The Man Keeping the Martial Down

[AMFV]

As I am concerned, the only reason this is relevant is that whole archetypes* of characters are "trap options".

I once made a comment about a story that had a pretty crazy power curve that as crazy as it was you could stat one of the most powerful people in the setting as a mid-high level D&D wizard. Any you would need 60 levels of monk or something to stat their partner.

Does anyone have any other insights about how this topic is relevant to the thread? If not do you think we could wind this aside down soon? I don't mean to be a kill-joy but its been about 4 pages or so since this got started.

* With occasional narrow exceptions.

The original topic was started because I was discussing making Wizards have to jump through the same sort of hoops that fighters do. Which seemed like a really fun idea to me, since I absolutely love those kind of exercises. Of course, the idea that character creation complexity could be something people could enjoy is apparently heresy to some.

Basically in 3.5 (and other similar systems) when you're playing a "martial" character you have to jump through a lot more hoops to have the character work at its intended role. Like Wizard 20 is a fine practical optimization build for the Wizard, and your feat choices don't really matter (though they can help) nothing matters but that 18 in your casting stat and those levels. I mean other things can help, but they certainly aren't going to stop you from contributing. Whereas the fighter (or martial, since it's never a pure fighter) has to carefully plan feats, carefully plan dips and multiclassing as well as prestige classing (and usually winds up with a single trick at the end).

Now some systems (like 5e and 4e) have made it so basically the fighter is just writing fighter down on his sheet, and simplifying creation to where everybody shares a fairly simple character creation, so we've seen that as an attempt to bring the mundane and the martial classes closer.

The thing is that I enjoy that character creation mini-game, I enjoy building characters that are complex so much that I'll build sub-optimal casters to enjoy it. So I was speculating that it might be interesting to try to make a system that complexifies the Wizard builds instead of simplifying the martial builds, which is relevant. Until it got bogged down in telling me how anybody who enjoys competitive stuff is pretty much literally Hitler.

It just teaches players to be "better" at exploiting the system, picking away at the faults and holes and cracks to find advantages over other players. It's the worst parts of "Gamism" on ugly display, with obvious problems in the system being regarded as "part of the rules, so part of playing the Game".

It's not "exploiting" if the system is intended with that in mind. And most of the "exploits" that I recall tended to be things that DMs could shut down pretty easily. Most of the Pratical Optimization isn't any kind of exploitation. Generally speaking even at tables where things that are explotiative of the rules are tolerated they're somewhat frowned on.

Well, straight up, enjoying charop exercises and enjoying playing high-op characters doesn't make a player toxic. You're right.

Yes, I am.

But a system that requires charop expertise for PCs to have basic competence in a cooperative environment is going to foster a toxic mindset and attract players who already have a toxic mindset. You may not have witnessed this firsthand at your table, but I've seen it firsthand and I've heard about it secondhand at many tables.

Very possibly, but all sorts of games attract different kinds of toxic players. I don't think enjoying competitive stuff is a toxic mindset, I think that it's a style of game, and a fine one to enjoy.

The system design you're advocating for here works well in a game that lasts a couple of minutes or a couple of hours, where the consequences of failure are points awarded to one's opponent. When a game lasts for months and the consequence for failure is not defeat but rather irrelevance, treating "system mastery" as a virtue means making the game objectively worse for the majority of its players, both by definition and by design.

Typically in games of the sort we're discussing DMs are pretty lenient with allowing people to reroll. Since that's part of the game. So it probably won't last more than a couple sessions at worst. And I'm not sure that you could argue that the majority of gamers wouldn't enjoy a competitive game. At all. You could argue that it would be worse for a very vocal minority, who doesn't really have to play, they have their own games. I would think they're worse off, since variety is the spice of life, but whatever.