Has anyone got any flak for buildung a character that wasnt optimized?

[aco175]

Interesting that you use the word competent.

In the racial ASI discussions several people, many times, said that competent means a 16 ability score...
So based on the definition, competent already means optimized to some degree to some players.

I was not thinking of a number when I said players should have a competent PC. A 16 is something you should have by level 4 if you are not trying. You may want to try something and not start with a 16 in you ability your class needs, fine. A playing group tends to be only 4-5 players today, so having a player not be part of the group and have their role at least somewhat competently players lessens the party.

That brings up party/player dynamics. A player at the table is there to play the game, same as everyone else. The PCs in a game would not want that PC in their group if it was an actual group facing danger. Like when you hire someone for your business or when I was in the Army, you screen the people first to see if they fit your needs- an adventuring party would do that. It is bad form at the gaming table to tell a player that his PC does not work for the group and the PCs are kicking him out and you need to role another. People just expect the rest of the group to have a dud since the other player can make anything he wants.

If that definition of competent means a 16, then fine. if that is optimized to some degree to some players, I cannot help that. Some people, some degree leaves a lot to haggle about.

 

[Greg K]

It wasn't 5e, but I experienced it once upon returning to a group that I started after taking a break due to work and taking traditional animation courses. During my abscence, the person that took over GMing brought in a friend whom was both a combination powergamer and butt-kicker under Robin Law's original gamer type definitions and optimized towards those ends. The guy was a problem player and he threw a fit that I did not optimize for combat.

 

[J.Quondam]

That brings up party/player dynamics. A player at the table is there to play the game, same as everyone else. The PCs in a game would not want that PC in their group if it was an actual group facing danger. Like when you hire someone for your business or when I was in the Army, you screen the people first to see if they fit your needs- an adventuring party would do that. It is bad form at the gaming table to tell a player that his PC does not work for the group and the PCs are kicking him out and you need to role another. People just expect the rest of the group to have a dud since the other player can make anything he wants.

This makes a LOT of assumptions how tables operate in general. I mean, all that might be applicable in your experience, but in my experience this really isn't how either players or parties of PCs tend to work, not even in back in my 3e/PF days.
Player preferences aside, there are plenty of reasonable ways in the fiction to envision a party forming from a suboptimal group. Not every party is a tough band of mercenaries vetting for the perfect complement to the rest of the group. And nowhere near every player plays that way.

 

[overgeeked]

There are time I think that by adopting a set of rules mellower on the optimization issues than the 3e family (including PF), 5e attracted a mellower audience.

I don't play Pathfinder so I wouldn't know about that end of the equation, but on the 5E side of things I run into optimizers constantly. Militant ones at that.

 

[Arilyn]

It wasn't 5e, but I experienced it once upon returning to a group that I started after taking a break due to work and taking traditional animation courses. During my abscence, the person that took over GMing brought in a friend whom was both a combination powergamer and butt-kicker under Robin Law's original gamer type definitions and optimized towards those ends. The guy was a problem player and he threw a fit that I did not optimize for combat.

You'd think he'd be happy to outshine you in combat...

 

[overgeeked]

I was not thinking of a number when I said players should have a competent PC. A 16 is something you should have by level 4 if you are not trying. You may want to try something and not start with a 16 in you ability your class needs, fine. A playing group tends to be only 4-5 players today, so having a player not be part of the group and have their role at least somewhat competently players lessens the party.

That brings up party/player dynamics. A player at the table is there to play the game, same as everyone else. The PCs in a game would not want that PC in their group if it was an actual group facing danger. Like when you hire someone for your business or when I was in the Army, you screen the people first to see if they fit your needs- an adventuring party would do that. It is bad form at the gaming table to tell a player that his PC does not work for the group and the PCs are kicking him out and you need to role another. People just expect the rest of the group to have a dud since the other player can make anything he wants.

If that definition of competent means a 16, then fine. if that is optimized to some degree to some players, I cannot help that. Some people, some degree leaves a lot to haggle about.

 

[Bill Zebub]

View attachment 150970

"Anybody shows up with a primary stat less than 16.....Dead."

 

[Ovinomancer]

To clarify, I was using "character sheet" as shorthand for how optimized (or not) the character is. Meaning that a badly unoptimized character played well is (or can be) more effective than a highly optimized character played poorly.

But yet a well optimized character played well would be better than both, yes? I've seen this argument before, and it just seems odd to me, because it's either trivially obvious (bad play is bad play) or seems to be trying to make a point about good play that separates it from the character. The latter is actually a reasonable approach, but it's not one 5e particularly stresses or enables. By that I mean that to do it in 5e, you have to intentionally ignore what 5e's put out there whenever it suits you to enable this kind of play.

 

[Bill Zebub]

But yet a well optimized character played well would be better than both, yes?

Uh....yeah, but that misses the point. Saying that variable A has a greater impact than variable B is not negated by the observation that variable A and variable B, together, have the most impact.

A college degree will impact your net worth more than, say, obsessively searching your pocket change for rare and valuable pennies. "But doing both will have more impact than either by itself!" Well, yeah, I guess.

I've seen this argument before, and it just seems odd to me, because it's either trivially obvious (bad play is bad play) or seems to be trying to make a point about good play that separates it from the character. The latter is actually a reasonable approach, but it's not one 5e particularly stresses or enables. By that I mean that to do it in 5e, you have to intentionally ignore what 5e's put out there whenever it suits you to enable this kind of play.

I was just trying to say that what @Dannyalcatraz was describing makes perfect sense to me. No more nor less.

In 5e in particular, my observation is that the delta between a highly optimized character and a poorly optimized character is less than the delta between skilled play and unskilled play. And I don't mean some kind of theoretical delta: I mean the difference between the skill of the actual players I play with on Monday nights. The best player with an unoptimized character is going to be more effective than the worst player with a highly optimized character.

IN OTHER WORDS....

If you're a good player, showing up with an unoptimized character doesn't have to limit your ability to fully contribute.

Sheesh.

 

[GrahamWills]

To be fair, there's a very traditional and very beloved approach to D&D that starts with "roll 3d6, in order." That's not really a game about running "competent" characters. That's a game about making the most with what you've got.

That was my first experience of D&D, and actually it was one of the games with the MORE pressure to be competent. It had a very high death rate, and if you rolled up a bad character you were sort of expected to let them die and be replaced. I later found out that most groups would look at a sheet and if it was sufficiently bad, they'd say "Oh, he'd never make it. You might as well save time and roll up a new character"