Why do people sperg out so much about muh roleplay vs. "roll"play?

Oh please, I want to know why anime ass monstergirls are devisive. Personally I just say fuck it and drop full monster and monstergirls into the same settings and cultures.

To answer your question, it's because GMs get buthurt when somebody questions how they run their game then come on here to complain about it, which just results in more people questioning/disagreeing with them which just perpetuates the problem.

I think personally the problem is that those things are difficult to have existing at the same time - people focused entirely on story are frustrated by people who not only don't care about story, but build their characters to take care of every fight really well.

Maybe I'm over-exaggerating too much, and that rarely ever happens, but in my limited experience it can be a pain to deal with in a game.

Subjectivity is not a blanket excuse, especially since some things are less subjective than others.

Badwrongfun has a number of vying definitions, but the simplest is fun that is harmful or detrimental. Pulling your teeth out is badwrongfun, regardless of how subjectively fun you might have convinced yourself it is.

If your brand of fun makes your group hate you, that's obviously badwrongfun. If your brand of fun lowers the standards of yourself, your group, and the greater roleplaying community, that's badwrongfun, regardless of how little you care about those three.

I'm not the GM, and he's an old high school friend of the rest of the group.

>Badwrongfun has a number of vying definitions, but the simplest is fun that is harmful or detrimental. Pulling your teeth out is badwrongfun, regardless of how subjectively fun you might have convinced yourself it is.
I've never seen anyone use that word that way. Generally "badwrongfun" is "someone having fun in a way I don't approve of".

>Just use ASL, Descent or whatever
The problem with those is that its DM vs. Players, usually. I like designing a dungeon or map for the players to go through. I find that roleplaying rulesets lend themselves better to deeper immersion as well as making the players actually talk out what they are gonna do amongst themselves. I don't make my dungeons easy, but they aren't cruel either. Its not something you can just roll a dice and solve but I see it as a valid way to try.
Tactical simulation is another thing completely.

>anime ass monstergirls are devisive
They are? You mean like, for non-porn purposes or something?

It's only used be oversensitive babies like yourself who can't stand people disapproving of their type of fun, so they run behind their paper-thin wall of subjectivity and sarcastically shout "Badwrongfun!"

>who can't stand people disapproving of their type of fun, so they run behind their paper-thin wall of subjectivity
I'm starting to suspect you don't know what the word "subjective" means either.

Most of the people I play with are pretty split on the matter. Half are fine with it if they aren't just used for porn, the other half sperg out at the slightest hint of them. The one time I did insert both takes on it into one setting was also the last time they let me GM given the massive shitfest that happened.
I honestly don't know if its some of my players being hyper-purist autists or if I actually fucked something else up. Does not responding to this particular case of bitching count as bad GMing?

it's best not to interact with cartoon characters like him.

nah, that's the internet ruining your players and turning them into hypercontrarian hyperextremists about inconsequential issues.
Can't be blamed for that.

>Does not responding to this particular case of bitching count as bad GMing?
You should probably always give their bitching a chance, no? I'm not a GM, but addressing these things is kinda your role in the game.
That said, they're definitely being autistic about it, if it bothers them enough to fuck the entire game up.

Yeah probably. I'll be honest though, I really don't care either way about it at this point. Other than that whole mess they're pretty much all decent people to play with short of the one jaded super-veteran, and he's really only annoying if he's running the game, guy makes a great player. The only moral I have of this whole thing is that "both" isn't actually a working compromise when the complaint is one thing just being there rather than taking the place of something else.

And around we go.

>Subjectivity is not a blanket excuse, especially since some things are less subjective than others.

Stop being an oversensitive baby about someone else having different fun than you.

Telling someone you disapprove of something they decided to share is hardly being oversensitive.

You baby.

As an outside observer, you seem real sensitive about it.

I mean you should say that's dumb as fuck and he should either pay attention or not play.
My games are Virtual and only once ever has someone played a game while we were playing and it was because I the GM was helping another player figure out their character sheet as they were new.

