What route did you take to gain your system mastery?

[Coidzor]

I mean, I read the handbooks and see what perspectives others have on various things by following the various age-old issues and the advice of the week threads.

When I'm not too susceptible to boredom, I sometimes even crack open a sourcebook whose material I've been skimming through and give it a dedicated read-through.

And yet, while I know certainly know things, and I play fairly regularly, it doesn't really feel like I'm developing a real feel for the system so much as being aware of so many disparate and often incongruous facts. :smallconfused:

Am I doing something wrong or is there's some alternate path/other thing that I'm completely missing out on?

What've you done? How do you feel about yours?

[DeAnno]

Experience. I played in a campaign from 2-23 which became more and more optimized (and more and more ridiculous) as it went on. The DM set the challenge bar high, the players reacted by spending time researching and optimizing, and the DM proceeded to set the challenge bar higher, optimizing our enemies more tightly for their CR. Retraining rules were pretty fluid, so things "developed".

Of course, over the course of all this, hours upon days upon weeks were spent combing through sourcebooks, looking for one advantageous spell or feat combination or PRC class level or whatnot. Strangely enough, the charop boards were mainly a secondary source of information; most of the real build cornerstones were self made.

The only territory that remained hands-off by gentleman's agreement was Epic Spellcasting, just because none of us wanted to delve too deeply in what was essentially a brand new system by that point. The final battle culminated in us being wiped by a Cheater of Mystra, an Epic Counterspeller build, and some various other atrocities (though I think we might've won if we weren't outnumbered 5 against 4).

[Lateral]

Well, I learned the system from a combination of casually reading over the SRD and reading OOTS comics. (I had prior knowledge of 4e, so that helped a little.) System mastery came mostly from reading RP-forum threads and handbooks, and being linked to or seeing things mentioned that helped me learn about optimization (e.g. links to the Tier system, passing mentions about Pun-Pun and other CO exercises, a thread about that damned crab, and the like).

[Metahuman1]

Combination Play, asking questions on boards, and reading forums.

And I still freaking ask questions even though I've been doing this for years, so don't worry. Heck, I've yet to even figure out what Books I need to get my hands on to learn Psionics and Incarnum, and I only got the hang of the Tome of Battle not that long ago.

[Lateral]

And I still freaking ask questions even though I've been doing this for years, so don't worry. Heck, I've yet to even figure out what Books I need to get my hands on to learn Psionics and Incarnum, and I only got the hang of the Tome of Battle not that long ago.

All you need for psionics is the online SRD (http://www.d20srd.org/) and a look at Psyren's signature. All you need for Incarnum is Magic of Incarnum.

[sreservoir]

by making many many many builds that seek to break the game more than druid 20. then try making them even better.

[Cespenar]

Not that I claim much system mastery, but I learned what I learned primarily from browsing this subforum. Unintentionally too.

[jiriku]

I've learned more or less like you, but I also DM about 70% of the time in my group. Being the DM gives me a lot of opportunities to try different things and see what works and what doesn't. So I guess it's a combination of study, practice, and experience. Much like anything in life.

[Safety Sword]

I've learned more or less like you, but I also DM about 70% of the time in my group. Being the DM gives me a lot of opportunities to try different things and see what works and what doesn't. So I guess it's a combination of study, practice, and experience. Much like anything in life.

Words of wisdom, right there.

Being DM most of the time does tend to make you get "in front" of the curve when it comes to knowing the system.

I don't claim mastery mind you. I also only introduce content from various splats after I'm familiar enough with it that it won't break all of my encounters and stories.

TLDR; What jiriku said.

[Alleran]

I trundled along for a while with a fairly unoptimised mage when 3.0 rolled around, and more or less kept it up for many years. I did pick up an idea of "this is much more powerful than this" every now and again, but I didn't go out of my way to use any of it, by gentleman's agreement. I was more interested in the settings anyway, so having a blasty-wizard or happy-healbot cleric (though it was usually a combo divine/arcane one) along was just shrugged off.

Then somebody at a session said that Mystra cheats in D&D.

I looked up the Initiate of Mystra feat.

And then I jumped off the slippery slope.

(In all fairness, the druid player did it first when he wanted a dinosaur companion after a Jurassic Park marathon, picked a Fleshraker, and took Natural Spell.)

[Wings of Peace]

I've had a fairly mixed history. Back in the 339 days I read the handbooks and the numerous threads about weird tricks people were discovering (those were exciting times). After a bit of time on 339 I started reading the GiantITP threads and the Brilliant Gameologist threads before eventually hanging around the Test of Spite crew (never participated, just listened and chatted about build ideas). I wouldn't say it's given me a mastery but it's definitely what taught me a lot of the weird angles I approach my optimization from.

[molten_dragon]

My system mastery comes from three sources.

First is experience. I've averaged playing once a week or more since 3.0 came out. I've played a pretty decent number of characters myself across a variety of levels, and seen many more in action.

