From a Dungeons and Dragons website - akitrom — LiveJournal

12:59 pm - From a Dungeons and Dragons website

There is a thread on the Paizo boards about "optimization" of characters, and "min/maxing" to get really combat efficient characters.

Here's what I posted.

From my perspective, you've hit upon a trend that started in 2000, with the release of 3rd Edition. If you look at the pre-release articles in Dragon magazine from that time, you'll see that they were peppered with "power play" sidebars, about how a 1st level Dwarf Fighter with these feats and that skill maxed out, and a 20 in Constitution, could have a remarkable saving throw against poison! And so on.

One of the first things Wizards of the Coast did when setting up a new edition was to set up a production system with real developers, unlike TSR, who were using mostly editors to do that job. 3rd Edition was developed by teams who were used to looking at Magic: the Gathering cards and decks, and carried that philosophy over to feats and classes. In AD&D, players roll up PCs; in 3rd Edition, they build them.

In Magic, the expectation is that a player will build a deck, play it for a season or so, and then build something else. In AD&D, there was a great sense of pride in how long a player'd been playing a particular character, in terms of years. In 3rd Edition, with the presumption of 13.3 level-appropriate encounters per experience level, and the elimination of needing to find an NPC for weeks of training, PCs would steadily increase in level until retiring. Then the player would build something else.

--+--+--

"Optimization" isn't a black-and-white thing. There's a continuum, with people who try to find weaselly loopholes in the rules and build characters who have "infinite money" on one side, to those who throw together the game character equivalent of Aunt May on the other extreme. In between are the people who would (to use the D&D rules as an example) prefer to give their Player Characters a Strength of 14 and a Constitution of 16, rather than 15 and 15, because even-numbered attributes are more efficient.

To paraphrase George Carlin, have you ever noticed how everybody that builds more efficient characters than you do is a maniac?! And everybody who builds less effective characters than you is a moron. It's amazing we get anything done around the table, with all the maniacs and morons running around.

--+--+--

The metaphor I've used compares a team of Navy SEALs versus people you'd expect to find on a city bus at 8:00 in the morning. Suddenly, the group meets a hostile pool of semi-intelligent jelly, about the size of an ox, forming eyes and savage mouths seemingly at will over its entire surface.

If everybody on the team is a Navy SEAL, all well and good. The commander barks an order, and they lay down suppression fire. If everybody is a normal shlub, all well and good. Everybody panics.

If just about half the team consists of Navy SEALs, but one guy's an asthmatic carpenter who spent a couple of years in the Merchant Marine back in the '80's, and somebody else is a college student two semesters away from a degree in Civil Engineering, then we have a problem. Some people aren't going to have much fun.

--+--+--

The sad thing is that, for people who like stories, optimization is counter-productive.

Let me explain. In any situation approximating real life, there's a well-motivated reason for bettering yourself. In the Marines, recruits work out and develop more skills so they'll be better able to handle combat situations. The more training, the better your chances of coming home from a successful mission in one piece.

D&D isn't like that.

So, your group finds a couple of rules loopholes and designs a team of characters who are much more effective than, say, the iconic characters of the equivalent classes and level. And you head out the gates of the fort, looking for adventure.

Well, a good Dungeon Master (DM) realizes that your combat threat is higher than your level would normally warrant, and throws trols at you instead of ogres. Wondering whether to set a combat in terrain favorable to the party or not, he'll elect 'not'. He'll give the magic-slinging minion of Set some extra bodyguards, because he saw what you did to the last Evil High Priest he threw at you.

In other words, when D&D parties get stronger, they don't have better chances of coming back from a successful mission in one piece. They simply get tougher fights, over less advantageous conditions. Rising in level doesn't change the combat situation; it just introduces tougher foes and larger numbers of gold coins.

Your character has reasons for wanting to get stronger and more capable of casting powerful spells. As a player, you have much fewer reasons for wanting that.

And what about the parties that didn't worry so much about tactical efficiency? They prepared some spells 'cause they were fun, and took some skills to flesh out character backgrounds, or because they just looked interesting. Given a choice between the ring of protection +2 and the cloak of the mountebank they took the latter, because it was flashier.

And in combat? The DM does run them up against ogres, and gives them a good site for ambushing the thrallherd and her caravan, and sets the minion of Set up to be charged, because the DM knows that if he throws the same threats against this party that he throws against the Marine commando team, they'll all die.

And sometimes, when they win the fights, they do so because of some rube-goldberg idea that they manage to pull off. They do so because somebody thought to use the Craft (cooking) skill to fry up some bacon and coat the floor in grease. Robert Plamodon, in his book "Through Dungeons Deep" relates the story of conquering an enormous dragon single-handedly, with nothing more than an artist's smocks, a bad French accent, a good bluff, and a Mirror of Life Trapping.

And in the next dire encounter, they'll come up with something else. (If this were the commando team, somebody would have maxxed out her Craft (cook) skill, and it would have been All Bacon, All the Time.)

There are never quite so many stories told about the optimized parties. They charge and chain-trip (in those systems where such tactics are approved) and sneak attack, and add significant bonuses and do large numbers of damage, like clockwork. But next level, they'll do even more damage even more regularly, and so this level's victories will be overshadowed by next level's challenges.

But tricking a dragon into looking at its "portrait"? We're still talking about that 30 years later.