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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pming" data-source="post: 6538692" data-attributes="member: 45197">Hiya! I didn't read the whole 12+ pages, but did some quick skimming. No matter how you slice it, here's my 2¢. First, I always look at the name of the Feat (so far; our next campaign isn't going to use them, and the current one may even nix them retroactively...but that's neither here nor there). The Feat is called "Polearm Mastery". So, that means, as far as I am concerned, that the benefits of the Feat are only applied when actually using the Polearm. Casting a spell is not using the polearm...and therefor would not be allowed in my game. You have "Polearm Mastery", not "Polarm-Spellcasting Mastery". With this basis for interpretation, all of us are stomaching the whole Feat thing better. Second, I totally respect power-gamer/optimizer's right to play the game however they want. However, and this is talking from experience with some pretty major optimizer's over an array of different RPG's over the decades I've been DM'ing, optimizing is an "all or nothing" thing. That is, everyone at the table has to be doing it and into it. If even one person at the table doesn't want to or doesn't like it, it will end in tears. I have one player who enjoys "optimized-specialty". He enjoys creating one-trick-ponies, basically. He doesn't care how effective (overall) his character is most of the time, as long as he can do the "cool stuff" he built his character to do at least once in a session, he's happy. I have two other players who could give an osquips behind about optimizing. We have, mostly in the past, had some, uh, "sour feels" arise over the course of a campaign. The Opt'ed PC was mostly useless, most of the time...but when he could, for example, fight in his element (whatever he was optimized for), ALL the other PC's were mostly useless. Over time, the optimizer has really, really tonned down his optimization to the point I don't really consider him a powergamer/optimizer anymore (unless he's in one of his moods again... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> ).Anyway...sorry for the rambling. The point is this: To the OP, don't decide by yourself. Make it a group thing. Explain that if this is allowed to fly, then everyone should optimize their characters and he (the DM) will do likewise for specific NPC's and monsters. If anyone in the group says "I don't really like doing that...I'd rather have a more balanced character", then you should enforce a more "if it smells like limburger or havaarti, then no...you can't". Powergamers and non-powergamers simply do not mix, I'm sorry to say. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f641.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":(" title="Frown    :("  data-smilie="3"data-shortname=":(" /> ^_^Paul L. Ming</blockquote>

Verification