The Man Keeping the Martial Down

[AMFV]

The difference between an "obstacle course" and D&D chargen is that an obstacle course is a competitive event where the other players are the enemy and victory is defined by using your superior knowledge to defeat them.

Right the enemy isn't other players, the enemy is the rules. The same way as in an obstacle course the enemy is the course and your body not other people on the course. This is why runners and lifters talk about PRs more than they talk about winning competitions, because they are most frequently competing with themselves.

D&D, for the most part, is a cooperative event with no defined victory condition and in which the purpose of your performance is to enhance the other players' performance or at least their enjoyment of the game.

It's all well and good to have an enjoyable character creation minigame, but when that minigame takes place at the expense of the actual game being played at the table, your design philosophy and execution are fatally flawed. 3.X is very much that game, and saying that it's better that way marks a person as someone who fundamentally fails to grasp the nature of D&D as a group activity and doesn't have any business playing D&D with other people.

The "git gud scrub" mentality has its place in less cooperative games, but in D&D it just makes you a toxic impediment to others' enjoyment.

I agree that 3.5 D&D did not work as well as it could for this case. That's never been in question here. Although I would argue that people who play with a lot of optimization and competition at the table aren't inherently toxic unless they take that attitude and attempt to force it on people who prefer a different style. Which actually in the current trends I've seen it's the other group more likely to try to force that.

"Sorry you assumed that the burgers in my restaurant were made with food-grade beef. What, you think you see a sign anywhere in here promising that it's fit for human consumption?"

No, this is you coming into a restaurant and throwing a fit because the meat in the burger is medium rare, and NOBODY COULD POSSIBLY LIKE A MEDIUM RARE BURGER AND MAKING BURGERS MEDIUM RARE IS BAD COOKING. That's the analogy. Non food-grade beef can hurt you. A character creation mini-game is never going to hurt you unless you already have some pretty serious issues. This is a matter of taste, people like different things.

By promoting character creation as a supposed "minigame" that players need to "develop skill in", he's unavoidably implying a gap between players in that skill, and unavoidably implying a win-loss scale that puts one player ahead of another.

It is true that some people are better at creating characters in games than others are. Some people are better at roleplaying in games than others are. Some people are luckier with dice than others are. If you're playing a game of the sort I'm discussing then the responsibility if you're better is to give other players advice (if they ask) and to generally not brag up your character, and to try to make a character that fits with the power level of the group. That's an element of the mini-game.

Furthermore, the results of character creation have ongoing effects on the subsequent actual gameplay, that unavoidably advantage the enjoyment of those players who quote-unquote "win" character creation over that of those who quote-unquote "lose" character creation when a system if full of "challenges and complexity" (that is, traps and bad options).

I'm not competing with the other players (although there could be a system where that was the case). I'm competing against myself and the rule system, the same way as when I lift weights I might not be competing with anybody but the weights.

Character generation should not be an 'obstacle course' unless you're playing something like Paranoia.

So unless the game is designed for that? That's exactly my point. Thanks!

Is this the part where I have to remind you again that in a game of chess, both players get the SAME SET OF PIECES? It's not like one player has the 'opportunity' to pick 15 pawns and a king, which I guess would be the equivalent of playing a 3.X Fighter vs. a spellcaster.

Might I again remind you of exactly what I've been saying.

1.) The Wizard is largely exempt from the character creation mini-game in 3.5. You literally just write Wizard on your sheet.

2.) The Fighter has a lot more work to do to make it work efficiently (and never as well as an optimized wizard in any case).

3.) Some games (4e and 5e) have made it so that the fighter has less work involved in the mini-game, and you just write fighter on your sheet to make it work as well as it should work in the game.

4.) I personally enjoy games where there is a character creation mini-game, so I enjoy playing fighters or gishes in 3.x.

5.) I was suggesting a hypothetical game where greater balance is achieved by forcing the wizard to play the same sort of character creation mini-game the fighter is