Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="MrMyth" data-source="post: 5545098" data-attributes="member: 61155">Yeah, I'm... not sure that is an accurate depiction of folks who optimize. Nor do I think there is some sort of binary between "fun and entertaining player invested in RP and character development who you enjoy playing with" and "optimizer who is about nothing but numbers and damage." Many, many players enjoy both making effective characters and ones that have an interesting concept and background and investment in the story. And, indeed, even a character who focuses only on optimized mechanical options can still roleplay his character well and isn't just out to 'win' the game - implying otherwise falls into the Stormwind Fallacy, the idea that optimization is somehow directly opposed to roleplaying.  In an actual game, all of these are sliding elements on a vast spectrum that changes from player to player. And that's precisely why this becomes an issue, for all the reasons noted above, which you've basically avoiding addressing. Should the game designers plot everything out solely for the mindset of the optimized crowd? Probably not... but it probably should certainly be on their minds.  The ideal should be to present balanced options that also retain whatever flavor or usefulness they set out to provide. Ignoring the potential for optimization is hardly good game design, since even those who aren't out to 'win the game' could stumble upon broken combos that disrupt their group's enjoyment - or result in characters being extremely unbalanced in comparison to each other.  Sure, you can still have fun in the non-combat scenes in such a case, but shouldn't every also be able to have fun and contribute in combat, too? That's one of the goals of 4E, and I don't think it serves the edition well to move away from it.  That said, I'm certainly not claiming that this is going to be an inevitable problem in every game. But it does present problems, along the lines of the ones I discussed, in many games, and the potential for harm is undeniably there.</blockquote>

Verification