Quote Originally Posted by Zeful View Post
Not what I'm saying. tuggyne[sic] was implying that a game that isn't very fun for optimizers is an undesirable state, either because of bad design, or taste. Given my experience with the optimizers on this forum, I disagree, on both it as an undesirable state, and bad design.
Well, tuggyne's right on that front, it is undesirable if 5e isn't fun for optimizers...just as it's undesirable for it to be not-fun for the beer-and-pretzels crowd, or the story-teller crowd, or what have you. It's impossible to completely cater to every sort of player, but you want as many categories of player as possible to have something of interest.

People like to claim that optimization culture is a 3e thing. It's not, but because different kinds of optimization happened in each edition, people who can and do optimize in one edition might view another as too hard or too easy to optimize. 3e and 4e have lots of prerequisites, hoop-jumping, and "you must have X to do Y," so optimizing in that ruleset means working your build out ahead of time to ensure you can do what you want to be able to do. AD&D has less flexible classes (with most customization coming in the form of learning spells, making and finding items, and such), as well a fairly delineated level progression ("name level," level caps, different XP tables, UA class variants, etc.), so optimizing in that ruleset means strategic multi- and dual-classing and seeking out magical stuff to make you better. Optimization-in-build vs. optimization-in-play, if you will. For a game to be "bad" or unfun for optimizers would mean it would either have to be practically impossible to optimize (lots of randomness, DM fiat everywhere, etc.) or pointless to optimize (homogeneous options, no advantage to be gained, etc.). Those kinds of games are good for PC-killers like one-shots, old-school dungeoncrawls, tournament play, and such; non-serious games like Paranoia, where the rules don't really matter anyway; and PCs-as-inferior-underdogs games like WHFRP and CoC, where the whole point is that the PCs are relatively powerless and doomed to die; none of which modern D&D really resembles.

Similarly, the people who argue in WotC D&D about the technical literal meaning of RAW are the same people who argue in AD&D about vague and contradictory rules; too many rules is just as bad as too few rules. The people who get upset when 3e DMs don't allow PrC early-entry and ban material for bad reasons are the same people who argue with 2e DMs about banned kits and subsystems or 4e DMs about banned themes and rituals. The fact that there are a lot of powergamers/munchkins/rules lawyers/[derogatory term du jour] online doesn't mean that they should be catered to less than the drama queens/"real" roleplayers/[derogatory term du jour] or the noobs/hack-n-slashers/[derogatory term du jour].

I haven't seen the overly-hostile optimizers you mention, at least on these forums, but I'll take your word for it that you have been burned by them before. Even so, dismissing optimizers as worse than cheaters is not the right reaction--you can deal with them sensibly just as much as cheaters, and usually more so. Calling out D&D forums as being the most wretched hives of scum and villainy around is the wrong reaction--the stuff you can pull in GURPS and Shadowrun is less out-of-genre than D&D but no less crazy. Wanting a game to be badly designed to have more vague and undefined rules to stop them (which would only lead to "story lawyering" on the part of the bad players and god-moding and railroading on the part of the bad DMs) is not the right reaction--note that there's a big different between a rules-light game and one with incomplete or vague rules.