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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Man in the Funny Hat" data-source="post: 5647912" data-attributes="member: 32740">There's a difference between mere competence and excelling at specific, key tasks.  I don't think most people have an issue with competence.  It's when characters are developed to skew well beyond mere competence that hackles are raised. Whose baseline?  The DM?  The individual player?  The rest of the players at the table?  Why should players at the table be required to to "play up" to the level of time and effort to create a character when they don't NEED to or want to?  This sort of argument does work both ways and comes down largely to differing preferences in style of play. I'd say that even in the simplest versions of D&D a certain amount of optimization is normal because it IS a game, and not JUST a roleplaying exercise. The DM is the one who has to arrange all the challenges for any given group of characters.  The closer the characters are to "average" competence or even INcompetence the easier his job is.  The higher the degree of optimization the more difficult his job is so it's natural for a DM to fight against that to one degree or another.  It also naturally focuses not just the DM's attention but the point of the game upon mechanics.  For a DM and/or other players who do NOT wish to obsess about mechanics and for whom a completely unoptimized character can get them what THEY want from the game it can feel like an impostion even if it isn't. The Stormwind Fallacy is that NEITHER focus (roleplaying versus optimization) is necessarily exclusive of the other.  Don't fall into the trap of assuming that because someone illogically believes that your highly optimized character is a bad thing that their LESS optimized character is in turn a bad thing.  Granted they may not mix well in the same party where players clearly have different focuses upon what THEY want from the game, but no matter how much better you think the party/game will work if everybody put more effort into optimizing their characters that is still a choice they are ALLOWED for their character unless the DM has set some other prerequisites for participation.</blockquote>

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