Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8680191" data-attributes="member: 6790260">When one only speaks of extremes, extremes are all that enter the conversation. When those extremes involve people, that means only extremists are discussed.The vast majority of discussion regarding optimization takes one of two forms:1. If you aren't hardcore optimizing, you're actively hurting your group, and that makes you a bad player.2. If you are optimizing to any degree, you don't care about roleplay or fun, and that makes you a bad player.And a significant reason this is the case is that almost everyone who talks about optimizing only refers to extremist players: those who actively anti-optimize because apparently being physically incapable of participating in anything the party does is True Roleplaying, or those who treat the game purely as though it were a calculus question trying to find the global maximum of a multivariable function without any color or charm or life. Even situations like this one, where there was no intent to do this, still lead to it because all we talk about are the extremes.Yes, extremes are bad. This is a truism. It doesn't add anything to the conversation. What is actually productive is trying to understand why folks optimize, or try to avoid optimizing; trying to find ways that folks with disparate interests can play at the same table and get the experience they desire; trying to break down places where the rules themselves provide perverse incentives or foster behavior some find undesirable, and discussing tools to address them.Instead, we get thread after thread after thread after thread of people viewing the world as hyperreductionist black-and-white, where either you're a filthy powergaming munchkin rollplayer (as opposed to a serious, mature, invested roleplayer) or you're a deadweight disruptive "but it's what my character would do!" non-player (as opposed to a serious, mature, invested player.)</blockquote>

Verification