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Message: <blockquote data-quote="hanasays" data-source="post: 4460628" data-attributes="member: 15060">A lot of it is a sense of one-upmanship, something that seems to have gotten stronger with later editions of D&D.  I started with 2nd ed.  Even the difference between that and 4th ed. of the same series, and how the focus of the game has changed, can be pretty amazing.  Character optimization has become far more important and sometimes the games just feel like the players are trying to outdo each other more than actually defeat a villain.  There's really a sense of competition between the players themselves, as opposed to earlier editions where the focus was more on cooperation (failure to cooperate generally meant you died). I'm not saying it's bad - I'm just saying it's different and how the focus of the mechanics seem to have shifted.  I'm sure that for this observation, there are 50 that someone else can provide of how they haven't changed or how they have shifted away from that. That's merely my perspective. D&D may appeal to a sub-set of gamers for whom a sense of one-upmanship is something that they want or expect from a game.  One of the reasons the last campaign was run using AD&D was because we wanted a little more freedom, and a little less focus on character optimization.  We were interested in being classic fantasy characters rather than superheros.I'm not characterizing all D&D players with my previous statement, I'm just saying that this tends to hold true for many of the groups I have played in.  Especially evil or politics-heavy campaigns where the PCs are often trying to gain an advantage or otherwise double-cross their own party members while still somehow stumbling toward a mutual goal.  On the other hand, we also approached this with a good-natured humor - it was hilarious watching our own PCs repeatedly shoot themselves in the foot. And it's not a bad thing, it's just a certain element of a game that may appeal to some people and put other people off.It can also be fun trying to come up with story reasons to explain why your PC suddenly developed a bizarre new skill, or using your PC to do absurd and unrealistic things.  I've played some over-the-top cartoony campaigns with a focus on character optimization that were hilarious because the characters were so ridiculous and overpowered that we were actually having a really hard time explaining how or why they could do the ridiculous things they were doing.  It devolved into comedic hack-and-slash and it was very fun.</blockquote>

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