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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cadence" data-source="post: 6050327" data-attributes="member: 6701124">But don't we have our understanding of physics now because we have lots of people dedicated to studying them and hundreds of years of mathematical infrastructure to bring to bear?   If we look at the historical periods most commonly associated with D&D (ancient greece to late medieval europe to pre-industrial japan) how well had things been figured out and how widely disseminated was that knowledge?  How much of it was just wrong (how many people in the US still have areas of science and medicine they discard for various reasons, even when confronted with the evidence)?   It seems like those from 500-2000 years ago trying to optimize would be trying lots of very faulty but "reasonable sounding" objective functions.In the case of combat and saves, who would be doing the studying and who would they study?   Are the mages and sages studying the underlying probability distributions of combat and trying to do challenging things, or are they developing new spells and still trying to figure out magic and the multiverse?   How many fighters of vastly different level are their out there to study if most of the world is 0-1st level?   What tools do they have to do the stuyding?  The ELO system didn't get applied to chess until the last century, and it takes lots of repeated attempts between players to get the ratings down.  Fielding metrics in baseball just seem to have gotten there, and they take video records of all the games to do well.    Judging teacher quality is still not ready for prime time according to many of the best psychometricians.  And none of those tell us how to get better at chess, fielding, or teaching in a measurable way.   And even if we know what we're supposed to do (say in terms of diet, exercise, studying, not using certain drugs that are addictive, not having our affairs on e-mail when we work for the government) how many people at the top of their game (be it college athletics or running the CIA) actually make those choices.Having a copy of the PHB with options analyzed through simulation and poring through notes on the inter-webs seems like a lot more than "a general idea of how their world works..."Is it that, or the definition of "middle ground"?    I wonder if its in the (over dichotomized) difference between picturing a character that doesn't suck and would be interesting to play and finding the feats/skills/classes that realize that picture versus finding the feat combo that makes the character a world beater and then trying to justify why it was chosen.</blockquote>

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