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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chris_Nightwing" data-source="post: 6056963" data-attributes="member: 882">I think the perceived correlation comes from situations such as [MENTION=22424]delericho[/MENTION] describes. I've had many intelligent players under my DMing wing, and they know how to work a system and get the most out of it. The trouble arises when I ask them not to use a particular optimization, or suggest that they follow a different path based on what they have told me about their character. This can manifest sometimes as 'I'd rather you not specialize so heavily on fire magic' for instance, which makes my preparation more difficult if I had challenges ahead that wouldn't be suitable for them, or sometimes as 'you describe your character as having travelled all over the known world, and I know you'll expect this to have some advantage for future knowledge checks, so could you take this feat to accompany that concept - no, I want this combat ability instead', which will lead to trouble when knowledge of other locations comes up because they still expect a bonus.Whether you DM with an iron fist or by negotiation, optimizers in my experience often do so by exploiting the metagame, which means many of them aren't acting or thinking in character at all. In the fire example, they know I can't make them useless for every combat if they are an important member of the party, so I adapt to their expectations. In the traveller example, I can put my foot down, but they'll still ask every time about local knowledge because I didn't read through their background where they visited every major city, or something.So, whilst I believe roleplaying and optimization exist on two axes, I think that we mostly ignore good-roleplayers-bad-optimizers because they are a lot of fun, we ignore good-roleplayers-good-optimizers because you can use their good roleplaying to prevent abuse of the system. Bad-roleplayers-bad-optimizers cause no harm, but we try to help them do better at both. Bad-roleplayers-good-optimizers are the most disruptive of all these groups, and hence they are the most prominent, and along with good-roleplayers-bad-optimizers we project the two traits onto a single axis: fun.</blockquote>

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