The difference between optimization and effectiveness

It seems to me that you’re describing two different issues.

The first issue is one of mechanics. Some players design characters that are ‘optimized’, and others design characters that are not. As an example, one of my wife’s characters has the Apothecary talent, despite the fact that she doesn’t use it and it doesn’t really have any in-game benefit for her at the moment. She has the talent because it fits her character’s background, and she likes it. I prefer to design characters that don’t have extraneous baggage. If a talent/skill point/etc isn’t going to directly advance my character in some tangible way, I generally avoid it.

The second issue is one of personality. Some characters almost have a life of their own. Many people have characters that they keep coming back to, and re-making under different systems and rulesets. My Nol Dappan priest, for instance, started his life in Living City (3.0 D&D) as a priest of Kossuth (actually became certed as the High Priest of Kossuth in Ravensbluff, before the campaign ended). I’ve been playing him, or a variation on him, for a long time. He does not react to situations the way I would, or the way my other characters do. In a curious way, he has his own personality. With that said, I have other characters that I haven’t been playing for as long, who haven’t developed their own personality or style. Some people will even go so far as to write out long backgrounds for their character.

In short, I think that you can have characters that either are or are not optimized from a mechanics standpoint, and they can either be well developed or not, from a roleplaying standpoint. I don’t think the two are necessarily related to each other.

This a great question, though I doubt that we will arrive at a consensus answer. Different players have different takes on the core element of the game.

One of the GREAT things about the 3rd Editions DMG 2 was to talk about the different types of people who play RPGs and the different things they primarily want to “take away” from the gaming table. Beyond a simple divide between “Roll Players” and “Role Players” it went on to discuss differences between a “power gamer” (constant improvement of mechanical abilities to excel in combat), a “thinker” (wants to outsmart the opposition and score an easy win) and a “slayer” (wants to look badass while destroying the opposition). Or an “explorer” (want to peel the layers of the onion of the campaign world) and a “thespians” (wants to help guide a great story-line) and a “goof-ball” (who enjoys getting his or her character into narrative trouble … and out again). Of course by turns almost everyone dips into each of the player archtypes. Still one is probably dominant. Personally I run towards an explorer most often and I am grateful that there is such a rich sandbox to poke around in.

A player who is an Explorer at heart probably finds it irritating when continuity discrepancies crop up…that undermines the process of exploration and discovery to have facts change. I know I personally grumbled to myself when Sarishian Steel was described as red in a couple of places in the crusade arc (last arc it was green). Guaranteed to have essentially no impact on campaign play. If the discrepancies are not not critical to the story-line a thespian type player might not care. By not care I also mean, may not even notice.

So in a long winded & round about way, what I’m getting at is that different styles of play and players each have different ideas about what “Effectiveness” means. Or optimization. Though really in the end I think it boils down to how much you enjoy the time you spend at the table. Effective characters are fun to play. Effective tables have enough overlapping interests that everyone agrees … or everyone enjoys the working out of the disagreements and still has a good time.

One last thing I’ll note is that not all styles and people mix perfectly. I personally do not especially enjoy gaming with people who are heavily into the “slayer” mind set (which I personally find 1 dimensional) or with some “goof-balls” whose antics reduce or eliminating the choices of other party members. Some people don’t especially like power-gamers. Or thespians. Or Thinkers. Maybe some people get bored when explorer types sift for tidbits of information that have nothing to do with the plot at hand…. So find people you like to play with, or embrace not knowing what you’re going to encounter when you sit down.

Did I say that was the last thing? Sometimes I’m such a liar. I think its implied that by optimization your are referring to the part of the game that involves rolling dice. In this game there are basically skills and talents (perhaps you can include attributes). There is obviously synergy between your mental concept and your ability to “bring it” with well constructed mechanics. Bringing it means having the right number of ranks to make a skill useful and perhaps the right talents to add extra options (bloodlines, spell casting) or more “boom” (Weapon Mastery, Smite Infidel). If you want to be “combat effective” at something you need 2-4 ranks at start and be able to raise it by an average of 3 skill ranks per tier and maybe some talent support. I would call that optimized. I call something “invested” if its being raised by 2 ranks per tier. Probably not optimized, but good enough to regularly beat a DC 15 skill check (eventually good enough to beat a DC 20 check). If you are only putting 1 rank per tier I call it “dabbling.” A DC: 15 skill check is something you still fail at with some frequency.

