[3.5, Sometimes Any] Fun vs. Efficiency

[Endarire]

One of my friends thrives on spontaneity. He doesn't know much about the rules, despite playing for years, and measures his fun in the silliness he can do and the chaos he can wreak.

I'm an optimizer at heart. It's in my family. I've been studying third edition's rules since 3.0 was hot off the presses at GenCon 2000. I view optimization for efficiency as fun and necessary. I hate making suboptimal choices, and my self-scorn is far more than any other's when it comes to optimization.

My friend views fun and efficiency as competing factors. I had considered this before, but never seriously. I occasionally lamented that an interesting ability wasn't mechanically viable, or that I was stuck spamming efficient effects in place of variety.

This doesn't consider the amount of system knowledge needed to make many concepts mechanically viable in 3.5.

How compatible are fun and efficiency in tabletop games? What can GMs and game makers do to merge these more?

[CycloneJoker]

I, personally, cannot concentrate at a game unless I've put serious work int my character, mechanically. So I'd say both are required for a game. I also have a bad habit of accidentally going super-optimize on my group by accident, I just get so caught up in the character and design, so I may not be the best person to talk about this.

[tuesdayscoming]

This is a hugely subjective question. There are players who really couldn't care less about optimization, who feel bogged down by the rules and think that spending time becoming intimately acquainted with splatbooks x, y, and z is just too tedious to seriously consider. There are other players (myself very much included) who will look back on a given session's combats and lament how unoptimal a given choice was, and will labor to improve their own behavioral patterns. These two players get a kick out of very, very different things in the game, and I fear that there's really not a way to find a perfect medium between the two.

From my own (admittedly biased) perspective, though, I think that it's easier to get an optimizer to enjoy roleplay than it is to get a roleplayer to enjoy optimization.