Second is reading forum threads. I spend a couple hours a week probably surfing here (and before I came here it was the WotC forums just checking out threads. I learn quite a bit.

Third, I read sourcebooks while I'm on the crapper.

[vampire2948]

Experience and reading these forums. A tiny amount of it came from reading through sourcebooks.

This forum is bad for me :smallamused: Being the root of my powergaming knowledge.

[Zylle]

I wouldn't call myself a "master" of 3.5 knowledge by any means, but I learned a lot when I DM-ed my first campaign, purely because my group would constantly come to me and ask "Can I take this feat?" or "Can I have this item?" thereby forcing me to read up on more sourcebooks. :smallwink:

[Olo Demonsbane]

I started like you, could make a fairly decent build, but I really didn't know how to fit new things together.

Then, two things happened simultaneously: I became my group's DM and I got involved in the Test of Spite.

The Test of Spite really pushed the boundaries of my Practical Optimization skills. I began with a Dungeoncrashing charger that, when I look back on him, looks fairly pathetic. Over time, I discovered several new exploits and, in general, began to think on a more optimized level.

Being a DM forced me to think tactically. My group has highly varying levels of optimization, and if I presented an encounter that would challenge the powergamers on its own merits, the ones with less system mastery would die horribly. So I started experimenting with different strategies, different monsters. Took me a while, but now I can use the same encounter and challenge either a party of optimizers or a less-skilled party.

[NikitaDarkstar]

Bugging the crap out of my first D&D DM with ALOT of stupid questions and not reading the PBH nearly as well as I should have. (Stupid questions cause I was fresh out of a D100 system... and didn't have a pbh copy...) Then just reading, playing and experimenting, but I still have huge gaps in my knowledge, but ohwell.

[Jayh]

My group also tends to specialize by favored class. I like wizards, some of our guys like druids, sorcs, or rogues. So if one of us are thinking about branching out, we talk to the specialist in that class.

[Claudius Maximus]

Reading every book cover-to-cover as soon as they came out is what gave me my wide base of knowledge for 3.5. When I came to the forums and saw all the discussions about optimization my response was mostly "oh yeah, I see how that would work."

Then I became a judge for the Test of Spite and had to personally figure out every detail of every trick in the contest, and debunk a few more that weren't technically legal. This is when my knowledge of the game become truly encyclopedic. Builds with less than 15 sources were practically a minority.

[Ryu_Bonkosi]

I played in a game where the DM had little to no idea what the hell he was doing. I was playing my first character ever, a half-elf rogue, and I felt a little useless after session 2 when he stopped throwing traps and diplomatic encounters at us in favor of telling a story based around his epic level npcs that we were glorified messengers for. I failed in combat, yet when the occasional scouting mission came up I was all for it, yet he always made it blow up in my face in the name of story. After the game ended I decided to look into making a character that wouldn't be useless in a situation that wasn't tailored for him (aka not a tier 4). During this time I found GitP and started to browse through the forums and read through the players handbook and realised that the DM had no concept on how 3.5 works. So I started to read Iron Chef and browse through the CharOP threads to see what combinations worked and what fell flat on its face. After I had an idea of what was good and what wasn't, I started to build character after character until I had an entire folder full of Word and Excel documents that detail the level progression of a given character from level 1-20. Either through some combination of odd rules or broken loop holes I made characters that power through most anything as long as the systems rules are in place.

tl;dr: My first DM was a joke, so I learned to optimise, abuse loop holes and read lots of splat books.

[noparlpf]

My first campaign lasted a semester, meeting most Saturday nights. The DM had played for a while but was new as a DM, and the other players were all newbies too. It went from 6th to 16th, I think. It ended with me having only the vaguest idea of how things worked; the DM made no attempt to make sure his players knew what they were doing.
So then over winter break, I read most of the PHB and half of the DMG, and the next semester I played in one campaign and a lot of one-shots and got a much better feel for the game.
So I'd say that although I learn best by doing, reading large portions of sourcebooks repeatedly definitely helped.

[Zonugal]

For five years I read threads on the old Character Optimization forum at the WOTC for two hours every day.

So much time, so much...

[Quietus]

Vicarious gaming. All my friends live somewhere far from where I am, and when we do get together, they tend to stick to the books they have and know. I love to read, so in lieu of gaming, I read all sorts of Complete books and such. My gamer friends fell behind, slightly, and when I noticed powerful things, I mentioned it to them. The Complete books became known as "Complete Cheater", partly because they only heard what I was telling them.

So I started reading these forums even more voraciously than I had been. I was lacking that stimulus that I needed, the sheer volume of information that I felt SHOULD be available to me, but was completely blocked by everyone I played with. Combined with a near-photographic memory for all things gaming, this naturally turned into me becoming every more well versed in the ways of D&D and optimization, until I can now quote most popular choices without looking them up. I've since apologized to my previous groups for misrepresenting the Complete books, but bringing them into the field of allowed material is a slow, uphill battle.

[Yuki Akuma]

I have no system mastery.

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