The Stormwind Fallacy

[Ceaon]

(Look here (http://www.loremaster.org/content.php/146-The-Stormwind-Fallacy) if you haven't heard of the Stormwind Fallacy before.)

Now, I understand this fallacy, but I would like to know: even though many people can combine roleplaying and optimization, I am convinced there exists a (negative) corrolation between roleplaying behavior and optimization behavior. There are some people out there who, maybe even because they roleplay very intensely, can't/don't optimize well and vice versa.

Do any of you agree? How big would you say this corrolation is?

[Yuki Akuma]

I don't agree at all, as they're fundamentally two very different forms of creativity without much overlap.

[Mastikator]

There is a finite amount of attention and priority one person can at a given time spend on a few number of things. Two seperate things are optimization and roleplaying, these are both complex and don't overlap.

However, it's complicated because people are differently intelligent and have different amount of attention to give. Some people are well trained in roleplaying games and are able to give more of their attention to optimization than roleplaying and STILL be able to give most attention to roleplaying in their group, because they are simply more cerebral.

So yes and no. Optimizing does come at a cost of roleplaying, but it is entirely possible that you can easily afford the cost and still be beyond good enough a roleplaying.

[Cor1]

I don't agree at all, as they're fundamentally two very different forms of creativity without much overlap.

Exactly this.

I'm role-playing better when I know my character's actually good at playing its role.

[Aeryr]

In my opinion optimization and roleplay don't overlap, so if you focus on roleplaying your optimization doesn't necessarily get diminished, nor the other way around.

In my opinion you optimize before the game, when building a character sheet. Then, during the game you roleplay your character, as described by its character sheet.

So basically no, if you can roleplay really well you can roleplay really well an optimized character.

[Golden Ladybug]

I disagree completely. The ability to optimise a character and the ability to roleplay a character are two fundamentally unrelated things; A player can be a poor roleplayer, and a good optimiser. Or, they can be a good roleplayer, and a poor optimiser. However, they are not a poor roleplayer BECAUSE of their skill at optimisation, or vice versa.

Anyway, I am firmly of the opinion that being able to optimise your character goes a fair ways to making them more fun to roleplay. Its great to be able to say "My character is powerful" and they actually are :smallamused:

[Water_Bear]

In general? No, not really.

In my experience optimizers are also good roleplayers. They put a lot of effort into thinking about their character and building their character's capabilities and background. They also understand the rules and typically have knowledge about the setting which is useful.

My worst roleplayers have always been people with a poor understanding of the rules. They are usually the people who fall into Special-Snowflake syndrome the hardest, are the least effective, and get angry when the DM refuses to bail their useless character out. :smallannoyed:

The Stormwind Fallacy is called that for a reason; it's 'common sense' wisdom which doesn't hold up. Why should being able to realize a character concept within the rules make you worse at roleplaying your character concept? It doesn't, in fact it's the exact opposite.

[PersonMan]

Now, I understand this fallacy, but I would like to know: even though many people can combine roleplaying and optimization, I am convinced there exists a (negative) corrolation between roleplaying behavior and optimization behavior. There are some people out there who, maybe even because they roleplay very intensely, can't/don't optimize well and vice versa.

Do any of you agree? How big would you say this corrolation is?

There are people who can't do either very well.

I imagine that a correlation might exist, in that people with little to no interest in DnD outside of the actual sessions might not spend much time on their character outside of it but still be good enough at improv roleplaying that the character's personality doesn't suffer for it. That would be the extent of it, though.

[Malachei]

Do any of you agree? How big would you say this corrolation is?

I partly agree. I don't claim good optimizers are worse rolepayers, or vice versa, in any way. Still, if you put a lot of effort into designing a character's mechanical aspects, and try to make it as best as possible, you're investing a certain amount of time which you cannot invest otherwise. In other words, while optimizing, you're not writing compelling background stories. You can do that in extra time, and perhaps you just spend more time creating each character.

But my personal experience is that those players who care most about mechanics care a bit less about roleplaying aspects. By most I mean these players are the top 10% in terms of mechanical system mastery. In my experience, they tend to deal mostly with the things their characters are able to do (abilities), and tend to care a bit less for who their characters are (personality, background). And yes, I've seen some of the most vivid and well-developed characters created by players who had very little mechanical system mastery.

This does not imply that optimization is badwrongfun, nor does it imply that an optimizer is worse at roleplaying. But it might tell you something about where their priorities lie.

[Acanous]

If you treat it as a zero-sum game, with the idea that you only get a finite time to do both things simultaniously (Such as if you could ONLY access your sheet and materials during session) then yes, you would have to trade one for the other.

The fact is, however, that most optimization can be done away from the game table, during coffee breaks, before bed, online from work.

Roleplaying, however, needs to be done at the table.

So really, if you do all your char-op before or after session, you'll never detract from one to do the other.

Some of us, however, are hard pressed to think things up on the spot, or are not good actors, while being good at data trawling and number crunching. This kind of gamer is where the origional association took root.

[sonofzeal]

I think it's got more to do with personality types than anything else. GNS Theory is a bit controversial, but it handles this well. Someone who's very much "Gamist" will tend to optimize a lot and not RP much, whereas a "Narrativist" will tend to do the reverse. So there's a little big of truth there.

On the other hand, people who get deeply involved with the game tend to be both Gamist and Narrativist to a fair degree, or else they'll drift off to other games that handle their preferred style better. These are the sort who'll stick around the longest, so they'll likely be the ones with the greatest optimization skills, and also get heavily involved in the roleplay. These sorts of people are unlikely to sacrifice either one for the other. A complicated build just ends up providing fodder for unique roleplay, and mutability of fluff gives them a wide-open playground to work in.

That's why it's a fallacy. There's certainly people strong on one or the other, but no contradiction involved in being both.

[jackattack]

I don't think that optimization hinders roleplaying so much as it directs roleplaying through character design.

Most of the characters I want to play will be sub-optimal, because they tend to have varied backgrounds and broad skill bases.

For example, my noble-born wizard has points in the Appraise skill because he grew up in a home with beautiful/expensive objects, and has some idea what they were worth. Even though I miss having those points elsewhere sometimes, I like being able to justify this aspect of the character when I roll dice, and I like being able to participate in scenes where the party negotiates trades and purchases instead of sitting on the sidelines.

I could still play that character as noble-born without the points in Appraise, but I can't back up my claims that he knows what finely crafted goods are worth when it comes time to roll dice. So the character becomes a noble-born dilettante who never really dealt with money and actually has no idea how much things cost in the real world. But that's not how I want to play the character. Mechanics influence character design, and thus influence roleplaying.

So I guess my bottom line is this:
Optimization doesn't influence how well you roleplay, but it does influence how you roleplay.

[Scowling Dragon]

Personaly I think that optimization creates stupid builds.

Optimization usualy means people good at making thier nonsense builds make sense. Its not as much roleplaying as much as it is explaining.

[Malachei]

I think it's got more to do with personality types than anything else. GNS Theory is a bit controversial, but it handles this well. Someone who's very much "Gamist" will tend to optimize a lot and not RP much, whereas a "Narrativist" will tend to do the reverse. So there's a little big of truth there.

On the other hand, people who get deeply involved with the game tend to be both Gamist and Narrativist to a fair degree, or else they'll drift off to other games that handle their preferred style better. These are the sort who'll stick around the longest, so they'll likely be the ones with the greatest optimization skills, and also get heavily involved in the roleplay. These sorts of people are unlikely to sacrifice either one for the other. A complicated build just ends up providing fodder for unique roleplay, and mutability of fluff gives them a wide-open playground to work in.

That's why it's a fallacy. There's certainly people strong on one or the other, but no contradiction involved in being both.

I think the GNS theory provides a very interesting perspective to look at this. I'd agree that there probably are players with more or less balanced interests and skills, while there may be players whose motivations and skills are more firmly rooted in either gamism or narrativism.

[Cor1]

I partly agree. I don't claim good optimizers are worse rolepayers, or vice versa, in any way. Still, if you put a lot of effort into designing a character's mechanical aspects, and try to make it as best as possible, you're investing a certain amount of time which you cannot invest otherwise. In other words, while optimizing, you're not writing compelling background stories. You can do that in extra time, and perhaps you just spend more time creating each character.

But my personal experience is that those players who care most about mechanics care a bit less about roleplaying aspects. By most I mean these players are the top 10% in terms of mechanical system mastery. In my experience, they tend to deal mostly with the things their characters are able to do (abilities), and tend to care a bit less for who their characters are (personality, background). And yes, I've seen some of the most vivid and well-developed characters created by players who had very little mechanical system mastery.

This does not imply that optimization is badwrongfun, nor does it imply that an optimizer is worse at roleplaying. But it might tell you something about where their priorities lie.

I get what you're saying here. I know I love building characters by mechanics, but I always try to tie them up into the setting. My optimized Psion is entirely built from plot threads resulting from the preceding scenario, and that also ensures I know how he thinks, acts and reacts, as defined by who he is and where he's from.

I mean, every option I put in the character has a reason to be there. When he PsyRef'd himself to get Incarnum powers, it was after months of learning about Incarnum from the party Totemist, and the only soulmeld he took is a Totemist one as a result. He's a True Healer (ACF for Psychometabolists to get the Life mantle) because he's been made to be a medical lab machine at first, for background reasons.

So yeah, you can get to define characters by simply thinking how each option on their sheet came there. My Incantatrix/Spellguard/Iot7V/Archmage had good reasons to not have a familiar, to use spontaneous divinations, to be a Spellguard, an Archmage, an Initiate of the Sevenfold Veil. Her story was simply how she earned them, and it explained how she acted and reacted, and that was all precious roleplay information.

I think optimization doesn't have to be an activity distinct from the background writing. It's all character creation, and it works better as a holistic process. At least that's my method.


Edit : About GNS, well that's not mutually exclusive. If you're good enough at system mastery to solve the Gamist part, then the Simulationist aspect is that you're fre to Narrate the story you want. That's WHY I optimize as far as I do. I want the world to (somewhat) make sense, I want to tell my character's story, and I want to play the game.

[Malachei]

I think optimization doesn't have to be an activity distinct from the background writing. It's all character creation, and it works better as a holistic process. At least that's my method.

I agree, in part. A counterexample would be if you go hunting through a dozen books for the best feat or spell synergy, and then reverse-engineer your character's backstory to accommodate to that.

And of course, the character's extensive background then provides a reasoning for having the feat / spell etc. -- not vice versa, i.e. the character's background determining mechanics, even to the exclusion of mechanically optimal choices.

I think whether mechanics follow background, or whether background follows mechanics is one possible indicator where the focus is.

[Menteith]

Personaly I think that optimization creates stupid builds.

Optimization usualy means people good at making thier nonsense builds make sense. Its not as much roleplaying as much as it is explaining.

That's sort of true for me, but that actually can help me create a new and unique character. Unless I have a very specific character I want to roleplay at the start of a campaign, I start with broad strokes, and gain more idea about the specifics as I work on the mechanical parts. The more I work on a build, the more time I have invested in both improving them mechanically and how they they fit into the world around them. The more heavily I've optimized a character, the more I'm invested in the character.

[Wyntonian]

I may have mentioned this before on these boards, but I've not only seen no exclusivity between roleplaying and optimization, but when I build a better mechanical character I tend to roleplay them better.

For example, for my first PbP I build a ranger. I don't even remember his name. Mechanically unoptimized, I took EWP (Bastard Sword) because I thought they looked cool and Skill Focus (Survival) because I was tired of thinking about feats. Yeah. Painful to look back on. This character was also the most two-dimensional person since Voldemort. He had a bow and a sword and liked to kill goblins. Inevitably dead parents. The whole nine yards of bad cliches. Because I didn't spend time rolling his abilities, his limitations, his weaknesses, his strengths around in my head, I never really thought about him as a person. So, when it came time to write a backstory, I sat and stared at the screen for ten minutes, came up with some dead parents and called it a night.

Now, my most recent character is a gestalt Goliath Binder//Soul Blade (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=208842). I use three subsystems (binding, incarnum and maneuvers), and I spent probably five hours total looking for feats, maneuvers, soulmelds, and vestiges. He has feats that make him directly better at what he does.

So, because I have so much cool stuff that I already know about him (he can fly, summons spirits to grant him armor and a concealing cloak of mists, fights with a Large greatsword which is bound to his soul, throws insubstantial spears, can see into people's minds....) I have a better grasp of what makes him who he is. I built a backstory reaching back several generations, a thoroughly well-developed character, and when the game starts I'll actually be able to be the character when I write for him. Had I not spent so much time thinking about this character, bits of his personality and backstory wouldn't have ever occurred to me.


So, essentially, optimizing that character to a level appropriate for the party is making it so I'll be a better roleplayer. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Stormwind.



Personally I think that optimization creates stupid builds.

Optimization usually means people good at making their nonsense builds make sense. Its not as much roleplaying as much as it is explaining.

I beg your pardon?

If your build is nonsensical and you actually intend it for play rather than a theoretical exercise, you're doing it wrong. Of course you should have an explanation of some sort*, but really, come on. How's a sword and board fighter with Skill Focus Craft (Underwater Basket Weaving), or hell, even Dodge, less ridiculous than one with Power Attack?

Note that a Monk2/WhirlPounceBarian1/Fighter2/Whatever doesn't need to be a person who spent x years in a monastery, left to spend half that time with the spirit lion tribe of barbarians while learning their style, and then became a city guard or whatever. Their mechanics all say that they're a person who's good at fighting. So, explain them as such.

[JeminiZero]

IMHO: The correlation exists to the extent, that extreme examples at either end of the spectrum are more attention grabbing, thereby creating a perception bias.

Or put another way, consider 3 types of players:

1) The Average gamer: Roleplays and optimizes reasonably well

2) The Munchkin: Tries to bring in the twice betrayer of Shar. (After Pun Pun was turned down of course)

3) The Story-Junkie: Brilliant backstory, with character going through all sorts of situations and learning all sorts of things. Consequently character has 10 different unsynergized base classes in as many levels.

Lets say you are a DM, with access to a friendly gaming forum (not unlike this one). Which of the above, would likely to drive you to ask for advice and help on the forums?

Hint: It isn't number 1. :smallwink:

[Hand_of_Vecna]

There are people that reject (or would it be embrace?) the stormwind fallacy and take the first class/feat/skills/spells that occur to them and there are also those who care nothing for fluff or rp and will take whatever gives the best bonuses no matter how strange or convoluted their combination is and refuse to justify it IC or justifies it very poorly.

The existence of these people that think this way does not prove that they are correct.

The Hardline rper doesn't have the system mastery of a middle-of-the-roader (this is where I beleive the typical playgrounder falls and I will hereafter refer to this archetype as the playgrounder) so they won't even be taking the non optimal feats that best represent their character. For example I knew one hard line rper that took power attack and cleave on a mounted lance charger. How does one cleave with a lance? Sure if the second target is directly behind the first, but that's a niche case and ingame the player didn't restrict himself to that.

The end result is a knight supposedly a champion of the realm that can't fight his way out of a wet paper bag. How is that good for the immersion of those around him?

You could argue that it's the playgrounders ruining the fun because if everyone had system mastery on the knight's level the DM could run down to their level, but another character building on the same level playing a Barbarian Maxes Str and Con because those sound like what barbarians need, takes half-orc because a half-orc Barbarian sounds right, also takes power attack and cleave because their names sound the most like crushing your enemies and seeing them driven before you. Then a few weeks later they look at complete warrior and start building toward Cavalier and Frenzied Berzerker.

So, it doesn't even take a playgrounder to be OP(comparatively) and make rp awkward because a rp hardliner's character is incompetent.

On the other side of the scale is the screw rp be powerful camp. In the wild I find that these folks don't have the playgrounder's love of the game and never actually develop their level of system mastery. So while they will crunch a few numbers they won't actually be as powerful as most of the playgrounder's characters.

There are some outliers on the power side. Obviously a Power Player or Munchkin can go on the internet and look up builds a polite playgrounder wouldn't bring to most games and the playgrounder is optimizing within a concept and will occasionally have to choose between power and fitting their character concept. So, on the high end of the power scale I suppose the fallacy has a minimal amount of traction.

In conclusion it's been my observation that playgrounders or people that travel the middle road weaving fluff and crunch together are both better roleplayers and play stronger characters that the extreme cases used to argue the Stormwind Fallacy.

Side question does any one know the proper semantics for discussing the validity of a known Fallacy?

[Water_Bear]

IMHO: The correlation exists to the extent, that extreme examples at either end of the spectrum are more attention grabbing, thereby creating a perception bias.

Or put another way, consider 3 types of players:

1) The Average gamer: Roleplays and optimizes reasonably well

2) The Munchkin: Tries to bring in the twice betrayer of Shar. (After Pun Pun was turned down of course)

3) The Story-Junkie: Brilliant backstory, with character going through all sorts of situations and learning all sorts of things. Consequently character has 10 different unsynergized base classes in as many levels.

Lets say you are a DM, with access to a friendly gaming forum (not unlike this one). Which of the above, would likely to drive you to ask for advice and help on the forums?

Hint: It isn't number 1. :smallwink:

Nope, it would be number three.

Munchkins are easy to deal with; tell them to get serious or leave.

Nice players with crippled builds are almost impossible to DM for. At best the unoptimized player will not be able to contribute, at worst a weak link in the party might result in a wipe. Either way, the player is likely too invested in their character backstory to take their inevitable inglorious death gracefully.

[limejuicepowder]

Personaly I think that optimization creates stupid builds.

Optimization usualy means people good at making thier nonsense builds make sense. Its not as much roleplaying as much as it is explaining.

I think this opinion comes from taking the supplied class/feat/ability fluff too seriously. Yes, describing a character in game as a goliath spirit lion barbarian 1/dungeoncrasher fighter 6/warblade 3 sounds awful, but it also pretty much the only way to reasonably reflect a massively powerful combatant that strikes viciously and scatters his enemies like bowling pins.

This is the problem with the lower tier classes: they can't actually do what the fluff says they should be able to do WITHOUT dipping and cherry picking from several different sources (also called "optimizing"). A fighter isn't going to be some great warrior, the barb is just a guy that rages ineffectually, the ranger can't hunt anything more dangerous then small woodland creatures, and the paladin isn't fit purge anything more evil then Moe, terror of the 1st grade. And really, how much fun is it to role play losers like that?

[Menteith]

Also, the optimized a build I make, the more....well, interesting it is. A Warforged Dragonborn of Bahamut Ruby Knight Vindicator is way more interesting to me than a Human Paladin 20, and there are way more roleplaying aspects for the first one. It's better mechanically, and doesn't have to play a specific list of tropes. If that's a stupid or nonsense build because it's more complicated to you, well, that's your own problem.

[JeminiZero]

Nope, it would be number three.

Well, I did say EITHER end of the spectrum.

[Autolykos]

You're running into a serious case of selection bias. That's what creates your correlation.
Assuming there are people who enjoy optimizing more or less and people who enjoy drama more or less, there are four basic types:

1. Enjoys drama and optimization: That's what the Stormwind fallacy is about. People (erroneously) conclude from the (negative) correlation that this group wouldn't exist, which is obviously wrong (and insults the people in this group).

2. Enjoys drama, but not optimization: The "Narrativist" type of gamer. Despises optimization because it forces him to do something he doesn't enjoy (or be marginalized in the plot).

3. Enjoys optimization, but not drama: The "Gamist" type. Likes to build new cool character concepts and try them out on monsters. Doesn't care too much about the "roleplaying" part, it just distracts from hacking monsters to pieces.

4. Enjoys neither drama, nor optimization: Doesn't play roleplaying games (at least not for long).

Since group #4 is almost completely absent from your sample, it is biased. This is what creates your correlation. Just try it out: Put a bunch of points in a 2d normal distribution (centered on zero) in a coordinate system. There should be no correlation. Now remove the third quadrant, and check again. Tada: negative correlation.

EDIT: Image
Stormwind Fallacy explained:
http://bildupload.sro.at/a/images/stormwind.png

[Hand_of_Vecna]

Wow, I took forever typing my post so many posts in the mean time.

What Scowling Dragon describes is almost the exact premise of the Iron Chef competitions and yes it does happen sometimes(and it's far stronger when not saddled with a IC ingredient), but it really doesn't have to be a problem. Someone who comes up with a very strong build (with some unusual/obscure/awkward ingredients) and then builds a backstory can seem to be presenting a big stinky hunk of cheese in a pretty wrapper. Here's the thing at worst this player is a solid optimizer and an OK roleplayer.

At best they could be amazing at both the only way that their going to be disruptive to the game is if your entire group is are good to amazing roleplayers with absolutely no system mastery. Also, unless you ask were to ask this player they might be able to list off a dozen options that would have been stronger that they left out because they didn't fit their character concept and they didn't want to justify them or tweek their character concept to fit them. This is a player that any DM should be able to work with even if they need to tell them to tone it down a bit.

Also there is clearly much more to optimizing for example take a look at the mechanics and fluff of a Crusader 4/ Cleric 1/ PrcPaladin3/ RubKnightVindicator(refluffed)10/ Crusader 2 and tell me that it can't have the exact same backstory as a Paladin while being far more optimized.

[Answerer]

I agree, in part. A counterexample would be if you go hunting through a dozen books for the best feat or spell synergy, and then reverse-engineer your character's backstory to accommodate to that.

And of course, the character's extensive background then provides a reasoning for having the feat / spell etc. -- not vice versa, i.e. the character's background determining mechanics, even to the exclusion of mechanically optimal choices.

I think whether mechanics follow background, or whether background follows mechanics is one possible indicator where the focus is.
In order for that to be relevant, you'd have to show that background following mechanics results in poorer roleplaying.

I'm not even remotely convinced; often times I choose mechanics that I think seem interesting and I haven't tried before, and they describe a character to me.

After all, lots of classes and feats in D&D are based on completely natural aspects one has had from birth, or cultural artifacts that you grew up with. In-character, those mechanics have shaped that person's life. Why shouldn't they shape the out-of-character writing process?

I think either process can easily result in equally good backstories. Doing the story first frees you some to think of things that Wizards never did, but sometimes going with mechanics first causes Wizards to give you ideas you hadn't had.

[erikun]

even though many people can combine roleplaying and optimization, I am convinced there exists a (negative) corrolation between roleplaying behavior and optimization behavior.
I think there are people out there who find it difficult to roleplay a character well and optimize a character well. I don't think they are a large number, but am certain that such individuals exist.

I also think there are people out there who find it difficult to roleplay a poorly optimized character, in the sense of being able to succeed at the things they do well and having difficulty succeeding at the things they do poorly.

Mostly, however, I just think there are people who roleplay well (and optimize poorly) and those who optimize well (and roleplay poorly). I also think they get picked out frequently during Stormwind discussions. The difference between these people and the first group, though, is that these people are not part of a sliding scale. If you take a roleplay-well-optimize-poorly person and get them to ignore roleplaying and focus on optimizing, you won't have a well-optimized but poorly-roleplayed character. You'll just have a poorly-optimized and poorly-roleplayed character.

And that's just the problem. It's easy to see that John is good at optimization and Carla is good at roleplaying, and assume that it is John's optimization that is keeping him from roleplaying as Carla. It is a lot more difficult to determine if John really is optimizing while giving up roleplay, rather than being poor at roleplaying, or not enjoying roleplaying this particular character, or just doing what he naturally likes best.

[jaybird]

Optimization happens off table time, usually (in my experience) with the players putting their heads together over Skype or Facebook and building a party that works well together. Roleplay happens during table time, where the players have their optimization already done and are ready to get adventuring. I can't see the conflict - fluff and crunch aren't linked. For example, here's two characters that can be played as Synthesist archetype Summoners with bipedal Eidolons with Flight, Natural Armor, and Slam attacks.

http://media.giantbomb.com/uploads/0/31/11738-ssj_goku.jpg

http://images.wikia.com/marveldatabase/images/d/d5/Iron_Man-7.jpg

[Verte]

Personally, I hate how people blurt out "Stormwind Fallacy!" when a DM talks about a player who leans heavily in one direction or another. I think that it may arise because certain people get set in their ways - I've known people who've already decided that they only wanted to focus on optimization and would put no effort into roleplaying or backstories because they were convinced that it wasn't important.


1) The Average gamer: Roleplays and optimizes reasonably well

2) The Munchkin: Tries to bring in the twice betrayer of Shar. (After Pun Pun was turned down of course)

3) The Story-Junkie: Brilliant backstory, with character going through all sorts of situations and learning all sorts of things. Consequently character has 10 different unsynergized base classes in as many levels.

I would say that 3 is actually easer to deal with because it's easier to teach someone who's good at roleplaying to optimize moderately than it is to teach someone who's "good"* at optimization how to write an interesting backstory and play a character consistently. Teaching 3 to optimize just means a little bit of extra time spent explaining the rules and going over ways they can more effectively realize their concept. Getting 2 to be good at roleplaying means a much broader investment of time and energy in my experience. And yeah, I have played with people like 3 who were able to learn how to build more effective characters after floundering with one that was poorly built.

I've also played with people who have seemed like 1 at first, until they completely forgot about their backstory after the first two sessions, threw away their character's original goals because they found out about templates that would make them more powerful, and ditched their "ancestral weapon" when they wanted to buy a more powerful one. Granted, he may not have optimized as much as other people (mainly because this was when 3.5 was still young) but he definitely knew what his priorities were.

Of course, none of this implies that optimizing will cause someone to be bad at roleplaying or vice versa. Now, in reference to Autolykos, I'd say that I've played with all four types. It is true that the type 4s usually dropped out after a short while. The type 2s usually switched systems. I think I'm more like type 1, but leaning towards drama.


Also, the optimized a build I make, the more....well, interesting it is. A Warforged Dragonborn of Bahamut Ruby Knight Vindicator is way more interesting to me than a Human Paladin 20, and there are way more roleplaying aspects for the first one. It's better mechanically, and doesn't have to play a specific list of tropes. If that's a stupid or nonsense build because it's more complicated to you, well, that's your own problem.

Personally, I can't stand dragonborn at all (actually detest Races of the Dragon in its entirety), so if you took that part out I might be fine with it. But if you were looking to play someone who worshipped Bahamut and then turned into a dragon person, then you might be disappointed. I really dislike draconic templates. I mean, other people get to dislike elves, so I should get to dislike dragonborn and half-dragons.

*IMHO, actually being good at optimization requires consideration of the campaign, the DM's requirements, and the other players. Plus, anyone can bring some horrible cheesy monstrousity they found online to the table. It doesn't take skill to copy a build found on a forum, but that's besides the point.

[Tanuki Tales]

I disagree because Optimization is something that takes far much less time and far less constant input than roleplaying does. You can be the worst optimizer in the world, come to a forum like this one asking for help and come out with your character being top notch for it's build. Sure, you may need to stay on top of keeping your character optimized and may need to help continuing doing this and you may not know inherently to use your optimized character optimally, but that's a small matter in regards to time consumption.

This isn't true of roleplaying. Yes, you can learn to be a better roleplayer and can get help with that, but roleplaying is something that takes constant attention and skill to maintain your character at the effect you want him to be and at the end of the day, all the advice and help in the world may never improve your roleplaying skill as easy as your optimization skill.

TL;DR: Optimization is Math, Roleplaying is being an author. A calculator can help you more than a literary criticism or peer review.

[Deophaun]

Stormwind Fallacy explained:
http://bildupload.sro.at/a/images/stormwind.png
And Autolykos wins the thread.

[Siegel]

In Burning Wheel to optimize, you need to roleplay oO

[nedz]

The Stormwind Fallacy relates to players who want, or need, to play Competant Characters (yes thats a trope). If you want to play such a character then you should optimise your build to match the concept you have in mind. The more competative players will only play in ths style.

There is nothing wrong in this approach; however not all players are like this. Others prefer to play characters which fit different tropes and for some of these optimising is an anathma. Competant Characters bore them, for whatever reason.

There is nothing wrong with either approach, they are both valid play styles, in fact these are just the extremes of one spectrum of play-style: The difficulty comes when you find both extremes in the same group.

[Togo]

The Stormwind Fallacy relates to players who want, or need, to play Competant Characters (yes thats a trope). If you want to play such a character then you should optimise your build to match the concept you have in mind. The more competative players will only play in ths style.

Really can't agree. It refers to people who want to play competant characters yes, and who further define competant as being better mechanically than a hypothetical character created without optimisation. This is a strange standard to go to, since the game may not actually feature such characters at all, and the dynamics and balancing of a team character versus a challenging encounter is entire different in any case.

Competitive players may want to play in this way, but certainly not all of them. The really competitive players want limits in place so they can try competiting with eachother against those limits, rather than, as end up being the case so often in practice, just submitting more and more broken characters until the DM draws an arbitrary line and bans anything that falls beyond it. Optimisation is more interesting as a contest, than as a game of chicken with the DM.


The Stormwind Fallacy was first written in an attempt to shut down criticism of high-op play. It's a simple strawman arguement, whereby critics of high-op play are mischaracterised as supporting an almost untenable position - that optimisation and roleplay are necessarily mututally exclusive. This acts as a cover to shut down the far more reasonable claim that optimisation, particularly optimisation to excess, might damage character development. The idea is that it's harder to develop a character in line with his experiences in-game if his build progression is pre-defined by mechanical considerations before the game even begins.

Whether this criticism or similar criticism of high-op play is actually valid depends heavily on the style of play that you have. It only really works if you expect character development to be driven by in-game events during the campaign, which is far from a given.

I think Autolykos has really already won the thread with his diagram. Just because of selection pressures, those who focus on optimisation will see at least half of their counterparts as useless idiots with no interest in playing the game, while those who focus on characterisation will see half of their counterparts as useless idiots with no interest in roleplaying.

But the Stormwind Fallacy is largely irrelevent either way. It only addresses those who firmly believe that optimisation and role-playing are in conflict by definition, which is a vanishingly small minority view if it exists at all. The more common challenge is that the practice of optimisation damages or impedes roleplaying, and whether you believe that is true or not (I think it's very situational), the Stormwind Fallacy has nothing to say on the issue.

[Answerer]

The idea is that it's harder to develop a character in line with his experiences in-game if his build progression is pre-defined by mechanical considerations before the game even begins.
3.5 was literally designed to punish that style of play. It's almost impossible to do anything with a character without careful planning.

[Togo]

3.5 was literally designed to punish that style of play. It's almost impossible to do anything with a character without careful planning.

All the RPGA campaigns seemed to manage on a rules set that stopped you planning a full build from level 1, and they were played by several thousand people. You can't get to the same level of optimisation, of course, but then part of the point of this discussion is that weaker characters aren't seen by everyone as a problem.

I do sympathise though. I find games where access to feats and prestige classes are given out as in-character rewards to be very frustrating, because, as you say, 3.5 mechanically punishes poor combinations of powers.

[Gamer Girl]

1. Enjoys drama and optimization: That's what the Stormwind fallacy is about. People (erroneously) conclude from the (negative) correlation that this group wouldn't exist, which is obviously wrong (and insults the people in this group).

2. Enjoys drama, but not optimization: The "Narrativist" type of gamer. Despises optimization because it forces him to do something he doesn't enjoy (or be marginalized in the plot).

