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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 3204899" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't see that there is a conflict between roleplaying and a serious interest in mechanics, including mechanically effective characters. I don't see what is uninteresting about playing a mechanically effective character - King Arthur, Lancelot, Merlin, Conan, Gandalf, Aragorn, Fafhrd, the Grey Mouser, just to name a few fantasy figures, all did pretty interesting things. Far more than the typical maimed commoner.As Brother McLaren noted, it is actually a roleplaying challenge to explain why a character deliberately pursues sub-optimal strategies.As the two quoted passages show, there are two elements to skilled play: effective play of a given character, and effective building of a character from the permitted rules elements. It is a strength of a roleplaying game, I think, that its rules permit effective play to make a difference to outcomes. Assuming all the players are working as a party, this sort of skill works to everyone's benefit.But I'm less sure that it's a strength for a great deal of skill, or possession of certain rulebooks, to be needed to build an effective character. This introduces a competitive element between players (like deck-building in M:TG), which does not contribute to everyone's enjoyment. I prefer rules which are (within the limits that result from their complexity) reasonably transparent as to the effectiveness of the options they create, and which price those options accordingly. As D&D really only has a few pricing options - feat slots, skill points, level gains and PrC prereqs - a high degree of balance in each of these elements seems desirable to me.I don't think that DM retribution is an effective substitution for mechanical balance. First, it undermine verisimilitude if the mechanically effective character is always the first target of every foe or other misfortune. Second, and more importantly, this can lead to bad blood between the player in question, and the DM.Obviously I don't agree with the first few sentences of this post. But I do agree with the criticism of pointless complexity that blurs the meta-game. This undermines the sort of rules transparency I argued for above.</blockquote>

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