Had one of those jaded super-veterans in my game before... fucking ruined everyone's fun when he went off on his own because he would almost always find the quest npc and attack them somehow despite the fact he almost never hit which just made everyone hate the party by extension. Eventually he pushed the others too far and we had him roll another character... resulted in a different type of bullying others into doing what he wanted so I just stopped inviting him to play, it's been better since but it's sad because the party is now a small group which made the whole dynamic shift hard.

I allow monster girl like races in my games, for example I had an entire settlement in an area that in lore has all sorts of fucked up planar shit going on and well basically a dysfunctional village of monstrous races that didn't attack the party. They all liked it but it took some getting used to. I didn't go anime level everyone is a beautiful monster girl on the inside or outside though. Also had monster men.

This is the stormwind fallacy. You can roleplay well with optimized characters. You can also be totally terrible at roleplay with an unoptimized build, even if your stats are designed towards roleplay.

But there is no conflict. Minmaxing does not prevent one from roleplaying nor does it interfere with others' roleplaying.

It's not like you need to pick one or the other.

Just go with both.

I suspect the argument that they can't both be done is made only by people who are just bad at one aspect and want to pretend like it's the wrong way to play anyway so they can ignore it.

As a DM I like both sides however I have to say I prefer the combat side those people are more fun to play with they challenged me more they are less caring if I hurt their character if I damaged their character they're not going to go off on me typically other than maybe in a better game since where they're just mad that I was able to use something against them but roll players get mad when I heard their characters in and out of combat or will players tend to be overly nitpicky with accents or me sounding like a woman when I'm acting like a woman that kind of thing it really annoys me although I would say both of them are equally as good and as bad

Because people who rollplay have this very nasty habit of viewing any non-optimal build as not only bad, but some form of heresy that must be stamped out of existence. Despite people saying Stromwind Fallacy is a thing, these same people will call anything that is non-optimal badwrongfun to the point of incoherent rage if they are not coddled.

>trying to whitewash the 'badwrongfun' crowd's hate of other people enjoying things
>using an extremely stupid false comparison as an example
Found the rollplayer.

Maybe you shouldn't play games with autists?

It's simple really
"Roleplaying" is what I like, and that's good and right
"Rollplaying" is what I don't like, and that's bad and wrong

This thread in itself is proof that many of the definitions we use at not very clear and different people use them in different ways. Plus, we tend to consider all playstyles and preferences that don't match our own as wrong.
People should start caring about what happens at their own table more than what happens at someone else's. But I guess many of us here don't even have a table.

My games are Virtual
One could say... your games are VirtualOptim

Learn to punctuate your fucking sentences.

That's d&d PF and shadowrun off the table

>three most horrendously designed games off the table.
You should be ecstatic

Because those "merits" have different appeal for diffwerent people, yet are shoehorned into a medium that is for some reason considered one, unitary hobby.

I acknowledge that some people may like dungeoncrawling and tacticool miniature wargames with basic RP sprinkled onto it, but I personally, don't. And by extension, I don't want to do it, don't want to be associated with it, don't want to deal with people who bring expectations from their own kind of gaming into mine.

Yet I am.

Seriously, gamist "rpgs" and really RP-driven games should part ways forever and each should be considered its own thing, no more related to each other than say, board wargames and miniature wargames. It would save lot of grief for both sides.

Because what you are talking about is putting a balance between the two.

Autists don't, they always work in extremes.

are you physically retarded

>playing d&d PF &
okay shadowrun gets a pass if it's with friends but you catch my drift

honestly this
All the people who I play with have the same mindset of "you shouldn't need to optimize anything ever, just go with what seems to work" and that's why I hope to never change my group

You mean anyone on Veeky Forums?

Like many so-called fallacies, the stormwind fallacy does not apply in reverse. said that you get problems if you have a nonconformal distribution of minmaxers and roleplayers there will be problems.

