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Aron Times
2015-02-25, 03:02 PM
So I went to this site that I hadn't been to in many years because I was turned off by their cliquish attitude. Back then, several players put me on ignore when I tried to talk to them on the chat room because I was apparently typing too much and it was distracting for them, never mind that the point of a chat room is to talk to people. It wasn't even a roleplaying chat room, just something similar to general discussion in most forums. It turns out that they really haven't changed, and are actually much worse. It's like their site is an echo chamber that reinforces their preconceived notions about RPGs.

Basically, what happened was that I had the gall to create a character based on mechanics first, as opposed to backstory or personality first. It didn't matter that I had a detailed backstory or a well-crafted personality for this character, what mattered was that my core concept was based on a mechanical aspect of the game, and that was just WRONG. The head admin even chewed me out because I was "trying to win the game," and that I'd get absolutely trashed by the older characters. This was most likely a reaction to how I mentioned that I played the game not just to see how my character interacted with the world and the other characters within, but also for the cool powers. Because, face it, most of us play RPGs either partly or solely for the cool powers.

I really, really hate roleplayers like these. They're like the equivalent of scrubs in more competitive games.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Scrub

I'm not sure what to call them, though. I've seen many different derogatory terms for such rolelaying fanatics such as:

1. One True Wayism - As in, there's one true way to play and enjoy this time, and you're doing it wrong. I first saw this term on the Wizards.com forums used to refer to a particularly obnoxious poster who complained about how paladins should only be lawful good and must lose their powers if they commit evil acts. Pretty much everyone agreed that that would've been a good official house rule to put in the 5e Dungeon Master's Guide, but this individual insisted that it should be the official rule in the Player's Hanbook, and that all players must abide by it. Apparently, he didn't understand the concept of house rules.

2. BadWrongFun - Used to refer to game systems as opposed to ways of playing. I've only seen this term used ironically, typically when someone says that X system sucks, and someone replies, "Badwrongfun," to mock the complainer.

So, um, what do you think Playground?

Kalirren
2015-02-25, 03:24 PM
Making a character inspired by mechanics is like marrying for money. It's not ethically wrong, just morally suspect - and people can and do make it shine.

In my experience, playing a character inspired by mechanics is often easier and better than one I come up with from concept first. I can't always stat out a character I like. But if I bring life to a character statblock that works, I don't have to worry that the game system won't support the way my character wants to interact with the world.

Edit: Just to be clear, it's true that on a certain level, playing a character that works mechanically involves a certain amount of "selling out" to the game system in general, tacitly accepting its framing. Depending on the system and what people are interested in exploring, my feeling is that most people are better off "selling out" to the system. It's a rare player with a rare creative agenda who actually makes a character, stats them out, then proceeds to push the boundaries of what the system can do, who helps a GM run a novel kind of game. These are the games that make you say, "I didn't know you could -do- that with system X".

If your goal is to do that, fine, then you get to bag on the other players in your group who have started out with a stats concept and play the character that comes out of it, if and when they get in your way. Most of us are not doing that at any given time.

Obak
2015-02-25, 03:56 PM
{scrubbed}

Jay R
2015-02-25, 04:19 PM
Nobody is capable of making a character that is not based in large part on the mechanics.

Did you choose a race? ... a class? ... a weapon? Oh. look - mechanics!

The question is the extent to which the character is a bunch of skills and abilities, with a backstory that's really just an unconvincing justification for things that really can't be justified, vs. a logical and reasonable character, who has abilities that work well.

Character design is like driving on a narrow street. Anybody faster than you is a maniac; anybody slower than you is a slug.

Aron Times
2015-02-25, 10:16 PM
Judging by the language that they use, they seem to be part of those who bought into the pretentious, high-brow elitism that White Wolf actively promoted in its heyday. oWoD rulebooks had sections discussing how to turn rollplayers into roleplayers, and some non WoD books that White Wolf made, such as Ravenloft 3e, instructed the DMs to impose penalties or deny bonuses to players who referenced game mechanics in certain aspects of the game, such as dying curses. I'm going from memory here, but the DM was told to give bonuses to players who used purple prose in their dying curses, especially if the player didn't mention any game mechanics. Mention game mechanics, even if the player is just asking about how the dying curse works, and the enemy that killed the player character got a bonus to his saving throw vs. the dying curse.

I really, really like how Onyx Path does nWoD, particularly nWoD 2e. They're more open about game mechanics and game balance, and there's generally less grimdark in their later releases. I mean, the World of Darkness is pretty much a grimdark setting, but the way White Wolf handled it, it verged on self-parody, kind of like how hilariously grimdark Warhammer 40K is. Vampire: The Requiem 2nd Edition actually goes out of its way to talk about the awesome parts of being a vampire, which is pretty much why most players play the game in the first place. There's generally much less wangst in nWoD 2e; it's shifted away from its gothic influences and onto a horror/urban fantasy game.

The folks in the website I've mentioned are simply stuck in the past, and they're being ***** about it. I've decided not to go back to that site, not even to say goodbye.

goto124
2015-02-25, 11:05 PM
Damn. I hated that kind of thing too. Annoying metagame is one thing, but having to go out of your way to 'roleplay' when the original mechanical language works just as well (serious, death curse makes sense IC, and how else are you supposed to describe a saving throw), and actively being punished when you don't?

It's even more horrible when a newbie was exposed to this sort of... stuff. Could instantly turn people away. I signed up for this forums just to ask why anyone would enjoy RP when they have to do bull like the above (which is a misrepresentation of RP).

Kalirren
2015-02-26, 12:46 AM
Nobody is capable of making a character that is not based in large part on the mechanics.

I have to disagree with this - if you're playing a freeform game, you really have no choice but to make a character in large part independent of mechanics, because the mechanics are Calvinball++ anyway. And lots of people play freeform.


Judging by the language that they use, they seem to be part of those who bought into the pretentious, high-brow elitism that White Wolf actively promoted in its heyday. oWoD rulebooks had sections discussing how to turn rollplayers into roleplayers, and some non WoD books that White Wolf made, such as Ravenloft 3e, instructed the DMs to impose penalties or deny bonuses to players who referenced game mechanics in certain aspects of the game,...

Oh, this. Yeah, oWoD had a weird sort of GM-centric social contract (don't you worry about the rules, let me as your benevolent dictator handle the rules and trust me to tell a great story with them.) I suspect it grew out of LARP sessions, where character creation itself tended to range from a collaborative exercise between GM and player to "here, play this", and everything was sort of fast-and-loose because you had 3 GMs collaboratively managing 25 people or so.

That sort of concept doesn't play well with the OOC expectation that many wargaming/D&D people have of "let me roll up a character and join your game". Really, it doesn't jive well with hardly any RP'ing that I've seen online.

And yeah, if they don't want you there, you're right to just go have more fun somewhere else. You'd just be griefing each other if you stayed.

Nalak
2015-02-26, 01:19 AM
I get the logic of story trumps rules. Generally obviously certain rules are central to a system, and you break those at extreme risk of breaking the game if it isn't a major detail. For example someone being able to do true resurrection isn't too big a thing in Dnd, but in Exalted that's basically doing something that shouldn't be possible. But as far the story Silver said unless your character was some insanely broken "I can cast 9th level spells as a lvl 25 caster as an infinite use cantrip and I'm level 9." Then if you did everything required for the character to be allowed into the game then there isn't a reason not to allow it.

I mean crying out loud I've found the best way to ease people into roleplaying is mechanical benefits.

Rallicus
2015-02-26, 05:53 AM
You sound extremely bitter about the whole thing, Joseph. And I'm not gonna to weigh in too much, as we've only been given one side of the story.

From what I gathered, these people might not be scrubs. They might be people who are tired of seeing their chat flooded by someone discussing mechanical aspects of their character. Was it VTM? If so, you should absolutely build your character off role play first and mechanics second. WoD prides itself on being the "storyteller" system -- that means roleplay over mechanics.

If someone came to me in my VTM game and said, "here's my Ventrue. I plan on this build gaining Dominate 4, blah blah, etc etc." I'd be like nope.

Coidzor
2015-02-26, 06:23 AM
Hmm. I think given that the assumed, stereotypical uniform is cheetohs-stained casual wear, generally jeans and t-shirts, IIRC, the closest things to scrubs would either be the cheetohs dust or possibly be the really nice, sleek dice bags that are noticeably more clean than the stereotypical clothing worn to a game.

There's not really a specific term for people who engage in nobadwrongfun, though.

M Placeholder
2015-02-26, 06:43 AM
Judging by the language that they use, they seem to be part of those who bought into the pretentious, high-brow elitism that White Wolf actively promoted in its heyday. oWoD rulebooks had sections discussing how to turn rollplayers into roleplayers, and some non WoD books that White Wolf made, such as Ravenloft 3e, instructed the DMs to impose penalties or deny bonuses to players who referenced game mechanics in certain aspects of the game, such as dying curses. I'm going from memory here, but the DM was told to give bonuses to players who used purple prose in their dying curses, especially if the player didn't mention any game mechanics. Mention game mechanics, even if the player is just asking about how the dying curse works, and the enemy that killed the player character got a bonus to his saving throw vs. the dying curse.

You've missed the entire point of Ravenloft, I think.

Ravenloft is based on classic horror, and the entire idea of Ravenloft is that the players are in the grasp of something far greater than them, which is mysterious, has purposes that can never be fully fathomed, and toys with people for unknown reasons - Ie the actual world. Remember, Ravenloft consists of domains, each under the control of its ruler. Basically, each domain is its ruler, and it reflects them. The rulers get power, but at a huge price - they have a curse that really hits them where it hurts. Strahd Van Zarovich, while having control over Barovia, has to cope with a reincarnation of Tatyana (the woman who was in love with Strahd's brother) appearing, and without fail, he will never have her. Sodo has been given the ability to heal and to bring people back to life with his touch. Sadly for him, hes a masochist that loves cold blooded torture, and as his form shifts so rapidly, he cannot use it anymore. The Dark Powers like playing with people. And that extends to the PC's.

Basically, the idea of Ravenloft, is like most classic horror, is that the heroes (you were unable to play as an evil character in the pre 2000's editions, as you would eventually become a darklord yourself) is that the players are being toyed with and manipulated by powers that they cannot see, and that seemingly, escape is the best they can hope for - this is the premise of classic horror. Jon Barker was far less powerful than Dracula, and it seemed like he was cought in a web that the Count spun. That is one of the premises of horror. In game terms, it means that DMing such as Railroading (are the players trying to escape Barovia? Just throw up some mist!) and giving a Darklord extra power (hey, Azalin needs extra spells, the Dark Powers will oblige) are perfectly fine.

The whole non mentioning of game mechanics has a reason, and its to do with atmosphere. Sure, you can play Ravenloft as a standard game where you take the un out of undead, with none of the atmosphere, but it loses what makes its special. Ravenloft is all about atmosphere, as is gothic horror. The game rules had a section on it, and the DM was advised to pass notes detailing mechanics to the players in secret, such as the effects of the dying curse if he wanted to. If he did not, then the player would find out later, as such for when the dark powers cursed him. For example, a player might gain the ability to run faster, but find out he has been cursed with a more bestial appearance. That is the whole appeal of Ravenloft and gothic horror.

Having a player ask about game mechanics at a time when as a result of a parties actions, an innocent dies and curses the party, would detract from the whole experience. Same with curses. "I Curse the player to lose is strength bonus in fights when there is a full moon" spoils the mood of the game. Having the farmer raise his hand, and with his last breath, curse the Paladin by saying -

You pride yourself on good deeds
But you led me to doom on this night
without amends, I implore them to sap your might,
Both you and your steed
Under the moons shining light!

Now thats a curse, and adds so much more to the game. It also adds to the fear, as the paladin has no idea of how much strength he will lose, and how he will lose it. It also adds another plot element to the game.


Its all part of the game. If you don't want to play it, thats fine. The whole point of Ravenloft and other Gothic Horror games is the atmosphere. Yes, you can play it by just rolling dice, but it loses pretty much everything that makes it special.

Aron Times
2015-02-26, 06:48 AM
You sound extremely bitter about the whole thing, Joseph. And I'm not gonna to weigh in too much, as we've only been given one side of the story.

From what I gathered, these people might not be scrubs. They might be people who are tired of seeing their chat flooded by someone discussing mechanical aspects of their character. Was it VTM? If so, you should absolutely build your character off role play first and mechanics second. WoD prides itself on being the "storyteller" system -- that means roleplay over mechanics.

If someone came to me in my VTM game and said, "here's my Ventrue. I plan on this build gaining Dominate 4, blah blah, etc etc." I'd be like nope.
Onyx Path, the successor to White Wolf, openly discusses mechanics in their blog and forum posts. They openly discuss about how to make the game rules enjoyable for everyone. Rules are not bad, and are the main thing that separates Masquerade and Requiem from freeform roleplaying.

So you'd reject someone who submitted a detailed and fleshed out character because he wants to actually gain some high level ability. The player's ability to craft and roleplay a character are irrelevant because the character was based on attaining some mechanical benefit. Your, sir, just described what I truly despise about oWoD-era White Wolf.

Mastikator
2015-02-26, 07:08 AM
OP, I don't think they were wrong, nor were you. You simply have different playstyles, you have different ideas about what roleplaying is about. You're wasting your time by spending it with people who aren't compatible with you. Though they are absolutely wrong for thinking they're better than you.


Nobody is capable of making a character that is not based in large part on the mechanics.

There's a difference between making a character based on mechanics and then appending backstory, and making a character based on a backstory and then appending mechanics.

Kane0
2015-02-26, 07:26 AM
I call them Stormwinds (http://community.wizards.com/content/forum-topic/2861636), the kind of person that believe that a character based on mechanics cannot be roleplayed, essentially drawing a line between rollplay and roleplay where there isn't or shouldn't be.



The Stormwind Fallacy, aka the Roleplayer vs Rollplayer Fallacy
Just because one optimizes his characters mechanically does not mean that they cannot also roleplay, and vice versa.

Corollary: Doing one in a game does not preclude, nor infringe upon, the ability to do the other in the same game.

Generalization 1: One is not automatically a worse roleplayer if he optimizes, and vice versa.
Generalization 2: A non-optimized character is not automatically roleplayed better than an optimized one, and vice versa.


Come to think of it, its mighty similar to a No-True-Scotsman fallacy when taken to extremes.

goto124
2015-02-26, 07:35 AM
OP, I don't think they were wrong, nor were you. You simply have different playstyles, you have different ideas about what roleplaying is about. You're wasting your time by spending it with people who aren't compatible with you. Though they are absolutely wrong for thinking they're better than you.

There's a difference between making a character based on mechanics and then appending backstory, and making a character based on a backstory and then appending mechanics.

I take it that both ways are equally valid and neither is 'better' than the other?

Also, is it easier to append backstory to mechanics, than the other way round? Because stories are more flexible than mechanics?

A person can do both anyway. I can use mechanic-before-backstory for a couple of characters, and backstory-before-mechanics for other characters, depending on what I wanted at first (I want a dwarven diplomancer / I want an effective Swordsage). I may make the backstory, then append the mechanics, then adjust the backstory to make it fit the mechanics a little better. It goes both ways.

Kurald Galain
2015-02-26, 08:01 AM
There's a difference between making a character based on mechanics and then appending backstory, and making a character based on a backstory and then appending mechanics.

Yes, and I'd call both of these valid. However, there's also (1) making a character based on mechanics and not bothering about (or giving only lip service to) backstory, and (2) making a character based on backstory and not bothering about mechanics.

I'd call the former a kind of munchkinry. I know at least one player who commonly comes up with a character that's a haphazard and inconsistent combination of abilities picked purely for their combat strength, with only the flimsiest of justifications of how on earth this character came up with this particular bizarre combination of traits. This kind of player may also be a scrub if he looks down on characters that are less mechanically effective.

I've seen the latter only rarely, and generally only with beginning players; an example would be writing a backstory that explains how the character is a noble versed in etiquette and trained from a young age as a diplomat, and then omitting to put skill points in diplomacy. This kind of player is only rarely a scrub in my experience, but may expect the DM to base (e.g.) diplomacy on what it says in the backstory rather than what it says on the character sheet, and cry foul when the DM disagrees.

Basically in both cases the issue is that the character's backstory and the character's mechanical abilities have a strong mismatch, and this creates conflicting expectations between one player and the rest of the group.

Aron Times
2015-02-26, 08:04 AM
The weird thing about this is that my normal way of creating characters is fluff-first, mechanics-second. Thus, I'm actually on their side of the character creation divide. I did mention that I would try something different this time and design a character based on a specific mechanical aspect of the game.

What turned me off was their attitude. They completely ignored my character's back story and personality and other aspects of fluff and focused entirely on telling me that I was doing it wrong, and that I would get trashed by the older characters, and that I had the wrong ideas about their game because I was trying to win like I was playing a card game, never mind that I stated to them that I defined winning in an RPG as accomplishing a character's goal. Had I created the character my usual way, that is, the way they preferred, I'd probably still be playing there now.

Coidzor
2015-02-26, 08:24 AM
There's a difference between making a character based on mechanics and then appending backstory, and making a character based on a backstory and then appending mechanics.

Depends on the game system whether X or Y is possible, though.

Vitruviansquid
2015-02-26, 08:29 AM
In most video game circles, the term "scrub" has been thrown around and abused so much it's lost all its nuanced meanings and just come to be someone you think is bad at games. But I digress.

I usually call these kinds of folks "turbonerds."

What you do is you call 'em a "turbonerd," then wait for them to boil over with rage. "The gall of this guy! The hypocrisy!" they'll think, "how dare he call us turbo nerds! Isn't he also an RPG player? Isn't he on an RPG forum? How dare he BETRAY HIS OWN and call us turbonerds?!"

