You don't seem to understand my criticism. Vast majority of time, when you or your players call a strategy "optimal", it is NOT a strategy with maximized reward to risk ratio in any actual scenario under discussion. It is a strategy with maximized reward to risk ratio in a vacuum, with spherical opponents. Quite often, when you come here to complain, you
yourself can point out the obvious flaw... yet then turn around and insist the players are following an "optimal" strategy. The core issue is this:
You have way too much faith in mathematical abilities of yourself and your players.
Chess is a perfect information game. No living human can math out the best possible strategy for a Chess game.
Checkers is a simpler perfect information game. Better yet, it is a solved game! A computer can be programmed to always play a perfect game of Checkers. Good luck trying to do the same as a human.
Even moderately complex games can keep speedrun competition circuits going for years as hundreds of players try to figure out the best route. Completionist runs are fairly different, as they are often designed to be completeable by the average end user. Yet, genuine
optimal paths for most such games
are often not known at all since it doesn't take a lot for that pursuit to turn into a
Travelling Salesman problem that'd require a computer to run an algorithm to approximate the correct result.
The efforts of you or your players going through an adventure
once aren't on the same level.
You are one of many people who are unreasonably afraid of perfect information, because your hubris blinds you to the difference of an optimal path existing
in theory versus you and your players being able to find it
in practice. Which, in turn, leads to you and your players proclaim solutions are "optimal" when they are at best functional, and often not even that.
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And what exactly do you think happens then when a game master plays characters and forces that content with, oppose and resist the player characters? What exactly do you think players are doing when contending with characters and forces made to oppose and resist them?
Or, you have an erroneous idea of how adversarial games are run and designed. Again:
This continues to be false. Again, we can replace the game master with a Chess player suggesting horribly lopsided board set-ups. The fact that they can do that doesn't mean that it is in their best interest, since any victory gained so is hollow. They get more, and more meaningful, gameplay by agreeing to a fairer match-up. "Give the (other) player(s) a reasonable chance of success" isn't an advice that's limited to non-adversarial games, to the contrary, adversarial games live by it. That's the reason why classic strategy games such as Chess strive for equal play power at the start of the game. Similarly, you seem to think trust isn't a factor in adversarial games, but it absolutely is. There is no meaning to an adversarial game without players being able to trust the other to follow rules of engagement.
You think the game master isn't an adversary, because you don't understand the reason why an adversary would self-limit to particular rules.