The stormwind fallacy is to claim that "Minmaxing automatically makes you bad at roleplay" and "Suboptimizing automatically makes you good at roleplay". The TRUE statement is that being good at roleplay automatically makes you suboptimized, because for any character that is more than just a sheet of statistical properties there is a better optimized version that IS just a sheet of statistical properties.
Good at roleplay -> suboptimal is the only true implication between the two properties.

As a wise and cute sage once told me. "There's no wrong way to fantasize".

>Minmaxing does not prevent one from roleplaying nor does it interfere with others' roleplaying.
I didn't say it did.
>You can roleplay well with optimized characters.
I didn't say you couldn't.

The problem is that having one super optimized character is going to screw with your power dynamic in the party. One or more characters are going to wind up as dead weight or cheer leaders with little to contribute during combat. Same goes for having an unoptimized character in a band of munchkins. They're going to be useless unless you give them a gimmick and even then they'll be the weakest link in the chain because they just aren't as well put together as your other characters. Having a single munchkin in an unoptimized party is like having Gandalf actually do his divine magic shit while traveling with the Fellowship; he instantly makes like half the party irrelevant and the story just becomes Gandalf and Co's Wacky Lightningbolt Adventure.

If you're running a primarily narrative campaign it's fucking whatever, but there's no point to munchkin in a narrative game anyway.

>/gt/
get the fuck out

The tabletop RPG industry is loaded with pretentious bullshit.

Next time you play a video game with a story you really enjoyed or gameplay that was really fun, ask yourself if having a focus on good gameplay detracted from the story. Ask yourself if not having to do a funny drama club voice at any point detracted from your enjoyment of the characters. Ask yourself if trying to mentally distance yourself from the numbers of the game was necessary in order feel rewarded when making decisions that influence the story.

When you have an industry loaded with 50-something year old men that believe they are performing some sort of art form, you can't serve them anything that pops them and lets the hot air out. This stifles improvement. Video games are getting more and more experimental with their narratives and RPGs still have old men telling their fellow players that trying to have a high stat is some kind of sin.

>You can roleplay well with optimized characters
But like you can't though. Unless we're using a different definition for optimized than what it truly means. Optimized means mechanically perfect with minimal work. Not slightly more functional or even best manageable, but literally optimal. As in, no excess fat such as a backstory that dictates in character decisions or mathematically suboptimal features. An optimized character sheet is a piece of paper which documents statistics and properties for which any change would make it non-optimal.

>t. Munchkin
Powerful characters are fine, user. The problem is that story telling is an inherent part of most of the hobby and baking up a character to be numerically optimal stringently limits your story telling options while also cutting options off for your other players. In some cases it just winds up giving you a narratively retarded character (like in cases where a player loads up on stacking negative attributes so they can super specialize in something).

It's possible to take an optimized set of stats and work a character around it in most systems. It's a pain in the ass and they'll probably wind up with a lot of similarities to other optimized characters (depending on the system) but you truly can do it. The real problem is that minmaxer type players don't tend to be role players looking for a story. Instead they play to win and wind up leaving the story telling component behind.

>It's possible to take an optimized set of stats and work a character around it in most systems
Then the character is no longer optimized. There's more work put in than the minimal requirement. Remember, perfection isn't when there's nothing left to add, but when there's nothing left to take away, and you can always remove non-mechanical characteristics.
Roleplaying by its very nature is a suboptimization.

Some people have fun crunching numbers and following a meta, and that's okay.
Some people have fun just hanging out and roleplaying while using the rules just as a guideline, and that's okay.
These two people cannot mesh well because they get each other angry.

It also doesn't help that the people who tend to be munchkins are engineers and such, while the roleplayers are either awkward young adults or more creative majors. It's hard to get art majors to follow any set of damn rules, and by God, my entire job revolves around translating the soup of awkward jargon from engineers to actual English so that their company or firm looks good.

There's enough strawmen in this thread to build a straw army.

A character's personality and desires have little if anything to do with their stats. At worst, it's an extended writing prompt and if you can't make a character around them then it's your fault for being a shit RPer, not the character's fault for your lack of vision.

