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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pauper" data-source="post: 6706374" data-attributes="member: 17607">Man, we're doing this again. I'll point out two things that I feel are highly relevant to the discussion, and ideally point out why the discussion should end.First, based on the formulation of the Stormwind Fallacy, there should be a corollary -- that roleplaying is not necessarily incompatible with optimizing. And at that highly vague, weasel-word filled level, that's probably true. The reality is, though, as already pointed out by others, in any game with an optimizer, character options that are primarily role-playing oriented are disincentivized. Eventually, the wizard will be able to do everything the rogue can do, some of them better (knock spell, anyone?), and still have all his special wizardy stuff to boot. Unless the rogue starts optimizing, he can't keep any aspect of his character to himself, so he either submits to becoming a reluctant optimizer or he stops playing. (Thus, my frequent assertion that optimizing drives out all other styles of playing RPGs.) So there is no corollary to the Stormwind Fallacy, which makes the statement itself either false or a paradox, neither of which suggests it should be observed as a truthful statement.If you're going to argue that this is a 'jerk player' problem, then you're arguing that all optimizers are jerks -- I'm not sure people realize the implications of this argument, and if they did, the argument would stop.Second, it's interesting to note that every time someone comes up with an example of an optimizer ruining a game, or making life unbearable for other players, or some other clearly axiomatic observation coming from actual game experience, the folks arguing the Stormwind Fallacy try redefining what 'optimizing' is to avoid the assertion. They engage in 'no true Scotsman' ('a real optimizer will pull back when he realizes he's about to break the game', despite no optimizer in my own experience ever doing so), or definitional retreat ('you can optimize in ways that don't have anything to do with combat effectiveness', ignoring that all optimizer builds look to the ability to defeat combat encounters, the most common kind of encounter, as the measure of their own effectiveness), or the argumentum ad misericordiam ('but optimizers just want to play the game!', ignoring that they want to play it by the rules as they interpret them, regardless of the harm it does to other players or the game itself).Folks who assert that optimization is an inferior style of play don't need to resort to these kinds of logical tricks -- pretty much every definition of a role-playing game ever offered makes it clear that role-playing as an activity, taking on the role of a character and making decisions as that character would, is either the method, the goal, or both. It is *what you do* in an RPG, and doing something else means you're not actually playing an RPG -- you're playing a tabletop adventure game where the goal is to kill as many mooks as possible, or an online game where the goal is to acquire the best loot.Insofar as the Stormwind Fallacy can be interpreted to mean, "Someone who always plays a character who has to be the best in the world at what he does is still role-playing," then the Stormwind Fallacy is not itself wrong -- but it's no more a guide to good role-playing than is the advice, "Always be Batman." In that sense, it doesn't have to be wrong to be irrelevant.</blockquote>

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