Meta: anthropological analysis of TO vs PO

[daremetoidareyo]

Why does the online community have TO discussions? What fuels it? Why did it come to be? Why does it persist? Do other online communities generate the same sort of high theory?

As a person who encountered TO, laughed at how dumb it was, and then began playing in the same RAW mudpit as the rest of the posters here, what do ya'll get out of it? Have you seen what optimize this feat has become?

Continuing to hone the impractical results that no-one would ever use in real life by using bad game wording emblematic of poor editorial control and really rules lawyery obtuseness of language is weird, right?

[Extra Anchovies]

Why? Cuz it's fun. This system tends to attract people with a head for rules, and speculating about what could be done without actually making it happen isn't exclusive to our community. It's similar to how some comic-book fanatics can debate ad nauseum the question "if superhero A fought superhero B, who would win?". In our case, the question is often something along the lines of "what's the most outlandish thing we can do with character option X?".

[Red Fel]

Automobile designers, particularly high-end ones, tend to test the limits of what they can build. Speed, power, aerodynamics, luxury. And they come up with some neat stuff. Stuff that will never see the road, either because it's too expensive to be feasible, or because it could never be made safe, or because of any number of other reasons. Some of their advances are practical enough to use, but others remain theoretical.

I don't know if any of that is true, but that's the idea. We test the limits of what the mechanics can do. Sometimes, it results in things that could or should never see play. Other times, by tearing the rule apart left and right, we figure out what makes it tick and find something that can see play. But whether we're doing it to find the practical ideas buried underneath the theoretical, or we do it to just study the rules themselves, that's what TO ultimately is - pushing the limits of the mechanics, irrespective of practicality or sanity.

[Zaq]

I don't have a solid answer. I only have a few gut feelings, which probably need to be reexamined in more detail. But let's start.

I think part of it might be the fact that D&D is something that you can't do all the time. It's very rare for people to have a group that meets more than once a week, if that often at all. In contrast with, say, forums dedicated to video games, time you spend theorycrafting with D&D is not time that could theoretically be spent playing the game, so thinking about the game becomes a way for fans to enjoy the game even when there isn't a group of dice-rolling friends in the same room. (What's more, since D&D is so complex and has so many different avenues of optimization, there's a certain level of reward associated with thinking about characters as opposed to just building randomly, which I think it kind of how the ball starts rolling.)

Then there's the fact that D&D is something that can be very personal. That's one reason why we like tabletop RPGs over computer-based ones—you're freer to come up with crazy stuff and innovative solutions and wild combos, and if you stick to the RAW, you don't have an impersonal machine telling you that this becomes impossible. (The line between PO and TO, by some definitions, is the point at which you have someone other than the impartial RAW telling you to stop what you're doing, though that's far from the only dividing line.) But people who like D&D often like pouring themselves into their characters and into their builds, and I feel like that sense of investment encourages some folks to see just how far they can go.

Speaking for myself very personally, I don't know when I became aware of the fact that I like to optimize, but many of the games (video games, tabletop games, card games, etc.) that I've enjoyed most fervently over the years are games that give me the chance to figure out how a bunch of rules and game elements fit together (and get rewarded for doing so). To list a few (non-exhaustive) examples in no particular order, there's the Mega Man Battle Network series (video game), there's Guild Wars (video game), there's the Pokémon series (video game—I hadn't yet figured out how optimization worked when I had my relatively brief foray into the card game), there's Magi-Nation (card game), there's D&D—I've spent many, many hours thinking about (and playing!) each of these games, and the common thread is that all of those games give (/gave) me the chance to bring together a whole lot of little fiddly bits into a coherent and awesome whole. (Of course, simply having fiddly bits isn't enough alone to keep my interest—those games also made it reasonably smooth to learn how to start putting all the pieces together, and those games also had lots of different viable paths instead of just one or two "One True Way" options overshadowing everything. I could never get into playing Magic, for example.) I don't know why I like optimizing so much, and I'm not even necessarily one of the best optimizers here, but I do find it highly enjoyable. (One reason I can't get into 5e very well is because there are so few avenues of optimization—the whole thing is done for you, and straying from what the book prescribes is basically impossible.)

