between players and GM over the content of the shared fiction, or GM fiat. I guess player fiat is a third alternative, but many ENworlders seem to be against that.)I know I'm not a very good wargamer (I have friends who are, and they utterly clean my clock in those sorts of games). But I appreciate the wargamer's or optimiser's eye for the difference that mechanics make.I'll go back to the example of Rufus. That character would be viable in BW. That he is presented as an obvious example of deliberate sabotage tells us something about D&D, and it's focus as a game. For instance, in D&D overcoming challenges is taken to be quite important. In BW, the mechanics of the game make it much more important to confront challenges than to overcome them. That mechanical difference makes a big difference to the tone and content of the RPGing that results. It makes a difference to the ways in which players can shape the shared fiction.Once you recognise that, in D&D, overcoming challenges is where it's at, you've already set a floor. Rufus is out. I'm happy to accept it as true that, in 5e, "merely competent" characters are good enough (or, to put it another way, that the marginal increase in success rates resulting from "optimisation" is not noticeable at the typical table running the typical 5e adventure); but look at the amount of design and development work that WotC had to put in to achieve this! Even with the learning of 40 years of D&D design, it still took them a two-year playtest.If the OP sets the floor a bit higher, well, who are we other D&D players to judge?</blockquote>

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