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if you profess a fondness for number crunching, be prepared to be found guilty by association. Innocent until proven guilty only applies in a court of law, not in the court of public or personal opinion.
Hopefully PF2 will keep the reins short on any potential rules abuses, making it much easier to tolerate min-maxers... simply becaus they can't cause too much damage any more.
Man. Thank you so much for helping make these forums so welcome to everyone. I really mean that. Any sarcasm you might detect is definitely not there.
Honest.
/s
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IIRC the forum rules heavily advocate trying to get the other person's point of view and treat them respectfully. Guilty by association feels at odds with this IMO.
Also in PF1 threads I often felt that the "powergamers" were far more often the target of attacks and negativity than the other way around.
That said far too many people whatever their style preference fall into the "you're doing it wrong" stance.
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I can only speak for myself here, but my personal less-then-cordial attitude towards 'optimizers' stems from the experience that these people have an awful tendency to ruin everybody else's fun.
Listen, speaking as someone who both optimizes a lot and has players who aren't always the best at that, and as someone who, as a GM, has dealt with people like you describe, I have something really important to say to you:
Your problem isn't with optimizers, it's with people being dicks.
Optimized characters aren't a problem in and of themselves, they're a problem when there are uneven optimization levels among the PCs, since then one character will overshadow another. That sucks. And, frankly, anyone who does it without trying to make things at least feel more even is a dick.
For exactly that reason, when I play or run a game, I take great pains to help people all get to about the same optimization level. Because I'm good at optimizing, I can advise those less good at it in how to properly reflect whatever concept they have in a more mechanically optimal fashion. Which is a form of optimization that results in more fun for everyone, since people who enjoy the mechanical minigame of optimizing have fun, and so do those who don't.
The problem is just that 3.x is just so abuseable, and the people who commit the worst feats of rules abuse are generally also the ones prone to rubbing it into other people's face. So, if you profess a fondness for number crunching, be prepared to be found guilty by association. Innocent until proven guilty only applies in a court of law, not in the court of public or personal opinion.
Finding people guilty by association makes you the dick, not them, and they have no responsibility to try and cater to the prejudices of others. Also, again speaking as someone who optimizes a fair bit, I have not found this to actually be true. Most people do not do this. People will sometimes get up in your face for daring to optimize...but it's not a majority and those people are generally dicks and not worth talking to anyway.
Hopefully PF2 will keep the reins short on any potential rules abuses, making it much easier to tolerate min-maxers... simply becaus they can't cause too much damage any more.
'Tolerate' is a bit of a loaded term in this context and you're coming off badly here. Please stop that.
That said, one of the good things about PF2 is that it's narrowed the gap between optimized characters and not-so-optimized ones quite a bit. You generally need a 16 in your attack stat...but if you have that and decent AC you're good to go and can readily play in the same game with even the hyper optimized.
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Others are already chiming in, but to talk specifically about the worries about how optimization worked in 3.5/PF1 - this isn't 3.5 or PF1. This is PF2, a radically different system that does a lot to prevent characters from dramatically changing the math. At least so far, you can't overoptimize and you really have to be sandbagging to underoptimize (ie take feats you know you won't use, putting a 14 in STR when you plan on using a lot of melee when you could put in a 16).
This is what's attractive to most optimizers in PF2. We want varied character options like anyone else, and tight math and a optimization floor and ceiling that are so close together they're nearly kissing means we can play practically anything we want without the bad taste in the mouth left by choosing the flavor option over what we know would be more effective.
And if something does actually widen that gap, I hope Paizo's quick to put out errata purely for the sake of balance.
So for PF2, at least, I would rather people chill out about optimizers and maybe not try to derail rules discussions by accusing them of caring too much about minutia or whatever. The game being balanced is not going to hinder your ability to tell interesting stories in the game.
It's pretty hard to get a 14 in your main stat for most characters, isn't it? You get one from your class automatically and if you don't put one of your final 4 boosts into it I'd be shocked. So that means you just need to put 1 of the 4 to 5 boosts you get from Ancestry and Background into your key stat to get 16, unless you have a flaw there.
The only exceptions seem to be the alchemist and certain flavors of gish where the stat they want to attack with isn't their key stat for their class. But it's hard to control for that if a character wants to play against their class's role but not take steps to make them good at what they are actually doing. I've seen an extremely new player just throw together a ranger with a random mishmash of weapons, feats, and edges which didn't gel together at all... But frankly that was mostly on him rushing and not bothering to actually look at the options available. That's probably the worst character I've seen and his second attempt was much more cohesive.