How you choose what your character does, is entirely up to you! Putting a package that makes sense thematically as opposed to “this sounds cool” to me makes little difference if you enjoy playing that character. As Josh has noted in another threat its easy to be good at two things. Or okay at several. Its hard to suck at everything And its impossible to do a lot of things at an optimized level.

OKAY. Finally. A little secret. More often than not, I design my characters around a mini I have or have seen. That’s usually where my ideas come from.

I would like to add to Eric’s commentary on the types of players. Not every player fits well into a single “Type”. I’d argue that none do. Rather they are blending’s of several different “types” which tend to surface at different times.

Take myself for example. I’m sure that I could be classified into the Goof-Ball category at times, particularly when playing one of my Heretical PC’s. But I also consider myself to be an Explorer and Thinker. I do not fit well with thespians because I just can’t seem to play at their level of acting. Acting has never been a strong suit for me. But I enjoy watching them a lot. I simply can’t stand to play with slayers. I don’t mind GMing a table of slayers as much, but if all you are doing in combat is soaking up damage, and dishing it out. Well, I can get that kind of entertainment at a computer game.

I agree with Eric that you either have to be adaptable when playing with a random group of players. Or select co-players based on the type of game that you wish to play with. Keep in mind you can dislike a person’s play style without disliking the person. But if you take the attitude that your going to push anybody out of the sandbox who’s sand castle looks different that yours, you will find that the sandbox gets pretty lonely pretty fast.

One last thing I’d point out. Everyone at an RPG table may play by the same rules but unlike a board game they all play a different game. That is to say they play with different objectives, and have different reasons for those objectives. That diversity is part of the shared environment. Eliminate the diversity and all you have left is a miniatures game.

I am opinionated.

So from my point of view there are characters that are heretical in appropriate ways:

-Human’s (and val/darkin/undir etc) that eschew the organized church to follow traditional but opposed views of the gods, or elemental paths, eg pengik/undir/naori that worship elementals. Hainese or Khitani that worship completely different aspects of existing gods.
-As much as i don’t like them The Mourners in Silence, that aren’t being controlled by the Silence (giving that org the benefit of the doubt)
-Elorii that eschew Belisarda in favor of the Elemental Lords
-Ssressn that follow Nier (instead of the fire dragon)

and their are examples of where I think its just wrong and/or done for the wrong reasons

-Elorii that follow human gods… unless you have some great backstory, this is just wrong, did you read the part where elorri feel the touch of belisarda all the time?
-People that play Mourners in Silence, Just to be part of the Silence, I don’t want to have my trust in a player to be betrayed, and it seems like these people just want to do that.
-Cultists (like the cult of a thousand eyes)

these ones that I don’t like, I feel the players are trying to set them selves up to be in contention with the party, I formed definite opinions about this in the last campaign when a mourner really screwed over a table I was at (and I probably wont play with that player again if I can help it), and much of my organized and general opinion has been influenced by this. I sit down to play to have fun and work to a common goal (even as a GM ). I hate the dynamic of US vs THEM that occurs when there are clear splits or fractions in loyalties. (as an aside, in the previous campaign our home tables were split loyalist / rebel but we still worked together because we were companions, and OOC we were friends)

I think that your working at goals that oppose the rest of the party, you have essentially split the party, and your playing at something else.

hrm this seems ranty I may edit this in the future

Though I know that optimized simply means “no waste” and effective means “perfectly functional”, I have always viewed ‘optimized characters’ with some trepidation. When I hear that word, it brings up memories of the D&D days where characters eschewed ‘unnecessary’ traits to become what I call ‘twinked’ characters. These twinked characters (which I generally oppose) then specialize so far in one extreme as to be the literal one-trick-pony. As I discovered at the one 3.5-era Origins I went to, this was the rule of thumb for players of that era and system, and to be honest it bugged me quite a bit. I like characters who are CHARACTERS, and not simply a collection of synergistic mechanics.

