Why do some people choose to play less optimal characters for 'roleplay reasons' when you can just refluff the optimal...

Fluff variety != mechanical variety.
People like to have things that play differently, so designers have to make things that do different things at the same level of power. That's hard, so power imbalances exist.

His armor, while excellent for his agile combat, is awful at letting him crawl. The joints just won't articulate that way, so he can't squeeze through. Seems fine to me.

This.

If I wanted to be more optimal as a bard, I would take the archery tax feats. Instead, it's more fun finding different things to do to provide value and utility, such as aiding another, casting spells, throwing alchemical items, placing simple traps (as appropriate), and buying scrolls to UMD to provide my allies an edge in combat.

Actually, fuck that. I wouldn't play a bard at all. I would make a mutant dip monster hybrid with classes that are always +1 bab.

But that's boring.

Breaks immersion for some people. And while I'll avoid getting into the false dichotomy of good roleplaying vs mechanical optimization, my personal experiences have made me wary of players who focus on mechanical optimization. They usually seem more immersed in the number of dice they can throw instead of the setting or campaign itself. At best they've roleplayed the same edgelord/shonen anime protagonists over and over again.

Two reasons.

Firstly, there's a difference between being an optimized character and shunning suboptimal option like the plague. Most options are suboptimal, but most builds are specialized, so they're take them anyway. Only a few options are so bad that they'd never be picked ever (and even they're sometimes picked for specific builds).

Secondly, suboptimal options allow more experienced players to purposely reduce the power of their character to match the power of newer players' characters (which are not optimized). From my personal experience (far too much time playing 3.5 before learning there were other RPGS), this ends up usually being a very effective way of balancing characters.

Because some players and GMs really hate reskins.

I'm usually all for refluffing things, but I'm having a hard time imagining armour designed for mobility that restricts movement.

Challenge is a sliding scale. Optimize your character however you want and the DM can throw a beholder at you and then you die. On the other side, end up with a 1hp mage whose only spell is enlarge, and the DM can throw nothing at you but giant centipedes until you hit level 5 (centipedes do 0 damage in 2e, btw).

Party balance is all that actually matters. Because balancing the world against the party is the DM's job. That one player who tries to optimize is, in essence, trying to throw off the party balance.

So therefore he's a douche.

Cursed armour. Once belonging to a warrior-king, the armour hastens your strikes while you fight, but weighs you down should you try to flee like a coward!

Refluffing across size classes is pretty silly, yeah. If I were GMing for this hypothetical character, I'd have insisted they be Small, though allowed them to count the rapier as a halberd despite it being Heavy.

There's a reason why the dichotomy surfaced to begin with, and my own experiences could pay testimony to the exchange of real character portrayal for spreadsheet calculations.

I think systems need more custom abilities per character instead of electing choices from a list. I think this would encourage developing the character as you want to play them.

This. If a PC is asking for the rules to work a certain way to assist them I usually say it os up to anyone whose toes it steps on

He'll get bored in a week, tops.

Weaknesses are fun to play.

Because playing less-than-optimal characters is, paradoxically enough, more fun and interesting.

>Why do some people choose to play less optimal characters for 'roleplay reasons' when you can just refluff the optimal character as whatever you want it to be?
Sometimes the "roleplay" argument makes zero sense if you imagine that the characters are supposed to have non-metagame motivations.

PC1: Fellow adventurer, why do you continue to use that awful weapon in combat?
PC2, metagaming answer: muh concept
PC2, non-metagaming answer: I don't know. I guess I'm stupid and want us both to die.

>not crafting a character destined to die
fucking /v/irgin "I am playing the game not my character" shit.

There are literally people in real life who think katanas are the greatest weapon ever gifted to mankind, you actually think it's too much of a stretch for a fictional character to think the same of whatever their chosen weapon is even if they're objectively wrong?

I honestly can't decide if this post is satirical.

>non-optimal character always means that player wants to fail and will fail
What did he mean by this?

"character concept" is just a dog-whistle term for metagaming in the opposite direction of optimization. The poor verisimilitude is the same, but the motivation is to be a speshul snowflake rather than to be overpowered.