Now, remember, that's only what they'll think. They'll actually *express* this inner outrage by doing what these people - the kind of people who'll cheerfully characterize themselves as "snarky," as if being a jerkass was a loveable trait - always do. They'll pretend not to be upset and put on their smuggest grin to say something clever and snarky like "well, looks like some kettle doesn't realize he's just as black as the pot" or "*roll eyes* just like a neanderthal rollplayer to use 'nerd' as a pejorative."

Now this part is ultra important but a lot of people are tempted to diverge from the playbook here. Don't be one of those people.

What you want to do now is disrespect the comeback and disengage from the conversation. A simple "whatever, nerd" will do the trick, but if that's not appropriate in the context, anything a fifth grader might say as a comeback is a valid response, including copying his exact words and putting "LOL" after it. This is because what your man is doing here is trying to pull you into his Snarkspace. The Snarkspace is where he will have his Snark-off with you and assert his dominance as the more intelligent alpha male (or female; I don't discriminate). He wants to end this encounter by being able to think "I engaged in glorious verbal battle with this miscreant and proved myself the greater intellect," thus feeding his bloated ego. What you do by disrespecting and disengaging is taking away his ability to receive this satisfaction.

Speak as little as possible while he blows his lid, ranting and raving at you. If you must speak, NEVER EVER say anything directly insulting to him, because you'd be slipping into his Snarkspace. Instead speak over him ("lol are you guys seeing this epic rage?") or pretend to turn the other cheek ("whoa, calm down dude, you're gonna raise your blood pressure"). lols and smiley faces help a lot at this stage.

snailgosh
2015-02-26, 08:38 AM
...

Trolling 101

Vitruviansquid
2015-02-26, 08:48 AM
Trolling 101

It should go without saying that you need to use these tactics responsibly and check your forum or chat room rules before participating.

snailgosh
2015-02-26, 08:54 AM
It should go without saying that you need to use these tactics responsibly and check your forum or chat room rules before participating.

Whatever, LOL

Segev
2015-02-26, 09:51 AM
What the people the OP is complaining about were doing is engaging in the Stormwind Fallacy. (http://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/22250/what-is-the-stormwind-fallacy)

snailgosh
2015-02-26, 10:54 AM
What the people the OP is complaining about were doing is engaging in the Stormwind Fallacy. (http://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/22250/what-is-the-stormwind-fallacy)

I think it's a bit different. If I understood right, it's not that they assumed him to be unable to roleplay (especially as it sounds as if Joseph played with them before).
It's the sheer thought of putting mechanics before backstory during character creation, or maybe more the thought of planning a build out beforehand instead of adapting the build to ingame events that impact the character, that seemingly breaks immersion for these players.

Edit: To my experience, DMs usually wish for the characters' abilities to be justified. Especially so if you stray from a "Base class 1-20" path and multiclass and/or prestige out a lot. So for some DMs it might be offputting if you present them a fleshed out build beforehand, requiring them to build the story around your character somewhat to justify his abilities.

Segev
2015-02-26, 11:02 AM
The fact that they accused him of "Trying to win the game" is what tells me it's the Stormwind Fallacy in effect. If you acknowledge mechanics in describing your character, it is assumed by practitioners of that fallacy that you are not really role playing. This seems to be what happened by his description: the fact that he said "I like these mechanics and have built a cool concept that--" led them to scold him for trying to win the game. The only way "trying to win the game" makes sense AND is a valid denigration is if one assumes that the purpose of playing is NOT to win but something else (generally "role playing," by whatever definition fits the speaker's view), and that caring enough about mechanics to make any decisions based on them renders you unable to do that "something else."

Mastikator
2015-02-26, 11:37 AM
I take it that both ways are equally valid and neither is 'better' than the other?Well that's certainly my opinion.


Also, is it easier to append backstory to mechanics, than the other way round? Because stories are more flexible than mechanics?

Pfft I don't know... and I won't say.

What I will say is that rolling for power attack or bullrush or save against fireball isn't roleplaying, if anyone thinks that's a stormwind fallacy then we will just have to agree to disagree on basically everything.
Another thing I will say is that time and effort are limited resources, you live for a finite time and then you die, you'll only spend X number of hours playing tabletop RPGs and you can't talk with a "funny voice" in character with other characters AND make a series of tackle rolls (I mean, you could, but it would be a weird game).

I find it a little bit weird that people on this forum will just invoke the stormwind fallacy (yes I am pointing fingers in this thread, and other threads) as a free card to just declare that playing the mechanics game is the same as roleplaying. It just isn't.There's nothing wrong with playing the mechanics game, you can totally play anyway you want but that doesn't mean you're not playing a different game. If I create a bard who spends all of his time talking in character with NPCs and creating social ties with them and you create a ranger who spends all of his time making jump, climb and track rolls then we're playing different games. Neither would be better than the other, but we're still playing different games.

Segev
2015-02-26, 11:55 AM
Um... nobody's saying that.

The Stormwind Fallacy is specific: "If you're playing mechanics, you cannot be role playing."

That seems to be the core of the scolding the OP received from this other board.

It's not the Stormwind Fallacy to say that a specific action is not role playing. But there was no specific non-RP action that was named, save "building a character inspired first by mechanics." Since that in no way impedes actually creating an RP-able character, acting like it does is the Stormwind Fallacy.

cesius
2015-02-26, 12:12 PM
... what mattered was that my core concept was based on a mechanical aspect of the game, and that was just WRONG. The head admin even chewed me out because I was "trying to win the game," and that I'd get absolutely trashed by the older characters. This was most likely a reaction to how I mentioned that I played the game not just to see how my character interacted with the world and the other characters within, but also for the cool powers....

I really, really hate roleplayers like these. They're like the equivalent of scrubs in more competitive games.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Scrub

I'm not sure what to call them, though. I've seen many different derogatory terms for such rolelaying fanatics such as:

1. One True Wayism - ....

2. BadWrongFun - ....

So, um, what do you think Playground?


[One] who adamantly believes that his or her "house rules" should apply to everyone to promote his or her view of "fair play".

It may just be where I'm from but scrub was an insult (and often used in relation to sports; this is the first time I've heard of it being used in relation to video games or tabletop behavior). I don't know if this forum has a specific similar term (and I'm grateful for what it says about the culture of GitP forums that I'm pretty sure there is no board shorthand for it) but I've frequently seen the term 'fatbeard' used on a different D&D forum as an, in context, extremely negative and insulting term for this sort of behavior. I should note for clarity that the term was not precisely related to a view point on character creation or mechanics vs role/story but an attitude similar to what you call One True Wayism. Generally speaking it was:

I have experience with RPGs.
My experience covers a long time period or was so subjectively amazing that my opinion is more important than others.
I thus presume to be an objective authority on a subjective subject.
Objections to my presumed authority will be met with insults, sarcasm, and other various schoolyard rhetoric.



The term fatbeard, I assume, came from the stereotype of hirsute, large male gamers. I'm not a fan of its use but that's more a civility thing.


... not just to see how my character interacted with the world and the other characters within, but also for the cool powers....
And this is actually quite interesting to me looking at mechanics vs backstory. Mechanics inform what a character can do in the world and how important is what one can do to shaping who they are and how they interact with others?

Knaight
2015-02-26, 12:21 PM
What I will say is that rolling for power attack or bullrush or save against fireball isn't roleplaying, if anyone thinks that's a stormwind fallacy then we will just have to agree to disagree on basically everything.

No, but choosing to do any of these things could be roleplaying, depending on the context. Maybe the bullrush is into a lot of danger, and choosing that tactic represents the reckless side of a character. Maybe the bullrush is a last ditch attempt to take a superior opponent down with you by taking both of you off a cliff, and it's expressing a character sacrificing themselves for their companions - maybe as the culmination of an arch where at the beginning they hated these people.

Roleplaying isn't just using accents and talking in character. A good part of it is about the decisions a character makes, and why the character makes those decisions. I'd consider that the absolute heart of roleplaying; talking in character and using accents when the character's decisions are just what you think is best at the time barely qualifies to my mind. This decision making by no means stops when the action starts. It can even be intensified there, as action can be a high intensity, high stakes scene where the decisions involved can be particularly long lasting and important. It's hardly the only intense, high stakes scene, and scenes like that generally benefit from having a lot of not-intense low stakes stuff going on for character establishment, subtle and slow changing, etc. but it is one scene which can be really important.


I find it a little bit weird that people on this forum will just invoke the stormwind fallacy (yes I am pointing fingers in this thread, and other threads) as a free card to just declare that playing the mechanics game is the same as roleplaying. It just isn't.
That's generally not how it's used. Where it is used is to say that knowledge of the system side of a system and using that system to realize particular ideas mechanically doesn't mean that people can't role-play. It's even used to argue a positive correlation, in that both of those things come with experience.

To use a personal example, I play a lot of Fudge. I design stuff for it all the time as well, so I have the dice probabilities pretty close to memorized, can talk about theory behind the design all day, can mechanically represent all sorts of things really easily, etc. I got most of this by GMing it as my primary game for close to a decade, and that period included a great deal of practice role playing a wide variety of characters (including more than a few PCs, though it was mostly vast numbers of NPCs since I'm pretty close to a perma-GM).

The Stormwind Fallacy is that my learning the system somehow means that I can't roleplay. It's a load of B.S.


So I went to this site that I hadn't been to in many years because I was turned off by their cliquish attitude. Back then, several players put me on ignore when I tried to talk to them on the chat room because I was apparently typing too much and it was distracting for them, never mind that the point of a chat room is to talk to people. It wasn't even a roleplaying chat room, just something similar to general discussion in most forums. It turns out that they really haven't changed, and are actually much worse. It's like their site is an echo chamber that reinforces their preconceived notions about RPGs.
Yes, the point of a chat room is to chat. This gets much more difficult when one person is talking so much that they're dominating the entire chat room and it's hard to even have a conversation. There's a reason flooding is disapproved of, and what you describe sounds exactly like flooding. I really can't see the issue with putting you on ignore. As for the site being "an echo chamber" and "cliquish", quite frankly the use of the terms suggests more that the site is one that has a particular culture to it which likes particular things in RPGs (oh, how terrible), and that they weren't particularly impressed when someone showed up, flooded the chat room, and flooded it with the stuff that they weren't even particularly interested in.


Basically, what happened was that I had the gall to create a character based on mechanics first, as opposed to backstory or personality first. It didn't matter that I had a detailed backstory or a well-crafted personality for this character, what mattered was that my core concept was based on a mechanical aspect of the game, and that was just WRONG. The head admin even chewed me out because I was "trying to win the game," and that I'd get absolutely trashed by the older characters. This was most likely a reaction to how I mentioned that I played the game not just to see how my character interacted with the world and the other characters within, but also for the cool powers. Because, face it, most of us play RPGs either partly or solely for the cool powers.
So you joined an existing game which was played a particular way, deliberately went against the point of the game, and somehow all the existing players are bad for not preferring to do things your way?

cesius
2015-02-26, 12:37 PM
No, but choosing to do any of these things could be roleplaying, depending on the context. Maybe the bullrush is into a lot of danger, and choosing that tactic represents the reckless side of a character. Maybe the bullrush is a last ditch attempt to take a superior opponent down with you by taking both of you off a cliff, and it's expressing a character sacrificing themselves for their companions - maybe as the culmination of an arch where at the beginning they hated these people.

Roleplaying isn't just using accents and talking in character. A good part of it is about the decisions a character makes, and why the character makes those decisions. I'd consider that the absolute heart of roleplaying; talking in character and using accents when the character's decisions are just what you think is best at the time barely qualifies to my mind. This decision making by no means stops when the action starts. It can even be intensified there, as action can be a high intensity, high stakes scene where the decisions involved can be particularly long lasting and important. It's hardly the only intense, high stakes scene, and scenes like that generally benefit from having a lot of not-intense low stakes stuff going on for character establishment, subtle and slow changing, etc. but it is one scene which can be really important.

Can't agree enough.


What I will say is that rolling for power attack or bullrush or save against fireball isn't roleplaying, if anyone thinks that's a stormwind fallacy then we will just have to agree to disagree on basically everything.

I think it's the convergence of roleplaying and mechanics which results in those abilities in the first place.

Player: This orc has been side stepping Loric Doomfist's attacks and it's pissing him off. Loric just goes to bum rush him into a wall."
GM: Okay.
Path 1 - Game does not have rules for Bull Rushing or performing an aggressive non-'attack action' action.
GM: Okay. Uh... let me see, what tool for interacting with the world would help best accomplish this bit of roleplaying? Oh, an opposed Strength check, yeah. Roll Loric's Strength while I roll the orc's.
Path 2 - Game has rules for Bull Rushing or performing an aggressive non-'attack action' action.
GM: Sure, use the rules on page 200 for performing that sort of action.

Aron Times
2015-02-26, 04:57 PM
Yes, the point of a chat room is to chat. This gets much more difficult when one person is talking so much that they're dominating the entire chat room and it's hard to even have a conversation. There's a reason flooding is disapproved of, and what you describe sounds exactly like flooding. I really can't see the issue with putting you on ignore. As for the site being "an echo chamber" and "cliquish", quite frankly the use of the terms suggests more that the site is one that has a particular culture to it which likes particular things in RPGs (oh, how terrible), and that they weren't particularly impressed when someone showed up, flooded the chat room, and flooded it with the stuff that they weren't even particularly interested in.

So you joined an existing game which was played a particular way, deliberately went against the point of the game, and somehow all the existing players are bad for not preferring to do things your way?

Actually I didn't get muted by the system. Several users muted me after I typed roughly five messages. One of the DMs explained that my chat was causing their windows to beep and flash, which was annoying for them. Still, the nicer thing would've been to tell me to slow down my chatting (which didn't even trip their anti flooding) instead of muting me without saying anything. One DM acknowledged that the site wasn't very newbie friendly, and that she was going to talk to them about being more hospitable.

I didn't deliberately go against the theme of the game. My character was simply based on having five dots in a mundane fighting style, and I made the mistake of telling them this. I bet that had I not mentioned mechanics at all, they'd be okay with my character. Still, the correct way to handle this, IMHO, would've been to gently tell me about how they did things there.

I realize that you might just be playing Devil's Advocate. I initially saw your post as deliberately misrepresenting what I said, but it actually is possible that this is how they saw my actions. People on the Internet have a habit of assuming the worst in people, myself included.

Knaight
2015-02-26, 05:38 PM
I realize that you might just be playing Devil's Advocate. I initially saw your post as deliberately misrepresenting what I said, but it actually is possible that this is how they saw my actions. People on the Internet have a habit of assuming the worst in people, myself included.

Honestly, that's what your post came across as. Just using terms like "echo chamber" tends to erode credibility, and I've seen a few obnoxious people who ended up largely ignored then sometimes banned on chat rooms before (granted, the ones who got banned generally pulled that off by doing something like harassing another member about their religion repeatedly).

Segev
2015-02-26, 05:42 PM
I dunno. Echo Chamber effect is very, very real, and I've never seen it and had it erode the credibility of the writer with me.

Perhaps I've just witnessed it too many times (and fallen prey to it, myself; it's tricky and sneaks up on you).

An echo chamber effect is one of the things I personally blame for the drastic change in tone of 4e D&D from its prior editions.

Knaight
2015-02-26, 05:49 PM
I dunno. Echo Chamber effect is very, very real, and I've never seen it and had it erode the credibility of the writer with me.

I've seen it to, but in the context of it getting thrown around in internet arguments I've consistently seen it applied in a ridiculous fashion. There's plenty of projection, wherein people in some tiny echo chamber try to claim that the rest of society is in an echo chamber and their tiny isolated fragment knows the truth. There's the use of it with standards so low that it pretty much means "anywhere where I have the minority opinion". So on and so forth.

BootStrapTommy
2015-02-26, 06:03 PM
I for one still think they sound like twits. While I get that they have their "clique" going on, I'm not too sure about the argument that their rude actions were justified simply because he did not fit into it.

I do believe that many "roleplayers" draw their snubbiness from a "scrub"ish sense of fairness. We've all played that session where the munchkin steals the thunder, whilst the rest of the party feels useless. They're not fun, nor balanced. And I've always felt that was part of the origin of that, along with all the aspiring thespians.

The best strategy, universally, is to build your character however you like, just make sure they have a good backstory which is fun to play with plenty of hooks. Simply, really.

Then, regardless of the GM and other player's preferences, you can answer the question of why your playing the character you are playing with " Because this is the character I'd like to play."

Aron Times
2015-02-26, 06:12 PM
Honestly, that's what your post came across as. Just using terms like "echo chamber" tends to erode credibility, and I've seen a few obnoxious people who ended up largely ignored then sometimes banned on chat rooms before (granted, the ones who got banned generally pulled that off by doing something like harassing another member about their religion repeatedly).

Hm... I'll make sure to avoid using the term, echo chamber, in the future. Thanks for the advice. :smile: I'd upvote or like this post if I could.

Gavran
2015-02-26, 07:51 PM
First: that TVTropes definition of scrub is far from universal.

Second: scrub is a purely derogatory, and usually quite offensive term. You shouldn't be looking for an equivalent to it on this forum, particularly about some people playing the game differently than you, and especially not when there are people on this forum who you would be including in that insult.

Third: Yep, people have different playstyles. Sometimes those people have no interest in the playstyles that aren't theirs. Online communities tend to develop cultures and it's not unusual for one to be favored over the other. There is a board here with a very strong mechanics first culture. I believe the WotC boards are/were much the same.

Fourth: If I was inclined to judge a person on one thread, I would take their side as you're 1) tacitly encouraging use of "scrub" 2) trashing them in the same way that you feel they wronged you - for preferring a different playstyle.

