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Message: <blockquote data-quote="tetrasodium" data-source="post: 8591771" data-attributes="member: 93670">I'd say that it's almost the norm in my experience.  In the past I'd split charop into threeish groupings<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">trash: absolutely no thought to a trash character that might be fun but is probably unoptimized to the point that even giving it powerful boons & powerful items was basically a no risk thing because using them for extreme power would generally be a difficult bar to meet with so many things having prerequisites.  These were mostly played by newbies who were pretty much just tooling around having fun week after week.  These players are the reason +5 holy avengers were a thing</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">mildcharop: These PCs were played by players who put in some level of forethought needed to meet prerequisites & such at minimal cost & optimal gain.  These could be played by any sort of player but they generally wanted to have fun & were willing to engage in a it of horse trading along with conspire with the gm if it meant everyone had fun or they got to be awesome. absolute power might not be as important as absolutely awesome a couple levels earlier</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Hyperoptimized:  Everyone knows punpun but there were so many lesser versions & all of them had their own strengths/weaknesses along with what were generally equipment requirements,  These were almost always a big problem at the table but usually relied on crazy person yarn map style umpteen splatbook builds & that alone could be used as grounds for reasonably refusing or reasonably restricting them as a gm without other players questioning the gm for doing so.</li> </ul>In modern d&d it takes real work to deliberately make anything that comes in sight of those trash PCs making them all but unheard of.  The barest hint of effort is all that's needed  for mild charop PC levels of power.  Then to top it all off that last hyperoptimized little more than "well I read the races, the feats, & chose a race that fits well with those", they can be phb or phb+1 making it hard for a GM to cry foul without looking like the bad guy even to the casual wall flower types just showing up week after week to hang out.  That's not limited to just charop where the GM is forced into being the bad guy, look at the "optional" & "variant" rules for things like encumbrance feats & magic items alongside the system's expectations & expectations.I think the tautological "most games don't use feats" claim of modern d&d is a severe case of GiGo & as a famous author once put it "lies damn lies and statistics".  There are a lot of reasons that d&d beyond characters  are going to skew low & the first ASI or two is often going to get used for a +2 rather than a feat even in games that do allow feats.  Under those conditions it's simply not reasonable to conclude that most tables "don't" use feats simply because there is an over representation of characters that don't yet have a feat. If the claim was as solid as is often claimed wotc wouldn't devote so many pages to feats book after book.That doesn't make your experience universal either & what amounts to little more than "nope don't see it, that's just you" doesn't quite balance out against "here are problems & this is how they impact things".  Dismissing the problems that result from the choices modern d&d makes as mere "laser focused power gamers" while dismissing the ways older editions having room built in for GM calls to appear more neutral or even generous is not reasonable. Despite your experience of not encountering them, these flaws still exist in modern d&d. Put in other terms... I personally have never probably played football in a way that makes brain injuries a concern & the same can likely be said of most people who have ever played a game of football in their life, but it's still a serious & documentable problem <a href="https://med.nyu.edu/departments-institutes/population-health/divisions-sections-centers/medical-ethics/education/high-school-bioethics-project/learning-scenarios/the-nfl-brain-injury" target="_blank">that can be explained</a>.</blockquote>

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