Conceptfags are among the worst at metagaming to the extent that something a character in-universe would never care or know about, like the name of their class, is super important to the conceptfag.

Metagaming isn't inherently a sin, but doing so to the extent that the characters make no sense sort of misses the point of playing a tabletop RPG instead of WoW. Concept-driven characters are just the primordial version of "le troll builds lol" in online games.

More tables need to follow the concept of "build worth bringing." If a character is such a knuckle-dragging liability that the reasonable thing to do is to ditch them at the nearest inn, then ditched at the nearest inn is what should happen.

This doesn't mean everyone should be playing either a Human Hand-Crossbow Fighter, Wood Elf Life Cleric, or High Elf Wizard, but they should be competent enough at their chosen job. to not be an active drawback to the group.

As to motivations, it's just attention whoring with a coat of martyrdom. Their "roleplay" is just hogging the spotlight by sucking dramatically every time they're on stage which keeps them the central figure while pretending they're doing everyone else a favor.

Because I start with the fluff of my character and slap together stats to give the best approximate match.

What poorly skilled one man team indie game does that edited image come from?

Why not just play board games? Legit question, swear its not bait. Aren't roleplaying games mostly story-driven? At least the type of games that your choice of examples seem to indicate? Certainly these games can be played as a glorified wargame like Warhammer, where the players simply focus on overcoming obstacles and collecting riches. But isn't most of the fun in exploring characters' personalities, and engaging in the humor and pathos of conflict? Of course I don't mean this to any sort of extreme. I don't want any player to act in ways that prove distracting or toxic to the game at large. However it seems like you are very anti-roleplay in a genre that not only encourages it, but is almost always built to promote it.

But he can't bait people by being condcending about RPers in RPGs.
What's he going to do, shitpost about people who need boards to play boardgames?

>Why not just play board games? Legit question, swear its not bait. Aren't roleplaying games mostly story-driven?

That's exactly the reason why concept "builds" are shit, and you're defeating your own point.

If you want to try gimmicks like "I'm gonna play monopoly and only buy warm-colored properties!" go ahead. It's a completely arbitrary idea that has nothing to do with a story.

If you want to play an actual RPG, you need to learn that builds are not character concepts.

"bob the fighter, loves his kids. wants to come home with enough that they can grow up to live a better lifestyle." is a character concept.
"bob the dual-wielding arcane polearm cleric" is not a character concept.

The moment bob decides to use a stupid weapon or idea for the job, verisimilitude is destroyed. That kind of shit is for bad world of warcraft and league of legends videos where a player does a "troll build."

Ah, I think see where our opinions differ: Despite various systems theming being that of conflict, I do not see the overcoming of said conflict to be the end goal of playing TTRPGs. Is it that you see victory over conflict (aka "winning the game") the ultimate end goal, and thus receive more pleasure from that over the experience of playing in itself?

I may choose suboptimal specializations, but you can damn well be sure I try to optimize within that specialization. Even if what I'm doing isn't worth doing, you can damn well be sure I'm going to be fantastic at it.

Like grappling, or having a ludicrously high carry weight.

Our opinions don't differ, you're just functionally illiterate. Read posts before you reply.

Julian? Is that you?

Oh? Alright. I guess we're done then.

I....I think I want all of you to die.
Or at least, never leave Veeky Forums. Stay here, and keep posting, and never bother anyone who actually plays rpgs.

Because I don't play D&D or games like D&D.

Your post has left me confused. You are arguing against "Bob the dual wielding cleric" whereas I would assume that most people are talking about "Bob's dad left him a sword and he uses it even though maces are better". Assuming that the post about PC1 and 2 non metagaming was yours, the appropriate response is something story driven. It's not hard to come up with some response, after all people in real life use suboptimal shit all the time

True. Having a gimmick doesn't prevent you having bob the fighter who loves his kids in any way. It's just the fighting style he has trained or whatever, easily explained by fluff alone.