Don't call them anything. You don't mesh (at least with those specific people), so move on and be done with them.

Galen
2015-02-26, 08:13 PM
There is no roleplaying equivalent of Scrubs, nor can their be. A Scrub is a weak player - in a game that has winning and losing - who hides his lack of success beyond an I'm-just-playing-for-fun facade. Usually this is accompanied by and-if-you're-playing-to-win-you-must-be-having-badwrongfun attitude, while completely ignoring the fact that the goal of the game (eg. Magic: the Gathering) is indeed to win.

But since there is no goal of winning in roleplaying games, and just-playing-for-fun is indeed the default - there cannot be Scrubs in roleplaying games.

BootStrapTommy
2015-02-26, 08:36 PM
Third: Yep, people have different playstyles. Sometimes those people have no interest in the playstyles that aren't theirs. Online communities tend to develop cultures and it's not unusual for one to be favored over the other. There is a board here with a very strong mechanics first culture. I believe the WotC boards are/were much the same.

Fourth: If I was inclined to judge a person on one thread, I would take their side as you're 1) tacitly encouraging use of "scrub" 2) trashing them in the same way that you feel they wronged you - for preferring a different playstyle.

Don't call them anything. You don't mesh (at least with those specific people), so move on and be done with them. Yeah, and the people who have different playstyles and lambast others for not following them? We call those people *****.

I read through OP's statements and find that in none does he actually claim their style is wrong. He even claims sympathy for it. His problem is that they decided to be so rude about it, motivated by their own belief that their style of play was superior. Which is more than a legitimate complaint.

Sound to me like excusing jerkish behavior. Regardless of what play style you prefer, telling someone else theirs is wrong? That's what is not cool.

Sith_Happens
2015-02-26, 08:41 PM
I really, really hate roleplayers like these. They're like the equivalent of scrubs in more competitive games.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Scrub

I'm not sure what to call them, though.

TV Tropes calls them "Anti-Munchkins (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheRoleplayer)" (see second bullet point), although the first sentence of the definition links to "Scrub" so you could maybe just call them that anyways.

...Of course, I think we of the Playground can do better.:smallcool:


I call them Stormwinds (http://community.wizards.com/content/forum-topic/2861636), the kind of person that believe that a character based on mechanics cannot be roleplayed, essentially drawing a line between rollplay and roleplay where there isn't or shouldn't be.

That's a good and obvious one. A bit too obvious, perhaps.


My character was simply based on having five dots in a mundane fighting style, and I made the mistake of telling them this.

So this was in WoD then. New or Old?


There is no roleplaying equivalent of Scrubs, nor can their be. A Scrub is a weak player - in a game that has winning and losing - who hides his lack of success beyond an I'm-just-playing-for-fun facade. Usually this is accompanied by and-if-you're-playing-to-win-you-must-be-having-badwrongfun attitude, while completely ignoring the fact that the goal of the game (eg. Magic: the Gathering) is indeed to win.

But since there is no goal of winning in roleplaying games, and just-playing-for-fun is indeed the default - there cannot be Scrubs in roleplaying games.

Sure there can be, they just have to think that deliberately building an effective character means you're "playing to win" regardless of whether that's actually a valid thing to accuse someone of at all. So, to distil your post into the parts that do in fact define the roleplaying equivalent of a Scrub:


A Scrub is a weak player... who hides his lack of success beyond an I'm-just-playing-for-fun facade. Usually this is accompanied by and-if-you're-playing-to-win-you-must-be-having-badwrongfun attitude--

--where "playing to win" is defined by the Scrub as "deliberately building a mechanically effective character" or similar, which probably means it overlaps a fair amount with the Stormwind Fallacy but that's fine.

...Ooh, that gave me an idea for the "what to call them:" Who can come up with a word that sounds as much possible like the opposite of "rudisplork (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=17779230&postcount=615)?":smallbiggrin:

Frozen_Feet
2015-02-26, 08:48 PM
The scrub, at least the TV tropes definition, fits RPGs poorly. In these parts, the person who loves their houserules more than the official ones is usually called the GM. :smalltongue:

The categories I've seen used are the Munchkin, the Real Man, the Roleplayer and the Loonie. The people described in the original post fit the third category pretty well, but take it to insane "Stop having fun" heights. I haven't seen such fervent dislike towards using mechanics as character inspiration since age-old arguments about how random character creation is unfun/oppressive/uncreative/what have you.

Arbane
2015-02-27, 12:49 AM
The German RPG community has a great term for people who play a baker or some other tradesman who's possibly useful at their profession or in social situation, but worthless in a fight: "Bauergaming". ("Bauer" means a farmer or peasant.)

A related term I've been trying to popularize is 'Gimps' for people who think that playing a character with no useful skills or abilities and/or crippling disadvantages somehow makes their roleplaying more 'deep and meaningful'.

Vitruviansquid
2015-02-27, 01:09 AM
A related term I've been trying to popularize is 'Gimps' for people who think that playing a character with no useful skills or abilities and/or crippling disadvantages somehow makes their roleplaying more 'deep and meaningful'.

I do not know if that's a good idea. The word already means a different type of person.

BootStrapTommy
2015-02-27, 02:18 AM
I do not know if that's a good idea. The word already means a different type of person. Unless you think about the parallels. They're there. And they're creepy.

Kurald Galain
2015-02-27, 11:25 AM
There is no roleplaying equivalent of Scrubs, nor can their be. A Scrub is a weak player - in a game that has winning and losing - who hides his lack of success beyond an I'm-just-playing-for-fun facade. Usually this is accompanied by and-if-you're-playing-to-win-you-must-be-having-badwrongfun attitude, while completely ignoring the fact that the goal of the game (eg. Magic: the Gathering) is indeed to win.

But since there is no goal of winning in roleplaying games, and just-playing-for-fun is indeed the default - there cannot be Scrubs in roleplaying games.

While there is no goal of winning in an RPG, some players think there is, and these players can be scrubs.

Basically the scrub mentality in an RPG would be "Bob's character is stronger than mine, therefore he's cheating", or something like "clerics must be healers, so if Bob's cleric is good at something else then he must be cheating".

Solaris
2015-02-27, 11:40 PM
2. BadWrongFun - Used to refer to game systems as opposed to ways of playing. I've only seen this term used ironically, typically when someone says that X system sucks, and someone replies, "Badwrongfun," to mock the complainer.

I've only seen this one used (and used it myself) to refer to people who were insistent that there was only one way to play a game, and everyone else was doing it wrong. For example, claiming that dungeon-crawling in an RPG is the "wrong way to play" when you should be playing deep-immersion roleplaying (and never mind what the dungeon-crawlers actually enjoy doing) would be telling the dungeon-crawling aficionados that they're having badwrongfun.
It's closely related to the concept of "Stop having fun! You're doing it wrong (because you're not doing it the way I want it done)!" It indicates someone who has a decided lack of empathy and has difficulty realizing that other people have needs, wants, and desires of their own that aren't necessarily coinciding with everyone else's.

I'd say you ran into a forum of snobs who hadn't yet grokked the concept of badwrongfun and why it's bad and wrong. As a general rule, I don't hold with online communities that make a habit of treating the new guys like dirt. If I, a veteran sergeant with two deployments under my belt could find it within myself to talk to a brand-spanky-new private fresh from basic training like he's a human being despite the fact that he's a life form only marginally higher up the evolutionary ladder than stuff I've scraped off my boots after following a herd of cows down the road, then these nerdlings with no accomplishments to speak of can find it within themselves to talk to people who've made the mistake of wanting to associate with them like they're human beings. If they lack that capacity, you're better off not associating with them.

Knaight
2015-02-28, 12:34 PM
But since there is no goal of winning in roleplaying games, and just-playing-for-fun is indeed the default - there cannot be Scrubs in roleplaying games.

There are a handful of competitive RPGs which can be won - Everyone is John comes to mind, though it's a bit of an outlier.

Jay R
2015-02-28, 02:05 PM
A. You don't want to play with people like them.
B. They don't want to play with somebody like you.
C. You are not playing with them.

Problem solved.

sktarq
2015-02-28, 03:28 PM
OP-While I have more than a little sympathy for their position and you've should a troubling willingness to universilize why people play (powers, cool part of being a vampire etc) these people seem like rude gits and you are better off not dealing with them.

That said there is an easy way to recover from such an explosion of rudeness. Simply say that you were flipping through "sourcebook X" looking inspiration and the level five power of fighting style Y caught your eye and you started to get ideas for brainstorming. People like that generally respect the term brainstorming even if they don't like it or do it themselves.

Maglubiyet
2015-03-03, 11:54 AM
But there was no specific non-RP action that was named, save "building a character inspired first by mechanics." Since that in no way impedes actually creating an RP-able character, acting like it does is the Stormwind Fallacy.

I disagree. Optimized characters stretch the limits of "realism" and hence are unbelievable characters to roleplay. How many people in the real world have only exactly the right combination of skills and experience to make them the very best at what they do? Answer: Very very VERY few. Most people know how to do a smattering of various things aside from their main vocation.

Very few, say, paramedics spend every waking moment studying trauma medicine, perusing catalogs of the latest technology for ambulances, practice administering different combination of drugs, putting on splints, assisting in surgeries, etc. And even fewer of these paramedics will have grown up in a refugee field hospital near a warzone where both her parents were trauma surgeons whom she assisted from the day she could first walk. Most paramedics have other skills not related to their day jobs, like surf-fishing, cooking, skiing, painting, carpentry, etc.

Optimized characters tend to be very one-dimensional -- they know ONLY the particular combination of skills that maxes out their performance, with no extraneous abilities that don't add to that maximum. They are not well-rounded individuals. If you met them in real life they would probably seem like they were autistic or something, only able to talk about one topic...endlessly.

That is why they are not role-playable, because they are unrealistic.

Galen
2015-03-03, 12:21 PM
Very few, say, paramedics spend every waking moment studying trauma medicine, perusing catalogs of the latest technology for ambulances, practice administering different combination of drugs, putting on splints, assisting in surgeries, etc. And even fewer of these paramedics will have grown up in a refugee field hospital near a warzone where both her parents were trauma surgeons whom she assisted from the day she could first walk.
It's usually much worse. We could be talking about a paramedic whose mother was a White Witch, and whose father was an Olympic fencer, and who inherited the powers of magic and swordplay from both. Also, at some point in his childhood, he fell into a hole where he mind-melded with a vampiric bat, and while in highschool, fell in with the wrong crowd, learned to pick locks and steal cars, and grew a third eye as a result of experimental drug mishap.

Most of those "my character inspired first by mechanics" life stories read incredibly boring - they are just a laundry list to cover the character's powers. "X happened to my character to gain power A, then Y happened to him to gain power B ...". Admittedly, they don't have to be this way, but fact is, Stormwind fallacy be damned, they more often then not are.

Knaight
2015-03-03, 12:42 PM
It's usually much worse. We could be talking about a paramedic whose mother was a White Witch, and whose father was an Olympic fencer, and who inherited the powers of magic and swordplay from both. Also, at some point in his childhood, he fell into a hole where he mind-melded with a vampiric bat, and while in highschool, fell in with the wrong crowd, learned to pick locks and steal cars, and grew a third eye as a result of experimental drug mishap.

These stand out, but I doubt they're anywhere near the most common. Heck, what we're talking about with this example is a character which maximizes one skill in WoD. That leaves plenty of resources to play around with, and plenty of room for the character to have various other parts to them. I've made heavily optimized characters based on mechanics (in play-testing, admittedly, in the process of helping work the mechanics out under extreme scenarios). I've had several players who do have some degree of munchkin tendencies, and have never seen this. I've seen some shallow characters and some pretty contrived group backstories (my personal favorite involves two characters both trying to mug eachother, both leaving eachother bleeding unconscious in the street, and a third character coming along and healing the both of them, at which point all three decide to stay together as a group), but that's with basically no connection to optimization and a lot of connection to the extent to which the campaign is beer and pretzels.

Segev
2015-03-03, 01:01 PM
I disagree. Optimized characters stretch the limits of "realism" and hence are unbelievable characters to roleplay. How many people in the real world have only exactly the right combination of skills and experience to make them the very best at what they do? Answer: Very very VERY few. Most people know how to do a smattering of various things aside from their main vocation. And yet, they do exist. And more importantly, they're focal characters in pivotal situations involving their skill. They're precisely the kind of person sought after for highly specialized tasks.

Which means they're quite likely to be main characters in a story, and definitely fit in nicely with the motivating point of the plot of "get people good at this task to perform it."


Very few, say, paramedics spend every waking moment studying trauma medicine, perusing catalogs of the latest technology for ambulances, practice administering different combination of drugs, putting on splints, assisting in surgeries, etc.Most would probably only be paramedics while training to become full-fledged doctors, yes. But such obsessed people can and do exist. There also exist prodigies who can learn as much from a "normal" amount of study and leave time for other things.


And even fewer of these paramedics will have grown up in a refugee field hospital near a warzone where both her parents were trauma surgeons whom she assisted from the day she could first walk. Most paramedics have other skills not related to their day jobs, like surf-fishing, cooking, skiing, painting, carpentry, etc.And?

If those skills don't come up in game, it's a resource tax to expect the player to represent them, mechanically. If I were designing a character with neat fluff background stuff like that, I would discuss with the GM whether they are likely to come up, and if they're likely to come up in a manner important enough to be worth spending resources beyond a cursory token towards their mastery.

I do this because a paramedic who is equally good at surf-fishing, cooking, skiiing, painting, carpentry, first aid, field surgery, and ambulence driving is going to be significantly worse at first aid, field surgery, and ambulence driving than one who has only a token nod to his skill in the first 5 and focuses on the other three.

And in a game where the first 5 come up maybe once each across dozens of sessions, and are not even important when they do aside from showcasing "hey, I have these skills, too," this character will generally underperform unless all characters take just as many (if not more) "fluff" skills which are equally useless to actually achieving anything in the game.

Moreover, the 5 instances where one each of those 5 fluff skills came up added nothing more to the game than they would have if the GM and I had said "yeah, Segev's paramedic actually knows how to surf-fish; it's pretty cool" and not even bothered rolling dice.

Game mechanics are best used to focus on how good the character is in USEFUL aspects of the game. One should never, ever be punished by resource taxes for role playing flavor that does not also make one "better" at more things that actually matter, mechanically.


Optimized characters tend to be very one-dimensional -- they know ONLY the particular combination of skills that maxes out their performance, with no extraneous abilities that don't add to that maximum. They are not well-rounded individuals. If you met them in real life they would probably seem like they were autistic or something, only able to talk about one topic...endlessly.

That is why they are not role-playable, because they are unrealistic.That's nonsense. They're highly expert at what they do, sure, but they can easily have a lot of character that need not be mechanically represented. Perhaps because, as mentioned, their non-mechanical fluff doesn't come up except in passing as - wait for it - flavor text. Perhaps, instead, because they just don't HAVE to be the best at something; their underlying stats for their focused skill are good enough to let them adequately represent being competent at a few flavor things.

Or perhaps because the paramedic who grew up in a war-torn region whose parents were both field surgeons and assisted them since she could walk also never really made friends her own age who weren't victims of horrific accidents. She grew up as a nurse-maid to her best friends, and she has a very nurturing personality. She may even not know how to deal with people who are self-sufficient, feeling "useless" if they don't need her. And feeling tremendously guilty if she needs something from others, because she should be helping them.

She keeps pets because they need her, and she loves taking in rescue animals. She's a sucker for romantic comedies which many would find "anti-feminist," because she identifies with the female stereotypes. She also tends to come on strong in relationships, but is shy about starting them without an opening of a need she can fulfil. Maybe she's got a smattering of Japanese language and culture - possibly not enough to justify a rank in any skills - because she finds the "girl makes boy lunch" romantic storyline instructive.

Her computer skills are adequate but not spectacular (probably don't need mechanics to represent competence with using patient-database software). Her driving skills may or may not include combat driving, depending on whether the player feels she would have driven that ambulence through that warzone.

In all, she's got plenty of character to her, including flaws and strengths.

If she's one-dimensional, it's not because she's optimized as a paramedic. It's because nobody bothered to develop a person to go with the mechanics. Being "well-rounded" with a random assortment of skills doesn't inherently create a person - a character - either.

That paramedic with fish-surfing, cooking, skiiing, painting, carpentry, and her paramedic skills only starts to have a character when you ask why she has those skills. Just pasting them makes a one-dimensional "do anything" mary sue (except, mechanically, she's bad at all of it).

Maglubiyet
2015-03-03, 03:38 PM
If those skills don't come up in game, it's a resource tax to expect the player to represent them, mechanically. If I were designing a character with neat fluff background stuff like that, I would discuss with the GM whether they are likely to come up, and if they're likely to come up in a manner important enough to be worth spending resources beyond a cursory token towards their mastery.


I think the fact that you keep referring to non-combat skills as "fluff" explains a lot about the style of gaming you play/prefer. An optimized build is for a wargaming mentality, more dps (or hps) always being better. For some people, though, role-playing is not all about that -- it's about actually playing the role of someone different, not necessarily the best at something.

I agree with Galen's assessment that a lot of the backstories of these optimized uber-builds are contrived to justify a fairly weak narrative of how such a person could exist.

Arbane
2015-03-03, 03:47 PM
That is why they are not role-playable, because they are unrealistic.

This is where I make a snide comment about how REALISTIC the elves and dwarfs and freakin' psionic half-dragons have to be, right?


I think the fact that you keep referring to non-combat skills as "fluff" explains a lot about the style of gaming you play/prefer. An optimized build is for a wargaming mentality, more dps (or hps) always being better. For some people, though, role-playing is not all about that -- it's about actually playing the role of someone different, not necessarily the best at something.