3. Enjoys optimization, but not drama: The "Gamist" type. Likes to build new cool character concepts and try them out on monsters. Doesn't care too much about the "roleplaying" part, it just distracts from hacking monsters to pieces.

This seems mostly correct. Though I'd point out that type one is very, very, very rare. Types two and three are the most common gamers.

Maybe:

2.Narrativist. This person is doing something special and unique, they are role-playing in a fictional setting. They see their character as a vessel through they can act and interact with a world. There goal is to experience role-playing the character open and endlessly.

3.Gamist. This person is just playing a game, like Monopoly or worse a video game. This person only sees their 'character' as an artificial game construct to play the game. And as they are locked into game mode, they mostly want to win the game.

[JoshuaZ]

3.5 was literally designed to punish that style of play. It's almost impossible to do anything with a character without careful planning.

Do you have a citation or evidence for this? This sounds close to the stuff Monte Cook said a few years after everything came out, but that looked more like an attempted excuse/rationalization for why some options sucked.

[nedz]

Really can't agree. It refers to people who want to play competant characters yes, and who further define competant as being better mechanically than a hypothetical character created without optimisation. This is a strange standard to go to, since the game may not actually feature such characters at all, and the dynamics and balancing of a team character versus a challenging encounter is entire different in any case.

Competitive players may want to play in this way, but certainly not all of them. The really competitive players want limits in place so they can try competiting with eachother against those limits, rather than, as end up being the case so often in practice, just submitting more and more broken characters until the DM draws an arbitrary line and bans anything that falls beyond it. Optimisation is more interesting as a contest, than as a game of chicken with the DM.


The Stormwind Fallacy was first written in an attempt to shut down criticism of high-op play. It's a simple strawman arguement, whereby critics of high-op play are mischaracterised as supporting an almost untenable position - that optimisation and roleplay are necessarily mututally exclusive. This acts as a cover to shut down the far more reasonable claim that optimisation, particularly optimisation to excess, might damage character development. The idea is that it's harder to develop a character in line with his experiences in-game if his build progression is pre-defined by mechanical considerations before the game even begins.

Whether this criticism or similar criticism of high-op play is actually valid depends heavily on the style of play that you have. It only really works if you expect character development to be driven by in-game events during the campaign, which is far from a given.

I think Autolykos has really already won the thread with his diagram. Just because of selection pressures, those who focus on optimisation will see at least half of their counterparts as useless idiots with no interest in playing the game, while those who focus on characterisation will see half of their counterparts as useless idiots with no interest in roleplaying.

But the Stormwind Fallacy is largely irrelevent either way. It only addresses those who firmly believe that optimisation and role-playing are in conflict by definition, which is a vanishingly small minority view if it exists at all. The more common challenge is that the practice of optimisation damages or impedes roleplaying, and whether you believe that is true or not (I think it's very situational), the Stormwind Fallacy has nothing to say on the issue.

Sorry, you missed the point Competant Character (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competent_man) is a trope.

[Answerer]

Do you have a citation or evidence for this? This sounds close to the stuff Monte Cook said a few years after everything came out, but that looked more like an attempted excuse/rationalization for why some options sucked.
That was what I was referring to.

And regardless of whether it is what they intended, it is what they got. That's how the game plays.

And the RPGA is a bad, bad joke. I've heard nothing but horror stories out of them.

[Worira]

Sorry, you missed the point Competant Character (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competent_man) is a trope.

Oh come on, this time you were linking directly to an article that spells it correctly.

[Togo]

Sorry, you missed the point Competant Character (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competent_man) is a trope.

You're quite correct, I missed your point entirely. Thanks for the correction.

[Jeff the Green]

This seems mostly correct. Though I'd point out that type one is very, very, very rare. Types two and three are the most common gamers.

Well, yes, type 2 and type 3 are more common. Assuming the two traits are uncorrelated, they should combined be twice as common as type 1.

I disagree with your assumption that type 1 is very rare, though. With the exceptions of exemplar builds (that is, builds designed to show what can be done with a class, not using the Exemplar class), I've seen a very good mix of the three types. (Actually, I've seen a positive correlation between optimization and roleplaying, though that sample is probably biased because practice increases both.)

The biggest problem I see with the Stormwind Fallacy (even the weak, correlative version) is that weak characters are usually bad roleplaying. Think about it. Unless you're starting out as a villager that gets thrown into extraordinary events (which is not, in my experience and judging from the PbP forums, very common) or you're playing a horror game (which D&D is ill-suited for), your character is supposed to be competent. Not just competent, often, but epic. Poorly optimized characters are not epic, and they're rarely even competent. This has been pointed out before, but not, as far as I can see, in this thread (at least not as clearly as needed to be said).

[sonofzeal]

This seems mostly correct. Though I'd point out that type one is very, very, very rare. Types two and three are the most common gamers.

Maybe:

2.Narrativist. This person is doing something special and unique, they are role-playing in a fictional setting. They see their character as a vessel through they can act and interact with a world. There goal is to experience role-playing the character open and endlessly.

3.Gamist. This person is just playing a game, like Monopoly or worse a video game. This person only sees their 'character' as an artificial game construct to play the game. And as they are locked into game mode, they mostly want to win the game.
I disagree that Type 1 is rare, because they are the people most likely to stick with the game.

Narrativists are much more likely to drift off into more RP-centric RPGs. White Wolf is a positive black hole for Narrativist gamers, but there's others as well. "In a Wicked Age", for instant. D&D is very rules-heavy, and Narrativists almost always prefer rules-light games. Thus, while Narrativists are quite common, I think they'll be significantly underrepresented in D&D games.

The same holds true for Gamists. They're likely to be attracted to 4e, MMORPGs, or Descent and other "Adventure Board Games". These games offer far more pure Gamist experiences. While 3.5e D&D does have significant Gamist elements, its Simulationist heritage often gets in the way of them, and there's a strong Narrativist tendency as well, at least when compared to those others I listed. This makes it an awkward choice for Gamists, who are more likely to head off to greener pastures and thus, like Narrativists, be under-represented at most tables.

I think the people most likely to stick with the game are those in the mushy middle of the GNS system, people who want a mix of Gamist, Narrativist, and Simulationist elements. That seems to be D&D's niche, and it's a good one since most human demographics do seem to form bellcurves with a strong middle between the extremes. This could explain some of 3.5's success, despite the fact that other games tend to roxx0r its boxx0rz in the various specific arenas. By mixing the three styles, it dilutes each of them, but manages to create a viable middle ground for people who like each of them.

I think "Type 1" (G/N hybrids) are the most common type of 3.5e D&D player. As others have mentioned they're the least likely to generate ire and thus don't get posted about on these boards, but I do think they're very common at most tables.

[Keld Denar]

And the RPGA is a bad, bad joke. I've heard nothing but horror stories out of them.

I liked the RPGA. It's said that optimization is doing the best you can with what you're given. The RPGA is was the pinnacle of that. It took a few attempts to make it past 2nd level, especially back in year 2 when people were still getting a feel for the CR/EL rules (a troll, despite being a +4 EL for APL 2, does NOT belong in a mod...I'm looking at you Brendigan's Bride...).

Surviving Living Greyhawk with a 15th level character or two was kinda something you look back on and smile. Like a tragedy that seems like a big deal at the time, but you look back on a few years latter and smile at because it really wasn't that bad.

Plus, the whole idea of going on vacation in different states and getting to experience their regions with all of their rich, highly developed storylines and feel was really awesome. Removal of that was one of my biggest complaints with Living Realms. Well, that and the fact that it was 4e.

[erikun]

I disagree because Optimization is something that takes far much less time and far less constant input than roleplaying does. You can be the worst optimizer in the world, come to a forum like this one asking for help and come out with your character being top notch for it's build.
I can't say I agree with this. Yes, the player would have a highly optimized build, but that doesn't necessarily include highly optimized play. Give a bad optimizer something like a high-OP Druid, and they'll likely waste time turning into bears or Flame Striking opponents or forgetting about their fleshraker.

A build could be optimized on paper, yes, but that doesn't automatically make it optimized in play. I've seen most situations like this turn the character into a one-trick pony, doing one thing over and over until it's no longer possible or they run out of steam.

[Gamer Girl]

I disagree with your assumption that type 1 is very rare, though.

Someone who can optimize and role-play is very rare. Though, naturally everyone thinks they can do this(and sing, or act or do anything really). But you just see the Epic Fails all the time. Where the type one either drifts to ''I roll X to do Y'' robot or the drama royalty ''roll to hit? Can't I just punch him I'm standing right there".



The biggest problem I see with the Stormwind Fallacy (even the weak, correlative version) is that weak characters are usually bad roleplaying. Think about it. Unless you're starting out as a villager that gets thrown into extraordinary events (which is not, in my experience and judging from the PbP forums, very common) or you're playing a horror game (which D&D is ill-suited for), your character is supposed to be competent. Not just competent, often, but epic. Poorly optimized characters are not epic, and they're rarely even competent. This has been pointed out before, but not, as far as I can see, in this thread (at least not as clearly as needed to be said).

Well, ''competent'' is a far, far way from ''optimized''. After all optimized is just a hair below out right cheating. A character should not be helpless and have no grasp of their abilities. but that is a far, far cry from ''everything this character does is awesome.'' And it's one thing if a character can simply fight and kill a monster, but another if they can do it in two rounds doing triple max damage.

In my experience, the players of optimized characters have a lot less fun in a D&D game...unless is a hyper optimized game against them(and even then they will most likely cry and give up and not want to play). Just take two groups. They unseal a door and find a lich. Group 1, the normal group, does a nice little running fight and gets away from the lich as quick as possible. Then they spend hours of real time trying to figure out who the lich could be and how to defeat it. And this can lead to several games worth of playing. Group 2 is the optimizers. The lich pops out, and away they go, dishing out tons and tons of damage and effects. And like a typical optimized fight it lasts all of ten minutes. Then the characters kill the lich, loot the room, and turn to the DM ''ok we killed the lich, can we kill a 'M' monster now?'' and the DM is simply stuck sending them from battle to battle.

Optimization is hard on stories. Ever notice the average fictional hero is never optimized? They just kinda walk around aimlessly, and then get surprised by the bad guys. That makes for a good fun story.

[Answerer]

Roleplaying games are not the same as narrative storytelling, though. You need to work a game in there somewhere. And a lot of the best stories do not lend themselves well to a game.

[Philistine]

The Stormwind Fallacy was first written in an attempt to shut down criticism of high-op play. It's a simple strawman arguement, whereby critics of high-op play are mischaracterised as supporting an almost untenable position - that optimisation and roleplay are necessarily mututally exclusive. This acts as a cover to shut down the far more reasonable claim that optimisation, particularly optimisation to excess, might damage character development. The idea is that it's harder to develop a character in line with his experiences in-game if his build progression is pre-defined by mechanical considerations before the game even begins.
It's not a strawman if that's what the people in question actually believe. See the OP of this very thread, as well as every other post in support of that position. And see various and sundry posts in every other thread on this well-worn topic stretching back over at least the past four years (and probably longer).


After all optimized is just a hair below out right cheating.
Optimization does not mean what you think it means. What you're talking about is a while 'nother concept, often referred to as "munchkinism."

[Menteith]

Someone who can optimize and role-play is very rare. Though, naturally everyone thinks they can do this(and sing, or act or do anything really). But you just see the Epic Fails all the time. Where the type one either drifts to ''I roll X to do Y'' robot or the drama royalty ''roll to hit? Can't I just punch him I'm standing right there".

To be honest, I've never run into an issue with differing playstyles in eight years of gaming. Maybe I'm just blessed with fantastic groups, but even though some people have difficultly roleplaying, and some people have difficulty making mechanically strong characters, it's never been a problem.



Well, ''competent'' is a far, far way from ''optimized''. After all optimized is just a hair below out right cheating. A character should not be helpless and have no grasp of their abilities. but that is a far, far cry from ''everything this character does is awesome.'' And it's one thing if a character can simply fight and kill a monster, but another if they can do it in two rounds doing triple max damage.

Optimized is an incredibly broad term, but there isn't a way that you could call it cheating (unless we're coming from very, very different perspectives, in which case, let me know why you think that!). Optimization happens when a Fighter chooses Power Attack instead of Weapon Focus, when a Rogue maximizes Use Magic Device, when a Wizard enters Archmage. It's all about making your character better, and whenever you do that, you're optimizing it. It can be taken to great lengths - Theoretical Optimization is a good example of this, but I've never seen anything like it in a real game. Additionally, a Dungeon Master is responsible for presenting appropriate challenges for the party. Sure, after a point, damage can get pretty insane. But that means finding ways to challenge a group that can't be cut into pieces.



In my experience, the players of optimized characters have a lot less fun in a D&D game...unless is a hyper optimized game against them(and even then they will most likely cry and give up and not want to play).

That's super. In my experience, a group of optimized characters will find more enjoyment in the game, because they have more options, their characters are deeper, and they can face down challenges that other groups can't, allowing for a huge variety of campaigns. And while I've seen players have an issue with the difficult of an encounter (Pit Fiend in E6), they didn't give up, cry, and not want to play. In fact, the opposite (sure, we failed and all died, but it was awesome!)



Just take two groups. They unseal a door and find a lich. Group 1, the normal group, does a nice little running fight and gets away from the lich as quick as possible. Then they spend hours of real time trying to figure out who the lich could be and how to defeat it. And this can lead to several games worth of playing. Group 2 is the optimizers. The lich pops out, and away they go, dishing out tons and tons of damage and effects. And like a typical optimized fight it lasts all of ten minutes. Then the characters kill the lich, loot the room, and turn to the DM ''ok we killed the lich, can we kill a 'M' monster now?'' and the DM is simply stuck sending them from battle to battle.

Then the DM isn't doing their job. There's a reason that Tippy's characters are still challenged even though they are so much more powerful than anything I have ever played. It's because encounters are more complicated than "go Nova on that dude over there, profit". This does mean that NPCs will need to be optimized up to the same degree of the group, but that's always been true.


Optimization is hard on stories. Ever notice the average fictional hero is never optimized? They just kinda walk around aimlessly, and then get surprised by the bad guys. That makes for a good fun story.

The term optimized cannot be applied to fictional characters that exist outside of D&D as optimized means built to maximize power in D&D. Like, should Katara from AtLA have taken Spell Focus or Extend Spell? The term just doesn't make sense when you're applying it to nongame entities....

Could you try and define what you mean by "Optimized"? Because I have to think we're using a very, very different meaning.

[jaybird]

Optimization is hard on stories. Ever notice the average fictional hero is never optimized? They just kinda walk around aimlessly, and then get surprised by the bad guys. That makes for a good fun story.

Batman.

On a more serious note, that's only a good fun story by your definition. My gaming group's collective take on Harry Potter was "why doesn't he take his piles of gold and buy a box of rifles?" Optimization is only hard on a group if the group doesn't want to or know how to deal with it.

[Amphetryon]

Characters in fiction are as "optimized" as the author makes them; it rarely matters, as characters in fiction have the Power of Plot to save them from the Fireball/Save-or-Die/Lucky Shot to the throat. Characters in D&D do not have the luxury of the Power of Plot, unless the DM is fudging things to make it so.

[Boci]

Someone who can optimize and role-play is very rare. Though, naturally everyone thinks they can do this(and sing, or act or do anything really).

If what you claim is true then that is only because people cannot roleplay, because all you need to optimize is internet access and an account on a D&D forum.


Optimization is hard on stories. Ever notice the average fictional hero is never optimized?

Define "average".

Does Skilhannon the damned, the grey man, Pug, Thomas, Nightfall and Nogusa not count?

[Cor1]

Funny thing, I like to have the Power of Plot right on my character sheet. Usually, I get to have it.

It's called Magic. (Or Psionics).

Wall in the way? Passwall. Need information? Divination. Need to travel? Teleport.

I don't always play in godmode, but I sure as death love to play god.

[Hecuba]

Batman.

On a more serious note, that's only a good fun story by your definition. My gaming group's collective take on Harry Potter was "why doesn't he take his piles of gold and buy a box of rifles?" Optimization is only hard on a group if the group doesn't want to or know how to deal with it.

Actually, Rowling had a farily specific response on that topic: I believe you can find it on the mail portion of her website. She deliberately avoided the presence of guns because she felt the average wizard would stack up poorly against them (simply as a function of reaction time) and that didn't work well for the desired plotline.

There's a lesson here: don't optimize in such a way as to poke holes in the plot.


Could you try and define what you mean by "Optimized"? Because I have to think we're using a very, very different meaning.

Not my quote, but I'll take a stab:

Most fictional characters can not realistically be seen as having made most of their choices and developed their expertise primarly to maximize their efficacy for dealing with the conflicts they face in the story.

More often, some portion of their resources are devoted to other goals that do not aid (or perhaps even hinder) dealing with those conflicts.

[Acanous]

<Snip> Then the characters kill the lich, loot the room, and turn to the DM ''ok we killed the lich, can we kill a 'M' monster now?'' and the DM is simply stuck sending them from battle to battle.


Dungeons and Dragons is not a real life simulator. It does do that, but very poorly. It is not a miniatures warfare game, no matter how much WotC wants you to believe it is so.

No, D&D is a Roleplaying Puzzle game. You solve puzzles and you roleplay.
Sometimes the puzzle is how to get from point A to point B without setting off Trap C. Sometimes the puzzle lies in investigating leads, accruing the parts of an ancient artifact, or literally solving a puzzle.

Sometimes the puzzle comes with special abilities and a sack of hit points.

Optimized characters solve those puzzles more easilly, and allow the DM to start experimenting with more complicated challenges... In the Lich example, for instance, that Lich could have used Astral Projection and Plane Shift, with his real body and Phylactery sitting in his own personal demiplane.
That'd be more challenging than just "Show up, triple damage, fight done".

[Boci]

Actually, Rowling had a farily specific response on that topic: I believe you can find it on the mail portion of her website. She deliberately avoided the presence of guns because she felt the average wizard would stack up poorly against them (simply as a function of reaction time) and that didn't work well for the desired plotline.

There's a lesson here: don't optimize in such a way as to poke holes in the plot.

Alternative lesson: Consider the world your story is set in, otherwise you have to force your characters to behave stupidly to preserve the desired plot line.

[Scowling Dragon]

Alternative lesson: Consider the world your story is set in, otherwise you have to force your characters to behave stupidly to preserve the desired plot line.

The better lesson is this.

[Hecuba]

Alternative lesson: Consider the world your story is set in, otherwise you have to force your characters to behave stupidly to preserve the desired plot line.

Not always a viable option. Consider the options for the Harry Potter example:

1) If guns do not exist or are not deadly, then this moves away from the desired presentation of the Harry Potter world as a hidden portion of our own.
2) If wizards actively prepare for gun attack by muggle, this more or less forces the idea that Wizards should actually fear violence from Muggles. This would drastically change how the two groups interact thematically and might undermine the blood purity:racism conceit. This effect is more extreme and undesirable if wizards don't prepare and actually walk around getting killed by gunshot wounds.
3) Side-step the issue and maintain the desired themes and setting at the cost of perfect internal consistency.

Personally, I think 3 is the best option here.


Another example: if your group intends to be playing in Dark Sun for 6 months, you might not want to have your cleric go around setting up create water traps en masse.

[Cor1]

Alternative lesson: Consider the world your story is set in, otherwise you have to force your characters to behave stupidly to preserve the desired plot line.

The better lesson is this.

A thousand times this.

Even if the party Übercharger one-shots the Lich, you'll have to find the phylactery. Even Xykon figured out what Genesis is for!

For an optimized group, it's the beginning of the adventure. With the Spontaneous Divination Wizard, they'll have basic leads to follow, and with everyone Mind Blanked all day erry day they won't be scried-and-fried at first rest, which would happen without fail without the immunity, unless the Lich is played stupidly.

[Boci]

Not always a viable option. Consider the options for the Harry Potter example:

1) If guns do not exist or are not deadly, then this moves away from the desired presentation of the Harry Potter world as a hidden portion of our own.
2) If wizards actively prepare for gun attack by muggle, this more or less forces the idea that Wizards should actually fear violence from Muggles. This would drastically change how the two groups interact thematically and might undermine the blood purity:racism conceit. This effect is more extreme and undesirable if wizards don't prepare and actually walk around getting killed by gunshot wounds.
3) Side-step the issue and maintain the desired themes and setting at the cost of perfect internal consistency.

Personally, I think 3 is the best option here.

Options 4: Have a conversations along the following lines:

Should we use guns?
Well aren't trained in their use whilst we have had 6 years of learning magic, and we could end up killing someone under the imperio curse. So no.

There, now we have established why our protagonbists don't use guns, the death eaters don't use them because its muggle stuff, and other wizards don't because they don't know much about muggle stuff even if they wanted to. Maybe a few do offscreen, but it isn't enough to change anything.


Another example: if your group intends to be playing in Dark Sun for 6 months, you might not want to have your cleric go around setting up create water traps en masse.

So the DM tells the players that the trick cannot (and does not ingame) work, as doing so would damage the setting. (And wait, clerics in Dark Sun?)

[Hecuba]

Options 4: Have a conversations along the following lines:

Should we use guns?
Well aren't trained in their use whilst we have had 6 years of learning magic, and we could end up killing someone under the imperio curse. So no.

There, now we have established why our protagonbists don't use guns, the death eaters don't use them because its muggle stuff, and other wizards don't because they don't know much about muggle stuff even if they wanted to. Maybe a few do offscreen, but it isn't enough to change anything.

That doesn't answer what happens when wizards encounter muggles who use guns, which is the question whose logical answer (they die) is what we want to avoid thematically.

Thus by choosing this answer, we draw attention to a flaw in the setting we want to avoid.


(And wait, clerics in Dark Sun?)

They're around (and have been since the setting's introduction, as far as I know): they worship the elements. Kinda quasi-druidic, though there are actual druids too.

[demigodus]

Not always a viable option. Consider the options for the Harry Potter example:

If you need the characters to ignore blatantly obvious solutions, it isn't the fault of the characters for picking those options. It is the fault of the author for providing them with the options, and then hoping they don't take it.


1) If guns do not exist or are not deadly, then this moves away from the desired presentation of the Harry Potter world as a hidden portion of our own.

This is a case of the setting creating plot holes. If a wizard started using guns, they wouldn't be creating plot holes. They would be filling those in (by fixing the setting to make sense)


Another example: if your group intends to be playing in Dark Sun for 6 months, you might not want to have your cleric go around setting up create water traps en masse.

You have two options here:
a) slightly rewrite the rules (no resetting traps for example). Maintain perfect internal consistency, the players are allowed to be clever without being faulted for daring to get clever

b) hope the players don't get clever, and if they do, blame them for thinking.

I tend to prefer option a.

[Boci]

That doesn't answer what happens when wizards encounter muggles who use guns, which is the question whose logical answer (they die) is what we want to avoid thematically.

That wasn't the inital problem raised (the one you first responded to). But since you have now: wizards don't encounter muggles with guns. Muggles don't know about them, and then a wizard slips up, they are rarely doing something that warrants guns shots, more a confused stare and a "Am I drunk?". Especially since it takes place in england where the average person does not own a gun, and certainly does not carry one.


They're around (and have been since the setting's introduction, as far as I know): they worship the elements. Kinda quasi-druidic, though there are actual druids too.

And they have power? I thought it was psionics and the defiler/preserver magic, both of which were arcane.

[Cor1]

If you need the characters to ignore blatantly obvious solutions, it isn't the fault of the characters for picking those options. It is the fault of the author for providing them with the options, and then hoping they don't take it.

This is a case of the setting creating plot holes. If a wizard started using guns, they wouldn't be creating plot holes. They would be filling those in (by fixing the setting to make sense)

You have two options here:
a) slightly rewrite the rules (no resetting traps for example). Maintain perfect internal consistency, the players are allowed to be clever without being faulted for daring to get clever

b) hope the players don't get clever, and if they do, blame them for thinking.

I tend to prefer option a.

I tend to prefer settings that don't ignore the rules. Or rules that don't ignore the setting.

Case in point: Create Water traps in Eberron, that's a very good idea. So a sane DM running Eberron will have to fix the Trap rules, because "how comes that the player was the first in Eberron to ever think of that?". But if the Cleric's player gets the idea from a self-resetting trap in a dungeon, how do you justify it not working, in-game? "It'll break the world" is not an in-game explanation.

And this is why no published setting makes sense with the rules. Or the rules don't seem to have applied to the settings.

[Little Brother]

Well, I can only, personally, talk about my own experience. My group consists of me, a heavy optimizer(My favorite part of the game) and a moderate roleplayer(If we put it on a 10 - -10 graph, probably a (3, 8.5)~), a light-ish optimizer and really good RPer(I'd say (7, 5~), but I'm a pretty heavy optimizer when I want to be, so I'm not sure), a really heavy(If not very good) RPer, but terrible optimizer(8, -3), and a decent optimizer, but terrible RPer(Probably (-2, 4)~). The funny part? We all have different takes on the game, but we compromise. We're a group. We're all friends. It's a social gathering just as much as its a game for us. Me and (7, 4) generally build (8, -3)'s characters for him, based on what he wants. We almost always average a power level around high t4 or low t3. I am a better optimizer, so I normally play worse classes to balance it out(Knight in a ToB game :smallcool:). The number one rule in our group is "Don't be a ****." It isn't a competition, it's a game, so we avoid idiocy.

This whole Roleplay v. Rollplay is really caused by a misunderstanding of each other. Me and (-2, 4) view the combat rules as the biggest part of the game. That's why IT'S the crunch, there aren't things like Exalted stunts. The rules are what makes it D&D. Otherwise, we might as well do some freeform thing that sounds awful.

The other two see it as RP first, crunch second(Well, (7, 5) puts them on even terms, he cannot stand bad crunch). So, what was the GRAND COMPROMISE of BADWRONGFUNNESS? Crunch and RP are separate parts of the game. Me and (-2, 4) don't want to write 5 pages describing our characters. Character concepts are good, but, really, how much do you need? A paragraph? Two? We both find it incredibly tedious when people spend 5 minutes describing their actions in annoying detail. When in combat, it's "I attack," "I power attack for X," "I charge," "I use Steel Wind," etc. Then, we do RP in social situations(Or sometimes determining action in combat, but not most of the time), and rules in rules-situations. The world didn't end. A fissure didn't open up and swallow the house. No fire and brimstone, no gnashing of teeth.

Given my experience,, I can safely say that the whole Stormwind is bull. RP and crunch are entirely unrelated.
My 2cp.


Optimization is hard on stories. Ever notice the average fictional hero is never optimized? They just kinda walk around aimlessly, and then get surprised by the bad guys. That makes for a good fun story.Sir Gawain was damn optimized. Arthur wasn't bad, either, and nor was Lancelot. Galahad had some serious saves(I bet he was a paladin), seeing as how he survived Siege Perilous.

Dr. Manhattan. Dr. Strange. Captain America has some stupid to-hit bonuses with that shield. Tony Stark has some crazy crafting optimization, and the Hulk, oh boy. Remember the Hulkbuster suit? Remember how that worked?

Arya and Rob Stark are both fairly optimized(though Rob's skills were a bit... could have used some work).

Noblesse's Frankenstein is really optimized. Shirahama Kenichi is the poster boy of optimization of bad rolls.

IRL, Freddy Mercury hugely optimized Perform, and obviously was capable of Epic uses of Craft:Porn 'Stache. I mean, look at that mustache, it's on par with another amazingly optimized man's, Teddy Roosevelt(Level 20 Warblade with leadership and all 18s seems a bit on the weak side, but that's what I'll go with for now).
I can go on, but I think my point was made.

[Acanous]

And they have power? I thought it was psionics and the defiler/preserver magic, both of which were arcane.

From what I understand, there are two kinds of clerics: Those who are bestowed their power by one of the Sorceror Kings, or those who worship the elements.
They do get power, but the Cleric spell list has been truncated. Create Water in particular, they don't get.

[Hecuba]

This is a case of the setting creating plot holes. If a wizard started using guns, they wouldn't be creating plot holes. They would be filling those in (by fixing the setting to make sense)

Whether or not the setting makes sense is not the only element of value. Theme has value. Drama has value. Scope has value.
These are not inherently in conflict, but in the case of certain iterations, they can come into conflict.

That does not mean that instances where they come into conflict should be ignored: it simply means that compromise is necessary there.
At times, this may require compromise on the part of the DM or author (altering setting to maintain internal consistancy). However, it may also require compromise on the part of the reader/player (acknowledging that the setting isn't perfect and not deliberately choosing to exploit the flaws).

This does not mean that the players should be "punished for thinking:" it means that a polite player will generally not try to intentionally exploit or draw attention to those flaws they know are present.


That wasn't the inital problem raised (the one you first responded to).

Sorry-- I structures the repsonse in that fashion because that's how Rowling expressed her concerns on the issue (at least to my memory-- her site has since changed and no longer has the old fanmail section). I though I made that clear in my initial response, but it seems not.


But since you have now: wizards don't encounter muggles with guns. Muggles don't know about them, and then a wizard slips up, they are rarely doing something that warrants guns shots, more a confused stare and a "Am I drunk?". Especially since it takes place in england where the average person does not own a gun, and certainly does not carry one.

But the magical world is not limited to the UK in the Harry Potter setting. And it's not just whether or not wizards are regularly shot. It's the fact that it's thematically valueable for muggles to appear relatively helpless next to wizards and for pureblood "fear" of muggles to be without vaildity. The presence of guns undermines that.


They do get power, but the Cleric spell list has been truncated. Create Water in particular, they don't get.

In the 3/3.5 version of Dark Sun (Licensed through athas.org, not directly published), it was replaced by Create Element-- so water clerics could Create Water, though others could not.

[Boci]

But the magical world is not limited to the UK in the Harry Potter setting.

But we never see outside of it, so what may or may not go on there is up to the reader's imagination.


And it's not just whether or not wizards are regularly shot. It's the fact that it's thematically valueable for muggles to appear relatively helpless next to wizards and for pureblood "fear" of muggles to be without vaildity. The presence of guns undermines that.

No it doesn't. Magic beats gun is perfectly viable, and should work in the setting given the low cost of magic.

[Hecuba]

No it doesn't. Magic beats gun is perfectly viable, and should work in the setting given the low cost of magic.

How? Either you need all wizards to be very fast on their wands if someone pulls a gun on them, or you need them all to walk around with protective spells against bullets at all times (which would imply muggles as a major and constantly-considered threat, and thus still break the intended theme).

The window is quite narrow: guns cannot be a threat to wizards, but their non-threatening status needs to not be the result of proactive defensive measures (which would imply that muggles could be a serious threat if accounted for). It can also not be the result of something that stretches the ability to perceive of the narrative world as a hidden part of our own, so some fundamental difference in guns is out too.

Moreover, even if you do find a solution to this that isn't a blatantly obvious hand-wave ("Wizards are immune to guns Harry, everyone knows that"), it doesn't change the fact that the issue wasn't unaddressed because the author didn't think of it, but rather because the author perceived the potential costs of addressing it to outweigh the benefits.

Instead, she simply chose to side-step the issue, and when someone asked about it noted that she did so. This is more or less the equivalent of a DM saying "Yeah, I couldn't find a way to deal with create water traps for this setting. Please don't have the characters examine this too closely."