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Martials in particular seem really built to handle a lot of stress put on them. It's hard to build a legitimately terrible one of them even if you pick substandard options (with maybe the Scoundrel being an exception since you have an alternate primary that you can't leverage as easily. Not to say the scoundrel is bad, just probably the easiest to screw up).
It's really gishes (and mutagen alchemists), specifically caster>martial gishes, where that beautifully slick system math seems to fall apart and it feels like you're constantly trying not to drown to make the character do what you want it to do. Martial>caster gishes have problems too but generally seem to come together a lot better if you don't mind the really slow start to your spell progression.
I think the ‘14 in a stat’ got a lot more focus than it was intended to. No one has really denied that a 16-18 key stat will be most common; and yes, to ‘suboptimaize’ takes either slipping through a crack or deliberate sabotage to achieve so far in 2e. Even the experience i mentioned is chalked up to me being too experimental before getting my bearing on the new system in action, and the PT just happened to expose them all the more.
Sometimes it legitimately gets difficult to tell where some people are coming from though with just the sheer amount of threads and information that gets passed around regularly, resulting in people using a shorthand that gets misunderstood at first glance. Just something that happens.
@DMW - I’m not sure how helpful it is to dig into someone that explicitly expressed having bad experiences with players causing them to become sour towards the concept themselves. Kinda just perpetuates it ya know?
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@DMW - I’m not sure how helpful it is to dig into someone that explicitly expressed having bad experiences with players causing them to become sour towards the concept themselves. Kinda just perpetuates it ya know?
I'm sympathetic to their bad experiences, and I don't think I 'dug into' them. But I'm also not gonna let someone suggest that someone finding people 'guilty by association' is ever appropriate under any circumstances without expressing my disagreement with that position.
Half of the guys meta building and calling everything non-viable, don't even play the game. You can play whatever, we had some NPC level characters in our Dragons Demand campaign, and nothing terrible happens. In PF2 you can be a lot more terrible on purpose and still contribute, thanks to the decreased focus on ability scores and magic numbers.
It's like: "Welcome to PF2 spotlight, where everything is bad based on white vacuum rooms."
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Your problem isn't with optimizers, it's with people being dicks.
Absolutely. No disagreement. But...
Finding people guilty by association makes you the dick, not them, and they have no responsibility to try and cater to the prejudices of others. Also, again speaking as someone who optimizes a fair bit, I have not found this to actually be true. Most people do not do this. People will sometimes get up in your face for daring to...
These message boards are very civil, the mods are seeing to that. But you have to understand that you are arguing from a rational point of view. Yes, in and of itself crunching numbers to make a stat block perform better is not a bad thing, yet you must remember 2 things:
1) Gaming is a social activity where people agree to an usually unspoken agreement: Don't be a dick/ don't spoil the fun for others. If *your* optimisation causes a problem then the onus is on *you* to scale it back, not on the others to engage in a metagame that they may, quite frankly, find disgusting.
2) People are, by and large, not rational beings, but rather emotional. You can argue from your standpoint of logic until the cows come home and even be right about. It will not safe you from the ire of fellow player who just got slapped in the face with the fact that his beloved toon is 'suboptimal', 'not pulling his weight' or 'an XP-mooching gimp'. I assure you, things get rather emotional and logic goes die in a fire.
So, just my little piece of advice: You can keep telling yourselves that optimising is harmless, but if you only ever look at it in the 'clean room' of a message board forum and fail to look at what happens at real life tables, you are not doing yourself any favours.
Yes, the *real* problem is people being dicks to other people, but the first step to becoming the dick is to dismiss another person's *emotions* about a subject because logic.
And yes, I hope Paizo keeps the reins tight. If optimizers, try as they might, can not ruin the fun for others, well, then both sides can coexist peacefully and actually have fun together. That's a good thing, isn't it?
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1) Gaming is a social activity where people agree to an usually unspoken agreement: Don't be a dick/ don't spoil the fun for others. If *your* optimisation causes a problem then the onus is on *you* to scale it back, not on the others to engage in a metagame that they may, quite frankly, find disgusting.
It's a 2 way road. Someone could be spoiling fun by optimizing but so to can someone do the same by not doing so in an otherwise optimized group. The social contract runs both ways: it not going with what the majority of the group wants that's disruptive and not any one single activity. That "beloved toon" that's made in a sub-optimal way in every way breaks the social contract in a group expecting a well made optimized PC.