If your definition of "good roleplaying" is "make bad decisions at every step and reverse engineer a pathos to justify sucking" then you belong with more of your kind. Might I suggest Gaia, or the AEG forums?

Okay, so first, optimizing takes system mastery which may or may not be a lot of work depending on the system. Ironically the most RP friendly systems would allow mechanical optimization with the least effort, allowing you to invest more effort in RP, backstory, improvisation, etc.

Second, a system that has a substantial powergap between optimized and nonoptimized is either a poorly balanced system or distinctly designed to disproportionately reward optimizers. Either way, it's probably the wrong game to be playing if you get nothing from playing around with the crunch aspect of ttrpgs.

And lastly there is no reason a backstory has to conflict with an optimized character's mechanical skillset. You can design a backstory around a skillset, in better systems mechanics are flexible enough in the first place to justify a broad range of rp qualities without losing potency, and some don't even relate the two to the degree you seem to believe is inherent.

Your perspective on this seems bizarrely diametric and I can only assume you've played bad systems with bad players so long you believe there is no other way for things to be, but I can tell you the roleplaying vs rollplaying does not need to be a dichotomy. They are in fact supposed to work together to express each other to their fullest or most optimal. I can only think all these people that view optimization as a bane just grew up with a game like 3.pf that has a high bar for system mastery, overly rewards that achievement, and completely muddles it's team dynamics to the point one sufficiently optimized character is capable of playing a single player experience in a party of unoptimized players.

Just stop playing bad games.

>ITT people who don't understand the definition of optimization
>optimization, noun. the action of making the best or most effective use of a situation or resource
If you can perform a function optimally without characterisation then characterisation is suboptimal by definition. This isn't about conflict or difficulty or the need for mastery or vision. If you make a mathematically perfect character in the majority of systems that do not consider roleplaying a statistical parameter, then attach any characteristics, any characteristics at all, the character becomes suboptimal. Because you've exceeded the resource minimum for the character to be perfect, which is what it was before you considered roleplaying aspects.
Within the strict definition of what is and isn't optimal, roleplaying is suboptimal. I don't care about your high-functional powerhouses, but don't refer to them as optimized if they have any kind of roleplaying narrative associated to them. It's just wrong.

This is the stupidest opinion in this thread.

>If you make a mathematically perfect character in the majority of systems that do not consider roleplaying a statistical parameter, then attach any characteristics, any characteristics at all, the character becomes suboptimal.
By your own definition, if these characteristics do not consume the same resources to take then mechanical optimization is unaffected. Why would my choosing to be an hobbyist woodcarver and having a preference for sweet rum detract from having a maximized stat bonus and optimized weapon selection? Do you somehow believe writing a backstory means you'll have less dice to roll with in combat or something? What mad logic are you following to come to these conclusions?

It's not an opinion. I never said engineered perfection was good, it just is what it is. You achieve optimization when the function is complete, and then subjectivity dictates how to suboptimize it to be most profitable (which is different from optimal in many, many ways). That is, if you even want to go that route, since there's no explicit requirement to achieve maximum profit from optimization at all.

Mental effort and time is a finite resource, user. If you're spending your precious waking moments considering your character's need for rum instead of the optimal application of their statistics to overcome the next twenty potential objectives laid out by the DM, the character is suboptimal to their mechanical function.

Note that if you accredit "fun" as a mechanical function, the "stormwind fallacy proof" becomes a tautology where we've decided to make roleplaying an optimizable parameter, which is assuming the inital point.

...Are you genuinely autistic?

Obviously

No. Don't know. Haven't had time to check.

>a good old dungeon-crawl without story fluff is perfectly fun on its own

I think it's because I and other people don't find that fun, but have been stuck in those games and didn't like it, and vice versa for others.

And because people on the internet have very little ability to disagree without calling each other faggots and flying into a rage.

>I think it's because I and other people don't find that fun.
I suppose it is a niche these days. The dungeon crawling genre is pretty barren compared to its height in the 80s and early 90s.