I agree with Galen's assessment that a lot of the backstories of these optimized uber-builds are contrived to justify a fairly weak narrative of how such a person could exist.

I'd argue that's a weakness of the game system, such as D&D never handing out enough skillpoints for someone to be good at their job AND their hobby. Guess which one people will prioritize, given limited resources? Unless you're playing Wraith, it's hard to roleplay when you're dead.

Maglubiyet
2015-03-03, 04:35 PM
This is where I make a snide comment about how REALISTIC the elves and dwarfs and freakin' psionic half-dragons have to be, right?

Yeah, I get your point, but even non-human/alien characters should have some element that a person could relate to. Unless they were tossed into a gladiatorial fighting pit the moment they hatched in a mad alchemist's lab, presumably they'll have relatives and friends, hopes and dreams, fears and prejudices.

If the most interesting thing you can say about a character is how fast he can chop heads off, how many arrows he can launch in 5 seconds, or how massively he can melt your brain, then you're not really role-playing -- you're building battle-bots.

Knaight
2015-03-03, 05:47 PM
I think the fact that you keep referring to non-combat skills as "fluff" explains a lot about the style of gaming you play/prefer. An optimized build is for a wargaming mentality, more dps (or hps) always being better. For some people, though, role-playing is not all about that -- it's about actually playing the role of someone different, not necessarily the best at something.

Optimization for non-combat stuff absolutely exists, so this bit is already ludicrous. Plus, occasionally the role is supposed to be someone good at something, or just something you have to fight the system for for basic efficacy. Sometimes the characters in play are a bunch of badass elite specialists, sometimes they end up with unflattering comparisons to Dumb & Dumber, most of the time they're somewhere in between.

Wardog
2015-03-03, 05:57 PM
I disagree. Optimized characters stretch the limits of "realism" and hence are unbelievable characters to roleplay. How many people in the real world have only exactly the right combination of skills and experience to make them the very best at what they do? Answer: Very very VERY few. Most people know how to do a smattering of various things aside from their main vocation.


How many people in myth and legend and folktales (or action movies) have exactly the right combination of skills and experience to make them the very best at what they do?

Probably rather more.

Galen
2015-03-03, 06:12 PM
How many people in myth and legend and folktales (or action movies) have exactly the right combination of skills and experience to make them the very best at what they do?

Probably rather more.

You and I may have been reading different folktales and watching different action movies. I mostly remember characters with some kind of flaws or drawbacks, who succeed despite of those flaws, and not because they have exactly the right combination of skills and experience.

When Huckleberry Finn took his epic river raft journey, I honestly do not recall him optimizing his River Rafting skill, nor do I recall him having been born the scion to a family of master river rafters. But, you know what, I'm sure he would have, if he was an RPG character.

Solaris
2015-03-03, 06:18 PM
You and I may have been reading different folktales and watching different action movies. I mostly remember characters with some kind of flaws or drawbacks, who succeed despite of those flaws, and not because they have exactly the right combination of skills and experience.

When Huckleberry Finn took his epic river raft journey, I honestly do not recall him optimizing his River Rafting skill, nor do I recall him having been born the scion to a family of master river rafters. But, you know what, I'm sure he would have, if he was an RPG character.

I missed where what the family comes up so often in action movies, and it's definitely not the main point of all mythical and folkloric heroes.
Besides, river rafting really... wasn't the point of Huck Finn, any more than riding a horse is the point of any other adventurer.

Galen
2015-03-03, 06:20 PM
I missed where what the family comes up so often in action moviesIt doesn't. I was poking fun of the "my mother was a White Witch and my father was an Olympic fencer" type of backstory.

Solaris
2015-03-03, 06:26 PM
It doesn't. I was poking fun of the "my mother was a White Witch and my father was an Olympic fencer" type of backstory.

Eh. It's more backstory than most RPG characters, optimized or otherwise, get. Most of the time you're doing good if you get a home country/village/planet/dimension out of them.

Milo v3
2015-03-03, 09:52 PM
Yeah, I get your point, but even non-human/alien characters should have some element that a person could relate to. Unless they were tossed into a gladiatorial fighting pit the moment they hatched in a mad alchemist's lab, presumably they'll have relatives and friends, hopes and dreams, fears and prejudices.

And none of the bolded has anything to do with mechanics, having an optimized character or not doesn't have any impact on that.

Maglubiyet
2015-03-03, 10:30 PM
And none of the bolded has anything to do with mechanics, having an optimized character or not doesn't have any impact on that.

Yeah, good point. I suppose I should've said hobbies, outside interests, job skills, past professions, aborted careers...something along those lines.

Solaris
2015-03-03, 11:04 PM
Yeah, good point. I suppose I should've said hobbies, outside interests, job skills, past professions, aborted careers...something along those lines.

A lot of the guys I know from the military are rather monomaniacally focused on military-, firearm-, and survival-related stuff. Their hobbies are related to shooting, tactics, and/or survival, and they don't really have any other job skills beyond killing bad guys and keeping good guys from getting killed. They're (mostly) very, very good at their jobs, and deliberately hone their skill-sets because they know they rely on their skills to keep them and their buddies alive.
They're still fully functional people.

Thus, it doesn't seem too unrealistic to have a fighter who doesn't dump skill points into Profession (farmer). In fact, it'd be more unrealistic to have someone who is a professional in a life-or-death field like combat or adventuring actively pursuing skills unrelated to their job; I'm unusual in that I had a bunch of hobbies like RPGs and wargaming, and didn't collect guns, play paintball, or play FPS games for fun. Outside interests and non-trigger-pully hobbies are for after you've retired.

Galen
2015-03-04, 01:21 AM
A lot of the guys I know from the military are rather monomaniacally focused on military-, firearm-, and survival-related stuff. Their hobbies are related to shooting, tactics, and/or survival, and they don't really have any other job skills beyond killing bad guys and keeping good guys from getting killed.You must have joined the wrong army. I learned to play D&D in the military. Just saying.

Arbane
2015-03-04, 03:20 AM
Yeah, I get your point, but even non-human/alien characters should have some element that a person could relate to. Unless they were tossed into a gladiatorial fighting pit the moment they hatched in a mad alchemist's lab, presumably they'll have relatives and friends, hopes and dreams, fears and prejudices.

If the most interesting thing you can say about a character is how fast he can chop heads off, how many arrows he can launch in 5 seconds, or how massively he can melt your brain, then you're not really role-playing -- you're building battle-bots.

I don't see any of those that require putting points into Profession: Underwater Basket-Weaving.* And I can make a character who's a useless bundle of neuroses with all of those.

*(Or is that Craft? Whatever...)


You and I may have been reading different folktales and watching different action movies. I mostly remember characters with some kind of flaws or drawbacks, who succeed despite of those flaws, and not because they have exactly the right combination of skills and experience.

When Huckleberry Finn took his epic river raft journey, I honestly do not recall him optimizing his River Rafting skill, nor do I recall him having been born the scion to a family of master river rafters. But, you know what, I'm sure he would have, if he was an RPG character.

I think _some_ RPGs have rather more in common with the Twelve Labors of Hercules or La Mort D'Arthur (Or Rambo...) than the works of Mark Twain, but whatevs.

neonchameleon
2015-03-04, 06:56 AM
The roleplaying equivalent of scrubs? "Roleplayers not rollplayers." Their own term.

Frozen_Feet
2015-03-04, 10:04 AM
If those skills don't come up in game, it's a resource tax to expect the player to represent them, mechanically.

In roleplaying games, it's perfectly appropriate to demand a character to pay the resources they would've needed to be in that role. At the same time, it's the player's job just as well to create situations where their character's investments play a part in the game. There are no "fluff" traits - if a player can't be arsed to think how to bring up their character's abilities and hence is unwilling to pay for them, the solution is to not have those traits, period. This way you won't create contradictions between player expectations and game rules.

It gets murky with systems where everyday skills fall below the simulational treshold of the game. Early D&D, for example, doesn't really have a method to establish rank among everyday occupations beyond the player or the referee just stating how things are. Of course, pretty much all skill systems since have been attempts to adress this and the problems with conflict resolution and verisimilitude it causes.



I'd argue that's a weakness of the game system, such as D&D never handing out enough skillpoints for someone to be good at their job AND their hobby. Guess which one people will prioritize, given limited resources?

Calling it a weakness of the system is disingenuous, as it will crop in any system with limited resource input. Real life rarely hands out enough skillpoints time and resources to be the best at your profession AND your hobbies. Inviduals who excell in multiple fields are pretty rare.

Which ironically loops back to the question whether min-maxing is realistic. It's not a problem with optimization - it's an optimization problem, one people face just as well in real life. Whenever you're looking at the best person in some narrow field, chances are they're monomanic unpleasant person with poor social life.


And none of the bolded has anything to do with mechanics, having an optimized character or not doesn't have any impact on that.

Superficially true, but doesn't hold up under closer scrutiny. You must be aware of the meme where all player characters are sole children of dead parents, yes? It's an attempt to game the in-game and metagame social dynamics so that the GM doesn't have leverage against them. On the opposite end, a player might try to establish their character's relatives as wealthy and powerful members of the in-game community - which is why many game systems (even D&D with its rules for leadership and retainers) actually factor in social relationships into their character building systems.

Similarly, many players leave their character's motivations deliberately vague and open-ended so no-one at the table can call them out for inconsistencies, or use their established personality as an excuse to try and win at the game. The guy who uses "I'm Chaotic Neutral!" as a defense for doing whatever is one example, but so is that paranoid old coot with low SAN score in Call of Cthulhu (the name eludes me at the moment).

Mechanics are used to justify in-game behaviour and in-game behaviour is used to justify mechanics all the time in RPGs. Hence, a serious attempt at optimizing will encompass personality, hopes, dreams, fears and social relationships of a character. If fiction was based on RPGs, this is the way you would've gotten Sherlock Holmes or Gregory House.


You must have joined the wrong army. I learned to play D&D in the military. Just saying.

D&D evolved from and is at its root a game about fighting, survival and tactics where characters often don't have a real job beyond killing people. Just sayin'. :smalltongue: (In Finland, we often joke about how army drills are just glorified LARPing with fancy props.)

Segev
2015-03-04, 10:12 AM
I think the fact that you keep referring to non-combat skills as "fluff" explains a lot about the style of gaming you play/prefer. An optimized build is for a wargaming mentality, more dps (or hps) always being better. For some people, though, role-playing is not all about that -- it's about actually playing the role of someone different, not necessarily the best at something.

I agree with Galen's assessment that a lot of the backstories of these optimized uber-builds are contrived to justify a fairly weak narrative of how such a person could exist.Where did I mention "combat skills" vs. "non-combat skills?" My example of a paramedic was drawn directly from the post to which I was replying, and even there, unless you count "paramedic skills" as "combat skills," I didn't mention either.

You are the one imposing combat/non-combat categorization on it.

My thesis is game-style agnostic.

If you're playing a game wherein you're high schoolers trying to be Japanese Idols, and the game will focus on school subjects and on performing (and contests involving the same), then even if your character is also a champion skiier and surf-fisher, you are wiser to expend resources on representing your character's performing skills and, potentially, academic/gymnastic ones. Because the game is going to spend time on and have meaningful consequences assigned to the results of checks which involve those skills, whereas even if skiing comes up, it is almost certainly not going to be important for more than one session, at the most.

If you think the school ski trip will take a session or two, and you want to therefore represent your skiing skill mechanically, spend minimal resources on it. Spending the resources to be as good at skiing as you are at singing or other performing arts will make you actively less effective in the game than those who focus more on their singing/performing arts, because you won't get to use it meaningfully very often if at all.

If you don't think it'll come up as more than a side-show, write it in your background and ask the GM to let you narrate "and my PC shows off his skiing skills" when all the more impact that can have is a few oohs and ahhs from NPCs (and maybe PCs whose players play along).


Yeah, good point. I suppose I should've said hobbies, outside interests, job skills, past professions, aborted careers...something along those lines.

If those are going to be relevant to the game, by all means, spend resources on them.

Demanding that you have to spend resources on them even if there's no chance they'll come up meaningfully (or worse, BECAUSE there's no such chance) is the Stormwind fallacy.

I can make a character who has points in umpteen different hobbies, past professions, or unrelated professional skills who is still hideously boring and one-dimensional. He's the useless dude with no personality.

I could try to give him a personality, and he might at least be entertaining in his uselessness.

I can also make a competent character who has skills which primarily or only are amongst those which come up with at least moderate regularity in the game, and make him either one-dimensional (generic cleave-path fighter number 5) or richly developed (that paramedic we discussed earlier).

My point is that the richness of the character is not determined by the mechanical optimization of said character for a particular game.

Pretending I said something about "combat" vs. "non-combat" skills is missing the point, whether deliberately or not.

Kurald Galain
2015-03-04, 10:16 AM
If those skills don't come up in game, it's a resource tax to expect the player to represent them, mechanically. If I were designing a character with neat fluff background stuff like that, I would discuss with the GM whether they are likely to come up, and if they're likely to come up in a manner important enough to be worth spending resources beyond a cursory token towards their mastery.

The problem is not so much that game systems allow you to put skill points in what you call fluff skills, but that in D&D in particular this is only possible at the cost of other skills. This is because D&D in particular has a very high skill cap and very few skill points for a starting character (as opposed to, say, any Whitewolf game, which works the exact opposite way: a new character gets 27 skill points with a max of three points per skill).

Vitruviansquid
2015-03-04, 10:17 AM
I do wonder why more games don't give you X number of points to use on a list of primary, job-related skills and then Y number of points to use on another list of non-job-related skills.

Segev
2015-03-04, 10:28 AM
The problem is not so much that game systems allow you to put skill points in what you call fluff skills, but that in D&D in particular this is only possible at the cost of other skills. This is because D&D in particular has a very high skill cap and very few skill points for a starting character (as opposed to, say, any Whitewolf game, which works the exact opposite way: a new character gets 27 skill points with a max of three points per skill).Perhaps, but that says nothing about the ability of the player making said character to give said character more than a one-dimensional role in the game.

As well, I would hesitate to call all of the skills which are useful in a D&D game "combat" skills. THey're certainly "Adventuring" skills, but the game is focused on adventuring; of course you should spend your character resources on things that make you competent at adventuring!

Insisting that it's impossible to "role play" rather than "roll play" if you haven't spent at least X% of your resources on things that will not come up meaningfully in the game is silly, at best, and possibly snobbish. There's nothing wrong with wanting to build as capable a character as you can, provided you're not overwhelming the other players' ability to also contribute meaningfully.

Honestly, it's the attitude that you must "role play" rather than "roll play" which tends to lead to the ludicrous backstories that contort to justify the optimal-for-the-game builds. Without that, with the attitude that you can build your character to be capable and have only a token nod at best towards "role play" aspects of the character which are not going to meaningfully impact the game will reduce the need to insist that your brilliant thespian endeavor just so happens to require these optimal skill and feature selections.

Even in White Wolf games, there are Abilities which come up more and Abilities which come up less. They HAVE narrowed the scope, and the low caps compared to the resources granted help, of course. But again, this is a game system thing.

I assure you that I can build characters in White Wolf that are well-rounded...and I can build ones that are one-dimensional. And it has nothing to do with how I spend my resources on their mechanics which they will be.


I do wonder why more games don't give you X number of points to use on a list of primary, job-related skills and then Y number of points to use on another list of non-job-related skills.

I have had DMs who explicitly grant bonus SP which can only be spent on fluff skills. They usually classify this as "profession" skills, but I've seen other qualifications assigned. As a general rule, they had to be things that were not likely to be highly relevant to the game. This isn't a problem because they gave bonus points specifically for it, rather than insisting that some unspecified number of points had to be allocated to it in order to not be sneered at as a "roll player."

Kurald Galain
2015-03-04, 10:44 AM
As well, I would hesitate to call all of the skills which are useful in a D&D game "combat" skills. THey're certainly "Adventuring" skills, but the game is focused on adventuring; of course you should spend your character resources on things that make you competent at adventuring!

Insisting that it's impossible to "role play" rather than "roll play" if you haven't spent at least X% of your resources on things that will not come up meaningfully in the game is silly, at best, and possibly snobbish. There's nothing wrong with wanting to build as capable a character as you can, provided you're not overwhelming the other players' ability to also contribute meaningfully.

The problem lies in your assumption that these things will not come up meaningfully.

Segev
2015-03-04, 10:53 AM
The problem lies in your assumption that these things will not come up meaningfully.

So... you're telling me that every skill available in the game comes up equally often in a meaningful fashion? Really?

Proper character creation involves a lot of discussion with GM and probably other players. If I have a "cool fluff skill" that fits my backstory, I will usually WANT to take some mechanical representation of it, and will ask the GM about whether or not it is likely to come up, and if so, how often. Unless the answer is "never," or my resources are limited (perhaps by the fact that I have "skill slots" instead of points to spend on just HOW good I am at each of them), I will usually throw (to borrow 3e mechanics for an example) the 1 SP it takes to be trained in the skill and able to roll it competently compared to those without it at such things.

But yes, I will posit that, for most games, I usually know enough going into them about the game system, genre, setting, and the kind of game the GM has said they're going to run to be able to tell if a given skill is going to be meaningful to actually have mechanics behind.

Not always, and not perfectly. But it's usually a safe bet that "perception" or its equivalents will come up more often than, say, Language: Swahili in a game about corporate espionage.

Even if your totally fascinating backstory includes being raised by missionary parents in subsaharan Africa.

Or than, say, skiiing is likely to come up in a game set in the Amazon Jungle.



In short: Again, yes, I do think it possible to tell if there are skills which will come up every session (or nearly so) vs. skills which will come up one session in the whole campaign at best (and then likely because the GM threw you a bone for having invested in them).

