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First, I'm sorry if some parts are not using proper grammar. English is my second language, but I found myself inspired to write something.
Second, Cartigan, by quoting you, I am not aiming at you. Your post was just the one that started my thinking on the game. You will find I do agree with you in some parts, and disagree in others.
Thanks for clearing that up. So you actually AREN'T getting ANY benefit for role-playing. You are getting EXP for overcoming the encounter. It doesn't matter HOW you did it. You just happened to do it by role-playing instead of a different way and you aren't getting anything for role-playing specifically.Let me rephrase that for you: Thanks for clearing that up. So you actually AREN'T getting ANY benefit for using the mechanics and their advantages. You are getting EXP for overcoming the encounter. It doesn't matter HOW you did it. You just happened to do it by using the mechanics and their benefits instead of a different way like roleplaying and you aren't getting anything for using the mechanics specifically.
See, it works both ways - that is what started me thinking.
Why, why does it work both ways?
Here is my take. Because getting mechanical bonuses and roleplaying are not the end of the game, they are both means to overcome encounters, and to tell a story about heroes (or villains) struggling to get as powerfull as they can in order to save the world / dominate the world / make a kingdom or a legend for themselves / becoming gods, etc.
As one of the means to overcome encounters, we find tips and tricks about roleplaying in many books, as well as many advices about the ethical aspect of it (adult themes, etc.) and the social and psychological aspect of it (look at the GM's Guide pp 70-78) but Cartigan is right: there is no formal rules to structure roleplay. Because it can't be described in a formal way, because the "rules" determining the possible effects of someone playing...
This is the best thing I've read all week, thankyou.
Getting in on this thread late, but doesn't look like I missed much.
Holt - welcome to Pathfinder. You'll find that there are a lot of other folks out there that agree with you and play Pathfinder without all the rules-obsession. Sometimes we don't post as much around here as everyone else, because a lot of the discussions aren't all that interesting to us. But don't worry, we're a strong part of the overall Pathfinder community, and Pathfinder supports our mode of play just fine. I have a healthy "rulings, not rules" PF group going on and we've happily wandered our way through a number of the APs.
It's good that you saw this though. I went from Basic to 1e to 2e to 3e to 3.5e to Pathfinder happily - I feel like the whole d20 paradigm is a big improvement - but then when I went back and played some 2e I realized some of the subtle effects a decade of playing the more rule-focused game had on me, and had to deliberately take corrective action to regain the freewheeling spirit of the old days. So do be aware that it can lead you down that path accidentally if you are not vigilant.
To try to get this thread away from an argument between a couple of forum members (that's what private messages are for), here's my thoughts on the OP.
I look at an optimized character as one that has planned a build, with feats and attributes and class abilities designed to synergize with one another.
Much like Holt and a few others, I come from an "old school" mentality, despite the fact 4th ed was my first foray into Dungeons & Dragons.
From 2002 onwards I played in an online text-based roleplaying intensive game called ArmageddonMUD (still ongoing to this day! I do miss it, but I became very much like a WoW addict with it). In this game you got to select a race, class and a single subguild (subguilds are like background traits in Pathfinder). That's it. That's the character creation process finished. You also had to write a paragraph long background (at a minimum) which would then be reviewed and approved by the Armageddon staff before you were allowed to play.
In this game, you don't have to spend hours logged in and actively controlling your character to become better on a mechanical basis. Time spent fighting NPCs was time spent not interacting with your fellow players (you could also spar with fellow players or even fight and kill fellow players). So if you were some awesome fighter after only 2 or 3 hours (or even 2 or 3 days) then clearly you were spending all your time gaining more experience rather then spending time roleplaying.
We were also discouraged from thinking about how to make your character mechanically better. Some players knew if you did X, Y and Z you could quickly become a better fighter. Sometimes doing X or Y or Z was in character, but doing all 3 all the time was rarely in character, if ever. Instead people were doing these things solely to gain a mechanical benefit rather than for a roleplaying reason.
