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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 6343420" data-attributes="member: 177">The game/GM has to specifically reward those forms of play that they want to specifically encourage.  If you want to encourage tactical play, you need to reward tactical play.  If you want to put emphasis on the longer game, you need to reward strategic play.  If you want folks to laugh a lot at the table, you need to reward humorous play.  From what we've been told, D&D at this time isn't specifically encouraging either tactically simple or complex play.  The design goal seems to have been to allow for both - everyone's welcome in D&D!  Now we get the problem of measuring "Expected Contribution", which is not well defined here.  "Contribution" is a slippery concept, especially when you start getting into characters who are designed not to do damage themselves, but to enable others to do damage. I'm working under the assumption that the system isn't designed to reward one of these kinds of play over the other.  So, the tactically complex character is there, for players who find tactical play rewarding, in and of itself.  Again, like for me doing a sudoku puzzle is sometimes amusing, in and of itself, without comparing my performance on the puzzle against anyone else's. As if a tactically minded player wasn't intending to play well all the time anyway, regardless? If the fighter wasn't there to compare to, was the tactically-minded player expecting to slack off, and not think much about tactics?  Of course not!  This person enjoys playing the rules, regardless of what other players are doing, and should be expected to do so. Rewarding a player for doing better than another that they're *always* better than isn't so much kudos to the one as it is a bias against the other.  We commonly say that D&D is a cooperative game.  This means isn't a competition between the players.  If I am to reward a player, it shouldn't be for outdoing another player, but for outdoing *themselves*.</blockquote>

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