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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sacrosanct" data-source="post: 7288842" data-attributes="member: 15700">As a game designer, I'm here to tell you that unless I am specifically designing a game for power gamers or system mastery wizards, I do not care about that in my design.  Period.  End stop.  If I'm designing a game, I am designing around two factors:1. What is my vision of what I'd like to accomplish (really the only factor if it's just a hobby game)2. What is my target demographic and how can I reach the most people? (which is a factor if my goal is to make money and/or have the most people play it)In fact, I'll go as far as to say I will avoid trying to factor in system mastery and power gamers intentionally.  That is for two reasons.  One, because once you start down that path, they game gets a lot more complicated by necessity because your analysis becomes way more complicated.  You're devoting a ton of man hours to something that 99% of gamers won't ever encounter.  And two, games catered to system mastery or power gaming turns off a lot of other gamers, which happens to run counter to my 2nd priority above.IMO, the 5e team did it about as perfectly as you can do it.  They designed a game that can be played by the majority, and gave guidance in how to beef up things for the more power gamery type of folks.  But they did not make the game power gamery right out of the box because that would have turned away a larger group of gamers than what you would have gained.  Optimizers are and always have been a minority.  Why some people can't get that through their head is beyond me.  And since the game tells you how to beef up your games to fit your style, refusal to do so is just pure lazy, and an incredible sense of entitlement to expect them to cater to your exception rather than the majority.  I have double contempt if you're (general you) being lazy and also personally attacking the designers for not catering to your personal style (whether that be power gaming or "story mode" without challenge).So yeah. That's my opinion.  As an award winning game designer myself.  Take it FWIW, but I'd like to think my experience gives me a little insight that armchair quarterbacks who refuse to do it themselves will have.</blockquote>

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