So for me, I look at it with the mentality that you have X hours you can devote to Dungeons & Dragons. every hour you spend pouring over the books, crunching the numbers and talking theorycraft is an hour you don't spend developing your character.
Sure, roleplaying well and min-maxing aren't mutually exclusive. But in my experience 9 times out of 10 someone who has spent their time making an overpowerered character, DOESN'T know the fluff of the region they're playing in. They often don't have an appropriate character name, and almost never do they have a background.
Now everyone here might be the 10th person I mentioned. But statistically this is unlikely.
That said, play the game how you enjoy it. If min-maxing, creating experimental builds and theorycrafting is how you enjoy the game, go nuts. But it isn't how I enjoy the game. And it's often why I don't enjoy playing in living campaigns. Living campaigns rarely have any story rewards or progress. And so they have nothing for people to focus on except for min-maxing. Given this isn't something I enjoy, I don't see value in it.
I instead look for interesting characters. I'm playing an elven paladin dedicated to Alseta, the goddess of doorways. I've got specific in character reasons for worshipping this deity, and have even looked into Janus for further inspiration. For me, that's an experimental build. Not a monk 2/fighter 2/wizard 2/rogue 2/etc.
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That said, I am exploring the mechanics more as I become more familiar with my characters. I've got a paladin, sorcerer and a druid character. I don't put any thought into what I'll do when I level. With each character I take another level of the base class and with the sorcerer I quickly look over his spell list to see which one I take. With the paladin and druid, they get access to their full spell lists, so no previous thought is required (only thought at the beginning of each new session).
However with the druid (which was the most complex character at the time), I became an expert overnight on the wild shape rules and poured over the bestiary to find appropriate animals for me to polymorph into. Now by the rules there is very little to some of the animals I've got my stats for, but I listed them separately because flavourwise they're much different.
However I've recently begun playing a Wizard. Wizards are one of the most complex characters I've played so far, so I put much more thought into it and I've created "level up plan" for every single level. I went over the spells in order to work out what school I want to specialise in and which schools I wanted to ban (I banned divine which I realised the night before was a dreadful school to ban! But I've kept it as a character quirk). I also went over the feats to see which ones I'd want.
I also considered if I should take any prestige classes, but I didn't like the flavour of any of them for my wizard. The couple that did match my flavour were mechanically a bad choice for a wizard, so I didn't chose them.
Now to an optimiser my character build would probably be laughable, but I created it so I could level up my character mid session. As the game progresses I'm also updating it to reflect in game developments. So I wonder if that character, by the definition I quoted above, is an "optimised build"?
Also when the campaign with my druid finishes I'm going to be signing up for a new campaign where I'll be playing a Rogue mutliclassed into Witch. This will be my very first multiclassed character, which will offer more complexities to me I've never experimented with before. The reason for this is purely the flavour of my character. I'm playing in the Serpent Skull AP and I'm going to play a Colonial character that over time will become enamoured with the native voodoo magic and so will go native.
The levels in Rogue will represent my time as a colonial while my levels in Witch will represent me having "gone native" and gained a mastery over the native voodoo magic. I've spoken with the GM and he's suggested a houserule to Arcane Trickster to work with a witch so I'll probably end up with "Rogue 5/Witch 3/Arcane Trickster 7" (or something like that, I haven't looked very closely at the rules yet).
So as I play and gain more experience with the ruleset, I am thinking more about mechanics. Although only in a way to better represent my character concepts and to backup the roleplaying.
Also, if you are Evil Lincoln, how does the "Evil Twin has facial hair" trope work when good Lincoln has a beard? ;)The good one gets his head blown off.
HAH!
Lurking for 5 pages, finally found something worth commenting on. History humor FTW.
This is the best thing I've read all week, thankyou.
Thanks! Glad you enjoyed.