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Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 6703883" data-attributes="member: 71699">WotC have said to retrieve anything important to us. For me an important statement from the WotC boards is this one by Tempest Stormwind."Optimising is not necessarily incompatible with roleplaying."Note that "not necessarily" doesn't mean "never". After walking barefoot along a path of broken flint I arrived at an observation on limitations."If you apply criteria that filter characters on some bases, the least strict criterion will delimit the largest subset and the most strict criterion will delimit the smallest subset."Comparing subsets, there can arise a circumstance where a focus upon one (optimising or roleplaying) necessarily will be (within that circumstance) incompatible with the other. (That can be demonstrated by working through some subsets and their intersections, or lack thereof.)At the time I tackled this problem WotC were running a sub-forum called Character Optimization. The offered an express definition of optimising that many players seemed to embrace, which was "Want to eke every mechanical benefit out of your character as possible? Is Min/Max your middle name? Or just design a character based on a loophole you've discovered! Bounce your ideas off the learned members of the character optimization forum." In particular, min/max is a concept from game theory and wargaming with an unmistakable intent to obtain the greatest economic or mechanical utility - the biggest numbers; the biggest mechanical leverage on the game.A great many people argued with me that optimising was essentially whatever you made of it. You could optimise to be the guy who does neither particularly good nor bad damage with a weak weapon choice and a hat. I still feel that line to be rather specious. On the other hand, they also brought into sight that an intent to roleplay can also be limiting. If you will only play emo elves using twin shortswords, while wearing a hat, then that too is limiting.Stormwind's fallacy is called that in reference to false dichotomies. The reason that troubled me is that there can logically exist circumstances in which optimising and roleplaying necessarily are (within that circumstance) dichotomous. And if your definition of optimising is the one that WotC were thinking about when they created that sub-forum, it could easily be the case that your optimising criterion will form your strictest limit. I don't know if many of my detractors have read Borges Library of Babel but given the definition of optimising that WotC were using it seems likely to me that of all the books listing 5th edition characters in that library, the greater number will be roleplayable and the smaller optimised. In part because most optimised characters will also be roleplayable, while a great many roleplayable characters won't be optimised (by that definition). The counter is to point out that a great many also won't be emo elves. So bear that in mind. The essential point is to be open minded and to resist assuming things are necessarily dichotomous when they are only dichotomous in some circumstances.</blockquote>

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