[Partysan]

Shirahama Kenichi is the poster boy of optimization of bad rolls.

Heh. I can so picture the player sitting in front of his sheet and desperately going through the books.
"How on earth am I supposed to do anything with this wimp? This is supposed to be a martial arts campaign! Isn't there some way to improve these ability scores? Geez, even the training bonuses for an epic level master aren't enough, I'd need five times as much to catch u - waaaaaait. There is no rule against having more than one master is there?
...Now if I just take fast regeneration as my first level feat..."

A few sessions past: "MUBYOUSHI!"
"Man, that wimp is hogging all the spotlight. Those disciple rules are totally broken, I tell ya."
"Be quiet, I need to make a foritude save every day or die from overtraining!"
"Yeah, in fact that happened multiple times, and while they revive him, he still needs to pay experience penalty."
"Oh, so that's why your character still acts like an idiot, even tough he can almost beat master class enemies by now?"
"Nah, that's just me roleplaying..."

[Jodah]

I think there are different types of people, some are technically oriented and others (for lack of a better term) creatively oriented. Those who are technical will have a better grasp of the rules, and will be better at optimization because of it. Those who are more traditionally creative will be better at role play.

Here is the rub, creativity is a skill. Sure you are more naturally inclined to certain things, but you can learn how to optimize or role play more effectively. And, the two work well together - one providing concepts the other letting you know how to bring those concepts about.

The best part is technical or creative can be in the ideation part, but the other will have to be in the how section. Example 1: I want to play a shapeshifting master of magic (creative), so I will play a druid (technical). Example 2: Druid seems like an interesting class, so I guess I will play a shapeshifting master of magic.

The problem with the Stormwind fallacy is that it neglects that people have their favored mode to approach a game with. The truth in it is that the other more atrophied approach can be trained to help and complement the already favored one.

[Ceaon]

To let me rephrase the OP: personally, I think that even though it is completely possible for a player to succeed at roleplaying a well-build character, most players do not.

There are unlimited creative ideas, while there are only a finite mechanical ways to represent them. Because 3.5 has so many options, ironically, it is harder to play whatever you want. It is expected that you build your character to acommodate how you want to roleplay them. If the correct option isn't available, what do you do? Many players take the reverse route: they create a build they want to play, and then think of how such a character would act. Is this bad? I don't think so, but it is interesting to note (hence why I started this topic).

I think that, although the Stormwind Fallacy is applicable often, it can also be the other way around. Optimization does not exclude the possibility of roleplaying, but those who tend to optimize more are more restricted in their roleplaying - and those who are more heavily into roleplaying play less optimized builds more often.

[Water_Bear]

This is just my opinion but I've always felt that ignoring the rules is automatically bad roleplaying.

Obviously most settings aren't like OotS or Goblins, PCs don't know about hit-points or attack bonuses. But the rules are essentially their physics; a Wizard can observe their own spells (or make Spellcraft rolls) to see how they work and what they do, a Fighter will have plenty of experience hitting a broad variety of creatures and objects with various weapons in different ways and seeing how they react.

If a setting or a plot requires that PCs or NPCs ignore obvious solutions that are within the rules, that is a poorly constructed story. If a character isn't optimized, AKA they haven't trained or bought items to ensure they are decent at what they supposedly do for a living, that character had better have a good excuse.

That's why the stormwind fallacy rings false to me. A single-classed Sword-and-Board Fighter without Power Attack who has Profession (Farmer) whose player treats them like a powerful warrior is playing them out of character. The 23 Intelligence Wizard who doesn't have Glitterdust in their spellbook is being played out of character.

Optimization isn't about winning the game, it's about making sure your character can do what they are supposed to be able to do in the first place.

[Boci]

How? Either you need all wizards to be very fast on their wands if someone pulls a gun on them, or you need them all to walk around with protective spells against bullets at all times (which would imply muggles as a major and constantly-considered threat, and thus still break the intended theme).

You need to think about why a wizard would assume their was a chance they were going to be shot. Muggles don't know about wizards. That is established, and until that is broken, there is no need to deal with what a wizard would hypothetically do if confonted with a gun wielding muggle.


Instead, she simply chose to side-step the issue,

or she didn't think of it, which given the other plot holes is just as likely.


This is more or less the equivalent of a DM saying "Yeah, I couldn't find a way to deal with create water traps for this setting. Please don't have the characters examine this too closely."

No it really isn't. Because resetting traps of create water didn't exist when Dark Sun was created, but guns existed when harry Potter was.

[IncoherentEssay]

Long post is long, but i wanted to cover all my thoughts on the matter and the things that i feel contribute to it.

I disagree with the notion that roleplaying and optimisation* are in any way opposed to one another.
Of course, most individuals will favor one over the other even if only slightly, creating the appearance of them being opposite one another.
Especially if the observer has an interest in promoting this divide ("Having a weak character makes me a better roleplayer!").

It is true that character concepts do have optimisation "floors" and "ceilings". The "aspiring swordsmaster" really shouldn't lose to a common goblin and the "town healer" won't be summoning the celestial hosts to fight for him. Playing a character much stronger OR weaker than the rest can obviously be a problem and should be cleared with the rest of the group beforehand (maybe they can help bring your character up to par/you can tone it down to their level. Maybe a stronger character covers for another characters weaknesses and everyone is cool with (A gets to play the otherwise too strong caster because it compensates for B's low-power concept).)

However, the character's concept has absolutely no influence whatsoever on the quality of roleplay. All characters are still people and can be RP'd just as well as any other regardless of concept or power levels. There's no such thing as "sacrificing power for flavor" (within the character concept), taking the "Awesome RP"-feat (effect: -1 hp) for all your feats will not make it so.

Another factor which contributes to the role-vs-roll illusion is the system not working as advertised. A mechanic with nice fluff has atrocious execution and is cripplingly weak or does not work at all. Or the system makes specific concepts jump through unnecessary hoops (a melee character with a side order of social skills? Either dip, pick human+able learner or set feats on fire since your skillpoints won't cover it otherwise). DMs/designers setting DCs for everyday things high enough to require ranks doesn't help at all :smallsigh:.

A player who isn't mechanically savvy will fall for the "trap" options. As a result, people who don't care for optimising end up with weak characters and easily assume that it's because of all the RP they put in. Part of the problem is how if mechanic X has Y fluff, some assume: only X can have Y fluff, you can only have Y fluff if you have X and if you have X you must Y fluff.
It only works if the system has no flaws. Evaluating mechanics-character consistency based only on the results the mechanics produce with no regard for the labels on the individual pieces makes it easier to accurately represent characters, allowing optimisation and roleplay to cooperate fully even if the system is clunky.

Then there's the "look at all these characters in fiction, they surely aren't optimised! Optimisation must be bad for the story!" line of thought. First, think of anything cool or impressive the character did. To do that in-game you need a solid build or bucketloads of dumb luck (if you can get such luck on demand, you should try gambling for a living :smalltongue:). It's also important to remember that fiction effectively only has one "player", the reader/viewer. Therefore the main cast is effectively one "player character" in terms of spotlight and having something to do. Applying this to an RPG group is likely to result in a table full of bored players. Similarly, highly thematic/otherwise limited powers and abilities are a matter of writer convenience: limited powers keep mundane plots relevant and makes setting consistency far easier to maintain (consider the most likely unintened impact of the trap creation rules on society in 3.5) and having few of them helps to avoid plot holes and holding the idiot ball. being only situationally useful doesn't make for an engaging rpg Character. Fiction isn't written with playability in mind, please keep this in mind when scouring it for ideas. A good game and a good book both have a story but go about doing their thing in very different ways.

"The time you spend on mechanics is time you don't spend on roleplay." True, but also misleading. As is often pointed out, most of the optimisation occurs out-of-game and roleplaying occurs in-game. Whilst backstory and pre-game characterisation is a good idea, there is a point of dimishing returns after which it is unlikely to come up or contribute anything to the ingame RP (around the point of designing a fully detailed family tree at the latest). The same of course applies to optimisation: the better you are the more bookdiving it takes to find better options. The two only compete with one another if the time available for character creation is extremely limited.

Then theres the claim that mechanics constrain roleplay. The ever present "player makes amazing speech, rolls poorly" and "feat Y allows manouver X, therefore i cannot use X without Y" dilemmas are often presented in support of this.
In my opinion it is not the mechanics obstructing RP, but how they are being misapplied.
Let's tackle the speech first: we'll assume the player's character is actually competent in diplomacy**. The immediately obvious issue is that the player RP'd his speech before knowing the results. A short description of what he's about to do followed by the mechanical resolution ("I persuade the nobles to join the alliance by appealing to their greed with improved trade profits and the spoils of war." "+2 diplomacy for perfect tool." *rolls made, success/failure*) to produce a "script" for RPing the scene would result in a more accurate portrayal. (Assume success - portray success - throw a hissy fit when "not as planned" occurs :smalltongue:) is just poor manners and poor RP. Don't be too attached to "your" script, use the mechanics as a springboard for RP instead.

Another factor is the swinginess/guaranteed success caused by resolving things with a single d20 + modifiers. If the result of something is important, don't model it with a single roll. You don't fight dragons with a d20 + combat pass/fail mechanic, so if the results of negotiations/overland exploration/armwrestling*** matter, use a bit more indepth model. Sticking with the speech, let's make it 5 rolls of DC X with each succesfull check increasing the DC of the remaining by Y. The character can address different issues in each "part" of the speech with bonuses/penalties depending on the audience (diminishing/no bonus for repetition). Success is determined by how many out of the checks they made. Even a poor speaker with can get results with the right arguments and even the best will have trouble scoring 5/5. That's how you model a speech.

As for defined abilities restricting creativity, remember that the feat(or class in some cases) describes the rules for the action for someone proficient in it. The "Improved X" line of feats presents a rough guideline for trained vs untrained: a +4 bonus and no AoO. A nonprofiency penalty and an AoO will cover most cases of "there's a feat for it (which i don't have)".


Many things can make it seem as if roleplaying and optimisation were opposed, but that's just people seeing what they want to see (anecdotes being anecdotes, have you ever seen a mechanics-savvy player complaining how roleplaying makes their character somehow weaker?).


*please don't confuse optimisation with powergaming or munchinism.
Optimisation means making the most of your character within a specific concept and constraints.
Powergaming is just concerned with making the most powerful character possible (it does synergise with optimisation, but everyone has at least read of "a totally OP monk" so the two do not always meet).
Munchikinism is powergaming with a side dish of selectivily ignoring the rules in the player's own favor and other miscellanous cheating.
Mixing them up (inadverdantly or not) comes across as insulting.

**because otherwise it's just poor RP and misrepresenting the character.

***armwrestling could be modeled by a 7 point scale (A wins/A heavy advantage(+3?)/A slight adv.(+1)/tied/B s. adv./B h. adv./B wins) where whoever wins the STR check moves it one step their way.

TL;DR: optimisation & mechanics are not opposed to roleplay, they support one another.

[Flickerdart]

Being an adventurer is a tough, risky profession. Failure means death. If your character cannot do the fundamental thing he's supposed to (adventure) then it doesn't matter how developed a character he is, because he died 10 dungeons ago on a goblin's spear. By the CR rules, roughly three quarters of all characters moving up a level will fail to do so and die, so if your character beat the odds and got to even level 2, he hasn't wasted all his resources on optimizing Profession (Basketweaver).

Unless, of course, he got there with the party's help. But then it doesn't make sense for the party to travel with such a lodestone, since his weighing them down could result in their death. Either way you get absurd situations that have to be handwaved away with far more effort than explaining why you have a level of Barbarian on your Paladin.

[willpell]

I definitely believe that Stormwind is valid as long as you take it as a "most" rather than an "all". It's not impossible to integrate optomized stats into a character's backstory seamlessly, but it's difficult. Making your character choices on an optomization basis usually, though not always, means picking things that aren't a perfect match for the character's personality, backstory, or the holism of the gameworld. As a simple example, Hidden Talent is obviously a better feat than Wild Talent, but sometimes a character's backstory doesn't benefit from them being randomly able to manifest a psionic power; would Kwai Chang Caine have been a more compelling kung fu guy if he'd gone around shooting energy rays? Sometimes the less-optomized choice makes for a better characterization; the occasions when a character can meet both these needs ideally are not nonexistent, but they are uncommon. A world can only contain so many Elminsters.

[Ceaon]

Being an adventurer is a tough, risky profession. Failure means death. If your character cannot do the fundamental thing he's supposed to (adventure) then it doesn't matter how developed a character he is, because he died 10 dungeons ago on a goblin's spear. By the CR rules, roughly three quarters of all characters moving up a level will fail to do so and die, so if your character beat the odds and got to even level 2, he hasn't wasted all his resources on optimizing Profession (Basketweaver).

But aren't the unlikely hero, the lucky survivor and the sympathetic drag on the party all possible characters someone wants to play?

[Malachei]

Being an adventurer is a tough, risky profession. Failure means death. If your character cannot do the fundamental thing he's supposed to (adventure) then it doesn't matter how developed a character he is, because he died 10 dungeons ago on a goblin's spear. By the CR rules, roughly three quarters of all characters moving up a level will fail to do so and die, so if your character beat the odds and got to even level 2, he hasn't wasted all his resources on optimizing Profession (Basketweaver).

Unless, of course, he got there with the party's help. But then it doesn't make sense for the party to travel with such a lodestone, since his weighing them down could result in their death. Either way you get absurd situations that have to be handwaved away with far more effort than explaining why you have a level of Barbarian on your Paladin.

Somehow, even non-optimized PCs tend to be the exception to the norm.

The vast majority of published adventures assumes a non-optimized party. The DM is defining the risk level to challenge the PCs, no more, no less. For one game, this may mean a higher threat level, for another a lower. The end result will often be similar survival rates. There is no internal justification in the game for you to be optimized.

[Flickerdart]

But aren't the unlikely hero, the lucky survivor and the sympathetic drag on the party all possible characters someone wants to play?
Yes, but the party might not want to have those characters drag them down. It's a cooperative game, after all.


Somehow, even non-optimized PCs tend to be the exception to the norm.

The vast majority of published adventures assumes a non-optimized party. The DM is defining the risk level to challenge the PCs, no more, no less. For one game, this may mean a higher threat level, for another a lower. The end result will often be similar survival rates. There is no internal justification in the game for you to be optimized.
Yes, but this is not following the CR rules, which is a thing that I said and you decided to ignore. That's what happens when you take parts out of a post, it starts saying a different thing than it did before.

[willpell]

Nice players with crippled builds are almost impossible to DM for. At best the unoptimized player will not be able to contribute, at worst a weak link in the party might result in a wipe. Either way, the player is likely too invested in their character backstory to take their inevitable inglorious death gracefully.

Personally I would be happy to go far out of my way to reward a player for great roleplay with circumstance bonuses, tailored treasure picks, relatively easy fights (unless they complain of boredom) and lots of Plot Armor or free Raises or whatever they need. If you "let the dice fall where they may", then yes, the player who didn't optomize is in bad shape. But I would much rather fudge every rule in the book to make sure you get to play your character, especially if you worked really hard on making him so vibrant and imaginative he practically springs off the page, as opposed to being a pile of cheesy mechanics with a slapped-on backstory that makes no sense.

Really, I think trying to build a brokenly powerful character is kind of a slap in the DM's face, like you think he's out to get you and you want to beat him at his own game. That may be what a lot of D&D ends up being, but it's not how virtually every other roleplaying game says that roleplaying games in general should be. Nearly everything in the modern market emphasizes that the rules should bend and that players deserve to get to enjoy the characters they play, instead of having to outsmart a killer DM just to avoid being destroyed. Granted, it's rather in-flavor for D&D to have some of that, being a game of trap-filled tombs that were intentionally designed to kill anyone intruding on them...even so, there's presenting a credible threat to raise tension, and then they're just being a jerk.

[Ceaon]

Yes, but the party might not want to have those characters drag them down. It's a cooperative game, after all.

So, if I understand you correctly, you agree with me that it may be the nature of the game of Dungeons and Dragons, not necessarily the player's skill at combining optimization and roleplaying, that creates a corrolation between the two?

[Flickerdart]

So, if I understand you correctly, you agree with me that it may be the nature of the game of Dungeons and Dragons, not necessarily the player's skill at combining optimization and roleplaying, that creates a corrolation between the two?
I have no idea what you're talking about.

[Water_Bear]

But aren't the unlikely hero, the lucky survivor and the sympathetic drag on the party all possible characters someone wants to play?

The problem with that is that those archetypes don't work in a D&D context.

An unlikely hero usually either has potential (retraining into a better build later) or Fate (DM Fiat) backing them up. You can't count on luck, so a lucky survivor is quickly going to become a corpse without DM intervention. And a 'sympathetic' drag on the party is looks like this 99% of the time;

http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20070518052024/memoryalpha/en/images/thumb/8/8c/Neelix.jpg/292px-Neelix.jpg


But I would much rather fudge every rule in the book to make sure you get to play your character, especially if you worked really hard on making him so vibrant and imaginative he practically springs off the page, as opposed to being a pile of cheesy mechanics with a slapped-on backstory that makes no sense.

Fudging the rules, IMO, leads to favoritism and poor homebrew. It's sometimes a necessary evil, but in the long-term will cause more problems than it solves. D&D 3.5 is a rules-heavy system, and changes tend to ripple outwards.

In other words; help the player spruce up their build to fit the backstory, don't just patch over the holes. Once they learn to optimize without the training wheels they'll be glad for the help.


Really, I think trying to build a brokenly powerful character is kind of a slap in the DM's face, like you think he's out to get you and you want to beat him at his own game.

Optimization isn't about getting OMG H4X P0W3Rz, it's about making a character's crunch match their concept. This usually means making a more powerful or skilled character, but that is because D&D is about heroes and epic deeds. You can optimize a guy to be a good farmer using the DMG II Business rules too, it just doesn't come up as much.

You're talking more about Powergaming (using the rules for ultimate power) or Munchkinry (bending/breaking the rules for ultimate power). Those kinds of players exist, I've played with them, but they can usually be rehabilitated with a little tough love.

[Menteith]

Really, I think trying to build a brokenly powerful character is kind of a slap in the DM's face, like you think he's out to get you and you want to beat him at his own game. That may be what a lot of D&D ends up being, but it's not how virtually every other roleplaying game says that roleplaying games in general should be. Nearly everything in the modern market emphasizes that the rules should bend and that players deserve to get to enjoy the characters they play, instead of having to outsmart a killer DM just to avoid being destroyed. Granted, it's rather in-flavor for D&D to have some of that, being a game of trap-filled tombs that were intentionally designed to kill anyone intruding on them...even so, there's presenting a credible threat to raise tension, and then they're just being a jerk.

Has a single person in this thread suggested that Optimization means "trying to build a brokenly powerful character"? I'm not sure where that mindset comes from, but that's not what optimization is about. Nor is it about being forced to sacrifice parts of your build in order to survive a killer DM. Optimization is about finding a way to make your character idea work. If there are differing levels of optimization, especially between the DM and the players, then yes, it's a problem. Both sides need to be on the same page with how powerful each respective side is.

[Oscredwin]

The first solution that pops into my head about Harry Potter and guns is that Wizards who have their wands on them learn a basic shield that protects them from minor things like falling off a broomstick, some random thing falling from the sky, stray magical beasts, and stray bullets if the muggles happen to be having one of their little wars where the wizard in question wants to go out for a stroll. Not worth talking about generally, explains some of the durability of the heroes in the story, and can be a throwaway line in the first book. The shield was around back when Hogwarts was raised, it predates firearms, and so wizards don't think about guns as risky. Their default protection takes care of that. Of course an Avada Kedavra can get past that shield like it wasn't there (can't be blocked). THAT is a threat!

[Malachei]

Yes, but this is not following the CR rules, which is a thing that I said and you decided to ignore.

You're probably meaning EL when you're using CR. And neither CR or EL contain a rule that every fourth battle a PC dies, nor do they imply such a thing. They also don't contain an in-world reasoning for a death rate. They're tools for the DM to use to challenge a party and make the game interesting.


That's what happens when you take parts out of a post, it starts saying a different thing than it did before.

I quoted and addressed your full post. Your post has no quoted other part. If your full post can't stand for itself, that's not my problem.

[Tanuki Tales]

I can't say I agree with this. Yes, the player would have a highly optimized build, but that doesn't necessarily include highly optimized play. Give a bad optimizer something like a high-OP Druid, and they'll likely waste time turning into bears or Flame Striking opponents or forgetting about their fleshraker.

A build could be optimized on paper, yes, but that doesn't automatically make it optimized in play. I've seen most situations like this turn the character into a one-trick pony, doing one thing over and over until it's no longer possible or they run out of steam.

Please don't take my post out of context. I addressed exactly what you just wrote. =/


Edit:
The first solution that pops into my head about Harry Potter and guns is that Wizards who have their wands on them learn a basic shield that protects them from minor things like falling off a broomstick, some random thing falling from the sky, stray magical beasts, and stray bullets if the muggles happen to be having one of their little wars where the wizard in question wants to go out for a stroll. Not worth talking about generally, explains some of the durability of the heroes in the story, and can be a throwaway line in the first book. The shield was around back when Hogwarts was raised, it predates firearms, and so wizards don't think about guns as risky. Their default protection takes care of that. Of course an Avada Kedavra can get past that shield like it wasn't there (can't be blocked). THAT is a threat!

Books disprove that idea sadly, so if Rowling came out and said something to that end, it'd cause even more plot holes.

I remember there being several comments made over the books that certain protected areas (like Hogwarts) caused Muggle tech to be useless in its radius. So maybe Wizards aren't afraid of guns because when they're grouped together in living conditions, guns just don't work and when they're out in the Muggle world their arrogance over their own powers makes them not view anything not magic or supernatural as a threat.

Mind you, a trained special forces agent is going to own most wizards in tactical battle conditions that they're aware of since wizards are poor shots and have crappy reaction time and generally aren't trained to deal with people who can be up in your face and breaking your wrists instead of at a respectable distance shooting energy softballs at you.

[Menteith]

The first solution that pops into my head about Harry Potter and guns is that Wizards who have their wands on them learn a basic shield that protects them from minor things like falling off a broomstick, some random thing falling from the sky, stray magical beasts, and stray bullets if the muggles happen to be having one of their little wars where the wizard in question wants to go out for a stroll. Not worth talking about generally, explains some of the durability of the heroes in the story, and can be a throwaway line in the first book. The shield was around back when Hogwarts was raised, it predates firearms, and so wizards don't think about guns as risky. Their default protection takes care of that. Of course an Avada Kedavra can get past that shield like it wasn't there (can't be blocked). THAT is a threat!

Except things like falling off a broomstick, random things falling from the sky, and stray magical beasts are threats in HPverse. It would require changing significant parts of the story around to take this into account. Additionally, if it only works while a Wizard has their wand on them, what's to stop someone from pegging, say, Bellatrix in the head from a mile off with a .50 caliber weapon while she sleeps? Or what about an air strike on Malfoy Manner when most of the Death Eaters are in attendance, shouldn't a thermobaric weapon kill wizards who (biologically speaking) are human? We've seen that the Prime Minster is aware of magic, and one would assume he's reasonably competent. Knowing that magic is presenting a clear threat to his nation, don't you think he'd authorize military action when he learns that giants and dark wizards are terrorizing the muggle population? Again, it's just a plot hole that was ignored for the sake of the story, and there isn't an easy way around it.

[Yuki Akuma]

Word of Rowling is that a muggle with a shotgun would beat a wizard with a gun nine times out of ten.

Which kinda implies "Protection From Bullets" isn't a common spell. Or at least, it takes longer to cast than it takes to get shot.

[Flickerdart]

You're probably meaning EL when you're using CR. And neither CR or EL contain a rule that every fourth battle a PC dies, nor do they imply such a thing. They also don't contain an in-world reasoning for a death rate. They're tools for the DM to use to challenge a party and make the game interesting.
CR+4 is a 50% death rate - two equal opponents. It is supposed to expend 100% of party resources. The reason the 4-encounter day is oft cited is because each CR+0 encounter is intended to expend 20% of resources (including HP), with 20% left over at the end of the day. Thus each CR+0 encounter is 1/5th as dangerous as a CR+4 encounter, cutting the death chance to 10%. For the 13.3 encounters one needs to gain a level, that adds up to a 75% chance of death.



I quoted and addressed your full post. Your post has no quoted other part. If your full post can't stand for itself, that's not my problem.
You quoted the whole thing, but then ignored parts of it. There is no need to continue being so rude.

[Little Brother]

Except things like falling off a broomstick, random things falling from the sky, and stray magical beasts are threats in HPverse. It would require changing significant parts of the story around to take this into account. Additionally, if it only works while a Wizard has their wand on them, what's to stop someone from pegging, say, Bellatrix in the head from a mile off with a .50 caliber weapon while she sleeps? Or what about an air strike on Malfoy Manner when most of the Death Eaters are in attendance, shouldn't a thermobaric weapon kill wizards who (biologically speaking) are human? We've seen that the Prime Minster is aware of magic, and one would assume he's reasonably competent. Knowing that magic is presenting a clear threat to his nation, don't you think he'd authorize military action when he learns that giants and dark wizards are terrorizing the muggle population? Again, it's just a plot hole that was ignored for the sake of the story, and there isn't an easy way around it.Predator drones - You never see them coming.

A bigger plothole, IMO, which is saying something, given how big this one is, is divination. Yes, there's a magic prophecy of doominess and all, so why don't they just abuse the hell out of divination? I mean, divination WORKS. So why aren't people predicting the future for useful things?

[Yuki Akuma]

The gift of true divination is very rare in the HP universe - and the one character we meet who has it has only made two real predictions in her entire life.

[Little Brother]

The gift of true divination is very rare in the HP universe - and the one character we meet who has it has only made two real predictions in her entire life.If that was true, then nobody would actually take it seriously. They do. Hogwarts has a class on it.

So, either it works, or Hogwarts and a huge number of wizards are idiots.

And there are people who can divine stuff. Freiza, or whatever that Centaur was called, was apparently qualified enough to teach people how to divine stuff.

[Flickerdart]

So, either it works, or Hogwarts and a huge number of wizards are idiots.
You mean this wasn't obvious from the start?

[Little Brother]

You mean this wasn't obvious from the start?I mean, so incredibly, mind-numbingly, frothing at the mouth idiots that they would believe in that.

It's like taking horoscopes and fortune cookies seriously. Except worse, since they already know how magic works...

[Yuki Akuma]

True Divination is one of those abilities like Parseltongue or that power Tonks has. It's rare, but has been documented and is known to exist.

The Divination they teach in Hogwarts is... fuzzy, at best. It doesn't always work, and a lot of witches and wizards (Professor McGonagall, for instance) don't believe in it*. This is made abundantly clear in the books. The only reason they have someone teaching it is because she's a true diviner who might make an important prophecy at any time, so they want to keep her close.

It's also possibly a way to test for true divination powers.

*You'll notice how Harry and Ron treat Divination as a goof-off period, and Hermione stormed out of the class and never went back. We're not supposed to believe it's real. So the fact that Professor Trelawney has an actual prophecy during the fifth book (or was it the sixth?) is meant to come as a huge surprise.

[Little Brother]

True Divination is one of those abilities like Parseltongue or that power Tonks has. It's rare, but has been documented and is known to exist.Tonks' ability is like animagi, IIRC. Anyone, or near anyone, can do it, it's just very difficult.

The Divination they teach in Hogwarts is... fuzzy, at best. It doesn't always work, and a lot of witches and wizards (Professor McGonagall, for instance) don't believe in it. This is made abundantly clear in the books. The only reason they have someone teaching it is because she's a true diviner who might make an important prophecy at any time, so they want to keep her close.Why? They have a copy of every prophecy, like, ever at the ministry, which means they need some way to pick up and record them. Just like they can detect magic, it is logical that you could detect divination. So there's no need to keep her there, much less waste a class having her teach nothing.

EDIT: So what about Freiza?

[Menteith]

It's also worth pointing out that most Hogwarts students lack the ability to find Mexico on a map, understand basic applications of algebra, understand how a compass works, use a computer, or the other distressingly important things one normally learns in a school.

While we're offtopic, would Voldemort be powerless if someone just grabbed his wand and took it from him? I know that Wizards are capable of wandless magic when the plot needs them to, but couldn't you just put him in prison and watch him carefully?

[Yuki Akuma]

Dumbledore does not work for the Ministry of Magic, and likely wouldn't be allowed access to their records. He's the person who hired Trelawney.

Centaur divination might be more "real", for all we know. I suspect that, because true human divination is random and unpredictable, all the stuff taught in Divination class was made up to try to help true diviners focus their powers. (It might even work. But given Trelawney, it probably doesn't.)

Edit: Also I don't believe Tonks' ability is one that can be learned like animagi. It can be honed, probably, but I think it's supposed to be a natural talent.

[Little Brother]

It's also worth pointing out that most Hogwarts students lack the ability to find Mexico on a map, understand basic applications of algebra, understand how a compass works, use a computer, or the other distressingly important things one normally learns in a school.Which makes one wonder how they haven't gone extinct by now...

While we're offtopic, would Voldemort be powerless if someone just grabbed his wand and took it from him? I know that Wizards are capable of wandless magic when the plot needs them to, but couldn't you just put him in prison and watch him carefully?Or, better yet... (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WhyDontYouJustShootHim?from=Main.WhyDontYaJustShoo tHim)

[Scowling Dragon]

It's also worth pointing out that most Hogwarts students lack the ability to find Mexico on a map, understand basic applications of algebra, understand how a compass works, use a computer, or the other distressingly important things one normally learns in a school.


Its simple. Muggles took the hard way through life and discovered alternative ways to the ways of magic. Through that they discovered things that outperform magic in simple practicality.

[Morithias]

Minax was born to a cult of Bhaal and was raised as one of their dark clerics.

Raised the underdark she quickly mastered, divine magic, rogue skills, and trap finding to work her way around the traps of her cult's targets (as well as that annoying booby trap her room-mate kept on her hidden treat jar).

Being a changeling, and one with ties to the plane of shadows, she found hiding and killing easy to master, and her mastery of death and planning gave her quick insight. Barely out of childhood, she had murdered 15 different people in 15 different ways. However she was told she could not join the deathstalkers due to being one short. In her rage she stabbed the cleric in the chest repeatedly killing him as number 16, and gaining Bhaal's blessing.

Seeing how she was now wanted by the cult of Bhaal, she sneaked into their headquarters and stole a magic knife "the eternal reward" and left, seeking a way out of the underdark. Eventually after 4 years and lots of bodies, she succeeded and fled to a nearby city where she joined the nightshade covenant.

After being told of a special tavern by a thieve's guild she joined (not the nightshade covenant, the insurer's guild), she won the "infiltrator" in a game of cards, and grew to like the armour's synergy to her magic knife. She also started to master more changeling powers, like being able to remove her organ's weakness to being stabbed, making her immune to critical hits and sneak attacks.

She seeks more power, and is currently doing wetwork in the city. She is looking for a new adventure in the dark to test her powers of assassination.

