Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Arial Black" data-source="post: 8228005" data-attributes="member: 6799649">Hah! You actually made me laugh out loud! : )What made me laugh-in disbelief more than amusement-is your apparent conviction is that the process of optimisation necessarily involves reading a guide or watching a video!How old are you? I'm 55. I've been playing D&D since AD&D wasn't even called 'first edition' because 'second edition' hadn't been thought of!That fact alone doesn't tell us how skilled I am, but it does show that I learned to optimise my PC's decades before the Internet existed.Do you think that the only path to optimisation is to copy someone else? That I, or any other optimiser, cannot do it without help?Perhaps we mean different things by 'optimisation'. For me, making sure my PC is good at the things my PC is supposed to be good at is what I mean. If I want to concentrate on, say, archery, my PC will pick things that make them a good archer. Like, y'know, the Sharpshooter feat. Yet you react as if choosing Sharpshooter is basically cheating! As if I need to consult the forums to come up with that!Sounds good!The advice I would give to everyone is to make a PC that YOU think is cool. Sure, it's nice if other people also think it's cool, but that's nowhere near as important.This is because the way every player interacts with the game is through their PC. If you don't enjoy your PC, it's very unlikely that you will enjoy the game.What you think is cool may differ considerably from the other players. But one thing we all have in common is that we not only want to play games or sports that we enjoy, we also want to play well. This is normal. We don't want to let our teammates down, we want to increase our skill and feel good when we do.In D&D, different PCs are good at different things, and we have great latitude in choosing exactly what we want our PC to be good at. Archery? Battlefield control? Talking to NPCs? The world is your oyster.But how much fun would it be to have a character concept that you want to be, say, a con-man who is also a good archer, and then because you don't know much about the rules, or can't be bothered with them, your PC isn't actually good at either? I imagine it would be pretty frustrating to play an allegedly skilled con-man/archer who can't hit a barn door or talk their way out of a paper bag? Wouldn't they enjoy the game more if their allegedly skilled con-man/archer is actually a skilled con-man/archer?And what do the other players think? Are they really thinking "I'm glad Fred's PC is rubbish, that means my PC is still the best!"? No, they want Fred to have a PC whose game mechanics more effectively realise Fred's concept. Nothing wrong with Fred's concept, they don't want Fred to change his concept, they want Fred's PC to better realise Fred's concept, so that Fred will enjoy playing more because his performance matches his concept better and he will succeed more often.And that is 'optimisation'.</blockquote>

Verification