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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 9185460" data-attributes="member: 996">Sorry, not my intent.  The point was exactly that there's an incentive to make the best possible choices whether the game is cooperative or competitive, the difference is that bad choices, in a competitive game, will lead to you losing, which is to bad for you, but fine for the player that wins - depending on the player, it might be annoying due to the lack of challenge, or not, if it's just all about winning for them.  Avoiding bad choices is part of the challenge, and making better choices than the next player is part of what winning is measuring.  In a cooperative game, bad choices hurt all the players, and making a better choice than the next guy is not necessarily going to help you win, while everyone making the best choices will help you win.  In an RPG, there's a whole extra layer beyond winning/losing - there's genre emulation, character concepts, storytelling, &c - that needs to coexist productively with the game elements.  Balancing the game elements facilitates that.  Obvious examples abound in D&D, you don't go dumping both STR and DEX with a fighter, for instance, which an entirely randomized chargen might do.  Dumping INT might be less destructive to a wizard guild, if you avoid spells that require attacks or saves, but a randomized chargen wouldn't avoid them.   <img class="smilie smilie--emoji" alt="🤷‍♂️" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f937-2642.png" title="Man shrugging    :man_shrugging:" data-shortname=":man_shrugging:" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" />Designing a balanced game certainly doesn't mean removing complexity, and optimization is always going to be possible... balance aspires to keeping choices viable, if done well, optimization ekes out a modest advantage that doesn't obviate the contributions of others.  (Optimization isn't the enemy of balance, it just leverages imbalance - in a very imbalanced game, optimization can just stop being engaging because it's too easy to pull too far ahead of both other players and the challenges the game presents. )Removing choice in the name of balance is, like, really missing the point.  You can cope with imbalance by formally or informally setting aside the bad choices.  But it's not really an improvement, just an acknowledgment.  I have certainly had experiences like that.  It's interesting that there's a genre of games that emphasize it.</blockquote>

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