I don't know what aspects of my personality make me the kind of person who likes that sort of thing, but I'm obviously not alone. And, as should be obvious, not everyone likes what we do here, and that doesn't mean in any way that people who don't think this way are less smart or less creative. (I don't even personally think of myself as being very creative in a traditional sense, though there's a history of me coming up with pretty darn creative stuff in the context of the game I'm optimizing.) I'm not the kind of person who needs to be super efficient in everything I do, so it's not just that, and I generally don't feel the need to simply be the best at everything, so it's not just that either. But the D&D community does attract individuals like me, and when you've got people encouraging each other to do that sort of thing, I'm not surprised that we've become what we've become.



Continuing to hone the impractical results that no-one would ever use in real life by using bad game wording emblematic of poor editorial control and really rules lawyery obtuseness of language is weird, right?

I mean, your last sentence is kind of hard to argue against. I want to say that the fact that we mark TO as TO (and therefore we all recognize that this is impractical and that we're not really playing the same game anymore) makes it better, but I can't honestly come up with a conclusive reason of why that should make things better.

No matter what, though, that doesn't mean I don't love it.

[Extra Anchovies]

Continuing to hone the impractical results that no-one would ever use in real life by using bad game wording emblematic of poor editorial control and really rules lawyery obtuseness of language is weird, right?

I wouldn't say it's much weirder than any of the other non-economically-productive things humans do in their spare time.


Automobile designers, particularly high-end ones, tend to test the limits of what they can build. Speed, power, aerodynamics, luxury. And they come up with some neat stuff. Stuff that will never see the road, either because it's too expensive to be feasible, or because it could never be made safe, or because of any number of other reasons. Some of their advances are practical enough to use, but others remain theoretical.

This is a very good comparison. Stuff like Madness Tarrasquekiller or planet-tossing Hulking Hurlers or Incarnate Construct/Dustform looping could be pretty accurately compared to those mockup images of zany-looking concept cars (http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/front-45.jpg) that auto manufacturers spit out to the press every now and then.


I think part of it might be the fact that D&D is something that you can't do all the time. It's very rare for people to have a group that meets more than once a week, if that often at all. In contrast with, say, forums dedicated to video games, time you spend theorycrafting with D&D is not time that could theoretically be spent playing the game, so thinking about the game becomes a way for fans to enjoy the game even when there isn't a group of dice-rolling friends in the same room. (What's more, since D&D is so complex and has so many different avenues of optimization, there's a certain level of reward associated with thinking about characters as opposed to just building randomly, which I think is kind of how the ball starts rolling.)

This is definitely a big part of why I browse the forums. It's almost like another way of playing D&D, where instead of creating specific characters and stories we just screw around with the rules and see if anything cool pops out.

[Necroticplague]

Easy: Tinkering with the game's mechanics is fun. With any game in existence with a sufficiently big following, you'll find communities who are devoted to pushing every aspect of the game to it's absolute limit. I mean, just look at this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpk2tdsPh0A) about trying to get to a high star with as few a-presses as possible. That's taking a game, and completely stretching everything about it's mechanics past it's breaking point. TO is just doing the same to a significantly more complex game. After all, such Mario games take place within perfectly defined reference frames. However, the legalistic nature of DnD means that we can talk not only about pushing at the boundries of defined rules, but interpretation the laws in the first place.

[Gildedragon]

And I think there's another aspect
D&D (at least 3.X) is full of traps; of things that promise to advance a concept but don't do so.
A lot of TO, I think, stems, originally, from PO: trying to figure out what things work and don't work, and how to make the things that don't work work.
More or less the same mentality that leads to the creation of handbooks for EVERYTHING
TO is the more... pure? academic? theoretical? offspring of that drive to optimize and make things work.

