Optimization and optimizers...

[prabe]

It comes from games from the 00s and earlier which were truly terribly balanced and which you could accidentally become overwhelmingly better than everyone. Scion 2e has already been mentioned on this thread, but D&D 3.5 was a noted problem; the druid was better than the fighter at almost everything out of combat - and a Bear druid who could turn into a bear, had a bear companion, and could summon bears might not be better at fighting individually than a fighter but two of the bears probably would be.

And I think there's a good argument that D&D 5e was kinda specifically not to be optimized. I mean, there are some choices that will end up being better than others, but they're pretty easy to suss out--it takes almost willful ignorance (or really bad ability score rolls, if you roll--and why on earth are you rolling?) to make an ineffective character. Past a point there's really not a lot of marginal gain, at least not before you completely destroy the fun o the game. The fact a lot of people came to 5e--especially early on--from games like 3.Pathfinder, where optimization was encouraged (if not required, and yes, you could still break the game that way) plausibly led to some toxicity in 5e's "play culture." You see it in the players who think they can "win the game in chargen." (for at least some definition/s of win)

 

[Theory of Games]

I'll bite: how is someone wanting to make the best character they can "problematic"?

Let's say they aren't cheating and they aren't telling anyone else what to do and they aren't "hogging the spotlight" or competing with the other players.

In over a decade of continuous GMing (at least once a month) online with various groups of strangers I've never seen someone object to a player optimizing. What I have seen is players ask me what level of optimization is acceptable (and IMO there shouldn't be a ceiling on how effective a PC can be). A lot of these TTRPGs present dangerous settings and thus the PCs should be as capable as the players can make them.

 

[soviet]

And I think there's a good argument that D&D 5e was kinda specifically not to be optimized. I mean, there are some choices that will end up being better than others, but they're pretty easy to suss out--it takes almost willful ignorance (or really bad ability score rolls, if you roll--and why on earth are you rolling?) to make an ineffective character. Past a point there's really not a lot of marginal gain, at least not before you completely destroy the fun o the game. The fact a lot of people came to 5e--especially early on--from games like 3.Pathfinder, where optimization was encouraged (if not required, and yes, you could still break the game that way) plausibly led to some toxicity in 5e's "play culture." You see it in the players who think they can "win the game in chargen." (for at least some definition/s of win)

I think 5e is actually a poster child for the kind of problem I've been talking about. It's built solidly on the foundations of 3e and 4e in terms of having character generation based on a giant menu of competing rules packets, and of combat focusing on efficient use of those abilities and exploiting the action economy.

Now, it's much less broken than 3e was, and there is also much less of a delta between characters built knowingly and characters built naively. But the delta is still there and there is also a big distorting effect in the kinds of characters that see play. How many fighters and barbarians aren't great weapon masters or polearm masters? How many ranged attackers aren't sharpshooters? How many warlocks don't rely on eldritch bolt? How many non-typical class/race combinations really see play? Do all the backgrounds and feats see a broadly equal amount of play?

3e has all these things much worse, and maybe 4e did as well. But 3e and 4e were at least built around them. You could see that 'building an effective character' (3e) and 'giving yourselves a viable package of abilities to play combat scenes effectively' (4e) are at least fun. 5e has all these legacy things of choosing this feat or that feat and choosing this action or that action but the consequences of defeat are so softened, the tactical options so limited, and the focus of the game so diffuse that they are sort of vestigial, artefacts of a previous version of the game that wanted you to think about them rather than taking them for granted as 'how D&D is supposed to be'.

 

[prabe]

In over a decade of continuous GMing (at least once a month) online with various groups of strangers I've never seen someone object to a player optimizing. What I have seen is players ask me what level of optimization is acceptable (and IMO there shouldn't be a ceiling on how effective a PC can be). A lot of these TTRPGs present dangerous settings and thus the PCs should be as capable as the players can make them.

In principle, I agree there shouldn't be a cap on how effective a legal PC can be. In practice, a large enough discrepancy can be a problem, even if no one's being a jerk.

 

[Distracted DM]

I think 5e is actually a poster child for the kind of problem I've been talking about. It's built solidly on the foundations of 3e and 4e in terms of having character generation based on a giant menu of competing rules packets, and of combat focusing on efficient use of those abilities and exploiting the action economy.

Now, it's much less broken than 3e was, and there is also much less of a delta between characters built knowingly and characters built naively. But the delta is still there and there is also a big distorting effect in the kinds of characters that see play. How many fighters and barbarians aren't great weapon masters or polearm masters? How many ranged attackers aren't sharpshooters? How many warlocks don't rely on eldritch bolt? How many non-typical class/race combinations really see play? Do all the backgrounds and feats see a broadly equal amount of play?

