D&D 5E Math v Character

[Umbran]

That's just not my experience - many games, including some versions of D&D, are happy to set the rocket launchers among the paintballs.

How I see it differently is already laid out in my previous posts. They don't generally set the rocket launchers out there. You have to dig around and construct them. The parts are easily available, yes, but you don't generally just stumble into a rocket-launcher build by accident. You go, "Hey, if I do this... and this... and THIS... wow!" And you generally recognize it when you do it. The others are then paintballs only by comparison to your rocket launcher.

Honestly, that seems like a bit of a cop-out to me. Some games make the cooperative endeavour a breeze. Others seem to go to great lengths to subvert or confuse expectations.

It isn't a cop out. Blaming the rules for something that you could handle yourself with a 10 minute conversation is the cop out. I am reasonably sure that far more problems arise from the GM not properly having the conversation about what the expectations are, than the rules screwing up players after that conversation has happened.

That's my opinion, of course.

 

[Cadence]

For anyone interested, http://www.critical-hits.com/ has a article that touches on this subject.

Thanks for the link. I especially like the ending:

Spoiler

Remember TSR’s old slogan? It was “Products of Your Imagination.” It wasn’t “Products of Your Obsession with Rules.”

 

[Ruin Explorer]

How I see it differently is already laid out in my previous posts. They don't generally set the rocket launchers out there. You have to dig around and construct them. The parts are easily available, yes, but you don't generally just stumble into a rocket-launcher build by accident. You go, "Hey, if I do this... and this... and THIS... wow!" And you generally recognize it when you do it. The others are then paintballs only by comparison to your rocket launcher.

Fair enough, I think we must have entirely different definitions of "rocket launcher" in this context, which is not surprising!

It isn't a cop out. Blaming the rules for something that you could handle yourself with a 10 minute conversation is the cop out. I am reasonably sure that far more problems arise from the GM not properly having the conversation about what the expectations are, than the rules screwing up players after that conversation has happened.

That's my opinion, of course.

I'm not sure it's as simple as that. In fact I'm sure, from long experience of different games and players and groups that it isn't as simple as that. I do find our positions are kind of mirrored from the "electronic devices" discussion, though - with me, there, saying "Oh just set expectations, it's not the devices at fault!" and you say "Well, that wasn't enough, we had to ban them entirely". So perhaps I can understand your position there a bit better now!

A recent example of setting expectations not being enough would be SR5. Both the players in my little SR group are non-extreme optimizers, but optimizers, both intelligent, articulate, and good at logic and math. I talked with them about what sort of dice-pools I expected to see, put in a bunch of house rules limiting or enabling stuff that I knew would be a problem/not work well under the default SR5 rules (in part relying on more experienced SR5 DMs that I knew), but we still saw issues, very much math-related, system-related ones, and ones that even with advice, even with system familiarity, I hadn't been able to anticipate (though I was glad for some of the stuff I had got ahead of!). So now I'm left with house-ruling or just rolling with it. If it was a larger group, I think it'd have been a real problem, but with two, not much.

Anyway, I'm maundering on, so I'll stop!

 

[Dausuul]

That's just not my experience - many games, including some versions of D&D, are happy to set the rocket launchers among the paintballs. It's not a result of DM dickery.

Here's how I think of it: The game is designed on the expectation that PCs will be armed with assault rifles. Encounter guidelines and adventures are planned around that. However, some classes in some games have weapons that look like assault rifles but are in fact paintball guns.

You can deliberately swap out your assault rifle for a paintball gun if you like. That's okay as long as everyone knows that's what you're doing, and as long as you yourself don't mind trying to get by with paintballs instead of bullets. The DM can adjust encounter difficulties to compensate, and everyone else knows not to rely on you in combat. (Now, if you take it to the point of being a liability to the rest of the party--where they are actually better off without you--they will be justifiably annoyed.)

The problem is when you pick a class that you think has an assault rifle, only to discover after a couple of firefights that you've been shooting paintballs.

CharOp skill enables a player to:

• Distinguish paintball guns from assault rifles.
• Upgrade a paintball gun to work like an assault rifle.
• Upgrade an assault rifle to work like a rocket launcher.

These abilities may be used for good... or for evil.

On a side note, it is relatively rare to create a rocket-launcher character by accident, but it does happen, usually when someone has the native talent for CharOp but not the experience to judge the results. I had this happen once with a druid I built in 3E. I was accustomed to playing wizards and sorcerors with familiars, so I figured if I wanted my animal companion to be effective in combat, I needed to go all-out to boost its capabilities. I ended up with a tiger companion that outshone everyone in the party including me. (There were times when I forgot to take my own turn because I was busy running the tiger.) I scrapped that character after a couple sessions.

 

[exile]

I play Pathfinder with a group of guys who have all three been playing a shorter time than have I. They love character optimization and-- in my mind-- are very good at it. I love character concept and am sort of okay at optimization. They enjoy my role-playing, steady contributions to combat, and niche abilities. I enjoy their potential for massive damage, massive healing, and being the best at what they do. I find that we can all play together at the same table, have a great time, and learn from one another.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I play Pathfinder with a group of guys who have all three been playing a shorter time than have I. They love character optimization and-- in my mind-- are very good at it. I love character concept and am sort of okay at optimization. They enjoy my role-playing, steady contributions to combat, and niche abilities. I enjoy their potential for massive damage, massive healing, and being the best at what they do. I find that we can all play together at the same table, have a great time, and learn from one another.