Now I might be autistic, but what don't you like about dungeon crawling? Is it the lack of an overarching story and the small scope of the game or something?

Not him but dungeon crawling is just not immersive and the associated fantasy doesn't last beyond the set of sessions where the crawl takes place. Most video game RPG's can provide more than that at this point so why would anyone go for even less?

Modern games with cool and complex dungeons barely exist at this point. Only series I can really think of is Etrian fucking Odyssey, and thats only succesful because the japs love it.
You're probably right though. People really like long-running campaigns, and crawls dont lend themselves well for that.

A rare mention. The fact that his and many other notorious tripfags seem largely to have been forgotten basically vindicated his hysterical beliefs. I'm betting 2014/2015, about when i left and virt showed up, really did see a massive influx of people to the board and the hobby in general, who are now too new to have cared about or recalled the massive shitstorm generated by that guy.

I'm almost nostalgic. It used to be cozy, before Critical Role and Wil Wheaton's RPG, before 5e and everyone and their mom started "roleplaying", when you shitposted *world because it was a jokey arthouse game that would never take off. When we had things to hate, like the twenty autistic neckbeard quests and pokemon anime bullshit, the disgusting Weekend Smut Thread, the cringeworthy Wizard's Guild (or whatever it was), derailment in every single thread and legendarily retarded conversations and exploits. DtD and the user that transcribed the rapey fantasy rpg he had written as an idiot kid.

I came back to this site a month ago and it feels sterile. I can't believe id say it, but it feels as if I see too many generals and polite banter, not enough schizophrenic OC and hilariously explosive personalities.

This isn't the stormwind fallacy.
>when you have some moderately realistic characters with believably eclectic skillsets and one Munchkin there's going to be problems

The issue here is you've got one unoptimised character and one optimised character. No matter how everyone roleplays one group is going to have a bad time.

depends on the system

>Optimized means mechanically perfect with minimal work
That's not what optimised means.
To quote: "make the best or most effective use of (a situation or resource)."
Optimising a character is not an exercise of using as minimal effort as you can to make a character, which is stupid because you can just use the pregenerated characters to do that to spend the least amount of time. Therefore roleplay, which uses only time, will not affect optimisation at all.

THAT IS NOT HOW OPTIMISATION WORKS

Why do people sperg out so much about muh arena fps vs. "realistic" fps
Why cant you accept that both have merits and that a good old Quake match without story fluff is perfectly fun on its own, like a fast paced deathmatch with friends.

Is there some specific reason this sort of play gets so much shit?

If people were as dismayed by unbalanced parties as you suppose 3.5/pf wouldn't have a foothold anywhere. Everyone can still have their time to shine, and fail. It's not as difficult as you'd think.

It's not about character creation, user, its about character ACTION.

>Nerd social fallacy or whatever
I legit do not understand how you could stand inviting someone over for communal fun only for them to sit there ignoring you.
I'd say it's pretty clear you're either not that good friends, or he clearly isn't having fun most of the time and is too much of a bitch to do something else.

Because they're bored, on the internet, and points of contention give them something to talk about. Exactly the same reason I'm taking issue with the premise of your post.

>It's not about character creation, user, its about character ACTION
WHO OPTIMISES CHARACTER ACTION
TALKING IS A FREE ACTION
AHHH I@M SO MAD MY SHIFT KEY HAS BECOME STUCK LOOK WHAT YOU@VE DONE

that the fuck kind of keyboard has @ on the same key as '?

>speech is the only component of roleplay

(What is the White Box?)

maybe he's a very confused slav

Because invariably somebody will take either one of those to the illogical extreme, but with roleplaying it might be worth for a few laughs as long as it isn't being straight disruptive (see any and all "that guy" stories) while a player who is there only for the rolling of dice and to see whether his latest build for a mutant wizard robot dragonkin shotgun specializing transmuter is able to blow up one or both halves of a dungeon in the span of a few rounds. Illogical extremes are bad in both cases, hence the illogical part, and both sides will get uppity because "it's how I like to play" and most of the time the one who takes rollplaying to the illogical max doesn't even do it for fun, but to see if it's possible, like a man who decides to see if he can consume an entire ghost pepper in a single bite, chew for a minute and swallow, except in this case you kick down other people's milk glasses and complaining that this is how you like it when they are pining for the fridge and cursing you.

