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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jasin" data-source="post: 3509101" data-attributes="member: 7531">Because your definition of optimized included "maximization of usefulness in a small number of ways or one specific way", while this character reduced usefulness in one specific way to increase usefulness in several other ways, with any "overall usefulness" being so hard to measure in an objective manner as to be meaningless.What if only one is present? For example, a wuxia swordsman carefully designed using core rules only is likely to be less useful to the party than a core-only cleric designed casually.Is it optimization if you put a great deal of effort into making something inherently weak as powereful as it can be? Is it optimization if you just casually pick stuff and it turns out to be powerful?Not much careful intent there. Barbarian is pretty much the most obvious route to go if you start with a half-orc, even if you care nothing for mechanical effectiveness.With a careful choice of feats and spells and such, the halfling could be built to approach maximum usefulness within the preset constraints ("halfling barbarian/bard"). Does the fact that his usefulness doesn't match that of a half-orc barbarian make it not-optimizing?What if the player manages to actually match or exceed the obvious-choice half-orc barbarian (Power Attack, Cleave, greataxe, stuff like that) in usefulness? Is it optimizing then?Yeah, for now, until it gets used and misused so many times that people get edgy the moment they see it, then we'll start calling it "usefulness enhancement" or "effectiveness prioritizing". <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" /> Oh, I would argue that many (perhaps not most, but many) people do want to optimize, and that the clash of play styles with the many people who don't want to (be required to) do so, and with the people who do want to do so but aren't as good at it, is what's fueling these debates.If it really were just a few people that wanted to optimize, it wouldn't be such an issue.That was a bit how it seemed to me, yes.What do you mean by "assumption of optimization"? The assumption that PCs would be optimized on part of the DM? The assumption that other PCs would be optimized on part of the players?Kelson?</blockquote>

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