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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ahnehnois" data-source="post: 6080303" data-attributes="member: 17106">No doubt, very different experiences.I put the terms CoDzilla the tier system and a variety of other things under a particular culture. I only ever saw them on charop boards, and they were generally accepted in that context. I liked the old WotC charop boards. Optimizing a druid is a fun intellectual exercise. I never actually saw truly optimized characters played in any of my games though, for a variety of reasons.However, the notion that people were playing these characters in situations where it caused a problem, or that the ability to build them was a problem in the rules that needed to be fixed, was something that I didn't see argued until well after 4e was released. And which, in any case, was never a consensus, merely one of many perspectives on the system.***Personally, I've had fluid membership in my group, but two of my core, long-term friends are a history major and an engineer. They expect things to be done right. They treat the game world as a complete functioning world, and have a pretty strict game rules as the laws of physics for the game world approach. I've seen and learned from other perspectives online, but they're still foreign to me. For me to pass muster as a DM, the way my world works and the way creatures behave has to make sense. Personally, I work in biomedical research and have a biology and psychology background, and before that was trained in drama and filmmaking, so I care about modeling wounds and having characters behave naturally more than most.To all of us, D&D is primarily a creative experience which can sometimes become an exercise in game mechanics. We all know each other and look at the game as a team effort. No one really cares much about balance between characters unless that gets wildly out of control (and when it has, it hasn't been the casters). All the players and the DM enforce a variety of measures to prevent that from happening, generally without even thinking about it. If a rule does create an imbalance, it's on the DM to fix it; no one is looking to game designers to do that.Thus, when I buy a game system, I'm generally looking for a world simulator that is both accurate enough and simple enough that I can use it. To me, the tension is between modeling detail in the name of realism and abstracting it in the name of playability. Balance between different character options is virtually irrelevant. (I also find the balance between options in 3e to be vastly better than in any other version of D&D, but that's another conversation).***Then again, D&D evolved from miniatures games, so I can see where other people might approach it differently. D&D players are an (intellectually) diverse bunch.</blockquote>

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