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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pax" data-source="post: 324883" data-attributes="member: 6875">The above is absolute truth.Okay, I'll admit, I'm a min/maxer ... I love balancing and rebalancing the numbers, to see what can or can't be done, to make the at-firs-tblush ineffective, become effective.I like to wrap my hands around a system and wring the absolute maximum advantage possible out of it (I can get a Fighter-10/Duellist-10 (Sword and Fist PrC) to armor-class 80+ ... both base AND touch).In a game, I love to find (or make) a situationinwhich to make USE of the character I have carefully crafted, honed, tweaked, and refined.Does that mean I'm not also a Role Player?  Nope.  Once I've got the mechanics down, I like to put EQUAL effort into crafting, honing, tweaking, and refining a character,a persona, identity, and so on.  I then wrap this "skin" around the numbers -- sometimes taking a hammer to the numbers, to dent-in unseemly projections which clash with the "skin" -- and THEN, I have a character I want to play.I can enjoy weeks of pure social engagement, without a whiff of ocmbat.  Okay, eventually I'll get "the itch" ... but if I wanted pure social interaction for my character, I wouldn't be playing a game dealing with traipsing about after dragons, demons, the undead, and what have you.I like to know that, within my chosen theme / "schtick", my character is the best I can make him or her.  To that end, I gleefully min/max (normally I call it being a "point monkey" -- analogous to being a "grease monkey").  Other than that ... hell, man, I'm here to have fun, period.Does my being a min/maxer, even occasional pwoergamer mean I'm not a team player?  Hell no; LN is my usual alignment, actually.  And I'll gleefully help others point-monkey their characters to greater efficiency, without shifting their persona, theme, atmosphere, and so on.  I actually enjoy that, as a challenge.However, I like to plan out the entire 20-level (with ELH, lord, I dunno what I'll do, hehehe) feat and attribute-ad progression for any character I make.  My default, when making a "this might be fun", is to plan feat choices out to 10th level.  For sorcerors, I plan the feats out to 20th level, along with every spell the character will ever know.I just don't see that th two must, innately or inherently, be at odds with each other.And for the record -- I am not a product of CCGs, CRPGs, an the like.  I found EQ to be boring in the extreme; plenty of point-monkeying, plenty of hack-and-slash combat ... no RP to speak of, that I could find at least.  nor am I young, nor an inexperienced RPG gamer.I am thirty-one years of age, and have been playing various pen-and-paper RPG's for, um ... 22 to 24 years, now (I started playing "somewhere" between ages 7 and 9).  I was introduced to RPGs with 1E and Basic D&D (mostly 1E); I remember getting the old '83 WOG boxed set for my 12th birthday (and lord I wish I had taken better care of it, lol).  I also avidly play several CRPG's (the Fallout series on PC is my favorite).I still have my first-printing '89 AD&D 2d Edition PHB, and MOST of the class books and race books ever printed ( I missed some of the later ones, as I wasn't actively DMing and only buy supplements for what I'm actually playing).I played for a while in a 3E campaign, going from 1st level Sorceror, through a couple character deaths and replacements, to a Necromancer(7)/Loremaster(7), before leaving the gropup last December.Did I min/max?  Hell, yeah.  Did I let that interfere with Role playing, eithe rby others or by myself?  Hell no.  Is my tendency to min/max based on having played various CCGs or CRPGs?Nope.Not in the slightest.</blockquote>

Verification