Nice backstory No? Now if the stormwind fallacy was true, there is no way this character could be optimized well.

rogue 20 + cleric 1/Ranger 1/death stalker 5/warshaper 3//legacy warrior 10

I dunno...a geslalt character that's abusing easy entry to warshaper, hit and run tactics via the dark template, and using the legacy champion to boost her death attack to 38 + cha mod by level 20? And has cleric spells around caster level 9?

I'd call that optimized fairly well. I mean it's not Pun-Pun, but it's still a build that took a lot of math to do.

[kaomera]

Now, I understand this fallacy, but I would like to know: even though many people can combine roleplaying and optimization, I am convinced there exists a (negative) corrolation between roleplaying behavior and optimization behavior. There are some people out there who, maybe even because they roleplay very intensely, can't/don't optimize well and vice versa.
The Stormwind Fallacy is flawed because both ''roleplay'' and ''optimization'' are large, open-ended subjects. The problem that you are referencing is, in my experience, primarily one where players and/or GMs want a certain type of results without engaging in play that is going to produce those results. If you want drama in your game, that's caused by the ebb and flow of positive and negative outcomes, if the PCs have to succeed at every little thing they do (every individual step - succeeding at most or all of their major goals shouldn't be a problem) then you aren't going to get that. Just like if you expect non-optimized characters to perform mechanically as well as non-optimized.

If you want n% non-dice / non-rules play in your game, then you can only afford to spend (100-n)% of your time looking up rules and rolling dice. Honestly many of the players that I have encountered who are the best at optimization have the least problems with this because they know the rules and have their notes and character sheets laid out to facilitate efficient play. Some of them do really want to focus on the mechanical elements of play, but that's a specific player preference.

[Menteith]

Well, I'm willing to accept that you can't just shoot a Lich to death (and Voldemort is a classic Lich, creates lots of soul jars that tether him to life). I mean, you could weight him down and sink him into the Mariana Trench, I suppose.....

[Little Brother]

Well, I'm willing to accept that you can't just shoot a Lich to death (and Voldemort is a classic Lich, creates lots of soul jars that tether him to life). I mean, you could weight him down and sink him into the Mariana Trench, I suppose.....Or figure out some way to hold him in stasis. Evil sealed in a can and all.

[Menteith]

Or figure out some way to hold him in stasis. Evil sealed in a can and all.

Point is, vanilla mortals have a host of ways to deal with Voldemort using the tools they should logically have. Maybe he can't die (although that theory should certainly be tested), but really, one crazy person and his cult of personality should have been logically stopped by normal humans after they became threats to the state. Sure, they have super powers, but they're incredibly ignorant of how society works, are suicidally arrogant, and aren't any more durable than anyone else.

[Tanuki Tales]

Again, it's just a plot hole that was ignored for the sake of the story, and there isn't an easy way around it.

Not necessarily a plot hole for large scale assaults. The books mention multiple times about anti-muggle tech magic fields and Unplottable locations and area memory charms and things like that.

[Menteith]

Not necessarily a plot hole for large scale assaults. The books mention multiple times about anti-muggle tech magic fields and Unplottable locations and area memory charms and things like that.

Walking Techbane (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WalkingTechbane) is only applicable on the grounds of Hogwarts, and it's actually not terrible clear what that entails (Would a Faraday Cage protect a computer? Does an old school revolver work, or does the magic field somehow warp reality in a way that prevents combustion in a confined space from doing what it normally does? Trains apparently work, so that implies some tech works...it's just not ever explored or elaborated on, except as a plot device when it's needed).

Sure, there are tools that Wizard could use (and a single intelligent evil wizard could rule the world pretty much with impunity, if they took a few weeks to Imperius every world leader via Invisibility and Apparition), but governments are remarkably effective in finding and subduing terrorists who stand out like sore thumbs and who rarely attempt to conceal themselves. Like, if Kingsly (who we know is with the PM during the last book) told him where to find a Death Eater, don't you think a UKSF team could kill them before they even knew they were there? Don't you think Avada Kevdara might have a problem when there's an entire Swat Team on you?

[Tanuki Tales]

Walking Techbane (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WalkingTechbane) is only applicable on the grounds of Hogwarts, and it's actually not terrible clear what that entails (Would a Faraday Cage protect a computer? Does an old school revolver work, or does the magic field somehow warp reality in a way that prevents combustion in a confined space from doing what it normally does? Trains apparently work, so that implies some tech works...it's just not ever explored or elaborated on, except as a plot device when it's needed).

Source? Because I don't remember it being mentioned as something exclusive to Hogwarts that can't be replicated elsewhere.

And as for guns, it could always do something like what the Sontarans tech does to human weaponry. *shrugs*

And yeah, the train is a hole unless there are ways to enchant or exclude specific items from the effect of the field.


Sure, there are tools that Wizard could use (and a single intelligent evil wizard could rule the world pretty much with impunity, if they took a few weeks to Imperius every world leader via Invisibility and Apparition), but governments are remarkably effective in finding and subduing terrorists who stand out like sore thumbs and who rarely attempt to conceal themselves. Like, if Kingsly (who we know is with the PM during the last book) told him where to find a Death Eater, don't you think a UKSF team could kill them before they even knew they were there? Don't you think Avada Kevdara might have a problem when there's an entire Swat Team on you?

The issue here is that would probably require some form of enchantment or enhancement of said SWAT teams since a lot of those type of spells are of the No Save variety when Muggles are concerned.

Now, assuming that Muggle governments could circumvent being affected by said magic, of course it'd be a curbstomp.

[Menteith]

Source? Because I don't remember it being mentioned as something exclusive to Hogwarts that can't be replicated elsewhere.

It's never explained. Hogwarts has a student population of under 500 (assumptions made based on how many students are sorted at the beginning of the year, and the total numbers of years attending the school). I'm going to go out on a limb and say that events like the Quidditch World Cup and places like the Ministry of Magic have greater populations than that of Hogwarts, and probably have similar enchantments in place (again, assumptions, but I feel they're fair ones). The only place that's ever stated to block technology is Hogwarts. I don't know if this is due to a specific trait of the school or another reason.



The issue here is that would probably require some form of enchantment or enhancement of said SWAT teams since a lot of those type of spells are of the No Save variety when Muggles are concerned.

Or just kill them from a distance, or in a way that prevents them from reacting - you know, the tactics employed by modern (para)military forces. An M25 Sniper Rifle has a good deal longer effective range than a wand. It's remarkably hard to target someone when you're in a cloud of tear gas. Sting (or flash bang) grenades will stop you from moving. In actual combat, Death Eaters aren't any more dangerous than a lunatic with a high powered weapon that will kill you if they aim it and fire it at you; and law enforcement has certainly prepared for dealing with that situation, and they're very good at it. And if every option is on the table to stop these people, then they'll be killed before they even have a chance to react.

[demigodus]

The issue here is that would probably require some form of enchantment or enhancement of said SWAT teams since a lot of those type of spells are of the No Save variety when Muggles are concerned.

Now, assuming that Muggle governments could circumvent being affected by said magic, of course it'd be a curbstomp.

A lot of the spells are "here is a moderately fast blast of energy flying at you. You need to be hit by this to be screwed" variety.

Also, I'm pretty sure if a SWAT team was told they were to eliminate a wizard, don't even bother with trying to capture him, the strategy would look more akin to having snipers half a mile away, not walking up to the wizard's face with guns. Even if they used the second strategy, it would come down to whether they can pull a trigger quicker then a wizard can flick a wand. Pretty good odds IF they have good intel on the abilities of wizards.

[Tanuki Tales]

You guys do know that the spells I'm talking about have effective ranges in the minimum of miles and in some cases can cover entire islands, right? :smallconfused:

[Menteith]

You guys do know that the spells I'm talking about have effective ranges in the minimum of miles and in some cases can cover entire islands, right? :smallconfused:

I'm talking about the offensive spells used in Harry Potter. Avada Kedavra, Crucio, Imperio, Confringo, Incendio, Oppugno (debatably, Voldemort uses it on glass to make it offensive), Stupefy. I totally might be missing some, but that's a fair sampling size.

All of these require line of sight to the target. All of these have been shown to miss moving targets, implying that the user must correctly aim. This means they are ineffective against targets the user cannot see or target. This makes them about as effective as a powerful, silent gun that has nonlethal setting (Stupefy). Also, they are (for the most part) single target. What HPverse spells were you talking about?

[Tanuki Tales]

I'm talking about the offensive spells used in Harry Potter. Avada Kedavra, Crucio, Imperio, Confringo, Incendio, Oppugno (debatably, Voldemort uses it on glass to make it offensive), Stupefy. I totally might be missing some, but that's a fair sampling size.

All of these require line of sight to the target. All of these have been shown to miss moving targets, implying that the user must correctly aim. This means they are ineffective against targets the user cannot see or target. This makes them about as effective as a powerful, silent gun that has nonlethal setting (Stupefy) What HPverse spells were you talking about?

I'm talking about the ones like Unplottable charm or the Muggle Repellant one from the World Cup. The kind that wouldn't ever allow a SWAT Team to come close to touching a Dark Wizard on their home turf or at the very least would buy quite sufficient time to Apparate away.

If the wizards weren't so damn arrogant concerning muggles they could probably use stealth and shock and awe to cripple power centers and such and just avoid actual military presence.

But as I stated, if military forces could circumvent magic and get in range, they'd curbstomp a wizard who wasn't as well trained as themselves in combat or wasn't prepared to take them on.

[Menteith]

Muggle Repelling Charm isn't exactly clear on how it works. The only thing we know about it is that they will "realise a reason as not to enter the area over this charm's protection, for example, by "remembering" that they had an urgent appointment somewhere else. " I'm not sure if this is enough to stop a dedicated force that knows exactly where it's going, or if it only discourages people from investigating it.

Unplottable Charm can remove an object from plain sight and from maps, but we don't know how it holds up against satellite imagery, radar, or other high tech solutions. I mean, maybe it protects against them, maybe it doesn't. Even if it does, the antagonists of HP aren't intelligent enough to use their abilities effectively (destroying or subverting key personal in the command structure, knocking out lines of communication, performing large scale mind control) since they have literally no understanding of a muggle world. Like, I don't know if Voldemort even knows what a cell phone is, let alone how to knock a communications satellite out of orbit.

Either way, it's just something that's completely unaccounted for within the story itself. One way or another, human society wouldn't remain completely passive players in this sort of conflict.

[navar100]

The Stormwind Fallacy is flawed because both ''roleplay'' and ''optimization'' are large, open-ended subjects. The problem that you are referencing is, in my experience, primarily one where players and/or GMs want a certain type of results without engaging in play that is going to produce those results. If you want drama in your game, that's caused by the ebb and flow of positive and negative outcomes, if the PCs have to succeed at every little thing they do (every individual step - succeeding at most or all of their major goals shouldn't be a problem) then you aren't going to get that. Just like if you expect non-optimized characters to perform mechanically as well as non-optimized.

If you want n% non-dice / non-rules play in your game, then you can only afford to spend (100-n)% of your time looking up rules and rolling dice. Honestly many of the players that I have encountered who are the best at optimization have the least problems with this because they know the rules and have their notes and character sheets laid out to facilitate efficient play. Some of them do really want to focus on the mechanical elements of play, but that's a specific player preference.

It's not flawed at all. To say that the ability to roleplay and the desire to optimize have nothing to do with each other is precisely the point. They don't. The violation comes when one says they do. To say optimization stunts creativity is the violation. To say your energy put into optimization takes away energy put into roleplaying is the violation.

It's quite possible an individual player cannot do both. However, such a thing is for that player only. That player may not be roleplaying. That player may only be thinking about the letters and numbers on his character sheet who cannot think outside the box when in a situation not optimal to his build.

The Stormwind Fallacy is about global assumption. To automatically assume the desire to optimize takes away even a minutiae of roleplay (and vice versa) is that violation. One calls the Stormwind Fallacy flawed because colloquially you feel bad about being called on it when you make that automatic assumption.

[DarkEternal]

Theoretically, I agree. Why would one exclude the other? I mean, if someone went to the pain of researching a good character that can demolish the battle field, he clearly cares about the character and wants to see him shine lore wise, just as much as mechanical wise, right?

In practice, however, I must disagree only because of my own personal experience. While I'm sure there are awesome highly optimised characters out there that could roleplay the hell out of me, my own players that tended to make uber strong characters usually sucked in terms of roleplaying, playing more of a character that had no real motivations or inclinations, but just went around and bashed stuff in because he could. If that was explained in some way, or played through, I wouldn't have a problem, but hell, even the players that usually played these characters confessed later that they have no idea where they were going with those characters. That there were far too many combinations of stuff, crunch and the like to make a coherent, belieavable character out of the mix.

But then again, that was maybe only my personal experience.

[Little Brother]

Muggle Repelling Charm isn't exactly clear on how it works. The only thing we know about it is that they will "realise a reason as not to enter the area over this charm's protection, for example, by "remembering" that they had an urgent appointment somewhere else. " I'm not sure if this is enough to stop a dedicated force that knows exactly where it's going, or if it only discourages people from investigating it.

Unplottable Charm can remove an object from plain sight and from maps, but we don't know how it holds up against satellite imagery, radar, or other high tech solutions. I mean, maybe it protects against them, maybe it doesn't. Even if it does, the antagonists of HP aren't intelligent enough to use their abilities effectively (destroying or subverting key personal in the command structure, knocking out lines of communication, performing large scale mind control) since they have literally no understanding of a muggle world. Like, I don't know if Voldemort even knows what a cell phone is, let alone how to knock a communications satellite out of orbit.

Either way, it's just something that's completely unaccounted for within the story itself. One way or another, human society wouldn't remain completely passive players in this sort of conflict.However, one thing you're forgetting: The good guys have wizards, too. If the wizards would just guard a couple of key things, put Teraport area-de-I mean, anti-apperation charms around key locations, much of the bad guys' power is gone. Plus, Wizard=Wizard, so Wizards+Muggletech(Which sounds like a cool game, actually)>Wizards.

Now, if all the wizards went psycho and tried to kill all muggles, there'd be a high casualty rate, but predator drones, heavy artillery, and nukes mean the muggles win.

[kaomera]

To say your energy put into optimization takes away energy put into roleplaying is the violation.
That's where it's flawed, if mainly in it's application. Optimization does not have to limit roleplay (and vice-versa), but only given infinite amounts of energy, time, and interest. If I have four hours* I can spend on building a character, I can't spend four hours optimizing the character and another twenty-four minutes developing a personality and backstory; you can't actually give 110%. It doesn't actually work that way, of course - usually you don't specifically schedule or segregate the two. But they are competing for the interest and attention of the players / GM at any given moment. Balancing that is just part of the game.

*At some point, for me at least, spending more time on character creation or campaign planning, or during play on mechanical elements or story, becomes counter-productive (if not impossible - I have a job and other responsibilities). The ratio is going to be different, but I think that is going to hold true for any player / GM.

[Amphetryon]

That's where it's flawed, if mainly in it's application. Optimization does not have to limit roleplay (and vice-versa), but only given infinite amounts of energy, time, and interest. If I have four hours* I can spend on building a character, I can't spend four hours optimizing the character and another twenty-four minutes developing a personality and backstory; you can't actually give 110%. It doesn't actually work that way, of course - usually you don't specifically schedule or segregate the two. But they are competing for the interest and attention of the players / GM at any given moment. Balancing that is just part of the game.

*At some point, for me at least, spending more time on character creation or campaign planning, or during play on mechanical elements or story, becomes counter-productive (if not impossible - I have a job and other responsibilities). The ratio is going to be different, but I think that is going to hold true for any player / GM.
Why can't you come up with the backstory and personality, and then choose the mechanical aspects - skills, feats, PrC, etc. - that best fit that backstory and personality?

[Grim Reader]

To me, it seems like the people who roleplay and build contributing characters are by far the majority. But I suspect Im older than most people here, and my peergroup contains more people who have had the time to develop both skillsets.

On the subject of optimizing...I was in the army. I was never on a battlefield, but I spoke to plenty of people who got shot at. And I've seen them talk to each other. And what do they talk about?

They talk about whats the best bodyarmor for their circumstances. Mountains versus plains, whch gun is least likey to jam on you. Whats the better helmet. In short, they talk optimization. Because that is what real people do when their lives depend on it. You never saw a soldier at war who didn't use a helmet for personality reasons.

People in D&D world, they got more than their lives riding on it, their world contains creatures who try to drag their souls to the lower planes. Any character under those circumstance who do not give considerable thought to his functionality is very poorly roleplayed.

[Solaris]

People in D&D world, they got more than their lives riding on it, their world contains creatures who try to drag their souls to the lower planes. Any character under those circumstance who do not give considerable thought to his functionality is very poorly roleplayed.

Unless the character is an idiot - in which case the player is dragging the group down for his own amusement, or actually roleplaying taking Intelligence as a dump stat. Take your pick.

[kaomera]

Why can't you come up with the backstory and personality, and then choose the mechanical aspects - skills, feats, PrC, etc. - that best fit that backstory and personality?
You can do that too, but regardless of the order of operation you can't spend more time / energy than you have.

[Amphetryon]

You can do that too, but regardless of the order of operation you can't spend more time / energy than you have.

But it doesn't require infinite amounts of either, as you posited.

[kardar233]

You can do that too, but regardless of the order of operation you can't spend more time / energy than you have.

To be honest, I think you're overestimating the amount of time that both of these take.

For example, I carry around several builds of various power levels in my head in case I need them.

Let's use a favourite of mine: Warlock6/Unarmed Swordsage2/Bard1/Hellfire Warlock3/Legacy Champion8. Swap Swordsage for Paladin if you're willing to sacrifice some versatility for excellent saves.

Now, I could play this as all kinds of different things. Off the top of my head, here's two:

A man who can channel his ki into blasts of pure energy, then learns to funnel this to his friends and into his fists.

A devotee of the Lower Planes who sold his soul for daemonic power and now defeats his opponents unarmed to show his total superiority.

Now, I made that build in about thirty minutes on a friend's computer a few months back. It'll take me maybe five minutes to reconstruct it for whatever level we're starting at. Those two RP ideas took me about thirty seconds each just now.

Of course, if you're going for a really lavishly detailed backstory or a ridiculously powerful character then it'll take longer, but characters of that kind of power level don't fit into many campaigns. And really, in the long run of the game, will it really matter exactly how many missions he took in his time in exile?

[Empedocles]

There are some people out there who, maybe even because they roleplay very intensely, can't/don't optimize well and vice versa.

Do any of you agree? How big would you say this corrolation is?

This correlation does not exist. Certainly, there are people who can optimize but can't roleplay, and people who can roleplay but not optimize. However, there're many, many more people who can do both if given the opportunity.

A roleplaying friend of mine has an excellent sense of optimization. While I don't think he would ever have invented Pun Pun, I've seen him make some absolutely brutal builds. However, he's also a very intense roleplayer who usually makes me feel like a number cruncher when we play together.

[kaomera]

But it doesn't require infinite amounts of either, as you posited.
I never said it requires infinite amounts of anything. But given that there is a finite amount of both time and energy that I can devote to gaming (and realistically less than I'd like), a decision has to be made on how to spend that time and energy

To be honest, I think you're overestimating the amount of time that both of these take.
I'm not trying to estimate how much time or energy is appropriate, because it's going to be different for every player. It's entirely possible to spend ''enough'' time and effort on both roleplay / fluff and optimization / mechanics / crunch, depending on what you're willing to put into the game and what you want out of it. However not every player or DM's desires match up with their resources such that they can accomplish both; and skill (at developing either fluff or crunch), and an understanding of what you want and what your real resources are is really significant.

[Amphetryon]

I never said it requires infinite amounts of anything. But given that there is a finite amount of both time and energy that I can devote to gaming (and realistically less than I'd like), a decision has to be made on how to spend that time and energy

Actually, you did.


Optimization does not have to limit roleplay (and vice-versa), but only given infinite amounts of energy, time, and interest.
Emphasis added.

[Togo]

Ok, quick question here, just curious to see how people view it.

To what extent should your build choices at, say, 10th level, reflect your character's history and experiences in the previous 9 levels (that have been played through in the campaign.)

If the answer is yes, will that not mess up your optimised build?

If the answer is no, do you think there might be case to be made for saying that your pre-decided build choices are inhibiting the development of your character, by forcing it down a path that is all about the mechanics with no reference to what has happened to him thus far?

Or do you deny that any such conflict ever takes place?

Just curious to see people's views on this.

[Answerer]

My view on this is that you are playing the wrong game if you want that to happen to a character. It's almost impossible to do that in 3.5.

Instead, a good 3.5 DM will talk to you about what you want for your character, and try to give your character opportunities for growth in a particular area.

As an illustration: a Paladin falling and becoming a Blackguard is a very dramatic event. It can be a very interesting narrative thing, and there's a lot of good reasons to want something like that to happen during the course of a campaign. It represents an enormous amount of character development.

Now look at the rules for Paladins: Huh, they can't multiclass. Then the Blackguard: huh, it requires a ton of things that Paladins do not get.

Huh, look at that. A Paladin who falls, even one who embraces his fall and would become a Blackguard... can't.

Great.

Unless you plan for it, and then you're OK. (Well, actually, you're pretty terrible because Blackguard's not too hot and Paladin's worse, but whatever).

[Hecuba]

Actually, you did.

Emphasis added.

That quote does not mean what you said it means. He's not saying that infinite ammounts of time are required for any task, he's saying that for competing demands not to come into conflict over a shared resource, the resource must not have limited availability.

And the phrasing is quite close to correct: two goals both competing for limited resources will always have some potential for conflict.
The flaw in that statment is that it doesn't need to be strictly infinity, it merely needs to have surplus availability greater than the peak sum demand.

Essentially, for there to be no conflict, the amount of time you have available for D&D as a whole must exceed the sum of the maximum amount of time you want to spend on each element.

Go Go Gadget Resource Economics!

[sonofzeal]

Ok, quick question here, just curious to see how people view it.

To what extent should your build choices at, say, 10th level, reflect your character's history and experiences in the previous 9 levels (that have been played through in the campaign.)

If the answer is yes, will that not mess up your optimised build?

If the answer is no, do you think there might be case to be made for saying that your pre-decided build choices are inhibiting the development of your character, by forcing it down a path that is all about the mechanics with no reference to what has happened to him thus far?

Or do you deny that any such conflict ever takes place?

Just curious to see people's views on this.
I find the two are rarely in conflict. Most competent builds are themed appropriately - all class levels relate to eachother in a tangible way - and hence all that's really required is that they've been practicing the same skills that they're best at anyway.

For example, if my build calls for a Barbarian/Ranger/Fighter multiclass, it's going to emerge naturally out of the character's martial skill and wilderness skills. At each level they get better with their weapons, and better at getting around in the wilds. The precise balance of those two is different than for a pure Barbarian, but it's hardly in conflict with the character's "history and experiences in the previous 9 levels".

Indeed, you'd be hard-pressed to find a build where there is a definite conflict. I can't think of any that I've ever played, nor seen played. And if there were, well, that's almost more a motivation for roleplay than anything else! If my build calls for my Paladin to eventually become a Blackguard, I've got some pretty heavy RP in front of me, setting up the themes and gradual personality evolution, and the result could be fantastic. Darth & Droids (http://www.darthsanddroids.net/) did that well, with Anakin's descent to the Dark Side, and it was epic.



In most builds, there's no conflict. And when there is, it can produce some of the best RP in the game.

So what's the complaint, again?

[Amphetryon]

Ok, quick question here, just curious to see how people view it.

To what extent should your build choices at, say, 10th level, reflect your character's history and experiences in the previous 9 levels (that have been played through in the campaign.)

If the answer is yes, will that not mess up your optimised build?

If the answer is no, do you think there might be case to be made for saying that your pre-decided build choices are inhibiting the development of your character, by forcing it down a path that is all about the mechanics with no reference to what has happened to him thus far?

Or do you deny that any such conflict ever takes place?

Just curious to see people's views on this.You asked "to what extent" and then posited a "yes" or "no" answer. That seems a little strange. Both of your "yes" or "no" answers seem predicated on agreement with your initial viewpoint, which reads as a form of begging the question (http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/begging-the-question.html), as well.

Let's try another question: Do you think that Prestige Classes are there for Player Characters, as well as NPCs? If yes, how often do your Characters qualify for them, without actively planning for it or talking it over ahead of time with the DM (for me, the answer has been "once, for Temple Raider")? If no, why do you suppose so many Prestige Classes were printed in books that weren't labeled as "For DMs Only"?

EDIT:

That quote does not mean what you said it means. He's not saying that infinite ammounts of time are required for any task, he's saying that for competing demands not to come into conflict over a shared resource, the resource must not have limited availability.

And the phrasing is quite close to correct: two goals both competing for limited resources will always have some potential for conflict.
The flaw in that statment is that it doesn't need to be strictly infinity, it merely needs to have surplus availability greater than the peak sum demand.

Essentially, for there to be no conflict, the amount of time you have available for D&D as a whole must exceed the sum of the maximum amount of time you want to spend on each element.

Go Go Gadget Resource Economics!I understand that's how you're interpreting his statement. I also understand that what you just said isn't the same thing as what he just said, regardless of how much Inigo Montoya may wish it to be true. :smallsmile:

[kardar233]

Ok, quick question here, just curious to see how people view it.

To what extent should your build choices at, say, 10th level, reflect your character's history and experiences in the previous 9 levels (that have been played through in the campaign.)

If the answer is yes, will that not mess up your optimised build?

If the answer is no, do you think there might be case to be made for saying that your pre-decided build choices are inhibiting the development of your character, by forcing it down a path that is all about the mechanics with no reference to what has happened to him thus far?

Or do you deny that any such conflict ever takes place?

Just curious to see people's views on this.

Unless we're talking about a seriously dramatic change (like deciding to ditch melee and start spellcasting) this shouldn't be an issue at all.

The names of the levels on your character sheet have nothing to do with what's happening in game. Say I was going to dip Crusader next level. I don't need to dip Knight just because I was knighted by my liege lord.

If you really are looking at making a 180 degree turn in the direction of your character mid-game, then you have two options:
a) See if between your own optimization knowledge and that of the board you can move the character in the direction you want to go without being useless. In my Warlock example from earlier, if I had a religious revelation of some kind at 12th level I'd amend the last eight levels of my build to be Ur-Priest instead of Legacy Champion. You won't get 9ths but it'll work pretty well.
b) See if you can get your DM to allow some retraining to fit with your new direction.

[Water_Bear]

To what extent should your build choices at, say, 10th level, reflect your character's history and experiences in the previous 9 levels (that have been played through in the campaign.)

I generally think it's a mistake to start off at 1st level for this reason. Your 'backstory' won't account for more than a handful of your abilities and the sheer speed an average character goes from 'seriously threatened by an Owlbear' to 'superhuman' strains my suspension of disbelief.

In general your build should reflect your life and vice versa, but in the broad strokes. If my Fighter was a farmer, I can safely leave Profession (Farmer) off their character sheet; it isn't a vital detail and wastes a precious resource. Similarly, a Barbarian dip might mean learning a more aggressive style of fighting rather than literally joining up with a barbarian tribe.


If the answer is yes, will that not mess up your optimised build?

Not usually.

Most (well made) characters have a definite arc you can see them going through; I had a LN Dread Necromancer who was constantly teetering between Hope and nihilistic Grief, and I knew eventually he would need to commit and either get over himself or become a full-on villain. Both of those characters would have had the exact same build, just different ways of using it; as a hero he would use his Necromancy to buff his party and small core of elite undead, as a villain he could go whole-hog and build a massive undead army.

Most builds have different ways they can play out, switching out Feats or even entire Prestige classes without really losing effectiveness. For a really drastic change, like a Frenzied Berserker rejecting their anger after accidentally hurting a loved one, the PHB II Retraining rules can help a character turn changing their build into an adventure on its own.


If the answer is no, do you think there might be case to be made for saying that your pre-decided build choices are inhibiting the development of your character, by forcing it down a path that is all about the mechanics with no reference to what has happened to him thus far?

It depends on what the build is. If I'm playing a Cleric of Pelor/Sacred Exorcist, my build will reflect the assumption that my character is not going to turn evil. That would be against the character's nature, and make them less effective in the short term. Trying not to turn evil, well, it's good roleplaying and solid common sense.

But as play goes on, a character's nature sometimes changes. Their build, as a whole, should change to reflect this. A Bard who becomes non-lawful can continue to advance as a Virtuoso, a Fallen Paladin can become a Blackguard and/or retrain as a Paladin of Tyranny/Slaughter, etc.

In a game like D&D with so many options, there are enough optimized paths from A to B that a character shouldn't ever have to sacrifice competence for roleplaying or vice versa. Sticking too closely to the existing fluff rather than looking at what the mechanics say about a character is what makes people closed minded, not system mastery.

[Hecuba]

The names of the levels on your character sheet have nothing to do with what's happening in game.

Except when they do.

This is a matter very much of how different people choose to play the game. If a group uses "crunch" elements to tailor a custom setting, "crunch" and "fluff" may be very much connected (even if not by the default presentation).


If my Fighter was a farmer, I can safely leave Profession (Farmer) off their character sheet; it isn't a vital detail and wastes a precious resource.

If it were important enough for me to make them a farmer and not a farm hand, I never would leave it off their sheet in a heavy RP game. Cincinnatus' skill as a farmer is just as important, if not more, than his skill as a warrior.

[kaomera]

Actually, you did.
OK, I did, but I only only intended the term to simplify my statement. I don't think anyone actually needs an infinite amount of time / effort to get what they want out of a game - in fact at some point I think you're just over-complicating things. But I also don't know how much any given player or DM is going to want / need; even for myself or a hypothetical ''typical player / DM'' I don't know that you can really set some kind of fixed value. If everyone spent enough of their resources to be fully satisfied with both sides of the equation, then there wouldn't be any issue here - and an infinite amount of resources would by definition cover all of your bases.

[Acanous]

Now, if all the wizards went psycho and tried to kill all muggles, there'd be a high casualty rate, but predator drones, heavy artillery, and nukes mean the muggles win.

What.

You forget that wizards do not have their own soverign country. The wizarding world exists within the normal world. They might have their own streets within a city, or have a large concentration of wizards in a given community, but if you're employing *Nukes*, you're nuking your own city.

Or allowing some other country to nuke one of your cities. Neither of those things go over particularly well.

Furthermore, Nukes don't kill straight away. Most of the damage from a nuke is not the explosion, it's the resulting radiation and fallout. Most nukes detonate high above the target, for maximum fallout.

So if the Wizards have spells to heal the radiation poisoning, they'd actually come out ahead here. We know they have spells for burns and loss of limbs.

Artillary might work, if they don't have targetting problems, but really the best way to do this would be house to house with a squad of trained soldiers.

You wouldn't get all of them, so you'd have to stay vigilant. It'd be a war of attrition. Muggles COULD win, but when Wizards can hide entire houses in extradimensional space, make food and water magically appear, and have a host of magical plagues for which there are no current cure to unleash, you have the makings of a very dirty war.

[Menteith]

You wouldn't get all of them, so you'd have to stay vigilant. It'd be a war of attrition. Muggles COULD win, but when Wizards can hide entire houses in extradimensional space, make food and water magically appear, and have a host of magical plagues for which there are no current cure to unleash, you have the makings of a very dirty war.