That's been my experience too.

There's this really sad, unhelpful tendency to equate "optimization" with "breaking the game", which is abjectly false, and not even hyperbole. "Breaking the game" and "optimization" are two different things. There's a reason why, for decades, the terms "Power Gamer" and "Munchkin" meant different things, and you often got "Real Man does this, Roleplayer does that, Power Gamer does a third thing, Munchkin does a fourth" and so on.

It's usually obvious when the game has been genuinely "broken", and it's almost never a result of normal optimization, and even normal optimizers shy from it.

The complicated stuff comes when the game is in a position between "fine" and "broken", where it's clearly making some funny engine noises, and not performing as it could be, but hasn't stopped and let out a cloud of smoke or whatever... Again I've rarely seen that caused by "optimization" though (not never), more often it's either:

1) Bizarre corner-case character (usually in a Supers RPG) accidentally causes clunking game play (often without being effective).

or

2) Game engine deals very poorly with surprisingly common situation (not necessarily breaking).

 

[SkidAce]

There's this really sad, unhelpful tendency to equate "optimization" with "breaking the game", which is abjectly false, and not even hyperbole. "Breaking the game" and "optimization" are two different things. There's a reason why, for decades, the terms "Power Gamer" and "Munchkin" meant different things, and you often got "Real Man does this, Roleplayer does that, Power Gamer does a third thing, Munchkin does a fourth" and so on.

ahhh...the bittersweet memories...thanks [MENTION=18]Ruin Explorer[/MENTION].

---

By the way, have you seen the anime called "Ruin Explorers"?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

By the way, have you seen the anime called "Ruin Explorers"?

Yes, many aeons ago my picture was Ihrie! I should probably get a new picture of some kind.

EDITED IN - Sadly the only breakdowns left online (how few there are!) seem to feature "Loonie" rather than Power Gamer, but I remember long, long discussions on what was a Power Gamer (which we now call an "optimizer") what was a Munchkin (which I think we would now call a "jerk", particularly "that jerk who intentionally breaks the game") and so on.

For me the difference was never more perfectly exemplified than in a CP2020 game, where I had a Power Gamer and a Munchkin.

The Power Gamer's PC was seriously tooled-up, had his stats in the right places, was great at his job, and a horrible menace in combat, but he didn't wildly invalidate other PCs, nor bend/twist any rules to get there.

The Munchkin's PC was... a walking rules exploit. Not just "good math" or "highly optimized", but bending the rules as far as they would go for the sole purpose of ensuring he could kill absolutely anyone who wasn't in power armour or a tank (being in an armoured car was insufficient protection!), and he did so in a very implausible way that only worked because of the peculiar way the game rules were set up.

(This was another time that setting expectations didn't do enough! We'd strictly limited availability on some stuff, discussed how high stats would go, how low humanity or whatever it was called would go, what money could be used, and that everyone needed skills beyond combat, but this guy slid right through the middle of that! He didn't need to go to extremes, because the game had just made it too easy to do what he did, all with seemingly individually harmless or even good rules, unless you combined them!)

(On top of this personality issues factored in - the Power Gamer, like virtually all optimizers I've seen, was a team player, eager to work with others and do his job well.

Whereas the Munchkin wanted to make the game about him, and his spectacular, head-shot-filled victories, even though they didn't really improve the game or make anything more meaningful for anyone. He was quite happy to sabotage a scene (though I don't think he did it consciously, and it was in-character, such as his character had a personality) and turn it into a firefight at the drop of a hat. God help you if you planned on doing a stealth run! He'd agree to it, but the moment any potentially enemy being with a head got into range, that head would explode, and as silencers and flash-hiders reduced the performance of his guns, they were right out... )

Actually that's interesting to think about - it's more or less exactly the same thing as people who insist on playing useless characters, just with the reverse. The "I must be this useless guy who cannot play well in a team!" player essentially also wants the game to be about him, he's just not focused on victory, or if he is, it's in an arena other than combat)

 

[Stalker0]

I personally don't care for math when I'm in the game, and do not want players sitting with calculators (oh 3.0 Power Attack optimizers!)


But to me, effective math should mirror the narrative. If the story encourages the player to act in a way that the math shows to be very unoptimal, the system is not working correctly.

The best example I have is the original 4e Skill Challenge System. The original system....was broken. By broken, I mean that a team of reasonably skilled party members encountering a reasonably leveled skill challenge for their level....would fail the vast majority of the time. The math only work if the DM took some serious steps to curb the challenge...but nowhere in the narrative was that intuitive. In other words MATH FAIL!!

Another example was the 3.0 monk's flurry of blows. The narrative was that the monk was a martial arts fighter who used blinding attack speed to destroy their enemies. What the math showed was the "flurry of misses" that soon became their mantra. For all of their attacks, monks just didn't perform well against comparable opponent's.



Both of these systems were eventually fixed, but both of them had big warning flags with some math analysis that could have been caught. This is where I think such analysis are most useful.