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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gradine" data-source="post: 7059878" data-attributes="member: 57112">I'll chime in and say I'm definitely in the "power-gaming isn't a problem unless someone makes it a problem" camp, but I think that if someone makes it a problem it then becomes a legitimate issue. A DM who doesn't like having to re-balance of their encounters has maybe less of a leg to stand on than a player who is tired of their PC getting out-classed by another, but in both cases the play style is legitimately getting in the way of a player's engagement with fun (and I include the DM as a "player" in this particular sense). Of course, what's going on here isn't that somebody is playing the game wrong, rather, the issue is that the play aesthetics of the group may be incompatible. When your options for games/players are many, this is easily resolved by simply finding a new game that better suits your play style. When options are limited, the work becomes finding a way to run the game that still allows everyone to pursue their own personal aesthetics, which is clearly much more difficult work, but certainly not outside the realm of possibility.That said, I am most definitely not in the "as long as all the players do it" camp. I can certainly think of scenarios where one PC out-shining others will be a problem for the other players; I've both run and played in games where one PC out-shined others and nobody so much as batted an eyelash over it. Our group had one definite powergamer, a Challenge-seeker through and through; the rest of us were so wrapped up in Narrative and Expression (and to a slightly lesser extent Discovery) that none of us were really building our characters with Challenge much in mind... it was actually to our benefit to have someone along who could easily handle the combat encounters. Hell, one of my friends was playing a grappling Fighter/Reaping Mauler, a build I once got reamed out for suggesting on the RPG Stack Exchange (despite the fact that he once choked an owlbear to death. Seemed plenty effective. to me :shrug: )This is what I mean, by the way, when I say D&D as a game tends to favor Challenge over all the other Aesthetics of Play. Nobody cares that much when a PC "outshines" the rest of the party... unless it happens in combat. It never seems to bother anybody when the party face (who always seems to be the same player or players; almost as if they were strong Expression-seekers) dominates social encounters; other when the skill-monkey dominates stealth segments or encounters with traps (and sometimes a Challenge-seeker focuses on challenges outside combat also). D&D divides every possible aspect of gameplay into niches and makes each niche solvable by a single PC... except for combat, where suddenly everyone is supposed to contribute equally. Moving beyond D&D and D&D-esque games you don't really see this happening; combat is just one more niche a character can either excel at or not have much to contribute to it at all. All it takes is rejecting the notion that all characters are supposed to contribute equally to combat to create a table where one PC can out-shine the others in that particular aspect of the game without causing any sort of friction or tension at all.FWIW, my main issue with powergamers has nothing to do with the actual gameplay itself and more to do with how they engage with the community; most optimizers are more than happy to share their considerable game system knowledge with those who ask, but there is a tendency for a handful of bad apples who insist their style of play is the only right way to play, and shout down or ridicule players who select "suboptimal" or "trap" character options because that's how they see their character developing. Of course, there are bad apples in every bunch; the flip side has its fair share of "role-play not roll-play" zealots who shout down any attempt to gain game mastery over, well, the game. I've just tended the find the former group more commonly in online gaming communities than the latter.But at the actual table? Never seen either to be much of an issue at all. Even when in "mixed" company, for lack of a better term.</blockquote>

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