ITT: Austists fail to appreciate that different people play games for different reasons

Why is it always the story-obsessed ones who understand this concept the least? You're all so shockingly close-minded about this argument.

That's fine. You're still illitirate. You're exactly the kind of double-thinking corrupted mind that Trump was elected to remove from our government.

Not exactly. I play board games, too, but they also have a sort of social contract to them: namely that a competition will occur.

If I offer to play chess with a friend and I win, that's fine. If he wins, that's fine. Ideally we both trade wins back and forth but if he's a chess junkie I might win a lot less often. Still fine.

If I offer to play chess, and instead of trying to win open up the board as fast as possible, sacrifice both rooks, and then resign my friend might be confused. If all I ever did was work my way into a bad position on purpose and then quit over and over again it's not going to be long until he wants to stop playing chess entirely, if "playing chess" is what you could call that.

I could be an asshole about this and go "lol, tryhard," "who cares, it's just a stupid game," "sacrificing both rooks is what my king would do," or "who cares about winning? the point is that we simulate a battle. do you want to simulate the same battle over and over again?" but the truth is that it would be pretty clear I was being a jerk by not actually playing chess, and by refusing to actually play chess I was stepping on his fun, as well.

Deliberately playing a not just sub-optimal but sub-standard character is a lot of ways very similar. If the agreement at the table is to play a group of adventurers who explore challenging ruins in search of treasure, then you should bring a character who's prepared to help adventure for treasure. You have a lot of options on how to flesh that out, both mechanically and story-wise, but if you show up with a wheelchair-bound seamstress who thinks grave robbing should be illegal you're no longer playing the game everyone else is, you're substituting it with a new game where you do weird things and then people respond to you. The DM can't build ruins that challenge a group of competent adventurers because you no longer have a group of competent adventurers, you have 3 competent adventurers and Myrtle. Don't be Myrtle

>I could be an asshole about this and go "lol, tryhard," "who cares, it's just a stupid game," "sacrificing both rooks is what my king would do," or "who cares about winning? the point is that we simulate a battle. do you want to simulate the same battle over and over again?" but the truth is that it would be pretty clear I was being a jerk by not actually playing chess, and by refusing to actually play chess I was stepping on his fun, as well.

I think there's a difference between building to be good at *something,* vs having no competencies whatsoever in pursuit of "story." There's valid in-and-out-of-character reasons for a character to exist who is spectacularly good at shutting down enemy spellcasters but can't contribute as much against other any types. There's really no reason to roll a halberd user with an 8 str because "missing is more dramatic than hitting" and "winning isn't everything."

It feels like something happened in OP's game and he needs to vent.

Two or three reasons.
First, some people may wish to roleplay that their character is actually weaker than optimal. Not everyone activly wants to be a badass.
Second, some players aren't happy refluffing, and instead really, really want to be a polearm master that uses masterwork ladders. "Counts as" will not satisfy them.
Thirdly, it seems a valid tradeoff; sacrifice some efficiency for style. Some people feel disgusted with themselves when they get to have their cake and eat it.
Fourthly, why even play an rpg if you don't actually make a character and just pick the strongest guy. Just play vidya at that point.
Fifthly, why even make a character when a hideously broken character abusing poor rule descriptions could be used instead?

>optimal character

kys

better yet, enjoy fighting your way through encounters tailored specifically to counter your build.

When are character optimization fags gonna learn you simply CAN'T "optimise" a character in pnp?

Because constant optimization for combat is fucking boring, cookie cutters are for pansies, and building a character organically rather than by a spreadsheet is fun.

I think a lot hinges on whether we're talking about 1d6 sword vs. 1d8 hammer, or whether we're talking about someone who deliberately puts an 8 in Str and chooses a sword they aren't proficient in because "not being worthy of my father's sword is part of my story."

The first is fine. I have a guy who wields a trident even though spears are strictly speaking better because he's from a fishing village and he grew up using one to spearfish. One of the characters from that game was a Life Cleric who used a longbow because it felt more Elf-like to the player to use it instead of a damage cantrip. That's fine, you can let a few points slip and still hold your own.

