Originally Posted by
TheOOB
While I'll admit choice overload is a possibility, I think that's an unusual situation. Anyone on an Unofficial D&D board should be willing to learn about the system, otherwise why are they here, and I think choice overload is more of an overreaction to the idea of learning too much rather than an effect actually learning.
The fact is, proper knowledge about a subject can never make a subject worse, only better.
It's fair to say most players want their characters to feel mechanically useful and beneficial to the party. Lets say Alice is playing a Druid and Bob is playing a Fighter. Alice picks a few good feats and ends up blowing Bob out of the water, to the point where Bob doesn't feel useful in combat anymore. Even after spending hours looking through source books and optimizing his character, he still can't hold a candle to Alice. Without understanding the tier system, Bob may think that he is bad at building D&D characters, which may make him not want to play. This is bad.
By understanding the Tier system Bob will learn that the fighter is just a plain mechanically poor class, and even a super optimized fighter is likely to be vastly inferior to even an average druid. He may next time decide to roll a warblade or a psychic warrior when someone in his party picks a Tier 1 class(he still wants to play a tough warrior type), and find himself feeling more useful and thus enjoying the game much more. By learning something new, Bob was able to have more fun, and possibly even make the game more fun for Alice who always had the lingering guilt that she was making the game un-fun for Bob.
Roleplaying and storytelling are great parts of D&D, but very very few D&D groups are completely filled with people who care nothing about the mechanics of the game(and as I stated before, if you care nothing about the mechanics, playing a mechanically dense pseudo fantasy wargame might not be the best choice).
Many people understand the balance of class power well before the Tier list was made, but the Tier list provides an easy way for players unfamiliar with class power balance to understand it, and helps to provide some useful tools with dealing with power imbalance(namely having vastly different Tiers in the party is typically not a great idea).
Also, I hate it when people equate knowledge to optimization, and optimization to playing an overpowered wreck. I understand how to make a stupid overpowered character, I have literally won a D&D championship. That said, I rarely make characters who are hugely more powerful than other party members, even though I typically play arcane casters. I like to build fun and interesting characters rather than uber powerhouses, though I also make sure all of the my characters are useful to the party and fulfill some role. Making a character that is vastly overpowered for a group is typically a sign of a lack of understanding of the system, not the other way around(or just a sign you're mean).
And know you know, and knowing is half the battle.