Why hate optimization?

[Darth Ultron]

No offense, but this is entirely your anecdotal experience. The 100 hit points connection with being funny makes no sense, I don't think anyone has ever said to themselves "I want to make a joker character, i need to have the most hp ever". A better example would have been to ask "why do you need 30 charisma to play a funny character". And the answer is, because more charisma means you're more capable of being funny when it mechanically matters.

It is bad enough that optimizers can't role play a funny character without something mechanical like a 30 in charisma, as a character with a charisma of like 11 simply can't be funny...or anything.

It is just beyond worse when the optimizers go off the deep end and say they must have high, or ''good'' everything to role play. Even when somethings like hit points don't have any effect on role playing.

Now of course, since humor is a subjective thing, you can't always be funny to every person ever, but, a more reasonable comparison would be: I want to play a character who's tough. Now in that circumstance, having 100 hp or having 30 hp actually matters. How can you possibly call yourself tough if you have low hp? You can call yourself tough, but the mechanics of the game disagree with you, since you always drop in one or two hits, not very tough at all now, are you.

This is yet another problem. A player will pick something like ''tough'' and then just randomly pick something mechanical, like ''hit points'' and then say ''my character must have a lot of hit points to be tough''. But something like ''tough'' can mean a lot of things, not just ''a got hit points''. And this is where the big disconnect is: the player could just be honest and say ''I'm roll playing and only care about the number of hit points my character has''....but they don't: they whip up the whole optimizing toughness cover and then hide behind it.

Same goes for calling yourself a master swordsman, but not being able to hit the far side of a barn with a sword, or any other character concept. If you want to play something, you need to actually be able to represent that with mechanics, because despite what you seem to be saying, D&D does have rules, and if your character is a terrible mechanically, then it won't live up to the hype of your roleplay. The two go side by side.

And this is the problem of ''master swrodsman'' vs ''demigod of swords''