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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Snarf Zagyg" data-source="post: 9691986" data-attributes="member: 7023840">This thread will go well ....Let me start with a story. In American law schools, there's an archetype called a "gunner." It's ... not a positive term. It's the type of student who is eager to impress and a little too competitive- because they are okay with not just winning, but having other lose to make sure that they win. They are known for their "helium hands" (always raising their hands ... often before the lecturer even asks a question) and have been known (back when books were used) to rip out pages of books after they read them to make sure others didn't get to read those pages. Anyway, the saying for first year law students was to look around your section. If you didn't know who the gunners were ... you were the gunner. I've noticed something similar when it comes to rules lawyers (see what I did there?). Any person who has ever encountered a rules lawyer ... well, they know how much they bring the game down. It's so true, it's not even worth arguing about. It's been true since the game started (and they were called barracks lawyers). There are articles in the 1970s calling them out, and parodies in Dragon Magazine. The afterword of the 1e DMG stated that you should never "allow some barracks room lawyer to force quotations from the rule book upon you."  (1e DMG p. 230). But here's the thing- whenever the topic comes up, there will be someone who defends rules lawyering- arguing that it's a good thing. That they are, in fact, defending liberty, or the other people at the table, or parsing words carefully to state that they aren't, in fact, rules lawyers. They are willing to argue, endlessly and forever, about any and every point, to show that while they aren't a rules lawyer and there really isn't any such thing, if there was such a thing, it would be totally awesome and good. Yep.So it goes with optimization. When people decry "optimization," they aren't talking about choosing an option that gives you d8 as opposed to d6. Just like when people talk about a gunner, they aren't talking about someone who wants to do well in law school. And when people talk about rules lawyers, they aren't talking about someone who want to know the rules. Intuitively, we should know this. So what are people talking about? Well, there are times when I see some people post here. And they make these builds- ones that combine rules to wring every last advantage that they can find. That rely on mismatches in different wordings from different areas. Or try to mix and match 5e14 and 24 rules where they don't fully jibe together. Or misunderstand the action economy... always in a way that benefits them. Or carries a specific game-word ruling to an absurd extent that it obliterates any fiction. No one is saying to make a "bad" character. But if your intent is to win D&D, well, you should recognize that not everyone plays that way. Because as some people note... D&D is a game. But it's not a videogame that you win. Unless that's how you want to play it- but if it is, understand that others do not.</blockquote>

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