Rant: High-Op Man, Low-Op World

[erikun]

For a while, I took what they said at face value, but then I got my hands on the books and started making my own assessments, then I started looking online…and then I realized that Good Gracious Mary, these guys are bad at the “game”. Understand that by the “Game” I don’t mean the actual process of playing, I mean the numbers behind the system that govern DnD.

I hope you don't mind if I rant myself here a bit, but this is one of the most annoying parts of D&D that I've seen. I find that most people who are interested in playing a roleplaying game are interested in the roleplaying, and in playing the game while roleplaying. They aren't interesting is the system as much, and certainly aren't interesting in playing a character creation "mini-game" in order to be any use during the roleplay. They wish for the system to work so that they can sit down and play the game, not to spend a large amount of time adjusting the system so that it finally works well enough for them to sit down and play the game.

Optimization is present and possible in pretty much every system I've seen; people wishing to tweak or optimize a character have had no problem in systems like GURPS or World of Darkness. It is honestly quite annoying when you sit down to play D&D only to discover that Fighters have difficulty fighting, or that the Healer is really bad at healing, or that the Druid renders everyone else pointless.

And back to your regularly scheduled thread.

This comes off of being a hardcore WoW player, so I generally try to temper it back, but its always going to bleed through a little bit.

I've found that trying to be competitive in MMOs is fairly difficult. You need to be as good as the highest level players, or at least as good as the most popular builds, to be any use as a character. You could ignore all that and just spend time with a group of friends, but that isn't exactly playing competitively.

In D&D, by contrast, the only competition you have is the four other people at the table. You could play a Monk wielding a Longspear and still be competitive, because your challangers are not the most powerful builds D&D has to offer, but just the other builds at the table.

In short, why not optimize something unusual? If you're good at number crunching, then taking something poor and turning it into something useful - like a TWF rogue wielding daggers/bastard sword/gnome battle cloak for someone who can freely switch between TWF, THF, and sword-and-board. It's honestly a bit more difficult that trying to see how strong you can make your buffing wizard.

My favourite is that the rogue jealously guards the privelege of opening doors or chests or walking first into new rooms. It doesn't matter that I'm immune to fire, immune to missile weapons, can absorb cold damage, have higher saves than him and just as good an AC; it would be a disaster in his mind to let the squishy wizard spring a trap. He also is not a fan of me using invisibility to come along on scouting runs (I partly understand that one because I might still make noise with less Stealth ranks than he has.)

To be fair, what is the rogue going to do if you trigger all the traps and do all the scouting? Although you could always just make the Rogue invisible, or immune to missile weapons, or whatever else would make him better and his job.

EDIT2: TELL ME I'M PRETTY.

YOU ARE A PRETTY LITTLE BALLERINA thanks to your Bard multiclassing with Warblade with the Song of the White Raven feat, going into Sublime Chord and then Jade Phoenix Mage for 9th level spellcasting with the highest level maneuvers.