Alright, so I'm not sure how many of you actually tabletop so I might be preaching to the choir and letting my words fall on deaf ears and all that good stuff but hope springs eternal in the hearts of man and all that shit. So in every RPG system you have two ever present playstyles. And yes, the two are intrinsically related, yes, I know what I'm saying and everloving yes, the Stormwind Fallacy is wrong. The two playstyles are powergaming and play acting. The two aren't mutually exclusive and they do not truly oppose each other, but they will most assuredly interfere with each other. Powergaming is a game of making the most effective character you can, you optimize combat and out of combat skills so that you can make your character succeed at everything. Your goal is to know the rules to the extent where you can use them to your advantage for everything. Some call this contemptable and explotative and game breaking and sinful. Yeah, that's stupid. It's actually just using your analytical mind and thinking about things logically, using everything to your advantage. Play acting, or more commonly, roleplaying is staying in character and working everything based on what you can do and say at a given moment. The goal is to create a character, a believable, living, real character that draws everyone into the story and lets the player be another person entirely. Some people say this is egotistical and useless and bullshit and stupid. Again, that's stupid. It's just using your ability to think on your feet and adapt to any situation to create an atmosphere or illusion. Why are these things so different then if both are legitimate in their own ways? It's my opinion that the more you lean towards one, the harder it is to think about the other. This is because no roleplaying system is balanced. D&D, for example, is notoriously unbalanced. No fully optimized character can be anything but a full caster because melee fighters exist to be movable walls, an unfortunate and unavoidable fact of the game. But if you always play a mage who stands behind others and never faces opponents directly he must be a certain kind of person. Can he be a berserker? No. Can he be a chivalrous knight? No. Can he be a poor commoner who clawed his way up the ladder without education or assistance? No. There are so many things a full caster will never ever be able to be by nature of his superior statistics and advantages. Even the fact that his in close fighting and physical strength are naturally low has a noticeable and unalterable effect on the kind of person he is. One my pose that magic can do anything so what if he buffs himself and goes into battle then? He's still not the same kind of guy as the one who trained his muscles for years in a hermitage or fought in the military. He cannot be. And learning a spell that would allow him to do that would also violate true optimization. This means if everyone powergames, you get a boring homogenized group of people competing to see who metagames their level ups better. So this is where the two start to butt heads. A fully optimized character is a limited character. On the other side of things, we have someone who wants to do nothing but characterize. The problem they run into? They can't do anything. They are more likely to fail their checks and thusly defer to one who could do it better, the optimizer. So a charming rogue con artist with proficiencies in theft, fast talking and lockpicking ends up doing neither because I wizard can cast spells to do the same job, better. So the rogue falls into the background and the party carries on letting some people play and others sit. This is what happens when extremes meet. It's a trainwreck and rivalries form on and off the table. In the end, no one is happy and the people that are get called names behind their backs or to their faces for it. That's really all I had to say. It just makes me unhappy when people try to say that the two are unrelated when they so clearly are. I don't have a thing against either playstyle but the arguments I see between the two sicken me. In case that all meant nothing to you... | | | V ...there's a guy dancing.
