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  1. Jiku Neon
    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...

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    V

    ...there's a guy dancing.
    Thread by: Jiku Neon, Jan 15, 2012, 0 replies, in forum: The Spam Zone
  2. Jiku Neon
    Grammar and style are very important to writing. You seem to be running on ideas right now because you aren't fully articulating your meaning in your writing. Below I've pointed out some of your pitfalls to look at in the future. Most notably, you need to use words the way they are supposed to be used. It comes down to the facts that you cannot use a noun as a verb or a verb as a noun and you cannot say one word when you mean another. So be sure you understand the words you're using before you use them.

    Red is word use.
    Blue is sentence structure and grammar.
    Green is style.

    Red and blue are objective and based on the rules of English, there is a right and wrong way to do things here.

    Green is more opinionated but there are precedents and standards that I'm working off of.

    Be aware that I'm not trying to put you down or make you feel bad. I'm trying to be helpful and supportive. I wouldn't waste my time if I didn't think this was worth reading. So remember that and also remember that I am not always going to be right about these things so I encourage you to look things up on your own and make your own decisions.

    Post by: Jiku Neon, Jan 14, 2012 in forum: Archives
  3. Jiku Neon
    No one has gotten approval yet. Tick tock guys. I go back to school in a week and will likely leave the site for the spring soon afterwards.
    Post by: Jiku Neon, Jan 14, 2012 in forum: Retirement Home
  4. Jiku Neon
    ISTJ

    very expressed introvert 89
    slightly expressed sensing personality 1
    moderately expressed thinking personality 31
    slightly expressed judging personality 1
    Post by: Jiku Neon, Jan 14, 2012 in forum: The Spam Zone
  5. Jiku Neon
    This[​IMG].
    Post by: Jiku Neon, Jan 14, 2012 in forum: The Spam Zone
  6. Jiku Neon
    First omparison is not all that farfetch'd. General facial shape is similar and while your nose, mouth and eye shape and setting aren't the same they aren't different enough to avoid people seeing a resemblance.

    I'm just gonna say now that you're more attractive looking than Angelina Jolie. I never understood what Hollywood saw in her. She isn't graceful, her lips are too big for her face, her jaw is too square and she's frequently made up to look like she's got these awful deep set eyes.

    I usually don't go on at length about quantifying and judging appearances but something about this thread made me turn into my mother.
    Post by: Jiku Neon, Jan 14, 2012 in forum: The Spam Zone
  7. Jiku Neon
    Poltergeist, nosferatu. Poltergeist, nosferatu. Poltergeist, nosferatu. Poltergeist, nosferatu. They're practically the same word.
    Post by: Jiku Neon, Jan 13, 2012 in forum: The Spam Zone
  8. Jiku Neon
    Does that mean you want to suck his blood and kill him?
    Post by: Jiku Neon, Jan 13, 2012 in forum: The Spam Zone
  9. Jiku Neon
    Post

    Jiku Neon!

    I am an advocate of the mind altering substances. Do them. Do them hard.
    Post by: Jiku Neon, Jan 13, 2012 in forum: The Spam Zone
  10. Jiku Neon
    Doing recreational drugs alone on a Friday night.
    Sad and pathetic.
    Post by: Jiku Neon, Jan 13, 2012 in forum: The Spam Zone
  11. Jiku Neon
    He's always bored, he needs to take up recreational drugs or something to get him out of the house on a Friday night.
    Post by: Jiku Neon, Jan 13, 2012 in forum: The Spam Zone
  12. Jiku Neon
    And easy to wear.
    Post by: Jiku Neon, Jan 13, 2012 in forum: The Spam Zone
  13. Jiku Neon
    He's gotta tsun before he deres.
    Post by: Jiku Neon, Jan 13, 2012 in forum: The Spam Zone
  14. Jiku Neon
    They're not trolling. Trolling is something else entirely. This is Lemming.
    Post by: Jiku Neon, Jan 13, 2012 in forum: The Spam Zone
  15. Jiku Neon
    Still not invisible.
    Post by: Jiku Neon, Jan 13, 2012 in forum: The Spam Zone
  16. Jiku Neon
    Goes back to /a/.
    Never comes back.
    Post by: Jiku Neon, Jan 13, 2012 in forum: The Spam Zone
  17. Jiku Neon
    Assumed it was the manga.
    Realizes is on kh site.
    Derp.
    Post by: Jiku Neon, Jan 13, 2012 in forum: The Spam Zone
  18. Jiku Neon
    Judged so hard for a second, then finished sentence.
    Post by: Jiku Neon, Jan 13, 2012 in forum: The Spam Zone
  19. Jiku Neon
    I'd go with significantly older given What?'s age and the fact that I sing this with the upperclassmen in my major semiregularly.
    Post by: Jiku Neon, Jan 13, 2012 in forum: The Spam Zone
  20. Jiku Neon
    Thread

    J'accuse!

    You all did it. I hope that you are pleased with yourselves.
    Thread by: Jiku Neon, Jan 13, 2012, 1 replies, in forum: The Spam Zone