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Absolutely. No disagreement. But...
Okay.
These message boards are very civil, the mods are seeing to that. But you have to understand that you are arguing from a rational point of view. Yes, in and of itself crunching numbers to make a stat block perform better is not a bad thing, yet you must remember 2 things:
Yes, I'm arguing rationally, that's correct. I'll come back to why later on.
1) Gaming is a social activity where people agree to an usually unspoken agreement: Don't be a dick/ don't spoil the fun for others. If *your* optimisation causes a problem then the onus is on *you* to scale it back, not on the others to engage in a metagame that they may, quite frankly, find disgusting.
Why is it always on the optimizer to change their behavior? Shouldn't that depend on the specific group dynamics? I mean, if you have five people, four of whom optimize a lot and one of whom doesn't, shouldn't the one who doesn't be the one who adjusts (hopefully with help from the people who optimize)?
And 'disgusting', really? I've never seen someone act like putting an 18 in their primary stat or otherwise building their concept to actually work mechanically is somehow 'disgusting'. If anyone really does feel that way, they're distinctly in the minority, I assure you.
And even if you are talking one optimizer in a group who doesn't do that, there are ways to create an optimal character who doesn't make the other players feel bad or overshadowed (the most obvious is a dedicated buffing Bard...their optimization helps everyone).
This whole argument comes off as, frankly, really one sided. Like your preferred style of gaming is the correct style on some objective level, and people should always accommodate it while you should never accommodate them. I'm hoping that's not your intent, but it sure comes off that way.
2) People are, by and large, not rational beings, but rather emotional. You can argue from your standpoint of logic until the cows come home and even be right about. It will not safe you from the ire of fellow player who just got slapped in the face with the fact that his beloved toon is 'suboptimal', 'not pulling his weight' or 'an XP-mooching gimp'. I assure you, things get rather emotional and logic goes die in a fire.
Sure, but that goes both ways. I've absolutely seen people called 'filthy munchkins' and bad players for daring to mention optimization. The lesson here is not 'My side is right because people on the other side were mean to me.' it's 'There are mean people out there on all sides. Ignore them.'
The person you describe is toxic and should be kicked out of any gaming group, including one that optimizes as much as possible. Their optimization has nothing to do with their attitude, and acting like it does is the same exact chain of logic as holding an entire race or religion responsible for the actions of an individual member. Which I'm sure you'll agree is terrible.
So, just my little piece of advice: You can keep telling yourselves that optimising is harmless, but if you only ever look at it in the 'clean room' of a message board forum and fail to look at what happens at real life tables, you are not doing yourself any favours.
I look at real life gaming groups all the time. I've had far more problems with people in this area (on both sides, since I'm pretty into building characters to theme as well as optimization) on forums than I've ever had in real life. Indeed, I don't think I've ever actually had such an argument in real life (other problems and arguments, yes, someone being super unpleasant specifically about relative optimization levels, no). When I optimize, I also go out of my way to help others do so specifically in ways that fit within their concept, and thus people basically never object to it. Because very few people actually want their characters to be ineffective at their primary schtick.
Yes, the *real* problem is people being dicks to other people, but the first step to becoming the dick is to dismiss another person's *emotions* about a subject because logic.
Speaking as someone who's generally involved in optimizing, your words tend to come off as every bit as offensive to me as some of the things you're talking about come off to you. Nevertheless, I'm engaging in rational discourse anyway because fairness and logic are good and important and we should all strive to base more of our decisions on them.
In short 'people are emotional' is true, but not an excuse for rudeness, being dismissive of others, or holding people guilty by association. It's a reason such things occur, but it's a reason riots occur, too. That doesn't make either one acceptable.
And yes, I hope Paizo keeps the reins tight. If optimizers, try as they might, can not ruin the fun for others, well, then both sides can coexist peacefully and actually have fun together. That's a good thing, isn't it?
Narrowing the gap is indisputably a good thing. Your phrasing on this demonstrates a fair bit of bias, though, it comes off as super aggressive and more than a little offensive.
I mean, I could just as easily say something like:
"I hope Paizo keeps the reins tight, if those 'roleplaying first' people, try as they might, can't build a useless character and ruin the fun of others, then both sides can coexist peacefully and actually have fun together."
I wouldn't because that's kind of a mean thing to say, but it's as true as what you're saying, and not actually any more biased.