Segev
2015-03-04, 10:55 AM
The problem lies in your assumption that these things will not come up meaningfully.

...and actually - making a separate point, hence the second post - this goes to the heart of my point: if you can honestly say that those skills in your backstory will come up meaningfully, then how are you disproving my thesis?

My thesis would state that you should definitely put points into them. They represent your backstory accurately and they are useful places to be strong, mechanically.

In any event, nothing you've said backs up the counter-thesis that spending your points preferentially on things that will actually come up meaningfully in the game you're going to play inherently makes for one-dimensional characters.

Kurald Galain
2015-03-04, 10:58 AM
In any event, nothing you've said backs up the counter-thesis that spending your points preferentially on things that will actually come up meaningfully in the game you're going to play inherently makes for one-dimensional characters.

Why on earth would I be backing up a "counter-thesis" that you've just made up and that nobody else in this thread appears to be promoting or even mentioning so far?

Segev
2015-03-04, 11:04 AM
Why on earth would I be backing up a "counter-thesis" that you've just made up and that nobody else in this thread appears to be promoting or even mentioning so far?

I beg to differ:


I disagree. Optimized characters stretch the limits of "realism" and hence are unbelievable characters to roleplay.

(snip)

Optimized characters tend to be very one-dimensional -- they know ONLY the particular combination of skills that maxes out their performance, with no extraneous abilities that don't add to that maximum. They are not well-rounded individuals. If you met them in real life they would probably seem like they were autistic or something, only able to talk about one topic...endlessly.

That is why they are not role-playable, because they are unrealistic.

Maglubiyet
2015-03-04, 11:14 AM
Because the game is going to spend time on and have meaningful consequences assigned to the results of checks which involve those skills, whereas even if skiing comes up, it is almost certainly not going to be important for more than one session, at the most.

Again, this is a power gamer mentality, where you're focused on results as opposed to storytelling. In most RPG's, and certainly in all versions of D&D, those results are centered around combat and combat support.

It says to me that you want to "win" in whatever contest this particular game is focused on. If that's the style of game your group plays, then fine, more power to you. But it doesn't encompass ALL role-playing...not even close. Believe it or not, some games actually focus on the interplay of the characters, their shared interests, their foibles, their successes as well as their embarrassing moments -- you know, things that actually make them human (whether that is their species or not).

Interestingly, that style of play translates much better to fiction than "my draconic bard boosted the party's hits by 10d6 acid and we took out Asmodeus in one round".

Segev
2015-03-04, 11:27 AM
Again, this is a power gamer mentality, where you're focused on results as opposed to storytelling. In most RPG's, and certainly in all versions of D&D, those results are centered around combat and combat support. Oh, I never said it didn't. I said power-gaming mentality does not preclude role-playing and interesting character. To say otherwise is the essence of the Stormwind fallacy.

I am absolutely a power-gamer; I play games because I like RPing doing things I cannot do in real life. That doesn't mean I don't like intersting stories. It just means that I don't find stories of perpetual failure to be interesting. I find them frustrating and unfun. I have built characters in the past designed around the idea that you have to have skills/powers/whatever that are not likely to come up in the game in order to make a "well-rounded" character that is not "one dimensional." I have found them to fail, repeatedly, at common tasks in the game because I did not prioritize those common tasks enough.

This was not fun.

I have since realized that finite resources are part of the game, and spending them to achieve the kind of character I want to play is optimizing AND role-playing, since the kind of character I want to play is going to be a guy who has business being involved in the game at hand.


It says to me that you want to "win" in whatever contest this particular game is focused on. If that's the style of game your group plays, then fine, more power to you. But it doesn't encompass ALL role-playing...not even close. Believe it or not, some games actually focus on the interplay of the characters, their shared interests, their foibles, their successes as well as their embarrassing moments -- you know, things that actually make them human (whether that is their species or not). Why do you keep insisting that it is impossible to focus on the interplay of characters, on having successes and embarassing moments, if you do not deliberately hamstring the character?

Is it that you value those embarassing moments more than successes?

Is it that you imagine that optimized characters never fail?

I assure you, it is not so. They may not fail as often and on as mundane of things as less-optimized ones, but they do fail. Sometiems spectacularly hillariously.

As an example, I'm actually playing an adult dragon in a Rifts game. He is, by far, the most powerful PC in the party in terms of sheer mechanics. RP/setting considerations make him constrained in ways he finds INCREDIBLY irritating, but they're very real constraints.

Even so, he has taken to occasionally stopping sky-cycles by physically interposing himself in their flight paths, as trying to halt them by catching up has failed miserably. One particular incident wound up with his turkey-vulture form being sucked into the jet engine.

Being a dragon, he survived with only about a tenth of his MDC (think "really big hit points") gone, but it's still a hillariously funny moment, mostly due to how I and the others RP'd it and our reactions. My character refuses to talk about it to this day.

Obviously, though, being very powerful and able to survive that mishap means we didn't RP and don't focus on characters, according to the Stormwind Fallacy which you keep espousing.


Interestingly, that style of play translates much better to fiction than "my draconic bard boosted the party's hits by 10d6 acid and we took out Asmodeus in one round".Again, fascinating that you seem to think competence and power mean you can't RP.

What kind of scene do you imagine having if Asmodeus knows that this party actually has the power to take him out in one round?

Do you imagine that he has no counter-threats of his own? No contingency "if you kill me, this will happen to things you care about elsewhere?" Heck, no ability to simply leave?

Do you imagine that the party is unchallenged and unable to go have Schwarma after the fight is over to discuss what they're going to do now that Hell has an opening in its top managerial slot?

What is it that requires that this party, facing Asmodeus, be made up of skiiers, surf-fishers, underwater basket-weavers, and bards who can't carry a tune in a bucket in order for them to have "Good RP?"


My entire point is that optimization is not a barrier to RP and character interaction. You can have horribly boring, one-dimensional, un-optimized characters MORE easily than you can have horribly boring, one-dimensional, optimized characters, if only because the "horribly boring, one-dimensional" part is equally easy either way, and optimal characters are harder than un-optimal ones to build.

The same can be said for interesting, multi-fasceted un-optimized characters and interesting, multi-fasceted optimized characters.

Frozen_Feet
2015-03-04, 11:38 AM
Worrying about how well a game translates to fiction isn't particularly smart, because roleplaying games aren't like traditional forms of storytelling. A persona focused on achieving results is a perfectly acceptable role. Story is what happens when such a person interacts with the world. In a roleplaying game, you use the game rules and dice to see that. Stuff happens in present tense and the story won't be complete untill the game is over. Whatever happens at the table is the story, period - even if it's just "guy wanted results and got them".

In many ways, due to the random component, traditional RPGs have more in common with reality than they with fantasy they seek to emulate. Sometimes interesting things happen, sometimes they don't, and you can't tell whether something will make for a good tale untill after the fact and cleaning up majority of details from the record.

neonchameleon
2015-03-04, 12:27 PM
I disagree. Optimized characters stretch the limits of "realism" and hence are unbelievable characters to roleplay. How many people in the real world have only exactly the right combination of skills and experience to make them the very best at what they do? Answer: Very very VERY few. Most people know how to do a smattering of various things aside from their main vocation.

Very few, say, paramedics spend every waking moment studying trauma medicine, perusing catalogs of the latest technology for ambulances, practice administering different combination of drugs, putting on splints, assisting in surgeries, etc. And even fewer of these paramedics will have grown up in a refugee field hospital near a warzone where both her parents were trauma surgeons whom she assisted from the day she could first walk. Most paramedics have other skills not related to their day jobs, like surf-fishing, cooking, skiing, painting, carpentry, etc.

Optimized characters tend to be very one-dimensional -- they know ONLY the particular combination of skills that maxes out their performance, with no extraneous abilities that don't add to that maximum. They are not well-rounded individuals. If you met them in real life they would probably seem like they were autistic or something, only able to talk about one topic...endlessly.

That is why they are not role-playable, because they are unrealistic.

You are arguing against what is effectively a strawman here. There are very few systems it is possible to optimise in such that here is only one thing you can do. Maybe GURPS. But certainly not e.g. the WoD where you must have more than one skill.

So given that the optimised characters that stretch the limits of realism do not exist in most RPGs (GURPS being a notable exception but diminishing returns largely preventing this), I can only assume that you are using your strawman to attempt to reject the idea of specialised characters. People dedicated and with drive and motivation (whether internal or external). Like almost every child prodigy with pushy parents ever.

And should adventurers be focussed on their area of expertise? Is it realistic that they spend a disproportionate amount of time getting ready for situations that are a matter of life and death?

As e.g. WoD forces you to take skills from all columns, and D&D forces you to take a range of skills, the hyperspecialised characters you are objecting to are not playable in an RPG because you can not make them using most sets of RPG rules. Merely specialised characters are run of the mill. The surgeon might tinkle on the piano, but they are probably a professional surgeon and only a strictly amateur pianist. Genuinely well rounded people are extremely rare - people with focussed areas of interest and smatterings of enthusiasms outside those focussed areas are pretty common. The nerd and the athlete are more common than the athletic nerd. Five dots in one skill and a handful in others is far more common than two dots across the board. And five dots in one skill and nothing anywhere else is simply against the rules.

Wardog
2015-03-04, 01:47 PM
Again, this is a power gamer mentality, where you're focused on results as opposed to storytelling. In most RPG's, and certainly in all versions of D&D, those results are centered around combat and combat support.

It says to me that you want to "win" in whatever contest this particular game is focused on. If that's the style of game your group plays, then fine, more power to you. But it doesn't encompass ALL role-playing...not even close. Believe it or not, some games actually focus on the interplay of the characters, their shared interests, their foibles, their successes as well as their embarrassing moments -- you know, things that actually make them human (whether that is their species or not).


The thing is, if those hobbies, interests, etc aren't things that your ability at is critical to the game, or things you are going to be "tested" on, then spending points of feats or whatever on them isn't going to be any more useful than just writing them into your backstory.

You can group plays, then fine, more power to you. But it doesn't encompass ALL role-playing...not even close. Believe it or not, some games actually focus on the interplay of the characters, their shared interests, their foibles, etc, just by going off what they wrote into their backstory (or what they developed it into).


Yes, technically, if someone has spent time learning to play the piano / surf-fish / etc, they will have had less time to learn sword-fighting - but it seems to me to be overly simulationist (and not a very good simulation either) to require a "Swordsman" character to spend points or feats on piano-playing (unless the game will test them on their piano-playing ability). It should work just as well to assume everyone has hobbies, have them written down in their backstory, and only simulate "adventuring" and other things that the game actually "tests" people on.

I think that would actually make for better role-playing than the alternative, as it doesn't force the players to chose between having a character that is good at their job but has no life, and one that has lots of interesting hobbies but can't effectively do their job.

Maglubiyet
2015-03-04, 02:55 PM
My entire point is that optimization is not a barrier to RP and character interaction. You can have horribly boring, one-dimensional, un-optimized characters MORE easily than you can have horribly boring, one-dimensional, optimized characters, if only because the "horribly boring, one-dimensional" part is equally easy either way, and optimal characters are harder than un-optimal ones to build.

What you say sounds entirely plausible and, were it not for my long experience gaming, I would agree with you. But unfortunately every time I've encountered this type of min-max munchkinism it's by players who are only building characters based around optimizing mechanics for the mechanic's own sake. Any backstory or personality these characters end up having amounts to just so much handwaving to explain extremely improbable combinations of abilities. In theory, yes, any character should be role-playable -- in practice, not so much.

Of course, it depends on the type of game the DM is running. If every encounter he builds milks the game system for all it's worth, when a couple of 2nd-level kobold rogues can take down a 5th-level party, then you're sort of forced to play along. It's ends up being an optimization arms race.

In my campaigns you would be penalized for maximizing one trait at the expense of all others. Not explicitly, but if you're a one-show pony it'll become apparent when half the encounters require more finesse than just the ability to level mountains. It's not for everyone and it definitely works in some game systems better than others.

Segev
2015-03-04, 03:14 PM
I can assure you that your players who minmaxed and then didn't RP would be just as bad at RPing if you forced them to use character weaker than they would design, themselves.

I, personally, RP a significant amount and often come up with really fun characters based on the question, "how would such a person come to have those skills/talents/traits?"

My beholder mage build - which I know I'll never get to play - has a solid character behind it. He is obsessive and arrogant, and he's striving to keep that in check due to being far weaker than he remembers, at least at first. (He was a high-level human wizard before he became an Elan Psion.)

Of course, when I optimize, I don't tend to min/max very much. I tend to optimize to be omni-capable, starting with defense. Because I don't like my characters dying, and threat-of-death is the most common thing that is used to prevent my characters even trying cool stuff. Playing Achilles from Grrl Power would be a great deal of fun for me, even with his (relative) lack of offensive capability. Because brazen disregard for common threats to life and limb is fun.

Galen
2015-03-04, 03:19 PM
I, personally, RP a significant amount and often come up with really fun characters based on the question, "how would such a person come to have those skills/talents/traits?"This is exactly the laundry-list background which I earlier said I despise. If all you can think of with regards to the personality of your character is "how did he acquire his skills", then, again, he is naught but a collection of skills, with a story-about-those-skills tacked in for a good measure. And the story isn't even very interesting, because we all know how it ends: he acquires those skills, the end.

I would rather a player asked about his character, "how did he become so distrustful of strangers", or "why does he like to travel so much", "why does he wear the color red". Those are questions that define a person rather than a collection of skills and stats.

BootStrapTommy
2015-03-04, 03:20 PM
Any backstory or personality these characters end up having amounts to just so much handwaving to explain extremely improbable combinations of abilities. Improbable and impossible are two different things. This statement reeks of the bias that improbable is somehow inferior to probable. But becoming an adventure was improbable to begin with.

Segev
2015-03-04, 03:29 PM
This is exactly the laundry-list background which I earlier said I despise. If all you can think of with regards to the personality of your character is "how did he acquire his skills", then, again, he is naught but a collection of skills, with a story-about-those-skills tacked in for a good measure. And the story isn't even very interesting, because we all know how it ends: he acquires those skills, the end.

I would rather a player asked about his character, "how did he become so distrustful of strangers", or "why does he like to travel so much", "why does he wear the color red". Those are questions that define a person rather than a collection of skills and stats.

And yet, all those questions you want me to ask, I eventually do, because "how did he get those skills" also requires me to ask, "why was he there to do so?"

My dragon in the Rifts game isn't actually from Rifts Earth; he's from a space opera setting (designed in mostly broad strokes) where magic is known and used with technology (but not quite as techno-wizardry), and FTL is achieved by means of an engine that takes teleportation magic and translates it to rapid translation across space while still covering intervening distance. The dragon was, effectively, the engine on a civilian cargo ship.

They flew into a negative space wedgie and crash landed through a rift into CS territory, and his crew was slaughtered.

He has a loathing for the CS that is going to be very dangerous one day, and he's got a nose-in-the-air disdain for the primitive and uncivilized tech of the CS. Imagine his surprise when he found that the CS is the pinnacle of technology.

That developed from two questions: how can I justify a dragon heretofore unknown in the region, and how can I play one who knows no more about the setting than I do?


The thing is, your questions, "how did he become so distrustful of strangers", or "why does he like to travel so much", "why does he wear the color red" require you to already know that he's distrustful, likes to travel, and wears red.

If I were designing a "laundry list" backstory that you so despise, I would likely first realize that he must travel an awful lot; after all, that's the only way he'd be able to encounter all these disparate training opportunities. I'd also realize that his reason for leaving several of them was a series of betrayals - some of them his own - which have left him jaded as to the nature of people and thus distrustful of them.

The red he wears came from somewhere in my conception of him, too, if I'm asking why he wears it. Most likely, if it's something I stop to think about, it's because I had a reason FOR him to wear it, so I wouldn't bother asking the question. If I didn't have a reason, it's "because I like it," and likely the answer for him, too, would be similar.

Your hatred of "laundry list backstories" is going to blind you to the fact that many players probably deny making them because they know you hate them. So instead, they come up with them, then dress them up and make up the "approved" kind of question to lay out the character to you in. It doesn't prevent them. It just makes people lie to you about the order in which they came up with things.


I'm not saying everybody does. I'm saying that you're forcing those who think like I do to either lie to you or anger you with hated orders of operations. I'm sure there are people whose first thought on a character is, "I want an iconoclastic loner who travels around in a red coat," and then develop the character from there. I'm usually not one of them.

Solaris
2015-03-04, 03:36 PM
You must have joined the wrong army. I learned to play D&D in the military. Just saying.

I said "A lot", not "All". The fact that I ran D&D campaigns in Wainwright, Hood, and Camp Boring Buehring doesn't change the fact that most of the guys in the battery (and company, when I changed over) were more interested in weapons, survival, and various fighting techniques than they were in other sorts of things.

Knaight
2015-03-04, 08:30 PM
And none of the bolded has anything to do with mechanics, having an optimized character or not doesn't have any impact on that.

This is hugely system dependent. There are plenty of systems where there are mechanics for exactly those things. Heck, there are systems where a large part of optimizing is making the character compelling through the mechanical representations of who they are, then reaping the resulting spotlight time.

sakuuya
2015-03-04, 08:50 PM
This is hugely system dependent. There are plenty of systems where there are mechanics for exactly those things. Heck, there are systems where a large part of optimizing is making the character compelling through the mechanical representations of who they are, then reaping the resulting spotlight time.

Hmm, I wonder if, in those system, the "Roleplay not rollplay!" crowd gives people crap for making characters whose Aspects (or whatever) come up a lot in play. "If you were a real roleplayer, your character's only Aspect would be Pretty Okay at Basket Weaving! And don't even think about being really good as basket-weaving, you munchkin!"