3e has all these things much worse, and maybe 4e did as well. But 3e and 4e were at least built around them. You could see that 'building an effective character' (3e) and 'giving yourselves a viable package of abilities to play combat scenes effectively' (4e) are at least fun. 5e has all these legacy things of choosing this feat or that feat and choosing this action or that action but the consequences of defeat are so softened, the tactical options so limited, and the focus of the game so diffuse that they are sort of vestigial, artefacts of a previous version of the game that wanted you to think about them rather than taking them for granted as 'how D&D is supposed to be'.

And yet if you toss out the optional rules like feats and multiclassing, 5e was very much like 2e (albeit with more built-in features). But... well... players really like options and builds. I can't fault them.

 

[soviet]

In principle, I agree there shouldn't be a cap on how effective a legal PC can be. In practice, a large enough discrepancy can be a problem, even if no one's being a jerk.

Yeah, for sure. I vaguely remember an old 3e thread (not here) about how a player who just naively wanted to play a shapeshifting and summoning druid and had a terrible time when it turned out so he effortlessly made the rest of the party wholly ineffective by comparison.

I remember playing a swordmage in 4e and having various utility cantrips, and holding them back sometimes to let the martial characters solve problems with smart practical schemes involving pulleys and dangled ropes etc rather than just butting in and saying 'mage hand, duh'.

 

[prabe]

I think 5e is actually a poster child for the kind of problem I've been talking about. It's built solidly on the foundations of 3e and 4e in terms of having character generation based on a giant menu of competing rules packets, and of combat focusing on efficient use of those abilities and exploiting the action economy.

Now, it's much less broken than 3e was, and there is also much less of a delta between characters built knowingly and characters built naively. But the delta is still there and there is also a big distorting effect in the kinds of characters that see play. How many fighters and barbarians aren't great weapon masters or polearm masters? How many ranged attackers aren't sharpshooters? How many warlocks don't rely on eldritch bolt? How many non-typical class/race combinations really see play? Do all the backgrounds and feats see a broadly equal amount of play?

3e has all these things much worse, and maybe 4e did as well. But 3e and 4e were at least built around them. You could see that 'building an effective character' (3e) and 'giving yourselves a viable package of abilities to play combat scenes effectively' (4e) are at least fun. 5e has all these legacy things of choosing this feat or that feat and choosing this action or that action but the consequences of defeat are so softened, the tactical options so limited, and the focus of the game so diffuse that they are sort of vestigial, artefacts of a previous version of the game that wanted you to think about them rather than taking them for granted as 'how D&D is supposed to be'.

We probably have different opinions on this--which is fine--but my take on 5e is the problems you're talking about are probably more a thing for people that A) came from 3.Pathfinder and/or B) are very online, and see the ... buildy builds. I've always seen 5e as like a streamlined 3e, with much less focus on maxing out the build (at least, if you have good-enough starting ability scores).

The melee-types I've DMed for in 5e have, so far, gone with shields. All of them. Even the barbarian. Well, not the monks. Sharpshooter is more of a pervasive thing, because longbowman-archer only has so much attached to it, mechanically--but I houseruled it so it was based on proficiency bonus, which made it less spiky, at least, if arguably more optimal. My new campaign is in Tales of the Valiant, which changed all those feats, though there's not an archer in the group, so I won't see how that plays out, there. (It also turned eldritch blast into a class feature, which arguably it should have been all along.)

 

[soviet]

And yet if you toss out the optional rules like feats and multiclassing, 5e was very much like 2e (albeit with more built-in features). But... well... players really like options and builds. I can't fault them.

Not really. You still have an action economy, race abilities, class abilities, backgrounds, paths, ASIs.

 

[Theory of Games]

In principle, I agree there shouldn't be a cap on how effective a legal PC can be. In practice, a large enough discrepancy can be a problem, even if no one's being a jerk.

Yeah but HOW is it a problem?

People here are clutching their pearls over "the problem of Optimization" but no one can explain HOW it's a problem.

 

[soviet]

We probably have different opinions on this--which is fine--but my take on 5e is the problems you're talking about are probably more a thing for people that A) came from 3.Pathfinder and/or B) are very online, and see the ... buildy builds. I've always seen 5e as like a streamlined 3e, with much less focus on maxing out the build (at least, if you have good-enough starting ability scores).

I get what you're saying but ultimately, if the game only works when people don't think about it too much, then the game doesn't really work. This is similar to the 3e thing where the designers thought everyone would just build and play clerics like they had in 2e, rather than players engaging afresh with the rules text that was actually in front of them.