However, I am very much in favour of characters who are effective in that they do certain things very well, but they can do more than a single thing to at least a passable extent. For example: My primary character is about as high on both melee combat and spells as I could get him (not quite, but close), but he also has some good social skills and can be the primary or back-up talker in almost any party. I could have sacrificed those social skills and even either spells or melee to boost the other skill, but then I wouldn’t be the character I wanted.

Hunh. This is turning out to be a great thread! Thanks everyone for the food for thought.

I want to turn to the subset of issues concerning the intersection of party effectiveness and “working together”.

Like just about everyone here I’ve had an experience or two with disruptive players both as a player and as a game master. I’d like to divide them into two categories. The first I’m going to call the outliers. They are the rare experiences where there is a player who just isn’t interested in playing nice with the group for whatever reason. I don’t have a lot to say to this category save that its thankfully rare and seems to be relegated to larger cons where you won’t see the other players again (ie no real consequences for the next time you sit down at a table and game). The other set of disruptive games I’ve played in have been where the PLAYERS (not characters) have stopped trying to work together.

This is an issue that sometimes came up in the old campaign where we had different secret societies and PCs who fought on the opposite sides of a civil war. I another this caused Henry and module writers some headaches in the last campaign calling sometimes calling on PCs to sometimes go on adventures that did not further their interests simply to see what was going on and return a report. Potentially worse were the modules that had no guidelines at all. To Shake the Pillars of Heaven was an amazing module, but when I ran it locally we had a die hard supporter of Calcestus who was against the idea of Elandre sneaking off with the scrolls. His character rebelled in the last fight and tried to stop Elandre and the other players (and created a temporary local rift in the players). I felt like I was running the last scene in the Sound of Music where the former boyfriend rats out the von Trapp family at the abbey.

Now I LOVE the added level of intrigue and am looking forward to the arrival\return of secret orders and side missions and perhaps to a disagreement in the player base of what is the right thing to do (it was pretty hard to argue against killing internals). But I also worry a little too. I don’t want sit at hamstrung tables either because the players can’t agree on what to do but also because no one trusts “the mourner PC”. In my experience it usually isn’t that way because even when PCs are in conflict the players are still looking for the workable compromise and module writers have “left an out.” A great example of this by module writers came during the old module temptations of the Flesh. Two different secret societies were sent after the same piece of jewelry. But one wanted the inscription and the other wanted the pendant. Players who were paying attention when reading their secret orders had plenty of space to work things out. I think its important for module authors to continue to think in advance about possible divides in the interests in the player base and also how they might be bridged. I also don’t think that every mod has to be playable by every PC. A loyalist only or rebel only mod (or even better a match pair to balance both sides) IMO would have been great in the last arc.

Its true that some players don’t like any conflict among the party, but some of my best play experiences have come at tables where characters are sometimes at odds. Last summer my best experience at Origins came at a Call of Cthullu table called Joy Ride. our characters were divided by “Federal” law enforcement , local law enforcement, and some local scum bags. We all turf to defend and differences of opinions but we all hunted down a cosmic horror. Working through our differences was a big part of the fun. Because the cosmic horror was able to possess people (which we didn’t know sitting down) we had some trouble in the begining with players who seemed to be acting like jerks. But it made it sweeter when the penny dropped for me and I finally figured out what was going on. We made a great table because we kept looking for ways to work together even while characters were sometimes at impasses. We also had a great judge who helped nudge us at times.

In short everyone there was effective at managing cooperation and conflict at the table.

I like to think that pretty much everyone builds their character to be effective at *something*, even if it’s being a great generalist (or person who can fill in whatever role is needed). the nice thing about this system, however, is that you can get a character who isn’t tied down to being just the “face” or “tank” of the group. in (for example) the 3.5 version of the campaign, people could get very possessive of various roles in a party, specifically (in my experience) the social or “face” role.
while I could probably site several examples of this, suffice it to say that I think that with the system we have now, people are much more likely to build the kind of character they want to play, as opposed to the dreaded “cookie cutter” build; and this is, I feel, one of the real selling points of the system.