Maglubiyet
2015-03-04, 09:14 PM
I can assure you that your players who minmaxed and then didn't RP would be just as bad at RPing if you forced them to use character weaker than they would design, themselves.
You're probably right.


I, personally, RP a significant amount and often come up with really fun characters based on the question, "how would such a person come to have those skills/talents/traits?"
And I appreciate that...a lot. Based on your posts, I'd party with you, cowboy. But I'm sure you've witnessed some of the lameness I'm talking about.

Me: "Why'd you pick that?"
MinMax: "Cuz it gives me an extra 2d6".
Me: "But how would your character ever be able to get that ability?"
MinMax: "I dunno, maybe his grandfather was a troll or something."

It's stuff like this that makes finding other role-players a breath of fresh air. I'm sure the group the OP was talking about was feeling threatened because they had finally found a refuge with like-minded souls and here was Joe Optimizer coming and crashing their party. Maybe they reacted a little harshly, but I can understand where they were coming from.

goto124
2015-03-04, 09:20 PM
I find it funny how players can be so... is 'judgmental' the right word here?... of other's RP. In my experience most people don't care about the little details of your RP as long as they're having fun and not being disruptive. So your party member has an ability that helps the group and causes no trouble. No reason to think so hard about how he got it. You can avoid giving that ability to your own character because it doesn't make sense to you, but telling another player that is... jerkish perhaps?

Maglubiyet
2015-03-04, 09:33 PM
I find it funny how players can be so... is 'judgmental' the right word here?... of other's RP. In my experience most people don't care about the little details of your RP as long as they're having fun and not being disruptive. So your party member has an ability that helps the group and causes no trouble. No reason to think so hard about how he got it. You can avoid giving that ability to your own character because it doesn't make sense to you, but telling another player that is... jerkish perhaps?

Well, we're talking offline here, not criticizing specific people to their face. As a DM these issues can become frustrating, which is why we're debating/b*tching about them here.

Generally, with my groups I'll just roll with things, even if it requires a big shoehorn to fit it into gameplay. If I think something simply cannot work, I'll help a player find something that will. And if things get really bad, if someone's play style is drastically at odds with the rest of the group and is impacting everyone's enjoyment, that person just won't get invited back.

Lord Raziere
2015-03-04, 09:55 PM
Hmm, I wonder if, in those system, the "Roleplay not rollplay!" crowd gives people crap for making characters whose Aspects (or whatever) come up a lot in play. "If you were a real roleplayer, your character's only Aspect would be Pretty Okay at Basket Weaving! And don't even think about being really good as basket-weaving, you munchkin!"

no those would be horrible aspects.

I dislike optimizers, but I love Fate and having competent characters in it. mostly because at any time, detrimental Aspects can be invoked at any time and are encouraged to do so; why, you practically NEED negative Aspects for the GM to invoke so that in certain situations you get a -2 penalty to an action. in exchange you get a Fate point to spend on another action later that will give you a benefit. its a system thats very much about a cooperative GM/PC give and take to keep the narrative interesting.

why I dislike optimizers, is that they make characters basically mary sues who always succeed in my opinion, horrible characters for the kind of fun I want to have, because my fun involves things being more swingy narrative wise than the optimized character coming up with a solution to every problem. if you are prepared for eveything in advance and can effortlessly deal with the situation, why are you playing at all? you have already solved this, therefore from my perspective I need to scrap the scenario you solved and come up with a scenario you have not so as to make it interesting instead of a foregone conclusion of an optimizer's victory in a DnD-like system.

I may dislike optimization, but I also do not like the people who try to make incompetent characters for no reason. you can have competent characters without optimization thank you very much.

goto124
2015-03-04, 10:02 PM
why I dislike optimizers, is that they make characters basically mary sues who always succeed in my opinion

I'm not sure how strict your definition of 'optimizer' is, but if so many optimizers you meet are those perfect people who never have any trouble with anything, I don't know what kind of people you've been with. Optimizing doesn't have to mean breaking the game and blasting through every combat and social encounter. I would give examples, but I think it's best left to others who remember better.

Knaight
2015-03-04, 10:39 PM
no those would be horrible aspects.

That's the point. In the context of Fate, making compelling aspects is optimizing, because they're more likely to see use. If your core concept is "Homeless alchemist with a debt", there's a lot that can be done. There are several positive uses, several negative uses, some degree of memorability. It is significantly more optimized than "Alchemist".

Lord Raziere
2015-03-04, 11:30 PM
That's the point. In the context of Fate, making compelling aspects is optimizing, because they're more likely to see use. If your core concept is "Homeless alchemist with a debt", there's a lot that can be done. There are several positive uses, several negative uses, some degree of memorability. It is significantly more optimized than "Alchemist".

No. optimized IS Alchemist. it doesn't have flaws. therefore it wins, therefore its optimized.

Knaight
2015-03-04, 11:38 PM
No. optimized IS Alchemist. it doesn't have flaws. therefore it wins, therefore its optimized.

It sits in the background, largely being bypassed by the fate point economy and occasionally being invoked for a positive benefit and getting to the margins of it. It's a deeply flawed aspect, and the flaws all pretty much eventually distill down to it being about as interesting as dry toast that used to be wonderbread.

Lord Raziere
2015-03-04, 11:45 PM
It sits in the background, largely being bypassed by the fate point economy and occasionally being invoked for a positive benefit and getting to the margins of it. It's a deeply flawed aspect, and the flaws all pretty much eventually distill down to it being about as interesting as dry toast that used to be wonderbread.

well yeah, thats because its perfect. perfect is boring. perfection is also optimization. therefore Fate works well against optimizing, because optimizing is a pursuit of perfection, that only leads to boredom. thats my point.

Sith_Happens
2015-03-05, 12:48 AM
I disagree. Optimized characters stretch the limits of "realism" and hence are unbelievable characters to roleplay. How many people in the real world have only exactly the right combination of skills and experience to make them the very best at what they do? Answer: Very very VERY few. Most people know how to do a smattering of various things aside from their main vocation.

Very few, say, paramedics spend every waking moment studying trauma medicine, perusing catalogs of the latest technology for ambulances, practice administering different combination of drugs, putting on splints, assisting in surgeries, etc. And even fewer of these paramedics will have grown up in a refugee field hospital near a warzone where both her parents were trauma surgeons whom she assisted from the day she could first walk. Most paramedics have other skills not related to their day jobs, like surf-fishing, cooking, skiing, painting, carpentry, etc.

Optimized characters tend to be very one-dimensional -- they know ONLY the particular combination of skills that maxes out their performance, with no extraneous abilities that don't add to that maximum. They are not well-rounded individuals. If you met them in real life they would probably seem like they were autistic or something, only able to talk about one topic...endlessly.

That is why they are not role-playable, because they are unrealistic.

If I had seen this post yesterday when it was your most recent one I'd be calling Poe's law on it, because I can barely wrap my head around the fact that it's even possible to fit anywhere near this much Stormwind fallacy and appeal to realism into the same small space, much less that someone would do so and be serious about it. But it's not yesterday, and I can see that this is in fact serious.:smalleek:

...Not to mention that second paragraph is actually quite a fun-sounding character backstory.


It's usually much worse. We could be talking about a paramedic whose mother was a White Witch, and whose father was an Olympic fencer, and who inherited the powers of magic and swordplay from both. Also, at some point in his childhood, he fell into a hole where he mind-melded with a vampiric bat, and while in highschool, fell in with the wrong crowd, learned to pick locks and steal cars, and grew a third eye as a result of experimental drug mishap.

Most of those "my character inspired first by mechanics" life stories read incredibly boring - they are just a laundry list to cover the character's powers. "X happened to my character to gain power A, then Y happened to him to gain power B ...". Admittedly, they don't have to be this way, but fact is, Stormwind fallacy be damned, they more often then not are.

This has nothing to do with optimization and everything to do with (a) laziness and (b) the mistaken assumption that every class (if applicable), feat (or equivalent), skill, etc. on your character sheet must in isolation correspond to some discrete phase or element of your character's life. In actuality, however disparate your character's abilities and capabilities may be, if you consider them as a whole (or at least in chunks) rather than individually it shouldn't be unduly hard to think up some relatively coherent context under which they can in fact exist together.


When Huckleberry Finn took his epic river raft journey, I honestly do not recall him optimizing his River Rafting skill, nor do I recall him having been born the scion to a family of master river rafters. But, you know what, I'm sure he would have, if he was an RPG character.

And I'm sure he wouldn't have, because the raft was just how he got from place to place and the Mississippi river is quite calm and easy to raft on. Most his actual adventures consisted primarily of tricking people and escaping various sticky situations, both of which things he was in fact quite good at (or, in RPG terms, optimized for).


Interestingly, that style of play translates much better to fiction than "my draconic bard boosted the party's hits by 10d6 acid and we took out Asmodeus in one round".

Interestingly, not only is my draconic bard probably my current group's overall favorite character out of the eleven we've been playing between two campaigns, it's mostly for how I portray him rather than for his ability to boost the party's hits by 6d6 sonic.:smalltongue:


[Snip]

http://i45.tinypic.com/2ynfa5i.jpg


In my campaigns you would be penalized for maximizing one trait at the expense of all others. Not explicitly, but if you're a one-show pony it'll become apparent when half the encounters require more finesse than just the ability to level mountains. It's not for everyone and it definitely works in some game systems better than others.

Funny thing, when someone is both a good optimizer and a good roleplayer, the bolded tends to be something they actually want out of the game (in moderation, of course). The best and most memorable moments in play tend to be those that involve both playing to your strengths and overcoming your weaknesses.


Improbable and impossible are two different things. This statement reeks of the bias that improbable is somehow inferior to probable. But becoming an adventure was improbable to begin with.

This. The vast majority of RPGs assume that the player characters are the sorts of people who very much aren't a dime a dozen.


I'm sure there are people whose first thought on a character is, "I want an iconoclastic loner who travels around in a red coat," and then develop the character from there.

You know, I think I know a character who probably fits that description:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/1b/Vash_the_Stampede.jpg


well yeah, thats because its perfect. perfect is boring. perfection is also optimization. therefore Fate works well against optimizing, because optimizing is a pursuit of perfection, that only leads to boredom. thats my point.

Optimization is the pursuit of being good at something, and is highly context-dependent. The Fate system has the peculiar (though more common than you might think) quality that one of the best ways to be good at something is to either be bad at something or have some particular sort of misfortune that you're a magnet for. Therefore, an "optimized" Fate character will have a balance of strengths and flaws.

Lord Raziere
2015-03-05, 01:00 AM
Optimization is the pursuit of being good at something, and is highly context-dependent. The Fate system has the peculiar (though more common than you might think) quality that one of the best ways to be good at something is to either be bad at something or have some particular sort of misfortune that you're a magnet for. Therefore, an "optimized" Fate character will have a balance of strengths and flaws.

You are mistaken. Optimization is concrete and obvious. To be bad at something is to not be good and therefore the opposite of optimization and therefore as you include anything bad into it, your not optimizing, therefore no, a good Fate character is anything but optimized. they are imperfect and therefore not optimized at all.

daremetoidareyo
2015-03-05, 01:03 AM
I have an optimization story.

This guy, Brian and I played D&D in the same group. He was an optimizer, and he was good at it. He could make a tank whose sole reason to exist was to make damage disappear. He understands game mechanics and metagame. He didn't understand social dynamics so well. Brian would tell you a story that he already told you, after you stopped him to tell him that you already heard this story. Brian would talk mechanical shop during every game we played and what people would get out of him was that the sole thing that he cared about was making the most powerful guy in the universe. His approach to this fantasy setting was to mathematically pick apart the game itself to assemble his game-token. This interrupted some peoples suspension of disbelief. That was his problem. Minmaxxer was thrown around a lot when conversation went on to Brian.

The thing is, I would do the exact same thing as brian. I would look at the game, break it apart mathematically, and assemble it all back together for an optimised character concept. But I would leave a hole, an achilles heal, on purpose, an obvious "attack me here" point because that would get my character design a free-pass. I assumed that there is an element of good faith in roleplay, DM assumed that I was really invested in a concept, and I assumed the DM would attack me at my weakpoint, but feel guilt and shame from exploiting the most obvious point of attack, so they would, at least, softball it. That is a whole level of optimization that Brian was and still is incapable of. Relying on social levers to carry you to a pre-ordained result, literally employing interpersonal dynamics to facilitate the creation of my super powerful mary sue, while suffering absolutely none of the social backlash for optimization. I would silently take stock of how many times a dm threw a certain monster at us and buy preparatory gear when it seemed like they were going to change up the pace. If I haven't seen undead in 3 levels, I'm going to buy some holy water from that temple that the DM took the time out of his limited number of words to describe the town with and some easily arguable wooden gearpiece, (easily disassmbled for stakes/ad hoc holy symbols, whathaveyou) JIC. Metagaming beyond metagaming because it could not be defined as such. It seems vain, but the number of times I was correct about these things was enough to continue the behavior.


The crazy thing is, the "roleplay not rollplay" crowd is totally ok with these optimization schemes. 1.) They're nigh impossible to pin to someone easily and 2.) they see it as attentive: rewards for engaging the plot for you, buddy.

Milo v3
2015-03-05, 01:07 AM
You are mistaken. Optimization is concrete and obvious. To be bad at something is to not be good and therefore the opposite of optimization and therefore as you include anything bad into it, your not optimizing, therefore no, a good Fate character is anything but optimized. they are imperfect and therefore not optimized at all.

Your nearly correct. The optimization is to be good at the Game, and in Fate the best way to be good at the Game is for your character to have flaws, meaning optimizers in Fate would give their characters flaws.

Lord Raziere
2015-03-05, 01:16 AM
Your nearly correct. The optimization is to be good at the Game, and in Fate the best way to be good at the Game is for your character to have flaws, meaning optimizers in Fate would give their characters flaws.

your mistaken. to have any flaw is not be optimized and to be good at Fate you must not be optimized. Being good at something and being optimized are two completely different things.

Maglubiyet
2015-03-05, 01:21 AM
...when someone is both a good optimizer and a good rollplayer (sic?)...

The crux of it is that this is a rare breed. I'd be happier with the former if more attention was paid to the latter (assuming that you meant "roleplayer").

I would still disallow exploits clearly not intended nor foreseen by the developers. With dozens of books written by dozens of authors over the span of a decade+ it was impossible for them to check every possible combination of abilities. When you hit upon a mix that allows your character to do damage an order of magnitude above other characters of the same level, you've found a bug, not an optimum.

sakuuya
2015-03-05, 01:30 AM
You are mistaken. Optimization is concrete and obvious. To be bad at something is to not be good and therefore the opposite of optimization and therefore as you include anything bad into it, your not optimizing, therefore no, a good Fate character is anything but optimized. they are imperfect and therefore not optimized at all.

Ah, see, here's the trouble: You're using "optimization" differently than the people you're arguing with. You seem to be conflating "optimization" with what's called "theoretical optimization," stuff like Pun-Pun and the Omniscificer. Practical optimization--the kind that sees the most actual play, and which most of the rest of us are talking about--is generally about building to a concept as well as possible. For instance, this (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?394981-Iron-Chef-Optimisation-Challenge-in-the-Playground-LXV) is an optimization challenge, even though it's centered around a gawdawful prestige class that pretty much precludes being good at...well, anything, actually.

You may disagree with this definition, but it's the common one, and people aren't wrong for using it.

Lord Raziere
2015-03-05, 01:41 AM
Ah, see, here's the trouble: You're using "optimization" differently than the people you're arguing with. You seem to be conflating "optimization" with what's called "theoretical optimization," stuff like Pun-Pun and the Omniscificer. Practical optimization--the kind that sees the most actual play, and which most of the rest of us are talking about--is generally about building to a concept as well as possible. For instance, this (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?394981-Iron-Chef-Optimisation-Challenge-in-the-Playground-LXV) is an optimization challenge, even though it's centered around a gawdawful prestige class that pretty much precludes being good at...well, anything, actually.

You may disagree with this definition, but it's the common one, and people aren't wrong for using it.

No, your using the wrong definition. you think that doing reasonable things is optimization, when your just watering down the term to mean anything remotely good. thus the term doesn't actually mean anything, because you apply it to anything resembling a strategy. thus you establish that "optimization" seems to be everything good, and thus your dominance over others who don't like it, just so you can pull this very thing on me, and thus be "right".

I mean I'm not an optimizer. and I don't want to be. Ever. therefore optimizers couldn't possibly do anything I do, because I'm not one of them. optimizers are just trying to be conceptually aggressive to make me think that anything good is optimization, when I know better than that. I make reasonable decisions that any rolepalyer would do, if an optimizer does the same reasonable thing, its just what any other roleplay would do, therefore the only things that can be optimization are the things that stand out from the average roleplayer and therefore not something I do. I don't optimize, you just mistake what I do for optimization because you can't conceive of anything good not being optimization. See?

sakuuya
2015-03-05, 01:46 AM
No, your using the wrong definition. you think that doing reasonable things is optimization, when your just watering down the term to mean anything remotely good. thus the term doesn't actually mean anything, because you apply it to anything resembling a strategy. thus you establish that "optimization" seems to be everything good, and thus your dominance over others who don't like it, just so you can pull this very thing on me, and thus be "right".

I mean I'm not an optimizer. and I don't want to be. Ever. therefore optimizers couldn't possibly do anything I do, because I'm not one of them. optimizers are just trying to be conceptually aggressive to make me think that anything good is optimization, when I know better than that. I make reasonable decisions that any rolepalyer would do, if an optimizer does the same reasonable thing, its just what any other roleplay would do, therefore the only things that can be optimization are the things that stand out from the average roleplayer and therefore not something I do. I don't optimize, you just mistake what I do for optimization because you can't conceive of anything good not being optimization. See?

