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<blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7400123" data-attributes="member: 996">I find the two often go hand-in-hand.&nbsp; If I have a good, interesting, nuanced concept, there'll be a lot more opportunity to optimize it in an interesting, broadly effective way.&nbsp; If you just go by some absolute optimization to a specific goal (DPR or whatever), you end up with a one-trick pony who's trick eventually lets you down.&nbsp;Nod.&nbsp; It's a way of coping.&nbsp; It can snowball, a tad.&nbsp; As you boost encounters their exp value rises and the PCs gain in power faster.&nbsp;Of course, power is relative in another sense, too, relative power among the PCs.&nbsp; One optimonster of a character can ruin the campaign for a few players less inclined that way.I've gotten a mix over the years.&nbsp; The group I ran for last night had two players who have optimized for damage, another that's more generally optimized, two who are more concept-driven and the last two just kinda ineptly thrown together (one of them /played/ ineptly, as well).&nbsp; Had I been running 3.5, it'd've been an ongoing trainwreck for the last year or two, with anything remotely challenging to the first three leaving the remaining four sidelined or messily dead.Conversely, another group I ran for a while back was uniformly not-so-optimized (some cool concepts though, that were fun to RP).&nbsp; The first part of the adventure was a tad grueling and they were thoroughly brutalized by relatively modest encounters.&nbsp; This was at a public event though, and one week a player with a more optimized character, a variant human in heavy armor, sat in, and with that character acting as a damage sink, the combats went more according to their nominal ratings.&nbsp; <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink&nbsp; &nbsp; ;)"&nbsp; data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> Relative character power can be a boon or bane, depending.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Tony Vargas, post: 7400123, member: 996"] I find the two often go hand-in-hand. If I have a good, interesting, nuanced concept, there'll be a lot more opportunity to optimize it in an interesting, broadly effective way. If you just go by some absolute optimization to a specific goal (DPR or whatever), you end up with a one-trick pony who's trick eventually lets you down. Nod. It's a way of coping. It can snowball, a tad. As you boost encounters their exp value rises and the PCs gain in power faster. Of course, power is relative in another sense, too, relative power among the PCs. One optimonster of a character can ruin the campaign for a few players less inclined that way. I've gotten a mix over the years. The group I ran for last night had two players who have optimized for damage, another that's more generally optimized, two who are more concept-driven and the last two just kinda ineptly thrown together (one of them /played/ ineptly, as well). Had I been running 3.5, it'd've been an ongoing trainwreck for the last year or two, with anything remotely challenging to the first three leaving the remaining four sidelined or messily dead. Conversely, another group I ran for a while back was uniformly not-so-optimized (some cool concepts though, that were fun to RP). The first part of the adventure was a tad grueling and they were thoroughly brutalized by relatively modest encounters. This was at a public event though, and one week a player with a more optimized character, a variant human in heavy armor, sat in, and with that character acting as a damage sink, the combats went more according to their nominal ratings. ;) Relative character power can be a boon or bane, depending. [/QUOTE]

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