Is it terrible that this sounds like an amazing campaign setting?

[killianh]

From what I've seen in my game there are quite a few examples of the fallacy holding up. Sometimes it becomes a matter of the characters being too worried about getting the right item as soon as they can, or they have designed some trick they want to use, but can't for another 3 levels so they skip story and drop role playing for the sake of getting their character the the breaking point they want, but I have seen that this does hold true for some. Maybe not everyone, but some.

[sonofzeal]

Except when they do.

This is a matter very much of how different people choose to play the game. If a group uses "crunch" elements to tailor a custom setting, "crunch" and "fluff" may be very much connected (even if not by the default presentation).
And yet flexibility is still possible.

Let's say the setting has something like the Order of McHolyFolks and members of that order all have the Paladin class, and that's the main source of Paladin training in the setting. That's what you're talking about with tailoring, right?

Would that prevent a character from playing a Crusader? Well, no, they'd just have to study somewhere different. Perhaps a much smaller rival order, or even just a single mentor keeping his lonely tradition alive. Or perhaps the character is simply Divinely Invested like Favoured Souls are, and had no mentor except himself and his deity.

In the latter two cases, it might even happen within the same Order of McHolyFolks. The character might be seen as unusual, and potentially untrustworthy - or perhaps elevated to the status of a hero within the order. Or both at the same time, by different factions.



A creative DM can almost invariably work with a player to work it out, and the process of doing so can often lead to interesting results. The single best RP I've ever had was the product of something like that.

[Answerer]

From what I've seen in my game there are quite a few examples of the fallacy holding up. Sometimes it becomes a matter of the characters being too worried about getting the right item as soon as they can, or they have designed some trick they want to use, but can't for another 3 levels so they skip story and drop role playing for the sake of getting their character the the breaking point they want, but I have seen that this does hold true for some. Maybe not everyone, but some.
The problem with this argument is that for the Stormwind Fallacy to not be fallacious, even in this limited case, you'd need for these people to roleplay better if somehow they were unable to continue optimizing.

It seems to me that someone who cares so much about some trick that's happening in three levels that they're willing to ignore the actual game just to get there as quickly as possible, isn't likely to be particularly good at roleplaying even if you took all character creation decisions away from him.

What you have is someone who is good at (or at least more interested in) optimization, and bad at (or at least less interested in) roleplaying. They are not good at optimization because they are bad at roleplaying, or bad at roleplaying because they are good at optimization, they merely are those things independently.

Which is what the Stormwind Fallacy is about. The Stormwind Fallacy is not saying that it's impossible to be a bad roleplayer while being a good optimizer; obviously that's possible. What it's saying is that there is no causal or even correlational relationship between these two: they are independent facts unrelated to one another.

[Knaight]

I'd note that much of the conversation so far has been assuming some level of general player competence split between optimization and role playing skills. That is nonsense. Optimization is an indicator of competence - if people know how to optimize decently, then they care about the game. It indicates that role playing games, as a hobby, are important to them. Which means that they are probably better at role playing as a group than those who do not optimize, as much of that group consists of people who don't really care that much about role playing games, for whom they are likely a relatively minor hobby or something they do to indulge someone else. This group is likely less capable across the board at skills pertinent to role playing games, unless they are more pertinent elsewhere. Role playing is one (or a group consisting of several, depending on how one chooses to look at it) facet of that.

[Hecuba]

I understand that's how you're interpreting his statement. I also understand that what you just said isn't the same thing as what he just said, regardless of how much Inigo Montoya may wish it to be true. :smallsmile:

What he is saying, however, is almost exactly how I've seen the concept simplified in most introductory textbooks and general market book on economics I've read.

It's also very close to how I present the concept to my economics students (though I would have very carefully avoided the word "only").

Moreover, there is a distinct difference between


Optimization does not have to limit roleplay (and vice-versa), but only given infinite amounts of energy, time, and interest.

and


Optimization and roleplay require an infinite amount of time

The first does not imply the second. The first statement is formally equivelent to:

For:
time & Effort, & energy T,
(finite) time & effort & energy O spent on optimization such that O is in T,
(finite) time & effort & energy R spent on role-play such that R is in T,
(And, implicitly, that there is no direct dependence between R and O and no direct dependence between T and R or O and R)

Then, if T tends towards ∞, T cannot constitute indirect dependence between O and R.

If your complaint is that I am reading in the parenthetical sections, I'll gladdly admit so. That affects whether or not the statement is demonstrable, but removing it does not make it equivelent to the second statement, which would merely be that

O and R must be infinite
Or more generally:
Positing (correctly or not) that some fact about a subset is true iff the parent set is infinite does not require at all that you posit that the subset itself be infinite.


And yet flexibility is still possible.
Possible but not guaranteed: if, for example, the first level abilities for Hatharan are fluffed as being granted as a holy right used for entry into the order.

Then, while another right might be made available to show how super cool the PCs are, it would be somewhat odd for them to go through that exact right without being granted the associated benefits.

[MukkTB]

Just to jump on the Harry Potter bandwagon.

#1 Wizards fearing gun wielding muggles would go against the themes and tone.

#2 Wizards protecting themselves against gun wielding muggles would go against the themes and tones.

#3 Wizards keep away from muggles because they don't want to be 'bothered.' The 'Secret Wizarding World' sort of thing.

#4 Wizards are incredibly ignorant of muggles.

This seems possible. Wizards don't seem to get into serious fights with muggles. They live apart, and they generally ward them away. Your typical wizard wouldn't be expected to ever have to fight a gun wielder. We're probably talking about a few muggings and other similar encounters. At the same time an experienced battle wizard is totally beyond anything a muggle can handle. These guys probably do know about guns. I'd expect them to ward against guns. It doesn't even need to be protection from bullets. Illusion or enchantment can pretty much shut down a gun wielding muggle. But I wouldn't expect them to use a gun because they're trained in wand work and the wand offers more utility. Because of this, the gun hasn't made an impact on wizard culture as of yet.

The people who would most benefit would be weak wizards preying on other weak wizards. People with the ethos of the death eaters. And I imagine killing someone with a muggle weapon rather than a wand would be rather embarrassing for a death eater to admit to. Kind of hard to claim superiority over a people while using their weapons. And if you can't kill a wizard with magic, what kind of weak blooded fool are you? So if they use them at all it probably doesn't involve any witnesses and isn't talked about afterwards.

As for Harry and the students? Well that's harder to say. Harry isn't really proficient with a gun. The wizard born probably wouldn't know much about them and none of the muggle born seem proficient either. Hmm. Call it a plot hole or hand wave it away somehow. No one really proficient is in atendance at the school.

I just don't feel that the gun problem is exactly a major problem. Its an amusing little thing. It hints that wizards sometimes have an overblown opinion of themselves. I'm more worried that the time turner isn't used more often. I'm more worried that combat wizards don't seem to stack multiple buffs. Forget about guns. Why aren't the major skilled combatants running around with illusions that make them difficult to perceive, spells that charm those who penetrate the illusions, damage reduction, pets, and other things I can't even begin to imagine? Yeah a wizard could use a horde of brainwashed muggles with firearms to attack another wizard. He could teleport poison into the other guy's cup. He could teleport the other guy to the far side of the moon using a portkey. With magic the possibilities could be endless.

In Harry Potter they aren't. Typical Harry Potter wizards make ranged touch attacks with save or die spells from close range at each other with no magical defenses, and very little other 'magical' tactics involved. I figure the DM made everything else hard. Guns? Ah well. It wouldn't be the first time some group of people weren't using the most optimal fighting styles now would it?

[PersonMan]

Ok, quick question here, just curious to see how people view it.

To what extent should your build choices at, say, 10th level, reflect your character's history and experiences in the previous 9 levels (that have been played through in the campaign.)

When I start at levels higher than one, my assumption isn't 'X spent Y time adventuring and is now level Z', but rather 'X is just that strong/good/talented, they basically started at level Z'.

Generally, I have a vague idea of what my characters' mechanical builds will be but don't really hammer out the details until necessary, in part because I play lots of notoriously death-happy PbPs.

I enjoy playing high-Tier classes because they allow me to say 'yes, I'm not playing this class anywhere near its full potential and I know it, but I like the aesthetic and character type who does this to that of a chain-Gater' and still be good at what I do. I start with one of the strongest chassi in the game, so if I add a few dead weights I can still go fast enough to not feel useless.

I have a character who I've built so far as a martial Cleric. Partially due to mechanical concerns (I honestly have never actually buffed myself, combat starts too early and it'll be months before I can even get close to DMM(Quicken).) I've constructed a sort of dual-route, two builds based on the in-game development of the character. One of them is a bit less powerful than the other, due to a lack of higher-level spellcasting, but since I rarely use spells it's not going to be that noticeable. Of course I'm taking the best options based on mechanics as well as roleplaying, because I want to actually be really good at fighting, like the concept says and stay true to what I envision the character being.

[sonofzeal]

Possible but not guaranteed: if, for example, the first level abilities for Hatharan are fluffed as being granted as a holy right used for entry into the order.

Then, while another right might be made available to show how super cool the PCs are, it would be somewhat odd for them to go through that exact right without being granted the associated benefits.
If the PCs were going to join the Hathrans but didn't all want to take levels in the PrC, there's all sorts of ways to resolve that - the easiest, given the rushed schedule most adventurers face, is to simply not have time for a full induction, and instead give them a more informal one that doesn't offer the same mechanical benefits, perhaps as simple as a signet ring or amulet to identify them to other Hathrans.

If the PCs want the mechanical benefits without joining the order, that's even easier. Heck, it doesn't require any work at all, you can safely just bypass the question entirely for most cases. Yes, the PC will have a peculiar similarity to Hathrans, but unless you're standing them up side by side to compare it's unlikely anyone would notice. And if you do, they can simply shrug and call it a coincidence.

There's a few specific powers that can be hard to explain, but perhaps 95% can be handled as simply as this, or even more simply in many cases. It's really not a big deal if the DM is working with the players to accomodate them, rather than trying to force them into whatever mold.

[MukkTB]

So. Stormwind Fallacy?

Well there is a grain of truth. Sometimes players create characters that don't fit well into the setting or are just a bit weird. Go check out any thread on template stacking if you want a look. People aren't talking about incarnate warforged half dragons because the flavor appeals. Sometimes they will mix classes in a way that has much more to do with crunch than flavor. But at the same time its never really impossible to explain how the incarnate warforged half dragon exists or why this character has one level each in witch doctor, rocket scientist, ballet dancer, and trombone player.

In fact to roleplay a competent character you MUST optimize at least as much as the DM does. To roleplay a skilled character you MUST optimize at least as much as the other characters around you if not more. You're never going to beat the DM in an arms race. But beating the DM leaves the realm of optimization and enters the world of munchkinism. What you are trying to do is compare favorably to the setting.

Most optimization takes place seperate from play. As long as the player has a bit of time between sessions he can optimize and never 'lose' time to roleplay. Something that happens at the table. You can write loads of back story when you're not playing if you want yeah. But that doesn't mean anything to your roleplaying until you communicate it to your friends at the table. The other way of saying it is you can optimize between sessions. You can only prepare to roleplay between sessions. You need the other players to actually do it.

In game you can make optimal choices in addition to your roleplaying. But there isn't overlap there either. Roleplaying tells your character what and why. "I'm going to attack the evil king with a weapon because hes threatening to pillage my home town." Optimization is all about how. "So I charge him with a shock trooper power attack." How do I accomplish what I set out to do? Not exclusive at all. A character who can never accomplish what he sets out to do is only a successful roleplayer if hes trying to portray an incompetent.



One last thing. A role playing game does generally require a gentlemen's agreement. The players won't whip out pun-pun or anything the group agrees is cheese. The DM won't spring Tuckers Kobold's on groups that don't have a chance of dealing with them. Capping out at low or mid optimization isn't a horribly bad thing.

[Hecuba]

There's a few specific powers that can be hard to explain, but perhaps 95% can be handled as simply as this, or even more simply in many cases. It's really not a big deal if the DM is working with the players to accomodate them, rather than trying to force them into whatever mold.

I agree-- I was simply pointing out that the problematic "5%" does exist.

[Lord_Gareth]

I wonder if Stormwind ever realized how many threads, arguments, and screaming matches posting his now-famous Fallacy would cause. If it were me, I know I'd be hitting my knees and screaming, My god, WHAT HAVE I CREATED?

[sonofzeal]

I agree-- I was simply pointing out that the problematic "5%" does exist.
They do exist, but they can mostly be worked out. There's a few real offenders like a Druid dip granting an entire known language, but they can mostly be ignored wholesale. I just don't think it's that big a deal, or particularly worth pointing out.


I wonder if Stormwind ever realized how many threads, arguments, and screaming matches posting his now-famous Fallacy would cause. If it were me, I know I'd be hitting my knees and screaming, My god, WHAT HAVE I CREATED?
It only really causes arguments because some people still commit the fallacy, and the existence and popularity of Stormwind's argument serve as a useful tool for combating it. Threads like these aren't going to convince everyone, of course, but on the whole I do think they have a positive influence.

[georgie_leech]

Just cause I feel like it, this is what happens (http://hpmor.com/) when you give someone with a mind for optimization the Harry Potter universe.

[Little Brother]

What.

You forget that wizards do not have their own soverign country. The wizarding world exists within the normal world. They might have their own streets within a city, or have a large concentration of wizards in a given community, but if you're employing *Nukes*, you're nuking your own city.Maxim 20: If you're not willing to shell your own position, you're not willing to win.

Or allowing some other country to nuke one of your cities. Neither of those things go over particularly well.If there was some coordinated force, I fail to see the problem.

You're also ignoring the best method - wizard detection spells(Hey, it can pick up 10-years old across the world, I fail to see the problem here. Plus, you must have a few wizard allies, like the Weasleys), and predator drones.

Furthermore, Nukes don't kill straight away. Most of the damage from a nuke is not the explosion, it's the resulting radiation and fallout. Most nukes detonate high above the target, for maximum fallout.But you don't have to. If your objective is pure destruction, I don't see why you'd have to. And, more fall-out means more dead wizards, so that's not even that big of a deal. I'd be more worried about the aftermath, honestly. So, conventional missiles are probably better, unless they manage to get some Rods from God.

So if the Wizards have spells to heal the radiation poisoning, they'd actually come out ahead here. We know they have spells for burns and loss of limbs.No. One, that's a big if, a really big if. Two, even if they did, we have treatments as well, and muggles vastly outnumber wizards.
we could afford several dozen casualties for every one of their's.

Artillary might work, if they don't have targetting problems, but really the best way to do this would be house to house with a squad of trained soldiers.No. House-to-house is dangerous. Risks troops unnecessarily. Imperious Curse alone makes it too dangerous, especially since they might see you coming, and just poof out. Plus, what about safehouses with that building-hidey spell? No, explosives are safer. Predator Drones - you never see them coming.

You wouldn't get all of them, so you'd have to stay vigilant. It'd be a war of attrition. Muggles COULD win, but when Wizards can hide entire houses in extradimensional space, make food and water magically appear, and have a host of magical plagues for which there are no current cure to unleash, you have the makings of a very dirty war.Yeah, I know. As I said, brutal war, huge casualties, but muggle's would win. One, there's plenty of motivation, more soldiers, and two, numbers. Numbers. Numbers. Most wizards live in their own little rural communities. There's never been any mention of wizard-cities. There can't be more than a million wizards, probably only a couple hundred thousand at a reasonable limit. Muggles have several orders of magnitude more people, better weapons, etc. Wizards have huge advantages, but, really, IG are a better army than Elder for a reason.

And that sounds like an AWESOME idea for a campaign.

[Ossian]

Whoooooooooops, missed 6 pages of very interesting debate. My 2 pennies: they are not mutually exclusive, provided the GM sets (or adjusts) the tone to the optimization. Not all is fair is you are playing in Conan's world, or Middle Earth, yet you can optimize as much as you want what IS available (perhaps from a narrower selection) and still roleplay well.

Personally, some of the funniest sessions I have gamed (granted, they were all 1-shots, no exceptions) were 100% random rolls, from class to stats to feats (with some sense, a character with all 7s does not make any sense to play).

O.

[Acanous]

IG are better than Eldar because of
CIAPHAS CAIN
HERO OF THE IMPERIUM
And he'd beat Harry Potter's entire wizarding world by trying to find a clever excuse to run away.

[Ceaon]

I wonder if Stormwind ever realized how many threads, arguments, and screaming matches posting his now-famous Fallacy would cause. If it were me, I know I'd be hitting my knees and screaming, My god, WHAT HAVE I CREATED?

Seeing as we are having a very civil, 8-page long discussion, for example, I am convinced the Stormwind Fallacy has done far more good than wrong.

My purpose for this thread wasn't disproving the Fallacy. My goal was to explore the notion that optimization is not completely seperate from roleplaying, since they do influence each other, at least for some people.

And people are agreeing and disagreeing with me in a very insightful and polite manner - which I admittedly have come to expect from these forums - which has caused me to think about how and when optimization influences roleplaying opportunities.

For example: when you have a preplanned build, doesn't that restrict your roleplaying opportunities? even though you can still roleplay fine in the direction you planned on taking your character, you can't really roleplay 'outside your build' (you can't have your Barbarian 1/Fighter 1/Ranger 3 suddenly develop arcane powers without breaking your Horizon Tripper build in two).

[sonofzeal]

For example: when you have a preplanned build, doesn't that restrict your roleplaying opportunities? even though you can still roleplay fine in the direction you planned on taking your character, you can't really roleplay 'outside your build' (you can't have your Barbarian 1/Fighter 1/Ranger 3 suddenly develop arcane powers without breaking your Horizon Tripper build in two).
I'm not exactly sure what you're going for, but I responded to a similar question back here (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showpost.php?p=13337496&postcount=135). Perhaps that'll address your point.

If not... well, there's various ways to any given end. If my Horizon Tripper Jr's RP takes him in a direction where arcane magic is more and more desirable, there's ways around that. Factotum, for example, gets Int to trip attacks, and some arcane-ish SLAs. Duskblade might also be an option, or Stalwart Battle Sorcerer. And there's also the possibility of PHB2 Retraining. An Optimizer can usually find a way to work something in effectively. That's pretty much what Optimization is about - taking concepts and making them effective.

I've never once been in a position where a character's RP took them away from my original plan in a manner where I couldn't work it all in effectively. I'm sure we could eventually find a situation that might stump me, but exactly how common do you think that is?

[Ceaon]

(...) but exactly how common do you think that is?

Thank you! That's the question that I've been trying to ask.

[sonofzeal]

Thank you! That's the question that I've been trying to ask.
I'd say "extremely unlikely".

- I suspect most characters don't change all that much as they grow, at least not in ways that would be reflected on their charsheet. They'll build relationships, gain enemies, maybe change their minds on a few topics, but none of that necessitates a build change.

- Of the things that change, I suspect most can usually be handled by tweaks like taking particular dips and feats earlier or later, or dropping a few spare skillpoints here or there.

- Of the changes that aren't minor, I suspect most can be incorporated in a way that's optimized given the new premise, as I described in the previous post.

- Of the changes that can't be worked in normally, I suspect most DMs can extend at least a little leniency if it's got a strong RP justification and there really isn't a good way to handle it otherwise.


The remainder might be a problem, but at this point I think we're looking at something rather much on the rare side, and not really a factor as far as correlating RP and Optimization.

[Togo]

You asked "to what extent" and then posited a "yes" or "no" answer. That seems a little strange.

Sure, I wanted to see who would say yes, who would say no, who would deny that such a conflict was possible, and who would avoid answering the question.


I generally think it's a mistake to start off at 1st level for this reason. Your 'backstory' won't account for more than a handful of your abilities and the sheer speed an average character goes from 'seriously threatened by an Owlbear' to 'superhuman' strains my suspension of disbelief.

Ok, so you don't play in this way to start with. That's interesting....



Not usually.

Most (well made) characters have a definite arc you can see them going through;

Another interesting comment. Just to be clear, when you say that 'well made' characters have a definite (pre-planned) arc they travel through, you mean from a story point of view as well as a mechanics points view, right? Are you saying that's the only or best way to achieve a well made character, or are there other ways to do it, ones that might involve a reaction to the storyline and events that the character has gone through?


I had a LN Dread Necromancer who was constantly teetering between Hope and nihilistic Grief, and I knew eventually he would need to commit and either get over himself or become a full-on villain. Both of those characters would have had the exact same build, just different ways of using it; as a hero he would use his Necromancy to buff his party and small core of elite undead, as a villain he could go whole-hog and build a massive undead army.

Ok, so let's try a specific example. I'm playing an alienist wizard, he starts to realise that he's getting sucked deeper and deeper into his work, and that sooner or later he will pass the point of no return. (the p-class ends with you growing tentacles or similar and becoming an outsider). At some point, I've decided, he's going to get morality, sign up fully with the good guys, and move into a divine oracle. Do I make that move at the best point mechanically in my progression (i.e. after getting the bonus spells and free metamagic feat from alienist, but soon enough to pick up the 2nd level of divine oracle) or do I make the move at the point where it makes most sense in the storyline?


In a game like D&D with so many options, there are enough optimized paths from A to B that a character shouldn't ever have to sacrifice competence for roleplaying or vice versa. Sticking too closely to the existing fluff rather than looking at what the mechanics say about a character is what makes people closed minded, not system mastery.

Sure, there are many fine ways to avoid the two conflicting. Say they conflict anyway, what then? Or is there always a way out?


. Sometimes it becomes a matter of the characters being too worried about getting the right item as soon as they can, or they have designed some trick they want to use, but can't for another 3 levels so they skip story and drop role playing for the sake of getting their character the the breaking point they want, but I have seen that this does hold true for some. Maybe not everyone, but some.

Precisely so, like the example of my alienist character above.


What it's saying is that there is no causal or even correlational relationship between these two: they are independent facts unrelated to one another.

Nitpick - they can be correlated and still unrelated.

This supports the diagram arguements given earlier, where optimisation invovles bad characterisation only because half the people doing it had no interest in that in the first place, and only started playing the game for the crunch.


I'd note that much of the conversation so far has been assuming some level of general player competence split between optimization and role playing skills. That is nonsense. Optimization is an indicator of competence - if people know how to optimize decently, then they care about the game. .

You're assuming that those who know optimise tend to do so. I like playing monks, and am better at optimisation than most people I know. The group's best optimiser may have a severely sub-optimal character.


I wonder if Stormwind ever realized how many threads, arguments, and screaming matches posting his now-famous Fallacy would cause. If it were me, I know I'd be hitting my knees and screaming, My god, WHAT HAVE I CREATED?

The conflict pre-existed Stormwind. It just had a different name. Judging from the original thread, he wanted a handy label to slap those who disagreed with him.



Predator Drones - you never see them coming..

Just a note for americans and other foreigners... In the UK, guns are rare, and avoided even by muggers, as they attract disproportionate attention. And while I appreciate that predator drones are both realtively silent and relatively stealthy, the UK is so full of airports, local residents, radio enthusiasts, meterological stations and other devices that trying to hide any kind of missile-firing aerial device is the far side of impossible. You'd maybe get away with it once, but everyone would know what had happened afterwards.

Remember this is the country that launched an airfix kit of the stealth bomber back when the very existance of the development program was still being denied, and regularly puts secret military installations on local maps sold to local hikers, because, well, everyone knows it's there.


I'd say "extremely unlikely".

- I suspect most characters don't change all that much as they grow, at least not in ways that would be reflected on their charsheet. They'll build relationships, gain enemies, maybe change their minds on a few topics, but none of that necessitates a build change.

That's interesting. My experience is that some characters actually change a great deal between their first appearance in the game, and many levels/years down the line, but then I generally play in long-running campaigns.

[Malachei]

CR+4 is a 50% death rate - two equal opponents. It is supposed to expend 100% of party resources. The reason the 4-encounter day is oft cited is because each CR+0 encounter is intended to expend 20% of resources (including HP), with 20% left over at the end of the day. Thus each CR+0 encounter is 1/5th as dangerous as a CR+4 encounter, cutting the death chance to 10%. For the 13.3 encounters one needs to gain a level, that adds up to a 75% chance of death.

I think you are mistaking resources used for party deaths. Even with 100% of HP expended, a character is still alive (albeit at 0 HP) and can still survive the encounter. And a party can retreat when their resources are almost exhausted.

[Water_Bear]

Ok, so let's try a specific example. I'm playing an alienist wizard, he starts to realise that he's getting sucked deeper and deeper into his work, and that sooner or later he will pass the point of no return. (the p-class ends with you growing tentacles or similar and becoming an outsider). At some point, I've decided, he's going to get morality, sign up fully with the good guys, and move into a divine oracle. Do I make that move at the best point mechanically in my progression (i.e. after getting the bonus spells and free metamagic feat from alienist, but soon enough to pick up the 2nd level of divine oracle) or do I make the move at the point where it makes most sense in the storyline?

You are the person who decides how your character's personal narrative of transformation plays out. You are the designer of your own build. The only reason the best point to leave the prestige class mechanically would be wrong for your character's story is if you choose it to be so.

Your Alienist is the perfect example of what I mentioned earlier; a character with a story-arc built in. If you know your character's goals and personality, you can usually see where the character should be headed and what paths they could take to get there. In my view, that is just as much optimization as plotting out your build before-hand.


You're assuming that those who know optimise tend to do so. I like playing monks, and am better at optimisation than most people I know. The group's best optimiser may have a severely sub-optimal character.

/Tangent. You can optimize a Monk and turn it into a Tier 3 build, it just takes some work. Monk 2/PsyWar 18 is the simplest optimized Monk, but there are tons of other more convoluted Monk builds out there which can hold their own. Just because you're a Monk doesn't mean you have to be a Monk 20.

[Flickerdart]

I think you are mistaking resources used for party deaths. Even with 100% of HP expended, a character is still alive (albeit at 0 HP) and can still survive the encounter. And a party can retreat when their resources are almost exhausted.
Yes, because it's so incredibly common for a character to drop exactly down to 0, and then for the entire party to turn tail and, carrying their crippled comrades, somehow escape their deadly fate.

[Malachei]

Yes, because it's so incredibly common for a character to drop exactly down to 0, and then for the entire party to turn tail and, carrying their crippled comrades, somehow escape their deadly fate.

You might not be aware, but you can even retreat before dropping to exactly 0 HP.

[Boci]

You might not be aware, but you can even retreat before dropping to exactly 0 HP.

But then they haven't spent 100% of their HP.

On a more serious note, this rarely happens. The party often (especially at low levels) needs to decide whether they are going to retreat as soon as the possibility of one of thiers falling emerges. One they are down it can easily become all or nothing (well all or complications with the fallen character).

So the party needs to make the descion to fight or flight when they they are about to lose a single member, which means they are rarely going to chose to run when they are only going from 100% to anywhere from 66-80%.

[Answerer]

My goal was to explore the notion that optimization is not completely seperate from roleplaying, since they do influence each other, at least for some people.
They are completely separate, since they do not influence each other, not for anyone.

Every single example in this thread has either been hypothetical to the point of being unrealistic, or has been people attributing a causal or correlational relationship where none exists. The only reason they see such a relationship is because they want to see it.


For example: when you have a preplanned build, doesn't that restrict your roleplaying opportunities? even though you can still roleplay fine in the direction you planned on taking your character, you can't really roleplay 'outside your build' (you can't have your Barbarian 1/Fighter 1/Ranger 3 suddenly develop arcane powers without breaking your Horizon Tripper build in two).
3.5 does not allow this to happen. It is literally not a realistic option within the system. In a world governed by the rules of the system, this cannot happen.

If the DM and/or player wants it to happen, then something strange and extremely unusual has taken place, and thus they are forced to houserule in options that actually make this viable and eliminate the fact that the player had not planned for this scenario.

Because an ECL 5 character starting to take levels in Sorcerer or Wizard is completely wasting his time. If those are supposed to be his new-found arcane powers, he is better off ignoring them entirely, completely within character. You could, instead, do something like Suel Arcanamach – except you do not meet the prerequisites, not even close. Hence the need for a house rule to change the system to allow this to happen, and then we're not talking about 3.5.

And if the system did allow this to happen, then there would be no conflict and optimizing would not depend so much on pre-planning.


Nitpick - they can be correlated and still unrelated.

This supports the diagram arguements given earlier, where optimisation invovles bad characterisation only because half the people doing it had no interest in that in the first place, and only started playing the game for the crunch.
They can appear correlated, but a correlation is a relationship: you can't be correlated and unrelated, they are mutually exclusive. So my statement still stands.

The removal of data is, I agree, an excellent way to give the appearance of correlation where none exists. So are anecdotes, by the way. And if you think that argument was suggesting that there is a correlation between the two, then you are misunderstanding that argument.

[sonofzeal]

They can appear correlated, but a correlation is a relationship: you can't be correlated and unrelated, they are mutually exclusive. So my statement still stands.
You seem to have completely misunderstood the nature of correlation. Perhaps you've heard that "correlation does not imply causation". In other words, things can be correlated and not related. The popularity of rock music correlates with the number of nuclear weapons in the world, for instance, and quite well at that.

I don't disagree with your central theme, but stats is a tricky discipline and even experts get tripped up (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_vos_Savant#The_Monty_Hall_problem).

[ThunderCat]

My goal was to explore the notion that optimization is not completely seperate from roleplaying, since they do influence each other, at least for some people.
I agree that they can affect each other, but usually the other way around from what you claim. In my experience, there is a small but significant correlation between optimisation (i.e. system mastery) and good roleplaying. But more importantly, I think people roleplay differently, and the narrow gospel of true ROLEplaying (as practised and preached by the kind of people who constantly need to stretch how they're not ROLLplayers) is severely limiting to many personality and roleplaying styles.

For instance, a lot of ROLEplayers feel you have to come up with your character's personality and backstory before the mechanics, in order to truly ROLEplay, but I often have serious trouble coming up with anything like that. My mind just doesn't work that way (possibly connected to my writer's block). But if I'm allowed to make a mechanical build first, and let the personality develop little by little (even if it sometimes doesn't fully solidify until after a couple of sessions), I often make roles that I have been told are both interesting and entertaining for others to play with.

In other words, I usually greatly benefit from the mechanical crutch that is optimisation (not powergaming). In addition, being inspired by something mechanically interesting often increases my enthusiasm for a role, which leads to better roleplaying. ROLEplayers don't work like that, and so they assume no one else does either, and therefore dismiss the roleplaying of people like me as mere 'justification'.

In contrast, while they would never admit this is what they do, I see ROLEplayers use their own mechanical crutches, like alignment (e.g. roleplaying better with mechanical rewards and punishments for playing one's alignment), which I don't need at all. I’m more into playing a person than an alignment, and if people insist I need one, I always make the personality first, and decide which alignment it fits afterwards. But even though mixing mechanics with morals feels (and is) restrictive to good roleplaying for me, I realise that some people benefit from that crutch just as much as I benefit from optimisation, and probably wouldn't roleplay their characters as consistent and fleshed out as they do without it.

The issue of optimisation and roleplaying isn't as simple as one detracting from the other (not even a little, as you suggest), or as simple as them being completely independent. The issue is that they interact with each other differently from person to person.

