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Message: <blockquote data-quote="prabe" data-source="post: 9692167" data-attributes="member: 7016699">This is as far as I got in the thread before feeling a need to respond. Anyone who I'm repeating, please accept my apologies. (Also, [USER=18]@Ruin Explorer[/USER] , I'm not writing this directly at you, just using your post as a bouncing-off point.)It seems to me the problem isn't optimization, as such--as the post I'm quoting points out, "not making stupid choices" is, well, optimizing. The problems with optimization (as a pure player-side thing, equipment/magic items aren't usually completely player choice in D&D and similar games) come to one of two most-likely issues: A) Someone is optimizing at a different level, or to a different extent, or any other variant of "more or less than" the other non-GM people at the table (and it's worth pointing out that the GM's preferences about how much players optimize will likely be pretty close to the table's norms on the matter, whether that's explicitly because the GM set those norms or not). I'll point out that this means someone optimizing less than the table's norms/expectations is as likely to be a problem at the table as someone optimizing more than those same norms/expectations.B) Someone has found something that breaks the game (and "breaks the game" might well have different meanings for different tables and/or different games). This could just be some weird synergy or unexpected efficiency or whatever, and it might be (or at least start as) something unintentional that arose from making choices that fit the character and just happened to go abruptly nonlinear.Either of those problems can, in principle, be handled by actually talking at and around the table. If someone is optimizing differently from everyone else by choice, the people around the table can figure out how much of a problem that needs to be (knowing it's intentional might matter, especially if the player isn't aiming to be disruptive). If someone has found a way to break the game, they can be asked to please not do that. Refusal to alter one's approach seems to me to indicate an issue of someone fitting in with/at the table, which plausibly means someone needs to leave the table. (I'm willing to go with someone intentionally running a less-optimized character being able to fit in, if the rest of the table is OK with that--that seems like the least-toxic instance to me.)</blockquote>

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