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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5846062" data-attributes="member: 4937">That's fair.  I'm perfectly happy to recognize a difference between acceptable and appropriate character optimization and extreme cases which break the game.  I simply didn't have any wildly accepted and recognized language for making that distinction, and was hoping that people would understand that by 'character optimization' I meant the sort of cases referred to by the original poster - namely being able to inflict hundreds or thousands of points of damage in a single turn (before or well before the high epic levels) so that you could easily defeat a CR equivalent foe in a single action.And for the bazillionth time, I know that and never said that it was.  However, also for the bazillionth time, the fact that 3e core is not well balanced is not a defense of adding in other unbalanced things.  Quoting myself: There are two separate problems here.  First, we'd like to give non-casters more non-broken options.   Secondly, we'd like to have optimized spellcasters be less broken.  Neither problem is addressed by giving broken options to non-spellcasters.  True.Huh?  That is abusing the definition of a 'gentlemen's agreement'.  In context, a gentlemen's agreement is an agreement to not do certain things which are permitted by the rules for the sake of greater enjoyment.   I have no such agreement.   Players are free to min-max within the constraints of what is available to their heart's content, and I have 3 (of my 6) players actively doing so - to the overall greater health of the game IMO.   So yes, the player's agree to play by my rules, but that's hardly what is usually meant by a gentlemen's agreement.  True, but irrelevant.  Since its only things that violate the first law that bother me, and not the act of optimizing within a system itself, what you optimize for isn't something I worry about.   I identify the cases I'm concerned about explicitly - either a character that is both broadly skilled and exceptionally so (a typical god wizard, or CoDzilla) and a character that is so good at something that they become Johnny One Trick.   Simply making a character skilled at something doesn't violate the first law, and your further discussion seems to indicate that you are still talking about the first point that you raised.  Because its addressing a position I don't actually have, I can agree with a lot of it without harm to the position I do have.I'm not aware that I did so, but if you got that from what I said, then I apologize.  I was speaking specifically of the sort of extreme character optimization spoken of by the OP.   I do not think that citing Pun-Pun as a more broken character than an optimized Hulking Hurler, diminishes the claim that the Hulking Hurler is a problem build.   Repeating myself again: - emphasis added</blockquote>

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