Please do not assume what I can and cannot conceive of. My point was not, in fact, about either definition being right or wrong (I disagree with yours, you disagree with mine, and I think we'll have to agree to disagree), but that your definition is not the standard one on these boards, which I think is at the root of some misunderstandings between you and some other people in this thread.

Milo v3
2015-03-05, 02:21 AM
your mistaken. to have any flaw is not be optimized and to be good at Fate you must not be optimized. Being good at something and being optimized are two completely different things.

Just because the character has Flaws doesn't mean the character has flaws. For example, taking a Flaw in 3.5e is a very good option from an optimization standpoint because of the benefits it gives you. One of the big munchkin things is about how they stack up on tonnes of Flaws so they can get abilities they normally Shouldn't be able to get.

Sith_Happens
2015-03-05, 02:22 AM
You are mistaken. Optimization is concrete and obvious. To be bad at something is to not be good and therefore the opposite of optimization and therefore as you include anything bad into it, your not optimizing, therefore no, a good Fate character is anything but optimized. they are imperfect and therefore not optimized at all.


your mistaken. to have any flaw is not be optimized and to be good at Fate you must not be optimized. Being good at something and being optimized are two completely different things.

http://www.troll.me/images/futurama-fry/not-sure-if-serious-thumb.jpg


The thing is, I would do the exact same thing as brian. I would look at the game, break it apart mathematically, and assemble it all back together for an optimised character concept. But I would leave a hole, an achilles heal, on purpose, an obvious "attack me here" point because that would get my character design a free-pass. I assumed that there is an element of good faith in roleplay, DM assumed that I was really invested in a concept, and I assumed the DM would attack me at my weakpoint, but feel guilt and shame from exploiting the most obvious point of attack, so they would, at least, softball it. That is a whole level of optimization that Brian was and still is incapable of. Relying on social levers to carry you to a pre-ordained result, literally employing interpersonal dynamics to facilitate the creation of my super powerful mary sue, while suffering absolutely none of the social backlash for optimization. I would silently take stock of how many times a dm threw a certain monster at us and buy preparatory gear when it seemed like they were going to change up the pace. If I haven't seen undead in 3 levels, I'm going to buy some holy water from that temple that the DM took the time out of his limited number of words to describe the town with and some easily arguable wooden gearpiece, (easily disassmbled for stakes/ad hoc holy symbols, whathaveyou) JIC. Metagaming beyond metagaming because it could not be defined as such. It seems vain, but the number of times I was correct about these things was enough to continue the behavior.

The crazy thing is, the "roleplay not rollplay" crowd is totally ok with these optimization schemes. 1.) They're nigh impossible to pin to someone easily and 2.) they see it as attentive: rewards for engaging the plot for you, buddy.

http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/16073432/images/1314385550573.jpg


(assuming that you meant "roleplayer").

<.<
>.>

...I have no idea what you're talking about.


No, your using the wrong definition. you think that doing reasonable things is optimization, when your just watering down the term to mean anything remotely good. thus the term doesn't actually mean anything, because you apply it to anything resembling a strategy. thus you establish that "optimization" seems to be everything good, and thus your dominance over others who don't like it, just so you can pull this very thing on me, and thus be "right".

I mean I'm not an optimizer. and I don't want to be. Ever. therefore optimizers couldn't possibly do anything I do, because I'm not one of them. optimizers are just trying to be conceptually aggressive to make me think that anything good is optimization, when I know better than that. I make reasonable decisions that any rolepalyer would do, if an optimizer does the same reasonable thing, its just what any other roleplay would do, therefore the only things that can be optimization are the things that stand out from the average roleplayer and therefore not something I do. I don't optimize, you just mistake what I do for optimization because you can't conceive of anything good not being optimization. See?

You, sir, have obviously optimized the hell out of your ability to confuse me.:smallconfused:

Arbane
2015-03-05, 04:37 AM
I do wonder why more games don't give you X number of points to use on a list of primary, job-related skills and then Y number of points to use on another list of non-job-related skills.

I could swear I've seen a few games that do that, but I'm blanking on names. RuneQuest sort-of does this, as there aren't many skills in it that aren't useful in one way or another. Big Eyes, Small Mouth had a clever approach - skills were supposed to have their build-point costs weighted by how useful they were in any specific campaign. (In a kung-fu campaign, martial arts skills were expensive, social skills less so. In a romantic comedy campaign, it would be the other way around.)


So... you're telling me that every skill available in the game comes up equally often in a meaningful fashion? Really?

"....And that's how we defeated the Tarrasque using my Profession: Farmer skill!" said no D&D characters ever.


I find it funny how players can be so... is 'judgmental' the right word here?... of other's RP.

As a semi-reformed Roleplaying Snob, I will confess to being guilty of this entirely too often. I think a lot of it is just Nerd Bullying, which almost invariably takes the form of trying to establish intellectual superiority.


I mean I'm not an optimizer. and I don't want to be. Ever. therefore optimizers couldn't possibly do anything I do, because I'm not one of them.


http://www.troll.me/images/futurama-fry/not-sure-if-serious-thumb.jpg


I'm not sure, either.

Lord Raziere
2015-03-05, 09:49 AM
As a semi-reformed Roleplaying Snob, I will confess to being guilty of this entirely too often. I think a lot of it is just Nerd Bullying, which almost invariably takes the form of trying to establish intellectual superiority.


I'm not sure, either.

The first part of this confuses me, as why would I want to establish intellectual superiority over anyone as I am not superior to anyone, as a person I am equal to other people, and therefore not inherently above others, therefore trying to be superior to anyone is silly because you can't, because your a person and trying to be anything else is trying an elitist seeking perfection which only leads to boredom or evil.

and yes, I really don't identify as an optimizer, as I do not want to do what an optimizer does. it just doesn't sound like me.

Segev
2015-03-05, 10:12 AM
I'm going to go ahead and respond to all these multiquotes I've taken the time to gather, though I confess that I fear I may be feeding Lord Raziere's brilliant effort to build himself up as a straw man. If so, I applaud him for his efforts, as it took quite a few posts before I started to suspect. If not...well, here is my response.

well yeah, thats because its perfect. perfect is boring. perfection is also optimization. therefore Fate works well against optimizing, because optimizing is a pursuit of perfection, that only leads to boredom. thats my point.


You are mistaken. Optimization is concrete and obvious. To be bad at something is to not be good and therefore the opposite of optimization and therefore as you include anything bad into it, your not optimizing, therefore no, a good Fate character is anything but optimized. they are imperfect and therefore not optimized at all.



Your nearly correct. The optimization is to be good at the Game, and in Fate the best way to be good at the Game is for your character to have flaws, meaning optimizers in Fate would give their characters flaws.your mistaken. to have any flaw is not be optimized and to be good at Fate you must not be optimized. Being good at something and being optimized are two completely different things.

(Incidentally, given that I've usually seen excellent grammar out of Lord Raziere, the "your" here makes me suspect it is, in fact, a clever ruse.)

*Ahem*

Optimization is maximizing your utility function. What your utility function is depends on several things. In RPGs, one of the biggest aspects of the utility function is how the game mechanics measure and determine your ability to succeed. Other elements are your personal goals with the character.

Literally any choice you make that is successful in making your character what you want to play and exactly as capable as you want him to be in the game is successful optimization.

Unsuccessful optimization is any action which diminishes the output of your utility function. If your goal is to make a competent member of a party who is fun to play with and to play, then choices which make your character unwelcome to the other players or which make him fail so often that he induces frustration are sub-optimal.

In FATE, if it requires having narrative flaws and weaknesses to achieve the most success overall, then optimization for a utility function based on success will require "balanced" Aspects.

Optimization is contextual simply by virtue of your utility function being contextual. What are you trying to achieve? Any effort you put towards achieving it which is not deliberately handicapped is effort towards optimization.

The key is identifying the utility function correctly.

goto124
2015-03-05, 10:17 AM
Is there a Worst Player entry for someone who tried to abuse the Fate Point system? Because that sounds pretty funny and horrible. And am I asking in the right thread?

Lord Raziere
2015-03-05, 10:28 AM
I'm going to go ahead and respond to all these multiquotes I've taken the time to gather, though I confess that I fear I may be feeding Lord Raziere's brilliant effort to build himself up as a straw man. If so, I applaud him for his efforts, as it took quite a few posts before I started to suspect. If not...well, here is my response.






(Incidentally, given that I've usually seen excellent grammar out of Lord Raziere, the "your" here makes me suspect it is, in fact, a clever ruse.)

*Ahem*

Optimization is maximizing your utility function. What your utility function is depends on several things. In RPGs, one of the biggest aspects of the utility function is how the game mechanics measure and determine your ability to succeed. Other elements are your personal goals with the character.

Literally any choice you make that is successful in making your character what you want to play and exactly as capable as you want him to be in the game is successful optimization.

Unsuccessful optimization is any action which diminishes the output of your utility function. If your goal is to make a competent member of a party who is fun to play with and to play, then choices which make your character unwelcome to the other players or which make him fail so often that he induces frustration are sub-optimal.

In FATE, if it requires having narrative flaws and weaknesses to achieve the most success overall, then optimization for a utility function based on success will require "balanced" Aspects.

Optimization is contextual simply by virtue of your utility function being contextual. What are you trying to achieve? Any effort you put towards achieving it which is not deliberately handicapped is effort towards optimization.

The key is identifying the utility function correctly.

Bolded part: see? This is what I'm talking about, you literally just said that any good choice is a optimal choice when I disagree with that. Please stop using the word for anything remotely good. Your watering it down and making optimization seem omnipresent and unavoidable. I disagree with that.

Good choices are not optimization choices. Optimization choices are choices only an optimizer would make, and since I'm not an optimizer, I wouldn't make those choices.

and I'm not trying to make a Straw man. I really do not want to be an optimizer, and do not believe that just because something is a good choice that it automatically means its an optimization choice! Stop forcing the term on where it doesn't belong!

Sliver
2015-03-05, 10:54 AM
Bolded part: see? This is what I'm talking about, you literally just said that any good choice is a optimal choice when I disagree with that. Please stop using the word for anything remotely good. Your watering it down and making optimization seem omnipresent and unavoidable. I disagree with that.

Good choices are not optimization choices. Optimization choices are choices only an optimizer would make, and since I'm not an optimizer, I wouldn't make those choices.

and I'm not trying to make a Straw man. I really do not want to be an optimizer, and do not believe that just because something is a good choice that it automatically means its an optimization choice! Stop forcing the term on where it doesn't belong!

You disagreeing with that doesn't make it wrong...

The sentence following the bolded part? Hilarious.


optimize
[op-tuh-mahyz]

verb (used with object), optimized, optimizing.
1.
to make as effective, perfect, or useful as possible.
2.
to make the best of.

Perfect is subjective, best is good. Meaning, that you want your character to be X, so you optimize it for X. X doesn't have to be 'the dullest character that ruins everybody's fun'.

Segev
2015-03-05, 10:58 AM
Bolded part: see? This is what I'm talking about, you literally just said that any good choice is a optimal choice when I disagree with that. Please stop using the word for anything remotely good. Your watering it down and making optimization seem omnipresent and unavoidable. I disagree with that.

Good choices are not optimization choices. Optimization choices are choices only an optimizer would make, and since I'm not an optimizer, I wouldn't make those choices.

and I'm not trying to make a Straw man. I really do not want to be an optimizer, and do not believe that just because something is a good choice that it automatically means its an optimization choice! Stop forcing the term on where it doesn't belong!

Optimization is making choices which maximize your utility function. By setting as your utility function "I do not want to be an optimizer," you are establishing that any choice you make which helps you not be "an optimizer" is an optimal choice.

This does approach the paradoxical sort of problems raised by "the set of all sets which do not contain themselves."

But the point remains: your definition of "optimizer" is not really clear, here, and is moreover being used to circularly re-defined "optimization" as "something an optimizer does."

You cannot define optimizers as "those who perform optimization" and then define "optimization" as "something optimizers do." It loses meaning.

Solaris
2015-03-05, 11:31 AM
Gentlemen, you're in a definitional argument with someone who's refusing to accept the commonly held definition of a term.
You're not going to win this one.

Lord Raziere
2015-03-05, 11:39 AM
Gentlemen, you're in a definitional argument with someone who's refusing to accept the commonly held definition of a term.
You're not going to win this one.

Yes! because the definition your using is too wide and is therefore meaningless. I might as well say that because I want a peanut butter sandwhich, putting peanut butter on bread is optimization! which is just absurd. thats just common sense, not optimization. optimization goes far beyond whats needed to actually get anything done. I don't need it. Your all just trying to expand the definition of optimization beyond what it should have and make it into something far greater than it actually is. I don't need optimization to make good decisions.

Segev
2015-03-05, 12:01 PM
Actually, you do.

That's what the word "optimal" means: "best under the circumstances."

If you want a peanut butter sandwich. then choosing peanut butter over something else is optimizing for a peanut butter sandwich. You can make more optimal decisions, if you like, by choosing a brand of peanut butter you prefer over ones you like less, or by choosing chunky or smooth to suit your taste.



Though perhaps it will be easier if you tell us what your definition of "optimizer" and "optimize" is.

Sliver
2015-03-05, 12:12 PM
Though perhaps it will be easier if you tell us what your definition of "optimizer" and "optimize" is.

Optimizer is a person who does whatever Lord Raziere will never do, because Lord Raziere will never be an optimizer.

TheCountAlucard
2015-03-05, 12:16 PM
Raziere, your problem is you think being called an optimizer is a bad thing, and that any amount of mental gymnastics it takes to avoid being labeled as such is remotely worth it.

Slap that notion right out of your head, please, before you offend more people. :smallmad:

HalfTangible
2015-03-05, 12:26 PM
@Raziere: I'll admit I only just got here, but it seems to me the problem is that 'optimizer' means something different than what you think it does. To optimize a character means to increase your ability to do a task, while minimizing their disadvantages to performing that task. Most of the time, what is 'optimized' depends on what you're trying to do with a character.

But you're specifically calling out 'optimizer' as a bad thing, because...... I honestly have no idea. It's only bad if your character becomes unbeatable and without weakness, which frankly is not going to happen in any competently designed game, because there's always alternate avenues of attack. If I'm playing Bounty Hunter in Dota, I'm going to buy Drums of Endurance, not Heart of Tarrasque.

Also, I think you outright said that everyone else is wrong and you're right, which is a terrible argument.

@OP: I'm not sure why you can't just use 'scrub'? It fits in this context, doesn't it?

Solaris
2015-03-05, 12:57 PM
Yes! because the definition your using is too wide and is therefore meaningless. I might as well say that because I want a peanut butter sandwhich, putting peanut butter on bread is optimization! which is just absurd. thats just common sense, not optimization. optimization goes far beyond whats needed to actually get anything done. I don't need it. Your all just trying to expand the definition of optimization beyond what it should have and make it into something far greater than it actually is. I don't need optimization to make good decisions.

Take it up with Webster, Raziere.


Well, we're talking offline here, not criticizing specific people to their face. As a DM these issues can become frustrating, which is why we're debating/b*tching about them here.

Generally, with my groups I'll just roll with things, even if it requires a big shoehorn to fit it into gameplay. If I think something simply cannot work, I'll help a player find something that will. And if things get really bad, if someone's play style is drastically at odds with the rest of the group and is impacting everyone's enjoyment, that person just won't get invited back.

I've found that asking the player questions about their character and guiding them in writing their background stories works a lot better than complaining about them online. Oftentimes it can be as simple as "And then what happened?" and offering up suggestions when they're not coming up with something terribly workable.
I mean, I know you work with the ones who're really bad, but... if it's bad enough that it bothers you, why not try and fix it?

Knaight
2015-03-05, 01:08 PM
I mean I'm not an optimizer. and I don't want to be. Ever. therefore optimizers couldn't possibly do anything I do, because I'm not one of them.

This makes zero sense. Using the exact same logic, I could say something like this:

"I mean, I'm not a tribesman in a remote corner of the Amazon, and I don't want to be. Ever. Therefore, tribesmen in remote corners of the Amazon couldn't possibly do anything I do, because I'm not one of them."

Yet we both eat, we both sleep, we both talk, we both encounter art in our societies, and there's even a reasonable chance that we appreciate some of the same technologies (even if they aren't generally thought of as technologies due to being really old).

On top of this, it's not like optimizing is some concept that was pulled out of thin air. It's had a mathematical definition for ages, and what you optimize for varies highly by application. You might be optimizing a cylinder for having the minimum surface area for a given value - that's a real world application that comes up fairly often in canning (though you're generally minimizing the volume of metal instead and surface thickness usually varies). It's also never going to be "flawless" - even the best cylinder uses more material than a sphere.

Maglubiyet
2015-03-05, 01:38 PM
I've found that asking the player questions about their character and guiding them in writing their background stories works a lot better than complaining about them online.

Who said I'm not doing that already? All. The. F'ing. Time.

Solaris
2015-03-05, 02:25 PM
Who said I'm not doing that already? All. The. F'ing. Time.

Ouch.
You have my sympathies, then. The worst crimes my players have committed with their backgrounds has been to not have one, or to have one that's utterly dull without really breaking anything setting-wise.

Any particularly good stinkers?

Maglubiyet
2015-03-05, 04:23 PM
Any particularly good stinkers?

I wish there were stand-outs, but it's mostly as you say, minimal effort. Or as Galen mentioned earlier, a list format designed to account for each specific ability individually.

For low-level characters this is not a big deal. But when we're talking about a draonnel-mounted paladin/cavalier, that's the kind of guy who probably has songs written about him, is emulated by half the kids in the kingdom, and is the target of half the baronesses who are trying to marry off their daughters. His lineage and credentials are going to be under very close scrutiny by hero worshipers and jealous rivals alike.

