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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6936730" data-attributes="member: 42582">I live in Australia, not NYC, and my only relationship to Luke Crane is that he has got (directly or indirectly) about $200 from me out of buying his books!I'm sorry if I misinterpreted. But there are a number of relatively common assumptions that seem to be made on these boards (and in this thread) that I find frustrating, because they seem to rehash debates that were silly even in 1990 and that make no sense at all in the light of the last 20 years of RPG design.These assumptions include that powergaming/optimisation = combat (back in 1993 I was running a Rolemaster game where some of the most optimised characters were optimised for perception and social skills and teleportation and summoning magic); that an interest in or attention to mechanics equates to an obsession with combat (see above; or see the all-thief AD&D game I was running in 1988/9); that there is an inherent tension between mechanically-driven play and story/character/"roleplaying" (not true even in games like RQ or RM back in the day; not true running AD&D Oriental Adventures in the mid-to-late 80s; not true in Burning Wheel; not true now in 5e, given the background and personality/inspiration mechanics); that it is somehow "nobler" as a roleplayer to sit back and let the GM drive the ingame events while providing colour with an accent and a quirky personality, rather than to take the game by the horns as a player and drive it where you want it to go (this one is not an assumption of fact, and so can't be rebutted just by adducing counterexamples, but to me it goes almost completely against the spirit of the game as presented by Gygax.Taking D&D by the horns, as a player, means declaring actions. Which often (not always) means making checks. The game is fairly punishing for failed checks (especially in combat, where the default failure state is miss-a-turn if only one PC goes down, and TPK if the whole party goes down). So thinking about the ability of a player to make checks is not a strange thing to do.When [MENTION=6787650]Hemlock[/MENTION] points out that a 10th level 6 STR barbarian has an 80-odd percent chance to successfully lock down a hobgoblin in a grapple, that's not any sort of challenge to those who say that mechanical competence matters. It's just pointing out that the maths of the game are more forgiving (or, perhaps, more cleverly designed - in my view there's no disputing the overall attention to detail in the maths of 5e) than the other person thought.</blockquote>

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