But at the end of the day we still showed up prepared to move the group forward and pulled our own weight, whereas if I'd showed up with a Champion Fighter who had renounced violence or she'd showed up with a Life Cleric who refused to use magic, we wouldn't have been.

>First, some people may wish to roleplay that their character is actually weaker than optimal. Not everyone activly wants to be a badass.
That's fine in a single player game, but when you're dragging down other people you need to pull your head outta your ass.

>Second, some players aren't happy refluffing, and instead really, really want to be a polearm master that uses masterwork ladders. "Counts as" will not satisfy them.
This is the point where the DM says either "No, ladders aren't on the PAM list you can't use them" or "Fine, but I'm only letting you do it if they count-as".

>Thirdly, it seems a valid tradeoff; sacrifice some efficiency for style. Some people feel disgusted with themselves when they get to have their cake and eat it.
See first response.

>Fourthly, why even play an rpg if you don't actually make a character and just pick the strongest guy. Just play vidya at that point.
There's a difference between "best" and "adequate". Nobody reasonable bitches about "he's not the best", but a whole lot of people will bitch if you're not adequate.

>Fifthly, why even make a character when a hideously broken character abusing poor rule descriptions could be used instead?
See four.

>There's a difference between "best" and "adequate".
What did he mean by that?

That no one in these threads every bothers to clarify if we're talking about being a B student, a D- student, or getting the pencil stuck in your nose.

Because i don't play D&D or Pathfinder and so i can play my character how i want and still be effective.

>Anything beyond the most optimized choice is somehow playable and not garbage
uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

>That one guy who only plays fully randomized characters.

There are edge cases where it doesn't work out, but I agree with the sentiment.

Because some people aren't playing dnd

Because maybe I think my suboptimal choices are cooler than the normal optimal builds and I want to mix things up.

While I haven't personally experienced it, I have a friend who once pretty much didn't get to make their own character because they picked wizard and the rest of the party groaned if he picked a less viable spell to mix things up, even if the rest of the build was optimized.

Accidentally hit enter without finishing my post.

I brought up said anecdote just to say that pushing for optimization as your primary motivation in character building stifles creativity, even if you try refluffing the same build everyone always uses to be something different from an RP perspective.

It depends how you view player characters, really.

If you see your character as simply being a 'skin' for dice rolls then yeah, it'd make sense to just refluff and optimal build, since the important bit is the stats.

However, that's not how most rulebooks lay out character creation. they tend to take the path of seeing characters as story elements. This way, your class, abilities, and stats should 100% be informed by the character, which usually results in sub-optimum builds, because interesting characters are rarely optimally built.

There's arguments to be made here for doing things both ways, but ultimately it comes down to how you play, and how you view your character

It depends on the game.

In games with better design, you don't have shit like D&D, where some equipment choices are strictly worse than others.

What sort of story element does it inform anyone that my weapon that has the same handedness/size/proficiency category/etc. does on average 1 less damage than a different one?

Fucking nothing. There's basically no reason not to refluff there.

I find it difficult to get attached to something I didn't put care into building, conceptually *or* mechanically.

I like playing with a handicap. It makes things interesting.

Human hand-crossbow fighter is the guy who'd get dumped at the inn, though. Like, you can't even apply your strength bonus to that, and dual wielding is objectively bad.

Not in 5e.

It's more fun if the mechanics play into the character concept. And sometimes you can't fit square crunch inside round fluff.

That's why the concept of "gameplay feel" exists. To paraphrase: strip Pandemic down to basic shapes and abstract names, and it'll still be a game about trying to contain something before it spreads out of control.

You can refluff Pandemic into a zombie apocalypse, or something about virus infections in the matrix, but you can't make it into a hotel management game. It'll feel wrong. (Unless you make it about pest control...)

>Why is it always the story-obsessed ones who understand this concept the least?
You're probably being false-flagged, friend.

>That's fine. You're still illitirate.
You need to get smarter or at least get a better spellcheck.

Because I like when the mechanics my character has actually fit how I want to play.