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<blockquote data-quote="ruleslawyer" data-source="post: 2910636" data-attributes="member: 1757">librarius_arcana: You keep asserting that [x] is the One True Purpose of D&amp;D without anything to back it up, and, on top of that, suggest that players should intentionally gimp their characters in order to conform to said true purpose. I emphatically disagree. Making optimal decisions is a fundamental aspect of playing any game; heck, it's a part of basic economic rationale. In D&amp;D, many of those decisions have to do with the appropriate roleplay, but many of them have to do with character design, since most mechanical gameplay other than character design is a product of chance (the roll of the dice). Making sub-optimal decisions &quot;because I'm roleplaying!&quot; is an ostentation that seems rather suspect to me. I don't like people who constantly try to break the system, because they eventually will and it tends to lead to bad player-DM interaction. I don't like people whose characters are mere sets of numbers with no personality, because that's just... well, boring. But I also think that, to paraphrase Felon(?), this sort of behavior is orthagonal to character optimization; it's not immediately correlated. As shilsen said, perhaps my greatest concern as a DM is that one player is simply so much better at optimizing his character that it starts to skew the survivability of the party. It's not much fun for anyone when one PC can do everything better than everyone else, or when an encounter strong enough to challenge one PC is likely to wipe out half the other PCs.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="ruleslawyer, post: 2910636, member: 1757"] librarius_arcana: You keep asserting that [x] is the One True Purpose of D&D without anything to back it up, and, on top of that, suggest that players should intentionally gimp their characters in order to conform to said true purpose. I emphatically disagree. Making optimal decisions is a fundamental aspect of playing any game; heck, it's a part of basic economic rationale. In D&D, many of those decisions have to do with the appropriate roleplay, but many of them have to do with character design, since most mechanical gameplay other than character design is a product of chance (the roll of the dice). Making sub-optimal decisions "because I'm roleplaying!" is an ostentation that seems rather suspect to me. I don't like people who constantly try to break the system, because they eventually will and it tends to lead to bad player-DM interaction. I don't like people whose characters are mere sets of numbers with no personality, because that's just... well, boring. But I also think that, to paraphrase Felon(?), this sort of behavior is orthagonal to character optimization; it's not immediately correlated. As shilsen said, perhaps my greatest concern as a DM is that one player is simply so much better at optimizing his character that it starts to skew the survivability of the party. It's not much fun for anyone when one PC can do everything better than everyone else, or when an encounter strong enough to challenge one PC is likely to wipe out half the other PCs. [/QUOTE]

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