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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Eldritch_Lord" data-source="post: 5576931" data-attributes="member: 52073">That's an absolutely terrible test.First of all, I'm the most rules-savvy person in my gaming groups (three of them), I optimize all of my characters and help all of the new players optimize as well, and all of our games tend to be higher-powered than the norm.  By your standards, I'm sure I'd qualify as a "dirty rotten powergamer" or whatever other derogatory term you want to use (not munchkin, though, that's just a cheater).  Yet I have played a 1st-level barbarian with 3 HP before; I've also played a frontliner ranger with 6 Con, a kobold beguiler with many terrible stats the lowest of which was a 4 Wis, and several other characters that would fall under the True Roleplayer[sup]TM[/sup] umbrella, because those were the concepts I wanted to optimize.  Taking a bunch of bad rolls, building a character with them, and not rerolling doesn't make you a "real roleplayer," it just means that (A) you're a good enough player to keep that character alive and (B) you're not the type of person to whine to the DM that explicitly random character generation isn't "fair."Optimizing is not a bad thing.  Optimizers are not bad players.  Optimizers are not prevented from being roleplayers, and in fact I've found that the people most invested in the game tend to be equally good at both optimizing and roleplaying while the casual gamers tend to be equally bad at both.  Deliberately handicapping your character because you think it makes you a better roleplayer, or refusing to improve the character if given the option, doesn't mean your Super Special Snowflake character is any more fleshed-out and real, it just means that statistically speaking you'll be roleplaying them for a shorter time before they kick the bucket.Roleplaying and optimization are not opposites, and anyone who pits them against each other is really missing the point.  They're two entirely separate axes.  You can have a player who places number-crunching above all others and makes 8-Cha 10,000-damage barbarians named Bob with no personality for every game because he wants to "win."  You can have a player who comes up with five-page-long backstories for every character but whose characters die halfway through the first session of every game.  You can have a player who comes up with multiple fully-fleshed out characters complete with backstories and builds just for fun.  You can have a player who forgets his character's name and his character's attack bonus with equal frequency.Just because you run into the Bob the Barbarian players more often than the generally competent players doesn't mean that all optimizers are like that.  Heck, there's one guy in my group who comes up with lots of interesting concepts and roleplays them to the hilt, but has practically no tactical acumen or mathematical aptitude...but I don't go onto the forums and say something like "Can you explain why sword-and-board is generally worse than two-handed fighting?  If 'yes', then you're a competent gamer.  If 'no', then you're a drama queen.  It really is the test that separates the men from the boys."  That's just offensive and shortsighted; your gaming style isn't the One True Way any more than mine is.</blockquote>

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