[Answerer]

You seem to have completely misunderstood the nature of correlation. Perhaps you've heard that "correlation does not imply causation". In other words, things can be correlated and not related. The popularity of rock music correlates with the number of nuclear weapons in the world, for instance, and quite well at that.
Huh, I was taught something like that is more properly termed the appearance of correlation, without any actual correlation.

[sonofzeal]

Huh, I was taught something like that is more properly termed the appearance of correlation, without any actual correlation.
"Correlation" just means that one predicts the other to some degree. If a higher X generally corresponds with a higher Y, and a lower X corresponds with a lower Y, then the two are correlated - you can predict Y based on X and at least have something better than a random chance of success.

Correlation can be a result of causation (X causes Y), mutual causation (Z causes X, and also causes Y), or can simply be a coincidence. Rock music's birth was not long after the first nuclear weapons, and it has been rather supplanted over the last decade or two as nuclear stockpiles have generally diminished. Neither causes the other, and you'd be hardpressed to find a mutual causation there. Both were nonexistant in the 30's, reached a peak in the 70's and 80's, and declined somewhat towards the present. If you tell me the popularity of rock music in a hidden year, I can make an educated guess as to the number of nuclear weapons around, and probably get into the ballpark at least. Still, while there are certainly societal influences affecting both, any relationship between the two is extremely tenuous at best. In effect, our sample size is too small - we've only seen one civilization invent nuclear weapons, and only seen one civilization invent rock music.


Back on topic, I think there's a strong case to be made that RP skill and Optimization skill don't have a causal relationship, whether positive or negative. They may have mutual causation though, in that different personality types may be pulled in one direction or the other. They might be correlated, even if their actual relationship is indirect. But, simply put, we don't have enough data to say either way.

All we can say is that a causal relationship looks exceedingly unlikely, and that any hypothetical correlation is far from total.

[Ceaon]

They are completely separate, since they do not influence each other, not for anyone.

No need to boldface your text, I can read it just fine.

I am not saying that the notion I mentioned earlier is right. I just want to explore the notion, and see what others have to say about it.

What I am seeing is many people saying: optimization and roleplaying are not related, because a) you can build something to support any amount of roleplaying and character ideas in 3.5 and/or b) unoptimized builds are bad roleplaying, as characters who are not strong enough should not be adventurers.

Edit: Let me put my point differently, as I can see that I am unable to bring my point across clearly. First, I agree that "people who are 'good' at optimization can be 'good' at roleplaying, 'bad' at roleplaying, or anywhere in between", since the two are not correlated or related. But, my point is that the system and optimization level do create boundaries on the available characters. In a fantasy game, you can't play a laserwielding timetravelling spacebabe. Likewise, in a high-op game, you can't play Joe the farmboy. As has been said, Joe would die. That is my point: doesn't optimization limit the number of available character ideas I can play?

Now, a point I've also seen made is that with better optimization comes better roleplay. I think there is a third variable here: investment.

[ThunderCat]

In a fantasy game, you can't play a laserwielding timetravelling spacebabe. Likewise, in a high-op game, you can't play Joe the farmboy. As has been said, Joe would die. That is my point: doesn't optimization limit the number of available character ideas I can play?
But the question is, does playing Joe the farmboy enhance the roleplaying experience any more than playing a laserwielding timetravelling spacebabe would do? And doesn't low-op gaming place just as many restrictions on the characters?

[Ceaon]

But the question is, does playing Joe the farmboy enhance the roleplaying experience any more than playing a laserwielding timetravelling spacebabe would do? And doesn't low-op gaming place just as many restrictions on the characters?

Playing Joe could enhance the experience for some, couldn't it? And low-op gaming does indeed place restrictions, but as they are different, I could still see a relation.

[Flickerdart]

But then they haven't spent 100% of their HP.

On a more serious note, this rarely happens. The party often (especially at low levels) needs to decide whether they are going to retreat as soon as the possibility of one of thiers falling emerges. One they are down it can easily become all or nothing (well all or complications with the fallen character).

So the party needs to make the descion to fight or flight when they they are about to lose a single member, which means they are rarely going to chose to run when they are only going from 100% to anywhere from 66-80%.
Precisely. And since you don't get XP for running away like a little girl, eventually you're going to have to take that risk.

[Sutremaine]

You're also ignoring the best method - wizard detection spells(Hey, it can pick up 10-years old across the world, I fail to see the problem here.

[....]

Predator Drones - you never see them coming.
Given that particularly talented schoolchildren can invent their own spells (albeit of the ranged-touch-Harm variety) and master the art of using wandless magic to transform into animals, how long do you think it would take for the best magical minds to invent a wizard detection spell for predator drones?

[Malachei]

But then they haven't spent 100% of their HP.

On a more serious note,

Obviously :smallbiggrin:


this rarely happens. The party often (especially at low levels) needs to decide whether they are going to retreat as soon as the possibility of one of thiers falling emerges. One they are down it can easily become all or nothing (well all or complications with the fallen character).

So the party needs to make the descion to fight or flight when they they are about to lose a single member, which means they are rarely going to chose to run when they are only going from 100% to anywhere from 66-80%.

No matter how often this happens, retreat is a valid tactical option. As long as you save the day by teleporting out before your characters are dead, heal up and go back to fight again, you avoid PC deaths. You can even spend your resources multiple times over against a recurring enemy. These, by the way, are among the more iconic villains.

Flickerdart's reasoning is flawed, because he translates party resources straight into casualties.

[ThunderCat]

Playing Joe could enhance the experience for some, couldn't it?
So could playing a laserwielding timetravelling spacebabe. Doesn't mean it's always (or even usually) a good idea. Restricting people's options is neutral, it can both decrease and enhance roleplaying in a group.


And low-op gaming does indeed place restrictions, but as they are different, I could still see a relation.
How are they different?

[Flickerdart]

Obviously :smallbiggrin:



No matter how often this happens, retreat is a valid tactical option. As long as you save the day by teleporting out before your characters are dead, heal up and go back to fight again, you avoid PC deaths. You can even spend your resources multiple times over against a recurring enemy. These, by the way, are among the more iconic villains.

Flickerdart's reasoning is flawed, because he translates party resources straight into casualties.
And your logic is even more flawed because you assume that party resources don't translate into casualties at all, that PCs can escape with impunity from anything at any time and then go back at their leisure. Personally, I would be dreadfully bored playing an easy-mode game like that, but whatever your DM needs to justify incompetent adventurers surviving, I suppose...

[Ceaon]

So could playing a laserwielding timetravelling spacebabe. Doesn't mean it's always (or even usually) a good idea. Restricting people's options is neutral, it can both decrease and enhance roleplaying in a group.

I can see your reasoning here, though I am not yet sure whether I agree.



How are they different?

Characters in a high-op campaign are godlike conjurers, wise priests and wild druids. They are seldomly non-magical warriors, since they can't be optimized as well. If I want to play a non-magical warrior in a highpowered (core) campaign, how would I do that? (Serious question, would love to get an answer.)

Low-op characters can be stout barbarians, zealous paladins or even unlikely John Doe's or firespouting mages. They are different from the above ones in that they represent different character types.

That's how I see it, anyway.

[Flickerdart]

If I want to play a non-magical warrior in a highpowered (core) campaign, how would I do that? (Serious question, would love to get an answer.)
Above level 6, even the normals have access to supernatural feats of strength, agility and toughness. You quite simply can't chop off Asmodeus' head with a plain ol' hunk of steel wielded by the town's militia captain.



Low-op characters can be stout barbarians, zealous paladins or even unlikely John Doe's or firespouting mages. They are different from the above ones in that they represent different character types.

And high-op characters can't be these things how?

[Ceaon]

And high-op characters can't be these things how?

Let me rephrase that: characters in a (sufficiently) high-op 3.5 campaign can't be non-magical, since they are way weaker. The concept of a magehunter is problematic, because warriors DIE against mages, no matter how well you roleplay.

[Water_Bear]

They are seldomly non-magical warriors, since they can't be optimized as well. If I want to play a non-magical warrior in a highpowered (core) campaign, how would I do that? (Serious question, would love to get an answer.)

I'm not sure you could go completely non-magical; AKA no Magic Items and no SLAs or Su abilities. But you can come really close.

A build I literally made yesterday for one of my newest players (Char-Op is hard on newbies, and I like making builds) is a bog-standard Daring Outlaw; Rogue 4/Swashbuckler 6/Swordsage 1, using a variable Tier-based point buy but otherwise standard rules.

She has no spellcasting ability whatsoever, exactly one Spell-like Ability 4/day, a literal handful of magic items that boost her Ex abilities, and only one Su Maneuver. She also deals an average of ~50 damage per attack (half that against creatures immune to precision damage) while two-weapon fighting with a nearly-full BAB.

Not exactly high-op, I'd call it a low-middle Tier 3, but she can contribute meaningfully alongside the other characters without magic and using primarily Tier 4/Tier 5 base classes.

[Ceaon]

I'm not sure you could go completely non-magical; AKA no Magic Items and no SLAs or Su abilities. But you can come really close.

A build I literally made yesterday for one of my newest players (Char-Op is hard on newbies, and I like making builds) is a bog-standard Daring Outlaw; Rogue 4/Swashbuckler 6/Swordsage 1, using a variable Tier-based point buy but otherwise standard rules.

She has no spellcasting ability whatsoever, exactly one Spell-like Ability 4/day, a literal handful of magic items that boost her Ex abilities, and only one Su Maneuver. She also deals an average of ~50 damage per attack (half that against creatures immune to precision damage) while two-weapon fighting with a nearly-full BAB.

Not exactly high-op, I'd call it a low-middle Tier 3, but she can contribute meaningfully alongside the other characters without magic and using primarily Tier 4/Tier 5 base classes.

Interesting... so your optimization skills allowed you to play an archetype that I wouldn't be able to. Nice!

I think it is best for me to reread this thread and look at whether I still agree with myself.

[Lord_Gareth]

Let me rephrase that: characters in a (sufficiently) high-op 3.5 campaign can't be non-magical, since they are way weaker. The concept of a magehunter is problematic, because warriors DIE against mages, no matter how well you roleplay.

It also depends on how you define 'high-op' and where the divide lies between 'practical optimization' and 'theoretical optimization'. I personally define PO as, "Representing a mechanical or flavorful concept as competently as is possible for the system and campaign." Take archery for example. Archery in 3.X blows meaty chunks all over the floor. But if I'm dead-set on a dude that uses a bow, I might just crack open all the source books needed to make the crumbling edifice that is the ranged attack rules function and beat my ranged damage capability until it actually functions. Is that high-op in your world? The amount of effort means I'd call it high op, yet it is admittedly inferior even to most T3 choices at mid-op.

[Malachei]

And your logic is even more flawed because you assume that party resources don't translate into casualties at all, that PCs can escape with impunity from anything at any time and then go back at their leisure. Personally, I would be dreadfully bored playing an easy-mode game like that, but whatever your DM needs to justify incompetent adventurers surviving, I suppose...

No, that's not what I said. You claimed that resource usage directly translates into PC deaths:


CR+4 is a 50% death rate

And I've shown why this is not necessarily the case. Then you argued against retreat being an option.

If you prefer to stay in a fight you cannot win, that's fine. I think that essentially ends up preferring failure over success, that's your personal style.

You're free to play whichever way you want. When facing overwhelming odds, I prefer my character to survive and fight another day. I think evolution-wise, it's also a smart strategy.

[Amphetryon]

A 50% death rate already assumes that death isn't necessarily certain, by the nature of the percentage. Sometimes, you'll see higher rates than that; sometimes, lower. It is, however, the expected mean, over a large enough sample size. Arguing that it isn't necessarily so is ignoring how the anticipated averages apply overall in favor of the individual example, which doesn't disprove the anticipated averages unless you can show those anticipated averages are themselves mathematically flawed.

[ThunderCat]

Characters in a high-op campaign are godlike conjurers, wise priests and wild druids. They are seldomly non-magical warriors, since they can't be optimized as well. If I want to play a non-magical warrior in a highpowered (core) campaign, how would I do that? (Serious question, would love to get an answer.)

Low-op characters can be stout barbarians, zealous paladins or even unlikely John Doe's or firespouting mages. They are different from the above ones in that they represent different character types.

That's how I see it, anyway.
But what if I want to play a wise priest of a wild druid in a low-op game? They're no less valid concepts, but if I played them in a low-op game, I'd easily be accused of being a munchkin who ruins the other players' fun by overshadowing them.

The way I see it, optimisation can also be used to narrow the gap between classes. If you want to play a class or a concept which is normally too weak to function properly in a mid-op game without DM fiat, the right optimisation can make it viable. A barbarian with pounce, a dungeoncrasher fighter, or a rogue/swashbuckler with the Daring Outlaw feat are all at least moderately optimised, and they hold up a lot better compared to casting classes than their non-optimised counterparts.

Of course, they can still easily be overshadowed by an optimised control wizard, but that doesn't make optimisation good or bad. It's just a tool. I often play powerful classes that are optimised for something completely different (e.g. sorcerers with lots of skills), which doesn't break the game at all, but lets me do things with the class I wouldn't normally be able to. Or I deliberately over-specialise so that I'm amazing at some things, but have glaring weaknesses which I need the party to compensate for. Doesn't make me less of an optimiser.

An important thing to realise is that when someone asks for mechanical advice, people will give them the most optimal choices, because that's kind of the point. But no one is obliged to take them all, they're just options. In real life, plenty of optimisers don't use all these powerful options all the time, because that would be boring. And when people give advice such as “Don't play a fighter, play a warblade”, they're not trying to limit anyone's choices, they're really saying “The stuff people normally play a fighter in order to do can be done a lot better with a warblade”, which is absolutely true (and notice that they rarely, if ever, say “play a wizard”).

A lot of people are turned off by language of optimisation because it deals in absolutes. There are right and wrong, optimal choices and less optimal choices, and because of that, advice is usually framed in terms of better or worse options. Some people mistakenly think this is about what's right or wrong for the game, but for most optimisers I've talked to, it's purely about options. Some options are mechanically better (i.e. more powerful and/or versatile), and people asking for mechanical advice will be told so. But how much of it you actually use depend on the player and the campaign.

Because I'm moderately skilled at optimising, I have more control over which kind of character I play. If I want to play something which is usually underpowered, but don't want my character to be weak and unskilled, I can optimise it so that it's effective. If the DM likes to kill PCs, but I would like my character to stick around, I can optimise it for survival. If I like certain aspects of a class but not others, I can optimise the parts I like to a degree where I don't have to use the parts of it I don't like (e.g. I've played a druid without wildshape and a Pathfinder witch whose primary use of spells was as emergency healing). It doesn't conflict with my roleplaying, if anything, it enhances it.

[ThiagoMartell]

But what if I want to play a wise priest of a wild druid in a low-op game? They're no less valid concepts, but if I played them in a low-op game, I'd easily be accused of being a munchkin who ruins the other players' fun by overshadowing them.

Not really. If you know what you're doing, you can be a cleric, a wizard or a druid in a low tier, low op party, contribute meaningfully and not overshadow anyone.
If you don't know what you're doing, chances are you won't overshadow anyone anyway.

[Malachei]

A 50% death rate already assumes that death isn't necessarily certain, by the nature of the percentage.

No, because the percentage does not include party behavior. The game designers have no knowledge of when a party may retreat and what methods they may use.


Sometimes, you'll see higher rates than that; sometimes, lower. It is, however, the expected mean, over a large enough sample size. Arguing that it isn't necessarily so is ignoring how the anticipated averages apply overall in favor of the individual example, which doesn't disprove the anticipated averages unless you can show those anticipated averages are themselves mathematically flawed.

As expending 100% of your HP resources does not equal a dead character, that reasoning is not supported by the rules. You're still alive.

Encounter Level design is not math. It does not represent a setting's population and does not adequately represent the average adventurer's survival rate. It is a tool for the DM to plan challenges -- and a very limited tool at that.

In fact, one character can (and usually does) expend more resources than another. A party interested in succeeding and surviving together will retreat when one of their members has expended his resources. And because other characters still have resources, they have the means to do so.

One DM may prefer Encounter Levels close to the party level, another may challenge a party with CR+8. Players with a DM who often poses extremely challenging encounters will more likely be ready to retreat and consider this a smart tactics than if you are used to always win easily and have rocket tag encounters.

The wizard is not going to watch while the party tank is butchered. He'll have the means to get his comrade out of the firing line. And he'll leave no one behind.

[Flickerdart]

The wizard is not going to watch while the party tank is butchered. He'll have the means to get his comrade out of the firing line. And he'll leave no one behind.
Once or twice, sure. The hundredth time the self-proclaimed master of swordplay or whatever is a drag on the party, the 30 Intelligence master of magics might start to wonder why they bother bringing that guy along anywhere.

[Malachei]

Once or twice, sure. The hundredth time the self-proclaimed master of swordplay or whatever is a drag on the party, the 30 Intelligence master of magics might start to wonder why they bother bringing that guy along anywhere.

And that's why values (and mechanically: alignment) play such an important role in directing the application of intelligence.

There are characters who will risk their lives for their friends, no matter how high their intelligence score.

[ThunderCat]

Not really. If you know what you're doing, you can be a cleric, a wizard or a druid in a low tier, low op party, contribute meaningfully and not overshadow anyone.
If you don't know what you're doing, chances are you won't overshadow anyone anyway.
This is wrong. Differences in power level are not created by optimisation, they're inherent in the system. If you don't know what you're doing, you can get lucky and end up choosing some of the least powerful options for the most powerful classes, and the most powerful options for the least powerful classes, but it can just as easily go the other way around. I played one of the strongest characters in the party in my first D&D campaign, just going after what I thought was interesting. I've heard other players do the same, stumble over a really powerful and effective build without any extensive experience optimising.

Not to mention that sometimes being powerful or exceptionally skilled is your character concept, and saying “Don't worry, you can still play a class as weak and incompetent” is completely missing the point. Joe Farmer, the chump who happened to stumble onto an adventure he never planned for, deson't go well in a party with Inigo Montoya, the tragic hero who trained his whole life to become the world's greatest swordsman in order to avenge his dead father. And telling Inigo's player that he shouldn't play a paragon at his chosen profession, because it makes Joe Farmer superfluous, is not encouraging good roleplaying.

[Flickerdart]

And that's why values (and mechanically: alignment) play such an important role in directing the application of intelligence.

There are characters who will risk their lives for their friends, no matter how high their intelligence score.
And those characters aren't roleplaying their intelligence score or friendship properly. Why the hell would you drag a valued friend into a warzone he's not even remotely prepared for, when you could ask him to stay at home where his life isn't constantly in danger?

[Menteith]

And that's why values (and mechanically: alignment) play such an important role in directing the application of intelligence.

There are characters who will risk their lives for their friends, no matter how high their intelligence score.

Sure, but I also wouldn't take an incompetent friend into a war zone. If the safest option for everyone is to leave them behind, it makes sense to do it, rather than risk their life and your safety basically to make them feel better.

EDIT
Swordsaged. We both used the term "warzone" and everything!

[ThunderCat]

And that's why values (and mechanically: alignment) play such an important role in directing the application of intelligence.

There are characters who will risk their lives for their friends, no matter how high their intelligence score.
{Scrubbed} If a character can't hold their own, they become a liability to the party. Dragging a liability around not only increases your risk of getting killed, it also increases theirs. There's a reason most armies don't allow unskilled civilians to go into war with them, and there's a reason most unskilled civilians don't go into war if they can avoid it. I'm not a soldier, but I have a friend who is, and if I ever told him I wanted to go to Kosovo with him, do you know what he would definitely not say? “Of course you should go, you're my friend, and because I'm Lawful stupid, placing my friends in situations where they're in way over their head and risk getting killed gives me a hard-on!”. Having characters volunteer for a job they can't do, and know (possibly from experience) that they can't do it, is not good roleplaying, it's moronic.

If the weak character who constantly needs to get saved serves a function for the plot, then fine. I played a noble without any noticeable combat skills in a campaign once, and it worked out OK because the plot gave me a reason to be placed in danger, and the other characters a reason to stick around and protect me (and because I mostly stayed out of reach of the enemy, firing my bow from behind my two bodyguards). But most campaigns are not like this, and more importantly, most campaigns shouldn't have to be like this. Adventuring because you're good at it should be enough.

[ThiagoMartell]

And that's why values (and mechanically: alignment) play such an important role in directing the application of intelligence.

There are characters who will risk their lives for their friends, no matter how high their intelligence score.

Strongly seconded.
Firefly example.
Firefly example. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsU4F7HBzg4)
Simon: Why did you come back for me?
Mal: You're on my crew.
Simon: But you don't even like me.
Mal: You're on my crew. Why are we still talking about this?
Naruto example.
http://108.60.201.122/32%2F183-282%2F7_90103.jpg
Shikamaru: Sasuke is not a very close friend of mine... nor is he someone important. However! He is a fellow shinobi from the hidden leaf, just like me and you. He is our comrade! This is why we'll risk our lives for him.

The Three Musketeers: One for all and all for one.
In Dragonlance we only see Raistlin discard hiis brother once he goes full evil.
Basically, plenty of evidence of why such behaviour doesn't only make sense - it's expected.



If the weak character who constantly needs to get saved serves a function for the plot, then fine.
All player characters serve a function for the plot: being player characters. :smallamused:


And those characters aren't roleplaying their intelligence score or friendship properly. Why the hell would you drag a valued friend into a warzone he's not even remotely prepared for, when you could ask him to stay at home where his life isn't constantly in danger?
Your line of reasoning ends up as "go tier 1 or go home".



This is wrong. Differences in power level are not created by optimisation, they're inherent in the system.
And can be mitigated or emphasized by optimization, which is exactly what I said.

If you don't know what you're doing, you can get lucky and end up choosing some of the least powerful options for the most powerful classes, and the most powerful options for the least powerful classes, but it can just as easily go the other way around.
Which is also exactly what I said. Chances are it won't come up, but it might.


Not to mention that sometimes being powerful or exceptionally skilled is your character concept, and saying “Don't worry, you can still play a class as weak and incompetent” is completely missing the point.
First of all, competency is relevant. If the DM just runs monsters out of the MMs and doesn't optimize NPCs, even a Fighter or Monk can feel competent with a tiny bit of optimization.
Also, you can be optimized in a niche. An optimized healbot cleric is competent and doesn't outshine anyone else.
Finally, "my concept is that I'm competent" gets tossed around so frequently when people simply want to outshine everyone else that it's not even funny. Being competent does not mean being better than everyone in your party.

Joe Farmer, the chump who happened to stumble onto an adventure he never planned for, deson't go well in a party with Inigo Montoya, the tragic hero who trained his whole life to become the world's greatest swordsman in order to avenge his dead father.
Oh, really? What would Fezzik have to say about that? :smalltongue: You know, that big guy who just happened to stumble onto an adventure he never planned for.

[ThunderCat]

Strongly seconded.
Firefly example.
Firefly example. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsU4F7HBzg4)
Simon: Why did you come back for me?
Mal: You're on my crew.
Simon: But you don't even like me.
Mal: You're on my crew. Why are we still talking about this?

Actually, this is just the opposite. The two of them are not friends, so we're not talking about risking one's life for one's friends, let alone letting one's friends come on a dangerous adventure for no apparent reason. Simon is a doctor (useful skill), not to mention I recall there being a reason he's part of the crew in the first place. That Mal saves him on principle doesn't mean Simon is usually a liability who drags the crew down, but who Mal keeps around because they're friends.


Naruto example.
http://108.60.201.122/32%2F183-282%2F7_90103.jpg
Shikamaru: Sasuke is not a very close friend of mine... nor is he someone important. However! He is a fellow shinobi from the hidden leaf, just like me and you. He is our comrade! This is why we'll risk our lives for him.


Again, not friendship. Plus, Sasuke is actually skilled at what he does.


The Three Musketeers: One for all and all for one.

Which of the musketeers couldn't fight very well, had no other useful skills, and needed to be saved by the others several times while never once being of real assistance to them? How about the non-combat love interest (what's-her-name), would they take her with them on a mission just because they liked her?


In Dragonlance we only see Raistlin discard hiis brother once he goes full evil.

What does that have to do with anything? Raistlin doesn't discard his brother because Caramon is a lot less skilled than other people whom Raistlin could get to adventure with him. Caramon is extremely strong and a skilled fighter, who you'd want on your team.


Basically, plenty of evidence of why such behaviour doesn't only make sense - it's expected.

So far, your examples include mostly highly competent and skilled characters, whose presence increased the odds of survival for everyone around them. We're talking about friends and family whose lack of skill is a liability, but who the other characters are still perfectly fine going into danger with, even though it would be safer for everyone if they stayed at home.

[ThiagoMartell]

Actually, this is just the opposite. The two of them are not friends, so we're not talking about risking one's life for one's friends, let alone letting one's friends come on a dangerous adventure for no apparent reason. Simon is a doctor (useful skill), not to mention I recall there being a reason he's part of the crew in the first place. That Mal saves him on principle doesn't mean Simon is usually a liability who drags the crew down, but who Mal keeps around because they're friends.
Mal keeps him around because they are companions. Simon being around is the reason they need a doctor in the first place.


Again, not friendship. Plus, Sasuke is actually skilled at what he does.
Not friendship, companionship.


Which of the musketeers couldn't fight very well, had no other useful skills, and needed to be saved by the others several times while never once being of real assistance to them?
D'Artagnan, 9 times out of 10.



What does that have to do with anything? Raistlin doesn't discard his brother because Caramon is a lot less skilled than other people whom Raistlin could get to adventure with him. Caramon is extremely strong and a skilled fighter, who you'd want on your team.
The point is that abandoning your party is the Evil thing to do.


So far, your examples include mostly highly competent and skilled characters, whose presence increased the odds of survival for everyone around them.
Completely wrong. Simon is the major source of trouble for the Firefly crew and rescuing Sasuke not only was a borderline suicide mission, Sasuke's only useful contribution to the Leaf characters throught the whole series was taking one hit for Naruto. Oh, and he considered Naruto do be useless back then, so there is that as well.

We're talking about friends and family whose lack of skill is a liability, but who the other characters are still perfectly fine going into danger with, even though it would be safer for everyone if they stayed at home.
No, you're talking about that. The topic was a Wizard deciding a Fighter shouldn't be in his party because he is not as powerful as he is and the Wizard being too smart to do that.

[Water_Bear]

Oh, really? What would Fezzik have to say about that? :smalltongue: You know, that big guy who just happened to stumble onto an adventure he never planned for.

You mean the enormous mercenary played by Andre the Giant? The one who routinely wins fights against a dozen or more enemies unarmed?

Fezzik isn't a good example of an unlucky everyman falling into an adventure. Maybe Princess Buttercup could fit that role, having no real skills or agency, but she is more of a living MacGuffin than a character and spends most of the story captured. Which kind of elegantly demonstrates the point actually.

Not to say low-tier characters, or characters without combat skills, shouldn't be played. They just need to be played carefully. Make sure they are good at something constructive, don't play up their burdensome nature in combat too much, and show why they are a hero. You do have to earn your keep in D&D, there's no 'Fate' to give main characters free rides like a lot of fantasy literature.

[Menteith]

Your line of reasoning ends up as "go tier 1 or go home".

No, his line of reasoning is that player characters should all be able to contribute in an encounter, and that characters who are actively detrimental to the team (consuming resources better spent elsewhere, requiring protection/supervision at all times) shouldn't logically be brought into dangerous situations. Don't put words in people's mouths.



Finally, "my concept is that I'm competent" gets tossed around so frequently when people simply want to outshine everyone else that it's not even funny. Being competent does not mean being better than everyone in your party

Being competent is sort of a pre-req for more builds, unless you're looking to a play a very specific type of character. I agree that it doesn't mean being better than everyone in your party, but almost every character in D&D should be competent at their role. Again, unless you're intentionally doing something very specific, it's not fun to play or play with useless characters.

EDIT
And no one is advocating for abandoning a team member in the middle of a tough situation. Instead, people are pointing out that it's much safer for everyone if incompetent characters aren't brought into dangerous situations to begin with. If your best friend is significantly less powerful than you, and risks complete destruction if he comes with you, then you wouldn't bring him with. This isn't terribly complicated.

[NichG]

I'd say the most harmful thing to roleplay, and more generally the cooperative-storytelling style of game, is fixation upon preconceptions of the world. Optimization can be a form of this but does not necessarily have to be.

For instance, the precomputation of 'Wizards are better in D&D than Fighters. Period.' is not necessarily something your character has experienced nor even something that the world as presented supports (due to e.g. the worst offender spells being unavailable, wizard NPCs not being assumed to have optimized or even to have been able to optimize if character build isn't a conscious choice, etc). This leads to a sort of behavior of "Its roleplaying for me to say your character is useless, because I'm smart and he is" which, roleplaying vs optimization aside is crass behavior for a table of friends.

Another kind of fixation that optimization can (but does not necessarily) encourage is when the system forces builds to be precomputed to have any hope of actually coming about. You could have a character who doesn't know he wants to join a certain guild/organization/etc corresponding to a particular PrC yet. But if he doesn't take feats on time, he won't be able to do so when the in-character motivation exists. This makes it so that the player has to be fixated on meeting all the preconditions of something, and means they must deform their in-game actions based on metagame knowledge of what they need to do to keep their options open later on. Retrain mechanics help cure this problem.

A third kind of fixation that is totally unrelated to optimization is the idea of coming into a game saying 'I don't know anything about this game, but I want to play this specific thing.' This could be anything from 'I want to play a wizard but I have no idea how the wizard mechanics work and don't care' to 'I must play a by-the-book lawful evil Beholder in a party of paladins!' kind of decisions.

Side note: I just want to comment, I'm seeing a lot of 'forget considerations of the game as a whole, I'm playing my character by doing X!' considerations. The idea that all adventuring parties must use optimal tactics, kick out weaker members, etc because it is a life or death profession and they would be dead otherwise, for example. There's two parts to roleplaying - one is playing your character, but the more subtle part that is equally important is recognizing and supporting the dramatic conventions of the story. There are some times in any drama where the brilliant tactician has to miss a detail, or there's no story. There are times when individual character considerations must be played out differently than first instinct so that a game can exist and all players can actually play. This isn't strictly speaking 'playing a role', but it is equally important as roleplaying or competency at a table, so I think its amiss to leave it out of the discussion.

[Oscredwin]

Strongly seconded.
Your line of reasoning ends up as "go tier 1 or go home".


If competent means anything in the tier system it means high tier 4 or better. Have you ever seen anyone complain about a Barbarian charger in their party or a Warblade being underpowered and a drag on the group?



Oh, really? What would Fezzik have to say about that? :smalltongue: You know, that big guy who just happened to stumble onto an adventure he never planned for.

Fezzik has been competitive wrestling for one reason or another since he was a small boy. He was a champion at age 6. Also, in DnD terms, he has a crazy point buy or template stacking (half ogre grappler build?).

