D&D: character optimization

[cellio]

I commend this response to a discussion about optimizing RPG characters, by akitrom, to my role-playing-gamer friends. This captures a big part of what made ralph_dnd such a fun campaign: it's primarily about the character development, not the power development.

When I want to play an optimization game, I'll go for one of the German-style games of that sort, like El Grande or Merchants of Amsterdam or Hermagore. Optimization games can be fun for several hours. But when I play D&D (or similar games), that's not the kind of game I'm looking for.

Ralph's game ended several years ago, and I still enjoy remembering and telling stories from it. I've played in, and enjoyed at the time, RPGs that were less about character and more about optimizing power; I don't even remember the names of most of the characters I played in those games. I enjoyed it then, but it didn't stick and it's not very interesting to me now. What attracts me now is the role part of "role-playing game".

Which is kind of funny because I'm a pretty inhibited player, and not very good at role-playing, until I've been with a group and a set of characters for a while. My character in Ralph's game was pretty under-developed for the first several months, while some others sprung to life in the first session or two. Keeping the game journal actually helped a lot.

Comments

[yuggazogy.livejournal.com]

The post you're referring to is excellent-I will further posit that rather than Magic: The Gathering that really triggered the min/maxing trend, it was the online MMORPGs like Everquest (which was alive and kicking in '99) that were the primary culprits for 3rd edition munchkinism. 4th edition clearly swiped several pages (philosophically) from these games and World of Warcraft in particular, with each class section having pages of recommended character build optimization.

[cellio]

It's probably a combination for 3rd edition. (I definitely see the hand of WoW in 4th edition.) I remember playing Magic: the Gathering in 1993, but I don't remember it really getting out of hand until a few years later. MMORPGs were building by then, and I expect they and M:tG and the emerging D&D edition all influenced each other to some extent.