His character sheet says he has skills in Knowledge (nobility and royalty) and Diplomacy, plus an obviously high CHA. So at the very least his character would know that the terse official backstory he was barking at people, that he was "raised by bandits", was not going to fly. We settled on him hiring a personal chronicler to handle his public relations.

neonchameleon
2015-03-05, 04:40 PM
This makes zero sense. Using the exact same logic, I could say something like this:

"I mean, I'm not a tribesman in a remote corner of the Amazon, and I don't want to be. Ever. Therefore, tribesmen in remote corners of the Amazon couldn't possibly do anything I do, because I'm not one of them."

I agree with the basic idea behind your logic but would use a slightly different analogy. "I am not a professional athlete, and I don't want to be ever. Therefore professional athletes couldn't possibly do anything I do because I'm not one of them." That's how silly Lord Raziere's statement is.

An optimiser is someone who takes the time to learn and understand the rules so they can best use them to play the game they want to play. Now some optimisers are also munchkins who deliberately set out to steamroll the game. But it is neither necessary nor sufficient to be an optimiser to be an annoying jerk who wants to squash the game using rules (and frequently net-built characters that they don't actually understand).

Pluto!
2015-03-05, 05:30 PM
I think there's a fundamentally difference in the process by which I (and many outspoken folks on these forums) approach RPGs and the process by which every person I've actually gamed with approaches RPGs.

When I play D&D 3/PF, I come in looking at the mechanics. I plan every step of a character's advancement far longer ahead of time than I expect the game to actually go. I pore through piles of splatbooks and databases of feats and gear to ensure that my dude performs extremely capably.

When every single player I've gamed with (seriously, all of them) play D&D 3/PF, they give a quick look at whatever books are at hand, build for exactly their level. After play starts, they might see that they don't have a healer or their dudes have been hanging around certain priests, and pick up a level of Cleric. Every advancement spontaneous with choices informed by the game's development and the actual materials immediately at hand.

I do consider these entirely different processes, and mine is what I think when I hear or type "character optimization." I suspect that process is what LR is talking about.

It's the process people on these boards even seem to refer to as optimization most of the time. At least until they defend or justify optimization as a playstyle. At that point, the definition seems to expand to refer to any character building without the use of a dartboard or blindfold.

TheCountAlucard
2015-03-05, 05:33 PM
Nah, Raziere was specific upthread; "optimizers" are those filthy people who don't do exactly what Raziere does, for exactly the reasons Raziere does them. :smallyuk: Whatever optimization is is what Raziere doesn't do, since Raziere has no desire to be affiliated with optimization or optimizers (regardless of how we mere mortals define it).

A touch sarcastic, yes, but the argument made things pretty clear: in Raziere's eyes, we're not fit to decide for ourselves what the words we use mean even in the context we use them.

Aedilred
2015-03-05, 05:41 PM
Good choices are not optimization choices. Optimization choices are choices only an optimizer would make, and since I'm not an optimizer, I wouldn't make those choices.
An "optimiser" is, by your definition someone who makes "optimisation choices". "Optimisation choices" are the choices made by an "optimiser". Since you are not an optimiser, you do not make those choices, and therefore are not an optimiser.

The problem with this definition is that it ends up being entirely circular, and thus useless, even moreso than idiosyncratic definitions for commonly-used terms often are, and thus raises questions over the rest of your approach, since further assertions and beliefs appear to be built on this faulty foundation.

There's an element of both "Hitler was a vegetarian" and "No true Scotsman" fallacy in there too.

Blackhawk748
2015-03-05, 06:30 PM
Im gonna mimic the "Optimization is not a bad thing" stance. Generally i have a goal for my character, "I want to make a Swashbuckler" being an example, now swashbuckler (as i think of it) is more of a play style than a bunch of abilities, but i need abilities that match that style.

Example: I want him to be a swift moving rapid attacker. So Swashbuckler into Rogue into Dervish, or something similar gets me what i want. Now did i "optimize"? Yes. I wanted to be good at attacking a lot and move quickly, this build does that. Are there better ways to do this? Oh god yes. So while it is "optimized" it is not "optimal". I believe that may be what Raziere is getting confused on.

Lord Raziere
2015-03-05, 07:33 PM
Raziere, your problem is you think being called an optimizer is a bad thing, and that any amount of mental gymnastics it takes to avoid being labeled as such is remotely worth it.

Slap that notion right out of your head, please, before you offend more people. :smallmad:

Why?

You may do it however you wish, but I don't focus on optimization things. I focus on the art of roleplaying. Optimization is just not my focus, and therefore I'm not an optimizer. Sure you can be a good optimizer and a good roleplayer, but they are separate things, and I'm not interested in developing any form of skill at being an optimizer. I don't want to be something associated with Pun-pun even in a small, vague way that has very little to do with it. Breaking the game, or playing at a high level of optimization skill, those are just not things I'm interested in. It would be about obsessing about numbers- which I'm not interested in- and while not ignoring fluff, would definitely putting them second for what? lifeless abstract symbols that are the mere skeleton and not the blood, the flesh, the meat, the organs of the character? When I think "roleplaying" the last thing I think of is sitting down to do math on how to give my character one more plus one just because its a plus one. It reminds me too much of MMO's, where you end up wearing a ridiculous clown suit because all those items give you great numbers yo. even in Pokemon, one of the games I'm probably most interested in, I'm not an optimizer- those kinds of guys are the ones that constantly breed pokemon just for a single nature or whatever, which I find absurd and too much work, just like I find being an optimizer in most games is unnecessary work to enjoy it or the game is so difficult that I'd rather just give up than bother with something so hard that it causes me more pain to learn how to play than time spent actually playing it.

Solaris
2015-03-05, 07:40 PM
That's nice, but it doesn't change the definitions of optimal and optimized.

Lord Raziere
2015-03-05, 08:23 PM
That's nice, but it doesn't change the definitions of optimal and optimized.

Thats nice, but I'm still never going to identify as one.

goto124
2015-03-05, 08:32 PM
It reminds me too much of MMO's, where you end up wearing a ridiculous clown suit because all those items give you great numbers yo

Maybe I have horrible fashion sense, but I've seen these 'clown suits' and thought: What's the problem, they look great! Same attitude to 'optimized' characters, whatever 'optimized' even means. I just don't see how the presence of such a character would ruin the entire party's fun, barring jerks (which is a problem unrelated to 'optimization') or those who steamroll encounters. If 'optimized' means 'steamrolls encounters both combat and social', then yes I get it. Otherwise, no.


'Optimization' and roleplay have nothing to do with each other. If a player is a jerk who ruins the party's fun and also happens to 'optimize', making him an underpowered character sheet will not help. If the player doesn't mean to be a jerk but just gets deep into the habit of 'optimization' and overshadows everyone else, it may help. So will handing him a Bard or similar support caster whose 'optimizing' buffs and helps the entire party.

Gavran
2015-03-05, 08:38 PM
Is it really that hard for everyone to get that to Raziere (and I think most people) someone who identifies as "optimizer" is someone who puts extra importance on optimization? That isn't to say that nobody else ever optimizes anything, it's to say that optimization is not a motive in itself (or is a lower priority motive) for them.

Lord Raziere
2015-03-05, 08:48 PM
Is it really that hard for everyone to get that to Raziere (and I think most people) someone who identifies as "optimizer" is someone who puts extra importance on optimization? That isn't to say that nobody else ever optimizes anything, it's to say that optimization is not a motive in itself (or is a lower priority motive) for them.

Yeah, thats pretty much what I think. I just don't think framing everything in terms of optimization is all that good, at least for me. Your mindset for doing something matters just as much as doing it itself. and I just don't like a mindset where I have to make everything into a number to get as high as possible. Not everyone thinks about figuring out how to make X thing 5% more efficient all the time or whatever. I'm pretty sure most just people y'know....go ahead and do things and it works well for them most of the time.

HalfTangible
2015-03-05, 08:50 PM
Is it really that hard for everyone to get that to Raziere (and I think most people) someone who identifies as "optimizer" is someone who puts extra importance on optimization? That isn't to say that nobody else ever optimizes anything, it's to say that optimization is not a motive in itself (or is a lower priority motive) for them.

Except that his comments are directed at optimization as a practice, not towards optimizers as a group. See here:
*
Yes! because the definition your using is too wide and is therefore meaningless. I might as well say that because I want a peanut butter sandwhich, putting peanut butter on bread is optimization! which is just absurd. thats just common sense, not optimization. optimization goes far beyond whats needed to actually get anything done. I don't need it. Your all just trying to expand the definition of optimization beyond what it should have and make it into something far greater than it actually is. I don't need optimization to make good decisions.


(Also, on an unrelated note, with how often we've been saying it here, 'optimize' is starting to sound weird :smalltongue: )

Solaris
2015-03-05, 09:15 PM
Is it really that hard for everyone to get that to Raziere (and I think most people) someone who identifies as "optimizer" is someone who puts extra importance on optimization? That isn't to say that nobody else ever optimizes anything, it's to say that optimization is not a motive in itself (or is a lower priority motive) for them.

There's nothing wrong with not wanting to be identified as an optimizer.

It's just interesting watching the mental gymnastics he puts himself through to avoid anything he does as being optimization, when by definition choosing the more efficient option is optimization.

You don't have to be an optimizer to optimize any more than you have to be an ichthyologist to have a pet guppy - and it's no accident I picked that comparison, either. Most hardcore optimizers put ridiculous amounts of effort into researching their characters, whereas the rest of us just pick out whatever looks like it does what we want after only a cursory examination. Likewise, an ichthyologist puts ridiculous amounts of effort into researching fish, whereas the rest of us just pick out whatever looks pretty and not too terribly diseased. There are many degrees between "hardcore optimizer" and "casual gamer", but all of them optimize to some degree or another to achieve a desired result - it's only a question of how well they do it and how much effort they put into it. There's simply no sense in complaining about the use of the term. It's like complaining about being called a player while playing a game, unless all decisions are literally made at complete random.

Lord Raziere
2015-03-05, 10:04 PM
Ha! Efficiency? I procrastinate for weeks on something then get it done by the last minute, all my interests are some form of art, I get good grades on tests I don't study for, I'm completely inefficient and unoptimized! Even I'm confused as to how I succeed half the time! I'm unoptimized AT LIFE. Cause I'm pretty sure if I was optimized at life, I'd a busy study-guy with specific skills applicable to a high-paying job who would be good at math AND good social skills to boot! But I'm not, I'm me. Too bad. I just have to make do.

but this is getting off topic and sort of too much about me, when its supposed to be about something else...I think sponges or something? :smalltongue: Time to go.

*makes an exit by doing a triple mental somersault through ten rings of emotions, bouncing off a trampoline of whimsy, flipping around a horizontal-hand pole thing to launch herself off the hook of thought in a most outrageous manner to land in the pool of dreams*

and Raziere wins the Mental Olympics Medal! GOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAALLL!!!!!

*cheering crowds, cheering crowds* V: YAAAY! I'M A FEY!

Blackhawk748
2015-03-05, 11:53 PM
......... Im just gonna check that all off on being a fey and think no more on it.

Solaris
2015-03-06, 03:06 AM
......... Im just gonna check that all off on being a fey and think no more on it.

With a side order of "Gaze not into the Abyss..."

neonchameleon
2015-03-06, 06:10 AM
Why?

You may do it however you wish, but I don't focus on optimization things. I focus on the art of roleplaying.

One of the reasons I am an optimiser is because I focus on the art of roleplaying. Because I am an optimiser I can take offbeat character concepts and make them work while not being a drag for everyone else. Because I'm an optimiser I am capable of in many semi-indy systems asking the question "What's this character's motivation" and designing the character so that their mechanical incentives align with their in character incentives.

Being an optimiser makes me actively better at the art of tabletop roleplaying.


lifeless abstract symbols that are the mere skeleton and not the blood, the flesh, the meat, the organs of the character?

Indeed. The skeleton isn't messy, it's not sexy, but if you don't get the skeleton right you end up with a body that looks like a jellyfish or moves like a B-movie monster wearing a skin suit. You might be going somewhat deeper than skin deep. But me? I prefer to go bone deep. I get the organs and I get the skeleton.


When I think "roleplaying" the last thing I think of is sitting down to do math on how to give my character one more plus one just because its a plus one.

From this I get the impression you are playing D&D 3.X, a system literally designed for optimisers (https://web.archive.org/web/20080221174425/http://www.montecook.com/cgi-bin/page.cgi?mc_los_142).


just like I find being an optimizer in most games is unnecessary work to enjoy it or the game is so difficult that I'd rather just give up than bother with something so hard that it causes me more pain to learn how to play than time spent actually playing it.

The answer to that is simple. Find better games. Apocalypse World, Fate, and Marvel Heroic Roleplaying all have plenty of levers for me to exploit to make fun characters. But they aren't massive undertakings the way D&D 3.X is.

Comet
2015-03-06, 07:07 AM
As said above, people should just play games where mechanical mastery contributes to, and is influenced by, a good story. The idea of this hobby consisting of two separate games, one where you roll dice and crunch numbers and one where you talk in funny voices, is pretty outdated.

Segev
2015-03-06, 09:26 AM
Let me ask you this, Lord Razier: If you come up with a wonderful character concept for a Knight in Shining Armor type who is out to discover whether the romantic ideal of One True Love is really out there for him, do you choose your class to best represent this?

If you choose "Paladin," "Crusader," or even "Fighter" over "Sorcerer," "Barbarian," or "Druid," you're optimizing for your concept.

Do you look at your character and ask whether he's competent at doing Knightly things, like rescuing damsels in distress and being polite in court functions? If you decide that he is, do you invest in weapons with which he's profecient and seek to make sure that he's not going to miss every time he swings it? Or do you just give him a randomly-selected weapon and choose no feats relating to it, and put no skill points into K: Nobility or Diplomacy?

If you invest in skills and feats which will let him succeed more often than he fails at things your character concept says he should be good at, you're optimizing.

If you choose to avoid skills and feats which would make him good at things you envision him being bad at, you're optimizing for your concept, because your optimal design is one which matches your conception of the character in all his strengths and weaknesses.

Being skilled at optimization means you can do this with finer precision, so you don't wind up with a "Knight in Shining Armor" who is actually unable to fight a monster of his supposed CR and thus cannot rescue that damsel in distress, even though it's supposed to be nearly routine for his character concept.

goto124
2015-03-06, 11:11 PM
Does the mechanical build have to PERFECTLY fit the character concept? A gross mismatch I can understand, but what if you need an essential feat that doesn't really make sense fluff-wise, but without which your PC lags behind rather badly? It gets problematic especially when paying attention to both mechanics and roleplay.

SiuiS
2015-03-06, 11:26 PM
Nobody is capable of making a character that is not based in large part on the mechanics.

Did you choose a race? ... a class? ... a weapon? Oh. look - mechanics!

Choosing a race != basing character creation decisions on the mechanics of the race chosen. You are confusing correlation and causation. Just because someone wants to play an elf does not mean they want a trancing frail agile sleep immune multicentenarian.

Sith_Happens
2015-03-07, 01:58 AM
Gentlemen, you're in a definitional argument with someone who's refusing to accept the commonly held definition of a term.
You're not going to win this one.

I don't know, now that Segev's broken out the formal definitions I think this is going somewhere interesting. Productive? No. Interesting? Definitely.:smalltongue:


Ha! Efficiency? I procrastinate for weeks on something then get it done by the last minute, all my interests are some form of art, I get good grades on tests I don't study for, I'm completely inefficient and unoptimized! Even I'm confused as to how I succeed half the time! I'm unoptimized AT LIFE. Cause I'm pretty sure if I was optimized at life, I'd a busy study-guy with specific skills applicable to a high-paying job who would be good at math AND good social skills to boot! But I'm not, I'm me. Too bad. I just have to make do.

but this is getting off topic and sort of too much about me, when its supposed to be about something else...I think sponges or something? :smalltongue: Time to go.

*makes an exit by doing a triple mental somersault through ten rings of emotions, bouncing off a trampoline of whimsy, flipping around a horizontal-hand pole thing to launch herself off the hook of thought in a most outrageous manner to land in the pool of dreams*

and Raziere wins the Mental Olympics Medal! GOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAALLL!!!!!

*cheering crowds, cheering crowds* V: YAAAY! I'M A FEY!

...Told you so.:smalltongue::smalltongue::smalltongue:


(Also, on an unrelated note, with how often we've been saying it here, 'optimize' is starting to sound weird :smalltongue: )

So what you're saying is that we're employing a suboptimal frequency of synonyms.:smallwink:


......... Im just gonna check that all off on being a fey and think no more on it.

...

Oh.

WHERE DID YOU AND MESCHLUM GO LAST NIGHT, RAZ? YOU DRANK THE CELESTIAL WINE, DIDN'T YOU!?:smalleek::smalleek::smalleek:

Segev
2015-03-09, 08:31 AM
Choosing a race != basing character creation decisions on the mechanics of the race chosen. You are confusing correlation and causation. Just because someone wants to play an elf does not mean they want a trancing frail agile sleep immune multicentenarian.But it probably means they are willing to play one, and that other aspects of the elven race did appeal. Otherwise, why choose it?



WHERE DID YOU AND MESCHLUM GO LAST NIGHT, RAZ? YOU DRANK THE CELESTIAL WINE, DIDN'T YOU!?:smalleek::smalleek::smalleek:

Yeah. That was, um, totally them. Keep pointing accusingly at them while I, er, am definitely not sneaking some Catafrat-boys out of Creation with those barrels that you only think bear Yu Shan's stamp.

I'm pretty sure Meschlum can take it; he's probably got an Oneiromancy up or something.