[ThiagoMartell]

No, his line of reasoning is that player characters should all be able to contribute in an encounter, and that characters who are actively detrimental to the team (consuming resources better spent elsewhere, requiring protection/supervision at all times) shouldn't logically be brought into dangerous situations. Don't put words in people's mouths.
Please, by all means, explain to me how a Fighter contributes in an encounter when he is alongside a highly optimized Wizard. Heck, make it a Warblade. Name one thing he can do, the Wizard does it better. Or the Wizard can summon something that does it better. With this reasoning a highly optimized Wizard wouldn't even need a party - he would just sit on his demiplane, doing whatever he wants to do through astral projection and summons.
And D&D does not consider player characters should contribute to all encounters. That is the reason why we have the term trapmonkey, even.



If competent means anything in the tier system it means high tier 4 or better. Have you ever seen anyone complain about a Barbarian charger in their party or a Warblade being underpowered and a drag on the group?
See the point above. A Barbarian charger or a Warblade is meaningless compared to a Wizard.


Fezzik has been competitive wrestling for one reason or another since he was a small boy. He was a champion at age 6. Also, in DnD terms, he has a crazy point buy or template stacking (half ogre grappler build?).
Wrestling is not adventuring, is it?
Also, it's funny to notice Inigo Montoya was actually the least competent member in their group (all he does is get defeated and teh one time he wins he nearly dies) and there is a member in their group that is better than anyone else in everything they do.

[Menteith]

Please, by all means, explain to me how a Fighter contributes in an encounter when he is alongside a highly optimized Wizard. Heck, make it a Warblade. Name one thing he can do, the Wizard does it better. Or the Wizard can summon something that does it better. With this reasoning a highly optimized Wizard wouldn't even need a party - he would just sit on his demiplane, doing whatever he wants to do through astral projection and summons.
And D&D does not consider player characters should contribute to all encounters. That is the reason why we have the term trapmonkey, even.

Well, frankly, he doesn't. That's a big reason why I would never play a High-Op Wizard in the same party as a Fighter. If I want to play a more appropriate caster for that situation, I'd run a Bardic Sage instead of a Wizard, as that's going to be much more fun fun for both of us, and will still let me play a "Wizard" archetype. But I'm not sure what point you're making from this. Mine is that characters shouldn't be magnitudes different from each other in terms of power.

[ThunderCat]

All player characters serve a function for the plot: being player characters. :smallamused:
I would never voluntarily play with anyone with that attitude. I had enough of completely inappropriate characters waltzing in, expecting to be immediately accepted into the party, be allowed to act however they wanted (“it's what my character would do”), and have the other characters put up with it even though it made no sense to the story, simply by virtue of being PCs.

I might not be the world's most dedicated roleplayer, but I expect that people's roles should at the very least make just a little sense in the story, and that the characters should have a reason to stay together and adventure.


Your line of reasoning ends up as "go tier 1 or go home".
Slippery slope fallacy. I'm not saying only the most powerful people should ever be allowed in an adventuring party (for one, most adventure parties wouldn't realistically have access to all the most powerful people to begin with), just that all members should contribute to the party and increase rather than decrease their comrades' chances of survival, unless there's an in-story justification for why they don't.


And can be mitigated or emphasized by optimization, which is exactly what I said.

Which is also exactly what I said. Chances are it won't come up, but it might.
No, you said that if people didn't know what they were doing, chances were they wouldn't overshadow anyone. Which my experience says isn't true.


First of all, competency is relevant. If the DM just runs monsters out of the MMs and doesn't optimize NPCs, even a Fighter or Monk can feel competent with a tiny bit of optimization.
Depends on the monster. Some monsters are stronger for their CR than others.


Also, you can be optimized in a niche. An optimized healbot cleric is competent and doesn't outshine anyone else.
But what if I don't want to be an optimised healbot? What if I want to be Inigo Montoya, the world's greatest swordsman? What if I want Raistlin the master wizard? There are plenty of characters in fiction who're exceptionally gifted in areas which are a lot more useful than healing in combat, why should you never get a chance to play someone like them?


Finally, "my concept is that I'm competent" gets tossed around so frequently when people simply want to outshine everyone else that it's not even funny. Being competent does not mean being better than everyone in your party.
Actually, it does. In fact, a lot of anti-optimisers/ROLEplayers say they prefer rolling for their ability scores instead of using point-buy because not all people are equal, and not all characters should be either. I'm not suggesting anything nearly as radical, I'm just suggesting that wanting to play someone more powerful than Joe the Farmer is not wrong.


Oh, really? What would Fezzik have to say about that? :smalltongue: You know, that big guy who just happened to stumble onto an adventure he never planned for.

Fezzik, the guy who was initially hired for a job? The guy who had almost superhuman strength? The guy who was so good at fighting that the only reason the hero was able to beat him was that, due to his incredible skill, Fezzik had gotten so used to fighting several opponents at the same time that he had forgotten how to fight just one man? That Fezzik? He's even more min-maxed than Inigo!

[Oscredwin]

Please, by all means, explain to me how a Fighter contributes in an encounter when he is alongside a highly optimized Wizard. Heck, make it a Warblade. Name one thing he can do, the Wizard does it better. Or the Wizard can summon something that does it better. With this reasoning a highly optimized Wizard wouldn't even need a party - he would just sit on his demiplane, doing whatever he wants to do through astral projection and summons.
And D&D does not consider player characters should contribute to all encounters. That is the reason why we have the term trapmonkey, even.

Raymond Feist's books work on that premise. His first cast of characters had fighters and wizards. Once they became epic his Epic fighter with Artifact level weapons and armor (Thomas) and his epic Wizard (Pug) went on one last quest together with Thomas noticing that he wasn't much use to Pug (despite the fact he was the second most powerful human in cannon at the time). All of their future teamups involved Pug needing one of Thomas' unique powers from his artifact level weapon and armor, or superior action economy than Pug could manage alone. Pug continued to be the driving force of the series, the Big Good, and now when he adventures he does so with a party consisting of mages.

At a high enough level the fighter is there so the battle is won a round quicker. But by the time the wizard has his own demiplane the game is almost over (level 17), the warblade is just not necessary to the success of the mission. If that bothers you, don't play at that high level.

[Water_Bear]

Please, by all means, explain to me how a Fighter contributes in an encounter when he is alongside a highly optimized Wizard. Heck, make it a Warblade. Name one thing he can do, the Wizard does it better. Or the Wizard can summon something that does it better. With this reasoning a highly optimized Wizard wouldn't even need a party - he would just sit on his demiplane, doing whatever he wants to do through astral projection and summons.

Well, firstly because of simple economics it is much better for the wizard to let fighters do the fighting and focus on battlefield control. Every spell the wizard prepares has a huge opportunity cost attached; if they prepare that one, they can't prepare any of their other options. The Fighter, having no real options aside from fighting in their chosen style, has virtually no opportunity cost. The Wizard should logically focus on doing things the fighter can't do, thus increasing their effectiveness as a team.

Also? The "Wizards win everything forever" hype is lame and misleading.

A TO Wizard (or Cleric, or Druid, or Psion, or Sorcerer...) can snap the game in half like a dry twig by RAW. But that is why DMs exist. To say "no you don't get an infinite wish loop" and to make sure everyone is on the same page with regards to build. Besides, the kinds of players who would bring in Pun-Pun are not people you want to associate with.

A well-made Wizard or Druid in a party of Tier 3 characters will not cause the setting to collapse due to imbalance. There is an acceptable difference in power between characters; the least powerful characters stick to their specialties and the most powerful fill in the gaps. But everyone needs to be able to do something well, or why is that character even in the group?

That is what people mean when they say its out of character to bring incompetents into a warzone. They mean that even if the power level is uneven, everyone should make a meaningful contribution in some way.

[ThiagoMartell]

I would never voluntarily play with anyone with that attitude. I had enough of completely inappropriate characters waltzing in, expecting to be immediately accepted into the party, be allowed to act however they wanted (“it's what my character would do”), and have the other characters put up with it even though it made no sense to the story, simply by virtue of being PCs.
That applies both ways, to the optimized Wizard who makes everyone feel irrelevant and to the Fighter who is not up to the power levle of the optimized Wizard.


I might not be the world's most dedicated roleplayer, but I expect that people's roles should at the very least make just a little sense in the story, and that the characters should have a reason to stay together and adventure.
Coming up with that reason is part of your role as a player. If you simply tell everyone "you're not powerful enough to adventure alongside my character", you'll simply get told "find another D&D table, then".


Slippery slope fallacy. I'm not saying only the most powerful people should ever be allowed in an adventuring party (for one, most adventure parties wouldn't realistically have access to all the most powerful people to begin with), just that all members should contribute to the party and increase rather than decrease their comrades' chances of survival, unless there's an in-story justification for why they don't.
You do realize I wasn't even talking to you, right?


No, you said that if people didn't know what they were doing, chances were they wouldn't overshadow anyone. Which my experience says isn't true.
Your experience does not encompass all possibilities. "Chances are" just means that it might play out fine. It might not. It's not a sure outcome.


Depends on the monster. Some monsters are stronger for their CR than others.
The broken-ness of the CR system is irrelevant to this discussion. Apropriate challenge has nothing to do with the CR system, because it is, after all, broken.


But what if I don't want to be an optimised healbot? What if I want to be Inigo Montoya, the world's greatest swordsman? What if I want Raistlin the master wizard? There are plenty of characters in fiction who're exceptionally gifted in areas which are a lot more useful than healing in combat, why should you never get a chance to play someone like them?
That swings both ways. What if you want to be Inigo Montoya but the other guy wants to be Vizzini?


Actually, it does. In fact, a lot of anti-optimisers/ROLEplayers say they prefer rolling for their ability scores instead of using point-buy because not all people are equal, and not all characters should be either. I'm not suggesting anything nearly as radical, I'm just suggesting that wanting to play someone more powerful than Joe the Farmer is not wrong.
Nor am I. You're arguing against a point I never made. I'm saying if you have a Fighter and a Wizard in your party and the Wizard tells the Fighter to quit the party, there is something wrong.



Fezzik, the guy who was initially hired for a job? The guy who had almost superhuman strength? The guy who was so good at fighting that the only reason the hero was able to beat him was that, due to his incredible skill, Fezzik had gotten so used to fighting several opponents at the same time that he had forgotten how to fight just one man? That Fezzik? He's even more min-maxed than Inigo!
Of course. Inigo is far from competent. He gets into two swordsights in the movie. One he loses, the other he barely wins. A borderline 50% success rate.
My point about Fezzik is simply that he fell into the adventure per se (rescuing Buttercup, when they actually work together, instead of fighting each other) by accident.

[ThunderCat]

Please, by all means, explain to me how a Fighter contributes in an encounter when he is alongside a highly optimized Wizard.
Why do you assume people all use a highly optimised wizard as the basis? We were talking about Joe the Farmer here. A fully optimised wizard can break encounters, that's true enough, but few people play fully optimised wizards, and the people who come the closets usually deliberately hold back.

The question here is the power level. Just as no one should be required to power-game to the level of pun-pun, or an exceptionally cheesy wizard, in order to feel useful, no one should be required to keep to the level of Joe the Farmer, or anywhere near that, in order to make Joe's player feel useful. Different strokes for different campaigns of course, but playing Inigo, Fezzik, Raistlin, or any other character among the best in their field, is a completely viable choice, which opens up just as many, if not more, opportunities for story-telling and roleplaying as Joe the Farmer does.


And D&D does not consider player characters should contribute to all encounters. That is the reason why we have the term trapmonkey, even.
No said they should. But my Beguiler, who's an exceptionally skilled thief, con artist, diplomat, and mage, while also being quite knowledgeable in many areas, and stealthy when she needs to, would still be considered overpowered in many anti-optimisation campaigns, even though her contributions against enemies immune/resistant to mind-affecting spells is fairly mediocre.

[Malachei]

And those characters aren't roleplaying their intelligence score or friendship properly. Why the hell would you drag a valued friend into a warzone he's not even remotely prepared for, when you could ask him to stay at home where his life isn't constantly in danger?

First of all, properly playing an intelligence score of 30 is very hard in general.

Well, suppose you have not been able to scry on the warzone? Your fighter buddy has saved your life dozens of times? He's still contributing to the team's success? He's part of the team and you would not want to leave him behind, because he feels it is his primary mission in life to fight the evil organization you're dealing with?

There are countless reasons for being friends, being a team, sticking together and defending somebody who cannot contribute to the team the same way.

In our genre, the greatest stories have been based on the strong protecting the weak, on diverse groups adventuring together and not leaving the others behind.

Lord of the Rings? Your character would leave the hobbits for the orcs to eat? Or left them at home? So the quest would have failed. Same goes for Parzival.

Characters who think of others as baggage have a lack of empathy, which I find a dangerous personality trait.

[ThiagoMartell]

At a high enough level the fighter is there so the battle is won a round quicker. But by the time the wizard has his own demiplane the game is almost over (level 17), the warblade is just not necessary to the success of the mission. If that bothers you, don't play at that high level.
Optimized Wizards can get their demiplanes a lot sooner than high level.
You're completely missing my point, however. My point is that a Wizard saying "Fighter, quit the party, I'm too awesome to hang around you" is bad thing to happen not only in an RPG, in a story. Your example even keeps the warrior around even after he is not relevant.


Well, frankly, he doesn't. That's a big reason why I would never play a High-Op Wizard in the same party as a Fighter. If I want to play a more appropriate caster for that situation, I'd run a Bardic Sage instead of a Wizard, as that's going to be much more fun fun for both of us, and will still let me play a "Wizard" archetype. But I'm not sure what point you're making from this. Mine is that characters shouldn't be magnitudes different from each other in terms of power.
My point is exactly that. If you go into a game and see you have a Wizard who is better than anyone else, instead of saying "your characters suck, reroll something better, I'm awesome" you should reroll (say) a Bardic Sage. Or simply tone down your optimization.



Well, firstly because of simple economics it is much better for the wizard to let fighters do the fighting and focus on battlefield control. Every spell the wizard prepares has a huge opportunity cost attached; if they prepare that one, they can't prepare any of their other options. The Fighter, having no real options aside from fighting in their chosen style, has virtually no opportunity cost. The Wizard should logically focus on doing things the fighter can't do, thus increasing their effectiveness as a team.
The wizard does focus on things the Fighter can't do. The problem is one of those things is "summoning a better Fighter".


Also? The "Wizards win everything forever" hype is lame and misleading.
It's also RAW.


A TO Wizard (or Cleric, or Druid, or Psion, or Sorcerer...) can snap the game in half like a dry twig by RAW. But that is why DMs exist. To say "no you don't get an infinite wish loop" and to make sure everyone is on the same page with regards to build. Besides, the kinds of players who would bring in Pun-Pun are not people you want to associate with.
If DMs must control high op, they must control low OP as well. My point is basically that "you're not powerful enough to be around me" is a bad thing to tell anyone in an RPG.


A well-made Wizard or Druid in a party of Tier 3 characters will not cause the setting to collapse due to imbalance.
Define "well-made". You surely don't mean optimized. You can build a WIzard to be in a t3 party. You can also build a Wizard to be in a t4 or t5 party. You just have to limit yourself.


There is an acceptable difference in power between characters; the least powerful characters stick to their specialties and the most powerful fill in the gaps. But everyone needs to be able to do something well, or why is that character even in the group?
Agreed completely. The problem is that a Wizard gets to do everything better than anyone. In fact, ThunderCat has been saying it will happen, 100% sure, even unintentionally, no way around it, your Fighter is worse than the Wizard.


That is what people mean when they say its out of character to bring incompetents into a warzone. They mean that even if the power level is uneven, everyone should make a meaningful contribution in some way.
But you just told me the DM should control/nerf high powered characters. Why isn't it the DM's job to boost low powered characters, as well?

[Flickerdart]

Well, suppose you have not been able to scry on the warzone? Your fighter buddy has saved your life dozens of times? He's still contributing to the team's success? He's part of the team and you would not want to leave him behind, because he feels it is his primary mission in life to fight the evil organization you're dealing with?

You're talking about several different points and then conflating them into one thing that addresses nothing anyone's said.

The case here isn't Wizard and Fighter (and if it were, the Fighter would not have done any of those things anyway). It's Sir Warblade the Competent and Billy Bob Mud Farmer who wastes feats on Skill Focus (Mud Farming) because it's flavourful. This sort of character doesn't save anyone's life.

The hobbits were a great addition to the team. They're small, they're sneaky - and they still got sent off while the real fighters got to real fighting. Sure, they were sent off in the direction of the enemy, but you will note that nobody expected Merry and Pippin to grab a sword and suit of armour and form ranks to defend the walls.

[Togo]

And those characters aren't roleplaying their intelligence score or friendship properly. Why the hell would you drag a valued friend into a warzone he's not even remotely prepared for, when you could ask him to stay at home where his life isn't constantly in danger?

If the power differential is that obvious, why are you playing an optimised spellcaster? i'm just trying to get a feel for how this would happen in practice.


They are completely separate, since they do not influence each other, not for anyone.

Every single example in this thread has either been hypothetical to the point of being unrealistic, or has been people attributing a causal or correlational relationship where none exists. The only reason they see such a relationship is because they want to see it.

I'm sorry you feel that way. Here is my example again, maybe you can say what's wrong with it?


Ok, so let's try a specific example. I'm playing an alienist wizard, he starts to realise that he's getting sucked deeper and deeper into his work, and that sooner or later he will pass the point of no return. (the p-class ends with you growing tentacles or similar and becoming an outsider). At some point, I've decided, he's going to get morality, sign up fully with the good guys, and move into a divine oracle. Do I make that move at the best point mechanically in my progression (i.e. after getting the bonus spells and free metamagic feat from alienist, but soon enough to pick up the 2nd level of divine oracle) or do I make the move at the point where it makes most sense in the storyline?

Can you show me the flaw?


You are the person who decides how your character's personal narrative of transformation plays out. You are the designer of your own build. The only reason the best point to leave the prestige class mechanically would be wrong for your character's story is if you choose it to be so.

So.. The events that happen in the story have nothing to do with it? My character's development, being a personal narrative, is not impacted by the game at all? The events in the game, the other characters, my own actions, are all irrelevent?

Let's say the party defeat the big bad in an adventure, as part of a larger campaign. In doing so they resolve a long-running plot to do with cultists of the Far Realms, and manage to prevent their insiduous knowledge from spreading. In doing so we are granted the blessings of the gods. Then they go off to a swamp related adventure. After three weeks, I gain another level of alienist, because I quite fancy the extra spell slots, and going into Divine Oracle early would be sub-optimal for my planned build. After another month, we've gained another level from killing swamp creatures, and then I decide to move to Divine Oracle.

Do you really think there isn't some kind of conflict there? I think there's a conflict?

The best time for the character's personality to change track would be at the climax of the Far Realm story arc. The best time for the character's build to change would be much later, in an unrelated quest. Which is more important?


Your Alienist is the perfect example of what I mentioned earlier; a character with a story-arc built in. If you know your character's goals and personality, you can usually see where the character should be headed and what paths they could take to get there.

Sure, I understood your earlier example, larely because I sometimes play in the same way. The reason I disagree with you is because, having followed the same playstyle that you describe, I have run into conflict between optimisation and role-playing so obvious and glaring that I don't understand how you missed them.



I agree that they can affect each other, but usually the other way around from what you claim. In my experience, there is a small but significant correlation between optimisation (i.e. system mastery) and good roleplaying.

Really? I've found exactly the opposite. Ah well, each to their own.


But more importantly, I think people roleplay differently, and the narrow gospel of true ROLEplaying (as practised and preached by the kind of people who constantly need to stretch how they're not ROLLplayers) is severely limiting to many personality and roleplaying styles.

I don't think a narrowly defined band of idiots need concern us, any more that optimisation necessarily involves looking down on and/or bullying people who don't play optimised builds I'd rather focus on the issue. We all have horror stories.


In other words, I usually greatly benefit from the mechanical crutch that is optimisation (not powergaming). In addition, being inspired by something mechanically interesting often increases my enthusiasm for a role, which leads to better roleplaying.

Interesting. I find that I am usually more creative within mechanical constraints than I am outside them. So to that extent the mechanical constraints of the game are useful. That said, the more optimisation you demand, the narrower those contraints become, and I think there is a point at which you start losing something. At the extreme end, an entire table full of variations on Pun-Pun and the Omnificer is, I feel, losing something. Even a table where everyone feels constrained to play an optimised Tier 1 character in order to contribute is loosing something of the potential richness of the game.

So there's clearly an extreme point at which optimisation becomes counter-productive. I don't think that's controvertial, (is it?). Similarly, there is a point of mechanical capability below which the character's difficulty with the mechanical aspects of the game may make it impractical, and that point is probably a relative one depending on the optimisation of the other characters. I don't think that's controvertial either.

Perhaps the bitterness surrounding this issue is simply that the choices one player makes constrain the others. If you have hugely optimised characters in the same game as very sub-optimal characters, then the game can run into problems. Thus we see that the very presence of the optimiser reduces the possible character choices available to others, and thus are perceived to harm roleplaying. The reverse is only somewhat true - someone who plays a very weak character limits the amount of optimisation that can practically be done before the game falls apart. This doesn't limit characterisation opportunities in the same way though.

Put it like this. One person is playing a Tier 1 character, one is playing a tier 5 character. Which one do you disappoint?

If the problem is simply that the player with the Tier 5 character doesn't know his character has mechanical problems, or has made poor choices, then the problem is easily fixed by adjusting his character upwards to something closer to the Tier 1. This is probably why so many people like to confuse optimisation wtih system mastery, and indeed prefer to believe that people who don't want to play optimised characters must be unintelligent, poor at playing the game, or selfish in some way.

If the player with the Tier 5 character is playing the characterisation they want to play, and thus is rejecting more powerful options, then maybe it is the tier 1 character that needs to change. This is probably why we see so many people claiming that optimisation limits role-playing. Because unless the optimisation becomes reduced, and the Tier 1 character comes down a bit in power, the low Tier character becomes unplayable.

This is a sensitive issue, becuase other people's beliefs
limit what you are allowed to do in a game. They limit the builds you can play, and the characters that can be played as a result.



That is what people mean when they say its out of character to bring incompetents into a warzone. They mean that even if the power level is uneven, everyone should make a meaningful contribution in some way.

Does that mean we should require a certain level of optimisation, or that we should limit optimisation so that (e.g.) wizards don't duplicate the core competancies of other characters? The latter seems easier, and more sensible.

[ThiagoMartell]

The case here isn't Wizard and Fighter (and if it were, the Fighter would not have done any of those things anyway). It's Sir Warblade the Competent and Billy Bob Mud Farmer who wastes feats on Skill Focus (Mud Farming) because it's flavourful. This sort of character doesn't save anyone's life.


Once or twice, sure. The hundredth time the self-proclaimed master of swordplay or whatever is a drag on the party, the 30 Intelligence master of magics might start to wonder why they bother bringing that guy along anywhere.

Funny, I thought the case here was a Wizard. I wouldn't even be arguing if not for that post.



Why do you assume people all use a highly optimised wizard as the basis? We were talking about Joe the Farmer here. A fully optimised wizard can break encounters, that's true enough, but few people play fully optimised wizards, and the people who come the closets usually deliberately hold back.
No, you are talking about Joe the Farmer. I'm discussing the Wizard exmaple Flickerdart brought out.


The question here is the power level. Just as no one should be required to power-game to the level of pun-pun, or an exceptionally cheesy wizard, in order to feel useful, no one should be required to keep to the level of Joe the Farmer, or anywhere near that, in order to make Joe's player feel useful. Different strokes for different campaigns of course, but playing Inigo, Fezzik, Raistlin, or any other character among the best in their field, is a completely viable choice, which opens up just as many, if not more, opportunities for story-telling and roleplaying as Joe the Farmer does.
I agree completely. I never said anything against that, even.


No said they should. But my Beguiler, who's an exceptionally skilled thief, con artist, diplomat, and mage, while also being quite knowledgeable in many areas, and stealthy when she needs to, would still be considered overpowered in many anti-optimisation campaigns, even though her contributions against enemies immune/resistant to mind-affecting spells is fairly mediocre.
That has nothing to do with anything I've said in this thread. :smallconfused: I'm not anti-optimisation.

[Flickerdart]

Funny, I thought the case here was a Wizard. I wouldn't even be arguing if not for that post.
My artificer is deeply hurt, and demands an apology.

[Knaight]

You're assuming that those who know optimise tend to do so. I like playing monks, and am better at optimisation than most people I know. The group's best optimiser may have a severely sub-optimal character.

Deliberately controlling for power and aiming low is still a form of optimization - it's one I do whenever I play 3.x, on account of being the best optimizer in the group. Moreover, this doesn't matter - almost all all of those who do optimize, care about the game. That there are also those who don't optimize who do care is irrelevant, as there are also plenty of people who really aren't into gaming that much, and as such aren't particularly good at any of the skills involved.


Every single example in this thread has either been hypothetical to the point of being unrealistic, or has been people attributing a causal or correlational relationship where none exists. The only reason they see such a relationship is because they want to see it.
There is a correctional relationship in that skills in both of them are partially derived from a common source - investment into the hobby and the game. It just indicates that optimization skills are an indicator of better role playing skills than the baseline.

[Flickerdart]

If the power differential is that obvious, why are you playing an optimised spellcaster? i'm just trying to get a feel for how this would happen in practice.
Who said anything about optimized? Hell, doesn't even have to be a spellcaster. The baseline for competence is really not very high.

[ThiagoMartell]

Who said anything about optimized? Hell, doesn't even have to be a spellcaster. The baseline for competence is really not very high.

But then why would he drop the Fighter? :smallconfused:

[Flickerdart]

{Scrubbed}

[ThiagoMartell]

{Scrub the post, scrub the quote}

I apologize, then. I misunderstood your point and was releasing the hounds on you for little reason.
I still don't think you should kick a Fighter from the party because he is nto that good, because if the player is having fun, his damage output or whatever does not really matter. If the DM can make the "RP choices" work in the campaign, even better. That's what good DMs do, I believe.

[Malachei]

You're talking about several different points and then conflating them into one thing that addresses nothing anyone's said.

Quite the contrary. I've been addressing your full post. You're quoting mine selectively.


It's Sir Warblade the Competent and Billy Bob Mud Farmer who wastes feats on Skill Focus (Mud Farming)

Now you've reduced your point to Skill Focus (Mud Farming). I'm fine with that.


The hobbits were a great addition to the team. They're small, they're sneaky - and they still got sent off while the real fighters got to real fighting. Sure, they were sent off in the direction of the enemy, but you will note that nobody expected Merry and Pippin to grab a sword and suit of armour and form ranks to defend the walls.

The hobbits were clearly the weakest element of the nine companions. They perfectly fit your example of what you referred to as "bagagge". They took part in many fights, including early on in their adventuring career, being attacked by the wraiths and then fighting in Moria. They required the attention of others to look after them both in combat and out of combat. And still, they made a difference, and probably the difference.

And yes, iconic stories like this inform our game.

[Boci]

The hobbits were clearly the weakest element of the nine companions. They perfectly fit your example of what you referred to as "bagagge". They took part in many fights, including early on in their adventuring career, being attacked by the wraiths and then fighting in Moria. They required the attention of others to look after them both in combat and out of combat. And still, they made a difference, and probably the difference.

And yes, iconic stories like this inform our game.

You've played in a game where you were Aragorn and another player was Pipin?

[Malachei]

You've played in a game where you were Aragorn and another player was Pipin?

I played a 36th level wizard and the other player was a ranger.

[ThunderCat]

That applies both ways, to the optimized Wizard who makes everyone feel irrelevant and to the Fighter who is not up to the power levle of the optimized Wizard.
The difference is that that the people who build weak characters tend to present themselves as better roleplayers, and people playing stronger characters are often accused of power-gaming and munchkinism. I'm fully on board with agreeing on a certain power-level in advance, or coming up with reasons for why characters who're obviously less/more competent than their companions would still adventure with them. But I don't think optimisation is bad because it can make Joe the Farmer feel useless, I think playing Joe the Farmer in a campaign that isn't specifically made for it is a pretty anti-social thing to do.


Coming up with that reason is part of your role as a player. If you simply tell everyone "you're not powerful enough to adventure alongside my character", you'll simply get told "find another D&D table, then".
But coming up with a reason for why other people's characters are in the group is not my job. I can help, and I usually try to make my character reasonably accommodating of whatever the other people at the table want to play (one of the reasons I dislike people who're obsessed with how much of a ROLEplayer they are is precisely because they often don't do that, because it's not what they've decided their character would do), but ultimately, you can't just show up with a character who has no useful skills, and expect others to find an excuse to include you.

If you simply tell someone “you should take my character with you because it's my character”, you should be told “make another character or find a different group”. Luckily, the characters of those kinds of people tend to get killed pretty fast anyway.


You do realize I wasn't even talking to you, right?
It's still the slippery slope fallacy.


Your experience does not encompass all possibilities. "Chances are" just means that it might play out fine. It might not. It's not a sure outcome.
Since I'm not a native speaker, I looked it up just to be sure, and “chances are” does not mean “it might happen or it might not”, it means “it is likely to happen”. So what you said what that it was likely that your character would not overshadow the others if you didn't know what you were doing. Since I've seen it happen several times, and since most groups consist of at least 4-5 players, who often play more than one character during a campaign, and often play several campaigns together, I'd actually say it's the opposite – chances are power discrepancies between classes will become an issue if you don't know what you're doing.


The broken-ness of the CR system is irrelevant to this discussion. Apropriate challenge has nothing to do with the CR system, because it is, after all, broken.
But if the DM plays by the book, it means he or she will use CR as a guideline to what's appropriate.


That swings both ways. What if you want to be Inigo Montoya but the other guy wants to be Vizzini?
Then he has to find a reason for why Vizzini would be in the campaign to begin with and why the other characters would include him in their group, possibly asking the DM and the other players for some special accommodations (such as wealth to pay the other characters (which was what Vizzini did), connections to make him useful, or some special role in an ancient prophecy or something).

Vizzini is far below the baseline for what can be reasonably expected of a D&D character. He never fights, never uses magic, never disarms a trap, never makes a successful diplomacy check (except if you count getting Inigo and Fezzik to follow him), and never figures anything out. He's far harder to fit into most games than Inigo is.


Nor am I. You're arguing against a point I never made. I'm saying if you have a Fighter and a Wizard in your party and the Wizard tells the Fighter to quit the party, there is something wrong.
If the fighter consistently needs rescuing and consistently doesn't contribute enough to make up for it, it's the most rational thing to do, not because of the mechanical advantages, but because few real people (or believable characters) would adventure with such a companion if they had a choice. The trick is to never get to that point in teh first place, and in order to do that, the onus is as much on the fighter to step up and become useful as it is on the wizard to step down in order to artificially boost the fighter's appearance of competence.

In fact, if the rest of the party is reasonably optimised or simply playing tier 3+ classes, the fighter is the odd one out, and should adapt. More so than a character who's more competent than his or her companions, since those companions would have an obvious reason to keep the competent character around.


Of course. Inigo is far from competent. He gets into two swordsights in the movie. One he loses, the other he barely wins. A borderline 50% success rate.
My point about Fezzik is simply that he fell into the adventure per se (rescuing Buttercup, when they actually work together, instead of fighting each other) by accident.
Inigo is an extremely competent duellist. He holds his own longer than anyone against a man with several level in the Mary Sue prestige class, with his off-hand. He mentions having defeated al his opponents before that, and we're not given any reason to doubt him. He also, from what I recall, fights several guards and easily wins. And the only reason he even breaks a sweat against count Rugen is because Rugen gets lucky and hit him with a knife before he can get close enough to engage in melee, which does not say anything about his skills as a swordsman, only that he isn't immune to thrown weapons.