And for the sake of the metaphor the illogical extreme of a roleplayer will lick everybody's habaneros at least once and then drink all their milk, leaving the poor bastards pining for the fridge once more.

Do people sperg out about that? I prefer arena style, but realistic shooteybangs can be fun too.

No. It's supposed to highlight how two different genres can co-exist, but not overlap.

People do, because people will scream at the top of their lungs if you dare not agree with their opinion and, depending on the side, call you a kiddie who can't handle challenge or an old fuck who has eyesight so bad they can't tell the difference between Super Mario Bros. and Mario Odyssey when further than 5 feet away from the screen.

>In-game time is the only time that matters
>Quotes definition but refuses to apply it
Are you two dumb or something? If your resource is your time and effort, you perform suboptimally if you use more of it than absolutely necessary to achieve the maximal performance. In the even that pregenerated characters are already the best mechanically possible, then yes doing anything other than copying them exactly is suboptimal. Most of the time though there exists a boundary condition for the problem that determines the optimisation to deviate from standard answers.

What you call is optimisation is really just performance upgrades to an arbitrarily satisfactory degree. And obviously that has no contradiction with roleplaying because there's no requirement for efficiency. But actual optimisation is literally just the quote you posted.

I'll agree with you if you also admit that both point buy stats and randomly generated stats are legitimate forms of play because they work for different types of games.

I think that’s pretty much it.

If you’re heavily on the roleplaying side, like I am, you spend a lot of time trying to get your character sheet to reflect the vision of the character you’ve got in your head. (If you roll stats, I guess you do it the other way around, working out what the character is like.) You sacrifice some effectiveness for the sake of your vision of the character, or perhaps you don’t worry about effectiveness enough to care about sacrificing. The parts of a session you like often involve interacting with people and things in way that extend beyond the game mechanics proper.

The “rollplayers,” on the other hand, are there to beat challenges, often via combat. Their characters are designed with a view to that goal, and other goals are secondary. The parts of a session that do not involve beating challenges using the mechanics of the game aren’t very interesting to them.

The two mix poorly. To the roleplayer, the rollplayer is like an improv actor who can’t be bothered to do any actual acting— he drags everybody down because he doesn’t respond to anything. To the rollplayer, the roleplayer is a boring, useless load who wants to do boring things and has to be carried through the important parts.

I’ve heard that playtesting data refutes GNS theory, though, so I wonder whether this characterization is actually correct.

...

Don't call it a grave; this is the future you chose.

...

Side-ties are perfect choice for somebody with non-human legs. Can't imagine how she got that top on though.

Eh. For a given ruleset, the space of possible optimized characters is a small subset of the space of possible characters; in fact, the point of optimization is to make that space as small as possible. (Yes, I know that these aren’t really spaces in the mathematical sense. Just regard it as a metaphor.) Ergo, while it is in principle possible to play optimized characters arbitrarily well, particularly given the fact that we have no sensible metrics by which to measure the quality of roleplaying, the process of optimization necessarily diminishes the scope for roleplaying by excluding many unoptimized characters which could be roleplayed well. Worse, the roleplaying opportunities afforded by the latter are often qualitatively different from those available to optimized characters— the archetypal example, of course, being suboptimal race/class combinations. Thus, the Stormwind Fallacy is not strictly fallacious.

>maximal performance
You can't optimise for "maximal performance" because there is no yardstick for best success in RPGs. Especially since generally goals include "having fun".

What are you trying to maximise, anyway? Campaigns per time spent? Just play single player campaigns and say your character commits suicide as their first action, you'll get through the most campaigns the fastest that way.