Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="moritheil" data-source="post: 3501975" data-attributes="member: 30610">I really think that that would have been clearest if you had just started talking about the issue in the abstract rather than opening with my quotes.That said, your concern is valid.  I happen to think that the attitude that people should never optimize their numbers and that doing so is somehow illegitimate is harmful to the hobby.  Generally I find that players optimize because they don't want a huge discrepancy between their RP aims and their actual character capabilities, or because they don't want to have to worry about the numbers during actual play.  They don't want to play a "gifted healer" who is actually lousy at healing, or a "veteran warrior" who can't take a hit.  The more people avoid optimization, the bigger the discrepancy between character concepts and actual abilities - and the more it matters that they roll well at some critical time, and the more it sucks when they roll poorly.  The combination of needing to do well and having to worry about things you have no control over does not strike me as particularly fun.Actually, it was a perfectly typical example.  He just wanted to have fun, and to do that he wanted to go in with better numbers so he wouldn't hold the group back.And I said that the DMM build was perhaps a bit too complex.FWIW, I don't agree at all with your idea of "beginning groups" and "disruption" due to powergaming.  IME, most of the disruption in DnD groups comes from theatrics, showmanship, and abusive personalities, not people who simply happen to have higher numbers on a sheet than the rest of the group.  There are certain characteristics that cause players to grate on other players.  Those are the real problem.I also said so.  But I note that that got lost in the overall rush to condemn powergaming.I don't have a problem with the fact that you made a different thread; in fact I am glad.  I was annoyed by the fact that rather than discuss the issue, you put my name up first, and we're in General this time, not Rules.  It's a different crowd and there are different assumptions.I never said it wasn't good enough; my initial purpose was to respond to some people whose knee-jerk response was that DMM<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":P" title="Stick out tongue    :P"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":P" /> was broken by any standard by pointing out that they often have no reasonable frame of reference.</blockquote>

Verification