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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9696210" data-attributes="member: 18">I mean, I accept that may be how you choose to use the word, but if you interpret other people as meaning that, you're just intentionally confusing yourself. And if you use "optimized" without any clarification, to mean that, you're just confusing others.It's anti-communication. I mean, it's not totally uncommon for people to do something like this (especially within fan subcultures), but who does it help? Why not use the term in the way it's vastly more widely used, especially given that wider meaning is itself relevant?Also re: 0% - is it though? I think you're assuming a very uncreative player who isn't actually good at optimizing. If you have a player who is highly engaged with the rules of a game, it's not particularly tricky to work all the major synergistic factors. That's just a MM race with two PHB Feats - the idea that only some sort of demented genius could come up with that, and thus everyone else got it from them is just bloody silly. Sure if a player who'd never shown any aptitude for optimization came to me with that I might be a bit suspicious, but if one of the smarter players did, no. This isn't some 3.5E deal requiring a PrC from an obscure splatbook, 3 Feats from different splatbooks, and a modified version of a base class from yet another splatbook or something. Also, it's not "broken", just annoying (and no longer works, as of 2024).All that said I tend to dislike that particular kind of build because it tends to rapidly bore players who play it, in my experience. I think this is an optimization issue we've kind of failed to discuss - some optimizers manage to optimize the fun out of the game for themselves! That happens a lot more with videogames than TTRPGs, but I've seen people come up with TTRPG builds that worked really well, didn't break the game, but that the player had clearly like, specialized into a role that wasn't actually how they liked playing. I've seen this even with truly harmless support-oriented characters. So anyone optimizing should watch out that they aren't just making a PC that's going to bore them! Of course this is true of poorly-optimized PCs as well, so it's a balance - I've seen many people get bored of PCs who were just terrible at their job because the person building them hadn't understood how to do so, or made some key Bad Decision (like having a low score in a vital stat for that job). Hell I've been the latter!</blockquote>

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