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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gradine" data-source="post: 7476380" data-attributes="member: 57112">My point is that role-playing and optimization can be the same thing, but it isn't always, and insulting the intelligence of players who don't think the same way they do (or, as you do in this post, the intelligence of their characters, which I'm not sure is that much better) is exactly the same kind of insulting, wrong-headed onetruewayism as the post you were responding to was, just for an alternative (some might say opposite) set of preferences. I would in fact make the argument that your qualifiers "often" and "For most people in most cases" are also exaggerations at best and just plain wrong at worst, as optimization is not as prevalent in the vast sphere of role-playing games as online echo-chambers tend to make it appear at first glance. I that where you are right is that most people like to build characters that are competent at whatever it is they are supposed to be good at. I happen to think the line between "incompetent" and "perfectly, mathematically optimal" is quite a bit wider than you give it credit for, and I would in fact argue encompasses the vast majority of D&D 5e characters that exist and have ever existed and will ever exist in this reality, including most, if not all, Druids and Rangers who don't decide to ever memorize healing spirit (even if Xanathar's is open to them). It's actually pretty hard to build a truly incompetent 5e character. Suboptimal, sure, but there's a long difference between the two.Tl;dr, you're mostly right by the letter here, mostly (or at least much more) wrong in spirit, and, most importantly, you're kind of a being a jerk.Meanwhile, this......is the biggest load of nonsense I've read a good long while, and I follow politics. There are many activities that fall under the realm of "role-playing" that lack structure, systems, or rules, and consist entirely of a shared storytelling experience, including many LARPs, and role-playing is right there in the name. If I read a bit between the lines, I suspect that what you're really talking about here (and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong) is a particular pet peeve you have of players purposefully making poor decisions for their characters that lead to setbacks or hardships for the character group as a whole. Which, from a gamist perspective, is understandably obnoxious; after all, if the RPG is a game and the goal of said game is to work together towards some shared objective, then these players are serving as a detriment to the game.At the same time, one could also make the argument that playing characters without flaws, or who never make mistakes, unless those flaws or those mistakes belong to or are made by the player, strictly because the object of the game is to win the game, is the very definition of meta-gaming also. I wouldn't make that argument, mind you, mostly because I neither think "meta-gaming" is a bad thing nor do I think that everyone is talking about the same thing when they talk about meta-gaming, and that some folks have a tendency to simply use it more as cudgel to describe "behaviors of RPG players I dislike" rather than following any set of coherent and universally agreed upon definition. I would argue that the best thing for any story in any form of storytelling (whether it be a singular or shared-group experience) is to have characters making the decisions that they are most likely to make, whether those decisions help or hurt towards the character's own goals. I'd also argue that characters making bad but completely in-character decisions is kind of necessary for truly great fiction, but that's neither here nor there. But I do think it's fairly obvious engaging in that behavior is the very definition of role-playing, and I'm not very sure how anyone could possibly begin to make the argument otherwise. I'm just also not going to argue that the reverse is true; you don't have to make mistakes or portray flaws to engage in role-playing or even in good role-playing.</blockquote>

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