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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 6075742" data-attributes="member: 6696971">Very much a bridge too far with this slippery slope and excluded middle.  Just because you make sensible build decisions and sensible spell-load decisions when you're playing a brilliant generalist wizard (I don't know anything more of any character traits, instincts, background or thematic interests beyond "brilliant" and "generalist" and "wizard" so I'll stay with that) doesn't mean that you're going to never play any other class, build, or spell-load.  It just means that you perceive there to be (and there may well be) a powerful class with an optimized, sensible default.  Nothing more.  You can't firmly extrapolate more than that.  While never playing one, I've seen my fair share in play (and had to deal with them as GM) to know that this much is inarguable. You're extending the generalities of adaptation and the malleable relationship between an organism and its habitat far, far beyond its intended meaning here.  Further, I'm using irrationality in the standard use here: an action taken or opinion given through inadequate application of reason, emotional distress, or cognitive deficiency...and I'm applying it to adventurers who live in life and death struggles...and must adapt to a malleable relationship between themselves and their habitat - eg. an aggressive one that wishes them dead.  I'm not talking about the benign decisions of "do I get a sandwich or salad for lunch" or "do I post another post on this internet message board or take 5 and watch opening hockey night."  When an adventurer does something in the game (by proxy of the player's decision-making) and is a decision that is clearly foolish or horribly defective from a risk assessment perspective (with some power of predictability...as an adventurer in an aggressive environment that wants you dead), it is either:1 - the player metagaming and wanting to "make things interesting" or "shake it up"2 - the player metagaming and doing something thematically compelling or character/genre-relevant3 - the player metagaming and playing in a system that rewards metagame tokens/points as incentive for such behavior4 - a product of inadequate application of reasonLet's work with the last as the other have baggage which is unrelated to the discussion.  For a wizard (whose career is predicated upon ingenuity, reason, guile and technical study) to have carved out a lengthy existence (by level 10) as an "adventurer who inhabits an environment that aggressively wants them dead" and to have somehow lived out those long, dangerous years circumventing the process of natural selection erstwhile willfully attempting to not adapt (eg have willfully bad/indifferent risk assessment and accompanying indifferent/bad/suicidal adaptive strategies) strikes me as a bit difficult to grasp.  "Foolish, irrational, impetuous, cognitively deficient" strikes me as the outlier amongst the wizardly types.  A D&D character is not Indiana Jones.  Indy is protected by plot immunity, not plot armor (HPs).  His bad decisions are exclusively the purview of the author leveraging 1 and 2 above...and having absolute authority over the outcomes.</blockquote>

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