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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kenada" data-source="post: 8649960" data-attributes="member: 70468">Well, yeah. Winning is fun. I just don’t see the same dynamic. His two big examples were the PvP honor grind, which was terrible regardless, and the raiding scene. The thing I remember from raiding in WoW is a lot of people were really into “the meta”, but they sucked at the game. It was a shibboleth. They would have been much better off learning not to be bad. I swear, our MT gemmed avoidance in early Mists of Pandaria because that was the meta at the time, but he died all the freaking time. If he had used hybrid gems (health/avoidance), he wouldn’t have died, and we would have made better progress, but that wasn’t optimal. (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ But I digress.The closest analogue I see in the tabletop RPG space is 3e optimization culture. I had a player like that once. He was very concerned about whether things were optimal or how people were being “punished” because of some tortured logic. I think he was trying to go for a telekinesis build where he got to launch a bunch of large objects. I doubt it would have really mattered if he hadn’t rage quit towards the end of book 1 of Kingmaker. It seems 5e has a similar culture, but I think there’s also a lot of people into customization for OC purposes (and why it seems like the anniversary edition is getting feat chains and background feats to help people give mechanical teeth to their concepts). I’m less familiar with 5e optimization culture, but my impression from running the game is the tools it gives you are nearly useless regardless.Isn’t one solution not to worry? It’s a sandbox, so it should make sense that things aren’t necessarily balanced against the PCs’ capabilities. It doesn’t matter how optimized a character is if they’re faced a problem that can’t be killed to death.This sounds like having wildly divergent priorities and expectations clashing at the table. The audience for 5e is so incredibly broad and with so many different priorities. I don’t know what would be a good approach for filtering for those with a compatible subset of priorities. (I also expect a lot of people who would be more inclined to what you are doing are looking for OSR games rather than trying to do it in 5e, so they select themselves out of the pool.)To be fair, D&D doesn’t do much to enable dramatic games. It requires a concerned effort by the entire group to make it happen. There are other games that do a better job of that (though maybe not so much if one wants to play through a curated story rather than to discover it through play).Is that gamer analysis or geek analysis? Seems like more of the latter to me.Yeah, that sucks. I don’t think those are all optimizers causing problems (I would bet some are OC players who don’t like constraints on their concepts), but there are also some pretty bad players. I would consider the last three examples as the kind of players I wouldn’t want.Sure, it can reach a point where it’s disruptive. My threshold for that is pretty high, but I also don’t put a lot of focus on combat.I think that can be true, but it is also true that they don’t all mix at the same table. There are a number of playstyles that will not have fun at my table, and I am unapologetic about that.These are all reasons why I would not use 5e for that kind of game. There’s a lot of stuff built into the system that negates exploration-based gameplay. One can try to fix it, but then you have to convince people looking for a 5e game to play 5e-but-different.I think people are entitled to run the games they want to run, but why run a game where a lot of people you’re going to be running for will want something different from it than what you’re offering?</blockquote>

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