And Fezzik didn't fall into the adventure. He was specifically brought in as a mercenary because of his great skills, and just ended up switching sides. If he hadn't been a mercenary, he would never have become involved in the issue at all.

[Boci]

I played a 36th level wizard and the other player was a ranger.

That arguably isn't the same, since a game like that falls way out of the scope of any traditional D&D.

[Knaight]

Inigo is an extremely competent duellist. He holds his own longer than anyone against a man with several level in the Mary Sue prestige class, with his off-hand. He mentions having defeated al his opponents before that, and we're not given any reason to doubt him. He also, from what I recall, fights several guards and easily wins. And the only reason he even breaks a sweat against count Rugen is because Rugen gets lucky and hit him with a knife before he can get close enough to engage in melee, which does not say anything about his skills as a swordsman, only that he isn't immune to thrown weapons.

He's also good enough to prevent the entire brute squad from getting him out of the forest, while drunk. He's good enough to take down four of Rugen's guards in about a second, while at a bit of a disadvantage as concerns equipment. He was in four fights in the movie, won three of them, lasted quite a while in the one he lost, and only really struggled to win one of the three he won, on account of a surprise attack and despite being drunk in others.

[Water_Bear]

Let's say the party defeat the big bad in an adventure, as part of a larger campaign. In doing so they resolve a long-running plot to do with cultists of the Far Realms, and manage to prevent their insiduous knowledge from spreading. In doing so we are granted the blessings of the gods. Then they go off to a swamp related adventure. After three weeks, I gain another level of alienist, because I quite fancy the extra spell slots, and going into Divine Oracle early would be sub-optimal for my planned build. After another month, we've gained another level from killing swamp creatures, and then I decide to move to Divine Oracle.

Do you really think there isn't some kind of conflict there? I think there's a conflict?

Not really. The idea of a denouement where characters apply the lesson of the climax is a fairly well established trope. Character development is slow, and even 'abrupt' changes should be foreshadowed well ahead of time.

If your Alienist saw the damage that kind of knowledge could do, and the beneficence of the gods, that would certainly be something to mull over. And if your character had pre-existing doubts or worries about their choices that would give them even more reason to have a change of heart. Eventually, after the character had talked to a Cleric about it and possibly had some nightmares about turning into a monster, they would decide to refocus their talents.

More than enough time for a level or two's worth of adventuring.


The reason I disagree with you is because, having followed the same playstyle that you describe, I have run into conflict between optimisation and role-playing so obvious and glaring that I don't understand how you missed them.

I'm a very introspective person who tends to be cautious and distrusts sudden changes. I make sure that my characters have a well-defined arc of personality growth because that way it gives me a role to play and increases the drama quotient of the game.

The idea of jumping from one build to another, or one personality to another, mid-campaign is literally difficult for me to believe. I understand the idea of a more free-form impressionable character making unexpected changes, but that is very much at odds with who I am personally.


If the player with the Tier 5 character is playing the characterisation they want to play, and thus is rejecting more powerful options, then maybe it is the tier 1 character that needs to change. This is probably why we see so many people claiming that optimisation limits role-playing. Because unless the optimisation becomes reduced, and the Tier 1 character comes down a bit in power, the low Tier character becomes unplayable.

Your right to swing your arm ends exactly where my nose begins.

Someone wants to play a character who is deliberately not able to function in the party? Fine, kind of odd but okay.

That person thinks they can dictate what kind of character I play because they're a "better roleplayer"? Go directly to Hell, do not pass go do not collect $200.


Does that mean we should require a certain level of optimisation, or that we should limit optimisation so that (e.g.) wizards don't duplicate the core competancies of other characters?

I would say both, to a limited extent.

In my games, I institute a variable Tier-based Point Buy (T1=24, T2=28, T3=32, etc) to add a smidge of balance. On top of that, I stick to official sources and require anything from Dragon Magazine/Web Expansions to be run by me first as a minor anti-cheese measure. Other than that, it comes down to helping newbie players build stronger characters and looking over the more experienced player's builds for obvious brokenness.

You don't need to be draconian to keep the party more-or-less on the same page, and a Tier or two of difference isn't the end of the world. As long as everyone can do something, who is doing what isn't that important.

[ThunderCat]

{Scrubbed}

[Malachei]

That arguably isn't the same, since a game like that falls way out of the scope of any traditional D&D.

You're referring to Aragorn and Pippin, right? :smallbiggrin:

I've played the wizard all the way up there, and yes, the characters were close friends, and the wizard's intelligence was way beyond 30.

But the ranger never to Skill Focus (Mud Farming), so that's maybe the solution. If you want your wizard friend to stand by your side, don't take Skill Focus (Mud Farming)!

[Aegis013]

I have to agree with I understood Flickerdart to be saying. I think it's a good rule of thumb of a game, books and movies not withstanding, to say "In a typical encounter, every player character should be able to meaningfully contribute to the success of the group."

If a player character is unable to do so, they may annoy other players, being a drain on resources. If this is viewed as a problem, and the solutions to it, differ from group to group.

I think using books and movies as examples for why something should be in a game is a bit odd, seeing as games are governed by different principles than books and movies.

[Icewraith]

There are three general instances in which you are going to create a character that will participate in an RPG.

1: You and a group of people are deciding to start a new campaign. You are all making new characters.

2: You are joining a pre-established campaign group. You are (probably) the only person making a new character, unless there are other people also joining the group or someone else is experiencing situation 3.

3: Your character died and you don't want to or are unable to resurrect the character, or you at least need a temporary character until the party's new quest to get your old character succeeds.

To stop this argument and the table grief that spawned it from occurring in the future, may I suggest that:

In cases one and three, you should have a decent grasp of the intended power level of the campaign, since you're all creating characters and should have reasonable access to the gm and each other (if nothing else to ensure you don't end up with a part of dark elves or similar).

In case, two, people clearly need to be more careful, becuase anecdotally a lot of the anti-optimization complaints come from "someone joined our group and made a TO/high op character and the DM couldn't or wouldn't stop it and it ruined everything."

Let me further suggest the following: The way you roleplay your character and the mechanics of how your character functions in the game are not independant of each other, at least after the first combat encounter. Once dice start rolling, no matter how rules-loose or rules-heavy your group is, your succesful and unsuccessful dice rolls will in part determine your character's successes and failures. In other words, this is a roleplaying game.

People who ignore/minimize the roleplaying aspect and focus on the game and people who ignore/minimize the game aspect and focus on roleplaying are both likely to negatively affect the group in different ways.

Finally, let me suggest the following: For effective roleplaying, your character should be mechanically capable of doing the things you want it to do, subject to the overall power level of the game, the other players' characters, the DM, and the level the campaign takes place at. Therefore the minimum amount of optimization that any person should be doing when creating a character is making sure the character is mechanically able to fill a useful role within the party that correlates with the player's concept of the character.

This really isn't a roleplaying issue at all, it's an issue of people either ignoring game mechanics (for good or for ill) entirely and/or making characters that are inappropriate (in either direction) for the power level of the campaign.

[Boci]

You're referring to Aragorn and Pippin, right? :smallbiggrin:

I've played the wizard all the way up there, and yes, the characters were close friends, and the wizard's intelligence was way beyond 30.

But the ranger never to Skill Focus (Mud Farming), so that's maybe the solution. If you want your wizard friend to stand by your side, don't take Skill Focus (Mud Farming)!

But if your wizard was being challanged, wasn't the ranger in constant danger of being slaughtered?

No one's saying the two cannot be friends. No ones saying they cannot enjoy eachother's company. But when the wizard goes looking for danger, it would make sense that he doesn't bring the ranger along, as what is dangerous to him is deadly to his ally.

[Malachei]

But if your wizard was being challanged, wasn't the ranger in constant danger of being slaughtered?

No one's saying the two cannot be friends. No ones saying they cannot enjoy eachother's company. But when the wizard goes looking for danger, it would make sense that he doesn't bring the ranger along, as what is dangerous to him is deadly to his ally.


movie quote

[after the briefing]
Matthews: What's the matter Danny? Something you don't like?
McKnight: No Spectre gunships, daylight instead of night, late afternoon when they're all ****ed up on Khat, only part of the city Aidid can mount a serious counter-attack on short notice...
[chuckles]
McKnight: What's not to like?
Harell: Life's imperfect.
McKnight: Yeah, for you two, circling above it at five hundred feet it's imperfect. Down in the street, it's unforgiving.


For me, flying, life was imperfect.

He was in the firing line. Of course it was unforgiving for him. That's his job. He still contributed. And he was the only person my character could trust 100% while going head-to-head with Orcus.

[Vladislav]

The hobbits were clearly the weakest element of the nine companions. They perfectly fit your example of what you referred to as "bagagge". They took part in many fights, including early on in their adventuring career, being attacked by the wraiths and then fighting in Moria. They required the attention of others to look after them both in combat and out of combat. And still, they made a difference, and probably the difference.That only works in fiction. Where there is, you know, storyteller fiat. If Tolkien wants the poor little hobbit to survive the wraith, the hobbit will survive. One way or another.

The twenty-sided die, however, is a cruel mistress. It has no such fiat. It will kill the weak character when applicable. What works in fiction doesn't apply to RPGs.

[Boci]

He was in the firing line. Of course it was unforgiving for him. That's his job. He still contributed. And he was the only person my character could trust 100% while going head-to-head with Orcus.

Could you provide some details? Like an encounter, what you faced and how you and him contributed? Because I am struggling to see how your wizard could have been challanged repeatedly without the ranger being killed as collatoral damage.

[Malachei]

That only works in fiction. Where there is, you know, storyteller fiat. If Tolkien wants the poor little hobbit to survive the wraith, the hobbit will survive. One way or another.

The twenty-sided die, however, is a cruel mistress. It has no such fiat. It will kill the weak character when applicable. What works in fiction doesn't apply to RPGs.

That was not my point. My point was that there are many motivations for a character to take another character / friend along on an adventure, even if he is comparably weaker, and great things can result. This is not only author's fiat, because it informs the genre and our games. The very basic of D&D was influenced by real-world myth and fiction alike. That's why I think you can overdo focusing on intra-party balance.

In a mid-level game, one rogue actually managed to trick the troll into drinking the the oil of fiery burning.

He was a hobbit, by the way, and probably the weakest party member. And he saved the day.

[Oscredwin]

In a mid-level game, one rogue actually managed to trick the troll into drinking the the oil of fiery burning.

He was a hobbit, by the way, and probably the weakest party member. And he saved the day.
Did he roll really well with some awesome and creative RP or was he a social character with lots of diplomacy and bluff?

[ThunderCat]

I don't think a narrowly defined band of idiots need concern us, any more that optimisation necessarily involves looking down on and/or bullying people who don't play optimised builds I'd rather focus on the issue. We all have horror stories.
Actually, these are very common sentiments from ROLEplayers, several of which have even made an appearance in this thread. Common opinions (which will inevitably show up on threads about roleplaying and optimisation, and often be accepted by many) include:

1: Coming up with your character concept before your mechanical build is a sign of roleplaying. People who focus on the mechanics first are less dedicated to simulation, narrative, and roleplaying in general.

2: People who don't like alignments or mechanical constraints in regards to alignment generally feel the way they do because they're less roleplay-oriented and want to be able to do whatever they want no matter whether it's in character or not.

3: Having dump-stats, or extremely high stats, is unrealistic powergaming/min-maxing, and make for poorly fleshed out characters. In the same vein, roleplayers are like to like rolling for ability scores, while min-maxers want point-buy.

4: Weaker characters are more 'authentic' (or whatever), and make for better roleplaying.

5: Spending time on your character's mechanics detracts from roleplaying because the time could be better spent thinking about your character's personality.

6: People who write backstories for their characters make for better roleplayers (and should possibly be rewarded for their effort).

All of this is stuff I see frequently on various message boards, and even in real life. If someone starts talking about optimisation detracting from roleplaying, chances are they hold one or more of the above opinions. It's not a small group of idiots, it's an attitude which is deeply ingrained in much of the roleplaying community. Since I don't roleplay very well that way (and I mean objectively. Whenever I've received praise for the way I've roleplayed my characters, I've followed the exact opposite philosophy than those described above), it bothers me quite a lot. It's not a horror story, it's the kind of stuff which was said on this very thread.


Interesting. I find that I am usually more creative within mechanical constraints than I am outside them. So to that extent the mechanical constraints of the game are useful. That said, the more optimisation you demand, the narrower those contraints become, and I think there is a point at which you start losing something. At the extreme end, an entire table full of variations on Pun-Pun and the Omnificer is, I feel, losing something. Even a table where everyone feels constrained to play an optimised Tier 1 character in order to contribute is loosing something of the potential richness of the game.
The thing is, I've never seen that level of optimisation in real life. I've not even heard about it happening in real life on an internet forum except in “Help me make a munchkin character to annoy my DM” kind of threads. On the other hand, I have seen a player make mechanically poor choices despite being warned about it, and then complain afterwards that he wasn't as strong as he would like to be.


So there's clearly an extreme point at which optimisation becomes counter-productive. I don't think that's controvertial, (is it?). Similarly, there is a point of mechanical capability below which the character's difficulty with the mechanical aspects of the game may make it impractical, and that point is probably a relative one depending on the optimisation of the other characters. I don't think that's controvertial either.
Optimising below a certain point isn't just 'impractical', it can actively hamper roleplaying just as much as too much optimisation can. The vast majority of fantasy/adventure-like stories consist of characters doing what they do because they're exceptionally skilled, and/or have unusual (and highly useful) abilities, or alternatively, becoming highly competent because of what they do. If you're not going to play these kinds of characters, you close yourself up from a lot, if not the majority, of possible stories. And having to de-optimise your character can screw up your concept just as much as the opposite.


Perhaps the bitterness surrounding this issue is simply that the choices one player makes constrain the others. If you have hugely optimised characters in the same game as very sub-optimal characters, then the game can run into problems. Thus we see that the very presence of the optimiser reduces the possible character choices available to others, and thus are perceived to harm roleplaying.
That depends on what the non-optimised characters wanted to play. If they wanted to play the gaming world's equivalent of non-optimised characters, they should do just fine. Having highly skilled characters doesn't limit your options unless the more skilled characters kick you out. You can still play whatever you want. Of course, if you want to make an unoptimised fighter who's still considered to be an extremely strong hero, the presence of characters with actual strength and prowess limits that concept, but then again, by requiring everyone to play something which makes an unoptimised fighter seem like a strong hero, you're also limiting them, not to mention your DM (who have to adjust CRs downward and have monsters employ deliberately bad tactics in order to make you shine).


The reverse is only somewhat true - someone who plays a very weak character limits the amount of optimisation that can practically be done before the game falls apart. This doesn't limit characterisation opportunities in the same way though.
Actually it does. If you want to be Pippin, and another player wants to be Aragorn, and you expect the other player to not outshine you, you're definitely putting contraints on characterisation opportunities. And even if you don't, the fact is that there are more reasons for Pippin to adventure with Aragorn than for Aragorn to adventure with Pippin, so I'd say Pippin's player is putting more restraints on Aragorn's player than vice versa.

But then again, why would you want to be Pippin if everyone around got adjusted down to your power-level? That's like saying you like to go to the sauna, except you want it to be no hotter than room temperature. The whole point of playing Pippin is to play the underdog. And yes, you'll need both your DM and the other players to accommodate you in order to make it work, you shouldn't expect to get your importance to the plot handed on a silver platter quite as much as the real Pippin did, and I wouldn't expect everybody to be willing to make those accommodations, but it could be done. But if you demand both the DM and the other players to adjust their power-level down to a level where being Pippin is like being Aragorn, why not just play Aragorn?


Put it like this. One person is playing a Tier 1 character, one is playing a tier 5 character. Which one do you disappoint?
Depends on the party. If there's an in-game reason for the characters to adventure together and both are OK with it, I'd let them both play what they want. If one of them had a problem, I'd try to help them adjust the mechanics to be more equal. If that's not a possibility, I'd look at the general power-level of group to see who was the odd one out. If none of them were (say the rest of the group was tier 3), I'd look at how much I would have to adjust the power-level of the campaign (assuming I'm the DM) in order to accommodate each character, and probably favour the one which made my job easiest.

All things being equal, I'd probably favour the wizard for various reasons, but I don't think one concept is inherently superior or 'roleplay-worthy' than the other, and I don't consider one to be more restraining than other either.

[Togo]

Not really. The idea of a denouement where characters apply the lesson of the climax is a fairly well established trope. Character development is slow, and even 'abrupt' changes should be foreshadowed well ahead of time.

If your Alienist saw the damage that kind of knowledge could do, and the beneficence of the gods, that would certainly be something to mull over. And if your character had pre-existing doubts or worries about their choices that would give them even more reason to have a change of heart. Eventually, after the character had talked to a Cleric about it and possibly had some nightmares about turning into a monster, they would decide to refocus their talents.

More than enough time for a level or two's worth of adventuring.

Right, so fudge the difference. Ok, now imagine that I change the example slightly, so that the gap between the two is too large to be fudged. Is there a point at which either the build has to suffer for the sake of the story, or the story has to suffer for the sake of the build, or are you saying that your justifications are infinitely elastic?

Because I feel you're actually ducking the problem here, rather than resolving it.


I'm a very introspective person who tends to be cautious and distrusts sudden changes. I make sure that my characters have a well-defined arc of personality growth because that way it gives me a role to play and increases the drama quotient of the game.

The idea of jumping from one build to another, or one personality to another, mid-campaign is literally difficult for me to believe. I understand the idea of a more free-form impressionable character making unexpected changes, but that is very much at odds with who I am personally.

Fair enough. However, you recognise that the conflict could exist for people who aren't you?




Your right to swing your arm ends exactly where my nose begins..

<shrug> I want a group of players who cooperate with eachother. That means everyone takes a few on the nose.


Someone wants to play a character who is deliberately not able to function in the party? Fine, kind of odd but okay.

That person thinks they can dictate what kind of character I play because they're a "better roleplayer"? Go directly to Hell, do not pass go do not collect $200..

Hey, hold on there trigger. You're imagining a consistent party with one outlier. Try the opposite. 5 people playing hobbits and one person who wants to be Gandalf. Do you agree that Gandalf needs to tone his character down? Do you agree that Gandalf has submitted a character that doesn't actually function in the party? Do you agree that Gandalf might just be missing the point of the game?

Would you agree that, yes, the 5 hobbit players do have the right to dictate to the Gandalf player what kind of character he plays?

Or just try a small party of three people, one tier 5, one tier 1, one tier 3. Who changes? If the Tier 5 player has made his decisions for role-playing reasons, and the Tier 1 for optimisation reasons, how is this not the two coming into conflict?

[Knaight]

That only works in fiction. Where there is, you know, storyteller fiat. If Tolkien wants the poor little hobbit to survive the wraith, the hobbit will survive. One way or another.

The twenty-sided die, however, is a cruel mistress. It has no such fiat. It will kill the weak character when applicable. What works in fiction doesn't apply to RPGs.
This works in plenty of RPGs. D&D is just not among them.


Try the opposite. 5 people playing hobbits and one person who wants to be Gandalf. Do you agree that Gandalf needs to tone his character down? Do you agree that Gandalf has submitted a character that doesn't actually function in the party? Do you agree that Gandalf might just be missing the point of the game?

Would you agree that, yes, the 5 hobbit players do have the right to dictate to the Gandalf player what kind of character he plays?

Or just try a small party of three people, one tier 5, one tier 1, one tier 3. Who changes? If the Tier 5 player has made his decisions for role-playing reasons, and the Tier 1 for optimisation reasons, how is this not the two coming into conflict?

This wasn't directed at me, but:

The one person who wants to be Gandalf is going to be problematic, and probably shouldn't be there. That doesn't mean that the 5 hobbits get to dictate what the Gandalf player plays, merely that a few specific concepts are out. A few specific concepts are always out, adding more of them is not a big deal.

Someone picking a tier 1 class "for optimization reasons" doesn't even make sense. Optimization is a method by which you achieve a goal, and doesn't encourage always going for high tier classes. Both people are trying to represent a character in some way, and the clash here is merely one where two concepts don't interact well within the system. It has absolutely nothing to do with optimization and role playing conflicting.

If anything, optimization is a solution to the problem. The basic concepts in tier 5 are largely a mix of warriors*, most of which have a specific specialization. The concepts in tier 1 are spell casters. Not knowing how to optimize can cause problems here, but with an understanding of it it is easy. Pick a tier 3 spell casting class, deliberately tweak it to be on the lower end of power, and then ensure that the tier 5 class either swaps up to a higher tier class (as almost all of them can be) or is built well.

*This is, obviously, restricted to the part that is particularly mechanically relevant. The concept for a character may well center outside of the mechanics, but if the power hungry heir who abandoned his people in a moment of clarity because he felt his sister would be a better ruler happens to swing a sword around while riding a horse when he fights, it's that last part that gets mechanically represented. Never mind that the internal struggle between a lust for power, love of his sister, and a desire for rulers who won't be terrible is far more interesting than the way he swings a sword around.

[ThiagoMartell]

The difference is that that the people who build weak characters tend to present themselves as better roleplayers, and people playing stronger characters are often accused of power-gaming and munchkinism. I'm fully on board with agreeing on a certain power-level in advance, or coming up with reasons for why characters who're obviously less/more competent than their companions would still adventure with them. But I don't think optimisation is bad because it can make Joe the Farmer feel useless, I think playing Joe the Farmer in a campaign that isn't specifically made for it is a pretty anti-social thing to do.
Dude, you keep making this into a "roleplay vs rollplay durr durr" argument. You're basically arguing against yourself. I never raised those points, I don't stand by them and I've never seen they come up. I never said optimisation is bad. Please, stop implying I did. My optimizer cred is quite high, after all.


But coming up with a reason for why other people's characters are in the group is not my job. I can help, and I usually try to make my character reasonably accommodating of whatever the other people at the table want to play (one of the reasons I dislike people who're obsessed with how much of a ROLEplayer they are is precisely because they often don't do that, because it's not what they've decided their character would do), but ultimately, you can't just show up with a character who has no useful skills, and expect others to find an excuse to include you.

If you simply tell someone “you should take my character with you because it's my character”, you should be told “make another character or find a different group”. Luckily, the characters of those kinds of people tend to get killed pretty fast anyway.



It's still the slippery slope fallacy.
First of all, slippery slope isn't even a fallacy all the time. In this case, it applies perfectly as a valid argument. I was working under a flawed premise (thinking Flickerdart was saying optimize Wizards should ban Fighters from their parties), but under that flawed premise, it applies perfectly as an argument. Say "you're not powerful enough to be around me" enough times and you end up with a tier 1 only party.


Since I'm not a native speaker, I looked it up just to be sure, and “chances are” does not mean “it might happen or it might not”, it means “it is likely to happen”. So what you said what that it was likely that your character would not overshadow the others if you didn't know what you were doing. Since I've seen it happen several times, and since most groups consist of at least 4-5 players, who often play more than one character during a campaign, and often play several campaigns together, I'd actually say it's the opposite – chances are power discrepancies between classes will become an issue if you don't know what you're doing.
That's exactly what I meant, becaseu under my experience, I've never seen it happen. I acknowledge it might happen, but I've never seen it happen. I don't think it's likely that it happens more often than not, because most D&D players I've met don't know about tiers, don't worry about optimization and think Monk is overpowered.



But if the DM plays by the book, it means he or she will use CR as a guideline to what's appropriate.
If the DM plays by the book, Wizard gets infinite loops and the party is meaningless. Oh, look. We're back at this point again.


Then he has to find a reason for why Vizzini would be in the campaign to begin with and why the other characters would include him in their group, possibly asking the DM and the other players for some special accommodations (such as wealth to pay the other characters (which was what Vizzini did), connections to make him useful, or some special role in an ancient prophecy or something).
Why is it his job, when reigning down the all powerful Wizard is the DM's job?



Vizzini is far below the baseline for what can be reasonably expected of a D&D character. He never fights, never uses magic, never disarms a trap, never makes a successful diplomacy check (except if you count getting Inigo and Fezzik to follow him), and never figures anything out. He's far harder to fit into most games than Inigo is.
You don't play much in conventions or with casual gamers, do you. :smallamused:


If the fighter consistently needs rescuing and consistently doesn't contribute enough to make up for it, it's the most rational thing to do, not because of the mechanical advantages, but because few real people (or believable characters) would adventure with such a companion if they had a choice.
If Hank though like you, the Dungeons & Dragons kids would all be dead in ditch by chapter 3. :smalltongue:

The trick is to never get to that point in teh first place, and in order to do that, the onus is as much on the fighter to step up and become useful as it is on the wizard to step down in order to artificially boost the fighter's appearance of competence.
Ah, that is something I can agree with.


In fact, if the rest of the party is reasonably optimised or simply playing tier 3+ classes, the fighter is the odd one out, and should adapt.
If. Yeah. This was only mentioned now.


Inigo is an extremely competent duellist. He holds his own longer than anyone against a man with several level in the Mary Sue prestige class, with his off-hand.
You know, you sound just like a Fighter player justifying why he won't reroll his character. "The Wizard is a Mary Sue, Weapon Focus makes me competent, damn it."

He mentions having defeated al his opponents before that, and we're not given any reason to doubt him.
Informed abilities (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/InformedAbility) hardly counts for anything. The PHB says Fighters are good guards and leaders, after all.

He also, from what I recall, fights several guards and easily wins.
I don't recall that at all. I just recall Inigo saying he could fight lots of guards.

And the only reason he even breaks a sweat against count Rugen is because Rugen gets lucky and hit him with a knife before he can get close enough to engage in melee, which does not say anything about his skills as a swordsman, only that he isn't immune to thrown weapons.
Because a master swordsman would never be able to parry a thrown dagger, of course. Wait, isn't that one of the major differences between Fighter and Warblade (Wall of Blades)? Dude, the more you mention Princess Bride, the more I realize how much of a chump Inigo was. My favorite character in the movie, but boy he sucked.


And Fezzik didn't fall into the adventure. He was specifically brought in as a mercenary because of his great skills, and just ended up switching sides. If he hadn't been a mercenary, he would never have become involved in the issue at all.
This is getting really offtopic, but after meeting Wesley and being defeated, Wesley and Fezzik only met due to chance.

[Water_Bear]

Right, so fudge the difference. Ok, now imagine that I change the example slightly, so that the gap between the two is too large to be fudged. Is there a point at which either the build has to suffer for the sake of the story, or the story has to suffer for the sake of the build, or are you saying that your justifications are infinitely elastic?

Because I feel you're actually ducking the problem here, rather than resolving it.

I see where roleplaying your character's emotions and capabilities come into conflict. What I was trying to point out is that those kinds of conflicts are usually not clear-cut. You can get a lot of mileage playing with how a character reacts; anger can boil or simmer, grief can be dealt with or repressed, fear can be overwhelming dread or anxiety, etc.

In a crunch, I would err on the side of keeping the character's mechanical abilities consistent; one poor choice in a build can kill the whole build, whereas almost every fictional character has OOC moments. But I wouldn't say either is really sacrificing Fluff for Crunch or vice versa, because it is usually minor stuff either way.


5 people playing hobbits and one person who wants to be Gandalf. Do you agree that Gandalf needs to tone his character down? Do you agree that Gandalf has submitted a character that doesn't actually function in the party? Do you agree that Gandalf might just be missing the point of the game?

I didn't mean to imply that it's okay to bring in inappropriately powerful characters, because that is something I don't support.

It's like in Driver's Ed, they ask you is it better to drive the speed limit or 5mph over. The answer is neither; you always drive at a Safe and Reasonable Speed, whether that is 5mph or 80mph depends on the road conditions and other drivers.

You shouldn't run roughshod over other players, even if your build is mechanically stronger than them. But you also shouldn't make your build weaker for 'Flavor' reasons and expect everyone else to play down to your level. Play at a Safe and Reasonable level of Optimization.

[willpell]

I guess to me the reason Stormwind rings true is that I like being able to design my character any way I choose, and I don't like being forced to optomize. I very seldom find a character where I want to try really hard to make him as powerful as he can possibly be; I'd rather have him be basically competent and have a few interesting personality quirks. Unfortunately D&D, at least the version of it that I'm used to, is really unforgiving toward that sort of thing. I like taking oddball Skills, but half my characters only get 2-4 skill points a level, with narrow selections of class skills and one or two must-have skills like Concentration or Truespeak (I haven't actually built a Truenamer yet, I'm just picking that as an example) eating up those points. Sometimes I want more feats than I'm allowed; other times I don't want any of the feats I have the option of getting. And I really hate having to sit and sift through a massive list of spells, trying to figure out which one is most worth my single Level X slot.

Basically, rather than optomizing to squeeze every drop of power out of the allowed build, I'd rather just have an embarrasment of riches which I'm free to spend frivolously. Give me more spells, more feats, more skill points and more gold to spend, but allow me to make those choices quickly and sloppily without suffering for it later, and don't allow others in the party to have the same largesse unless they're equally uninterested in squeezing every drop of efficiency out of it. I'm just here to have fun and make a character that's interesting story-wise. If optomization would be beneficial to those goals I'd have no problem with it, but it very seldom is.

I have a bit of trouble sometimes figuring out which rules I like and which I don't. I've realized that I'm on both sides of the fence with regards to point-buy - I really like the fact that point-buy makes you pay through the nose to have a single high Attribute, because I feel like people who have an 18 in anything should be exceptional, and that most people in the game-universe need to be able to deal with a wide variety of situations to survive. But then when I build my character with four 14s and a 9, the game punishes me because I don't get any bonus spells or extra weapon damage or anything. And raising the number of points to spend would benefit the min-maxers more than it would me. It's frustrating. The systems I have definitely figured out I dislike, though, are Wealth by Level and Feats. I want a lot more loosening up in those areas - perhaps a "Wealth allowance by level" where you don't actually buy specific items, but just have a cap on the general quality you have access to. My best idea for Feats is some variant of the Feat Points system, although as-written that one doesn't satisfy me.

[Tytalus]

I guess to me the reason Stormwind rings true is that I like being able to design my character any way I choose, and I don't like being forced to optomize.

I'm not sure if you realize, but that (and the rest of your post) has nothing to do with the Stormwind Fallacy.

[willpell]

I'm not sure if you realize, but that (and the rest of your post) has nothing to do with the Stormwind Fallacy.

It's a reason for me to believe the Fallacy ("Optomization and roleplaying quality are mutually exclusive") is at least partially true.

[Lord_Gareth]

It's a reason for me to believe the Fallacy ("Optomization and roleplaying quality are mutually exclusive") is at least partially true.

No, it in no way states that the Fallacy is in any way true. It just states that you prefer not to optimize (which is perfectly legit).

[Flickerdart]

"I want more stuff to build the character I want" has nothing to do with the Stormwind fallacy, and everything to do with your character concept not fitting your character level. In fact, your very goals would be well met by optimization! You want more feats? You can optimize that! You want more skills! You can optimize that! You want more spells? Oh, there are so many ways to optimize that!