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Message: <blockquote data-quote="comrade raoul" data-source="post: 5067924" data-attributes="member: 554">This is such a weird discussion! Some people seem to be saying that there are right or wrong ways to build a character that hold absolutely; others that it's all a matter of arbitrary preference, and that you're intruding on someone's magic personal space if you say anything about it. Nobody has said anything about groups, which is surprising. After all, gaming is cooperative; and a well-designed character makes play fun for everyone, not just the player in control of it. If somebody is ruining the game for everyone else because he somehow thinks it would be appropriate, in what is probably just a shallow role-playing sense, that his swordmage should have an Int 14 and suck in combat, better to let him know than expect everyone else to suffer in silence. If everyone is okay with a game where the swordmage sucks in combat--if the game is not combat-intensive, and stats are understood expressively, then obviously nobody has grounds for complaint. But the point is that whether anybody has grounds for complaint depends on the relationship between the player and the group, not the player and the rules or the player and herself.(That is, different groups have different implicit expectations, based on the kind of game they're playing. The designers of 4e clearly intended for most 4e games to center on combat, and intentionally wrote the rules so that they would be fun and playable for strategically-designed characters (that is, moderately optimized ones). Most players are likely to have less fun if combat goes badly, and combat goes badly without a balanced group that works well together. So there is a clear sense in which the swordmage is a badly designed character, according to the default expectations. Expectations may differ from the default, but they are unlikely to.)</blockquote>

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