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Message: <blockquote data-quote="KarinsDad" data-source="post: 6643151" data-attributes="member: 2011">People are inherently competitive. It's the nature of being human. Saying that they have choices is all nice and well, but 8 people out of 10 will make the optimal choice and it will not cause the game to be less satisfying for the majority of the other players the majority of the time because they too are humans that are competitive and often make optimal choices.The only way to avoid the repetitive aspect of this as a DM is to remove the outlier "must have" options that creep up in a game (typically with splat books, but with these few feats as well).This is human psychology. Saying that they have a choice in no way means that players will use subpar options, especially once they find good ones that work.I'll give an example in our game. The fighter player loves to rush in and fight. He really does play D&D like an MMO. The ranger/wizard player gets frustrated at the fighter player once in a while because the ranger/wizard player is more of a "if I was really there, what would I do?" type of player. He wants to make more rational and informed in character choices and combat is not necessarily the best choice. Yes, the player of the fighter has a choice to NOT rush in and fight, but from that player's perspective, that IS what his PC would want to do. Just because two players have mutually exclusive character goals, one of them being to optimize/pick optimal choices, does not mean that the game is less satisfying because of it. In fact at our table, some of the funniest moments is when one player gets frustrated at another player's choices and it's already an "oh well" moment. We do not play the game in a mindset that we have to be cognizant of the fun of every other player. If you want to have fun, do what is fun for you and don't worry about whether it negatively impacts other players because in the long run, I as DM will make sure that every player gets their moment to shine.Typically, it's not that a certain set of choices causes the game to be less satisfying for a given group. It's that a certain set of choices causes the game to be less satisfying for some specific members of a given group. Or, at least IME. It's not that the fighter with GWM is making the game less satisfying for all of the other players, it's usually that the fighter with GWM is outshining some other players who feel less satisfied because of it. Fix the feat. Don't fix the people. <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/laugh.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":lol:" title="Laughing    :lol:" data-shortname=":lol:" /> The problem is not with the people and their choices. It's because one PC is becoming Codzilla and some other players (including the DM whose carefully crafted encounter gets wiped out in 2 rounds) might resent it.</blockquote>

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