Pineapple Express: Someone Is Wrong on the Internet?

[Thomas Shey]

Sigh. The benchmark for every single RPG in the industry is not: yeah, but can it beat 5E? RPGs can be wildly successful without beating 5E.

Yeah, honestly, there might as well be two different industries for all the good of comparing things to 5e is.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Or--related, I think--if you don't optimize hard, you're not pulling your weight. I honestly wouldn't want to be a play culture like that, at this point.

The problem sometimes is there's a sort of group death-spiral. If optimization pushes you significantly ahead of everyone else, chances are pretty fair that the GM will start accounting for that. Which means everyone else is spear carriers for that character's success at best, and at worst are rolled over when things designed with that character in mind hits someone else. So they start optimizing. And after that's gone on a while, it can easily feel that the people not doing it aren't pulling their weight.

Its a vicious process.

 

[Ryujin]

The problem sometimes is there's a sort of group death-spiral. If optimization pushes you significantly ahead of everyone else, chances are pretty fair that the GM will start accounting for that. Which means everyone else is spear characters for that character's success at best, and at worst are rolled over when things designed with that character in mind hits someone else. So they start optimizing. And after that's gone on a while, it can easily feel that the people not doing it aren't pulling their weight.

Its a vicious process.

Being the role player in a min-maxing group is no fun.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Being the role player in a min-maxing group is no fun.

The worst part is that many min-maxers could argue with a straight face that they're roleplayers too, and have an argument. They'd just say that they prefer to roleplay very competent characters, so they use the tools at hand to get that.

 

[payn]

Being the role player in a min-maxing group is no fun.

The worst part is that many min-maxers could argue with a straight face that they're roleplayers too, and have an argument. They'd just say that they prefer to roleplay very competent characters, so they use the tools at hand to get that.

 

[prabe]

I prefer for the players to make reasonably effective choices for their characters--that's my own preference as a player, so no shock. In the systems I prefer, there's IMO not a lot of marginal gain to be had by optimizing hard-core; and I'm willing to talk to players who start running a little more min-max than everyone else. The players at the tables I run roleplay just fine, I think. No one makes really bad decisions, the people all get along.

Seems pretty close to having them both to me.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I prefer for the players to make reasonably effective choices for their characters--that's my own preference as a player, so no shock. In the systems I prefer, there's IMO not a lot of marginal gain to be had by optimizing hard-core; and I'm willing to talk to players who start running a little more min-max than everyone else. The players at the tables I run roleplay just fine, I think. No one makes really bad decisions, the people all get along.

Seems pretty close to having them both to me.

In those contexts, they aren't. We've got a fairly pronounced minmaxer in the PF2e games I was in; the difference in those between his characters and the rest of us wasn't so pronounced it would create any real problems.

Unfortunately, not all games are like that.

 

[Staffan]

Or--related, I think--if you don't optimize hard, you're not pulling your weight. I honestly wouldn't want to be a play culture like that, at this point.

It is something of a vicious cycle, I think.
1. Optimize character somewhat.
2. Fight things with character (or do whatever that character wants to do, but when talking optimization that's usually fighting).
3. "Huh, that was easy. Make it harder."
4. Fight other things.
5. "Damn, that was hard. I need to up my game." Optimize some more.
6. GOTO 2.

And by the time someone has completed a cycle or two of that, anyone else who wants to play together with that character needs to go down the optimization route themselves. The only four solutions I can think of are:
A. The only winning move is not to play. Don't optimize, and make sure you don't play with people who do. This is a bit hard to do on the game design level, though.
B. Remove most choices from character creation/advancement and limit choices to specific points where each choice is supposedly balanced with other choices. In 5.0, you see this with the Totem Barbarian where (in theory) Bear, Eagle, Elk, Tiger, and Wolf are all balanced against one another, and choosing one doesn't change anything else downstream.
C. Make a super-balanced system where there are numerous optimization paths that all turn out to be balanced with one another. Good luck with that.
D. Balance in chunks. Instead of allowing many smaller choices that may or may not synergize with one another, have characters make fewer but more significant choices, and then it becomes easier to balance those against one another.

5e mostly goes for option D, with few choices to make once you've chosen a class and subclass.

 

[payn]

In those contexts, they aren't. We've got a fairly pronounced minmaxer in the PF2e games I was in; the difference in those between his characters and the rest of us wasn't so pronounced it would create any real problems.

Unfortunately, not all games are like that.

All systems have an optimization gap. PF2 is designed where the gap isnt tremendous. In fact, since PF1 was discontinued the calls against min max seem to have died down across the board. YMMV.

 

[Thomas Shey]

All systems have an optimization gap. PF2 is designed where the gap isnt tremendous. In fact, since PF1 was discontinued the calls against min max seem to have died down across the board. YMMV.

That was pretty much my point. This can be very notable in non-class-and-level systems without a secondary capping mechanism, as a matter of fact.