[A_S]

Why I enjoy D&D optimization in general:

There's a class of problems that involve solving difficult combinatorical problems in well-defined-but-too-large-to-solve-by-brute-force problem spaces. Solving these kinds of problems is something I find immensely fun and satisfying. This is why I enjoy playing the card game Dominion, and also why I enjoy programming, especially solving programming problems where the best way to do what I'm doing isn't immediately obvious.

I also enjoy imagining sword-wielding, spell-slinging badasses having adventures. This is why I enjoy reading fantasy novels.

D&D optimization is a set of difficult combinatorical problems in a well-defined problem space where the solutions themselves are badass, sword-wielding, spell-slinging adventurers. Why would I not enjoy this?

Why TO in particular, as opposed to PO?

I think this is honestly a very specific vagary of the 3.5 ruleset. Any optimization problem of the kind I (and others, see Red Fel and Zaq's posts above) find enjoyable is going to involve pushing a ruleset to its limits to see how far it will go. This is fun on its own merits.

It turns out, because 3.5 wasn't very carefully balanced/edited, that if you push its rules as far as they'll go, what you get doesn't add up to a game that's much fun as an actual game. So the 3.5 player community has developed a (fairly fuzzy) set of norms describing how far you can push its rules without making the game no fun to play. Optimizing within these norms is what we call "practical optimization."

But not every fun-to-optimize ruleset is like this (especially if the owners/distributors of the rules are willing to do post-release curation or rebalancing to fix their mistakes). Look at Magic: the Gathering, for instance. At the competitive level, nobody is pulling their optimization punches, but lots of people still find it very fun.

If 3.5 were a better-balanced game, we wouldn't need the TO/PO distinction. But making games that are both well-balanced enough that they don't break if you push on them, and also have enough options that optimizing within their system is fun, is an extremely difficult design problem. So we make do with imperfect-but-awesome systems like 3.5.

[Troacctid]

I find TO to be a lot less interesting when it plays fast and loose with the rules. Too often, I find that TO takes the form of an attempt to exploit a loophole or dysfunction, using an interpretation that isn't actually consistent with the rules of the game (or is, at best, highly questionable), which seems to me to defeat the purpose.

The Tippyverse style of TO is much more impressive to me, because it is firmly grounded in rules that definitely work and are being used, essentially, as intended—just stretched to their logical conclusions.

[Honest Tiefling]

Continuing to hone the impractical results that no-one would ever use in real life by using bad game wording emblematic of poor editorial control and really rules lawyery obtuseness of language is weird, right?

I wouldn't really say so. People like to joke about things they love. As others have said, this is a game that rewards system mastery, so knowing and hiding these loopholes can be an excerise to help. And...Yeah. Not everyone is in a game, so sometimes you need something to fill that Dungeons and Dragons shaped hole in your heart.

Doesn't every language have lame puns and tongue twisters? There's no point to them other then I could do it, so I did it. I think it operates on the same logic, sometimes people get bored and like to poke at things to relieve boredom.

[Bakkan]

Because it informs us about the nature of the game and its properties.

For me, D&D theoretical optimization is somewhat like theoretical mathematics. In both cases the optimizer/mathematician is studying a structure that exists objectively external to himself. The most common thing to do is apply that structure to solve the day-to-day tasks at hand, such as making a character for a game you're actually going to play this evening or calculating the tensile strength of bridge cables. However, to more completely understand the structure that the optimizer is working with, he must consider not only the common applications of it, but the extreme possibilities.

In the early days of 3.5, the question "Is there an objectively most powerful build in the game?" had not been answered. The existence or nonexistence of such a build tells us about the structure of the system itself. A few years into the edition, Pun-Pun was discovered, answering the question with a resounding "Yes". Even though Pun-Pun should never be played except under the most bizarre of circumstances, the fact that we know it exists tells us something about the system we use.

An equally TO question is "Does there exist an objectively least powerful build in the game?". As far as I know, this question has not been answered. This potential for discovery, a question awaiting an answer, is very exciting to me.

I like Theoretical Optimization because I like to explore things, discover things, and learn more about the system than was known before.