-snip-
Make sense, GWG?
Everything except why you needed to fake being LE.
(Well, that and why the image is broken.)
Besides which, it's very simple to do something like 24 attacks per round.
I quit trying to count the time the character surpassed 40 bolts in a surprise round standard action. The enemy certainly was surprised.
Have you considered trying to kill the entire world's population in a standard action?
Wish.
Or, for a small enough world, there's a BoVD spell which targets something lime a 10 miles per caster level radius.
Hmmm... What's the Earth's material hardness?
Earth is primarily made of stone. Stone's hardness is 8. You
should be worried about the huge number of hit points.
Of course, this assumes that the world is like Earth. If the campaign world is made of adamantine with soil on top, it would be harder. If the world is flat or inversely spherical, it would be much, much easier.
You stop taking flavor text seriously when you read nonsense like "Fighter is the best fighting class". And you stop making arguments about writer intent when you notice that many times the rules contradict themselves even within the same book (for example, undead creatures that lose particular organs can no longer use the senses associated with those organs, but skeletons are neither blind nor deaf).
A lot of the writers didn't know what the other writers working on the same projects were doing. Flavor text and mechanics text seldom agree with each other. Besides, ultimately the point of a game is to have fun with it. If extrapolating literal interpretations of what you're given to bizarre conclusions is what you enjoy, you're no better nor worse than a player who uses the texts as a mere guideline framework to build their own shakespearean drama cause that's what they enjoy.
Preach it!
...But if your mini-game is rules-lawyering a bunch of loopholes, and you find satisfaction in game-breaking bugs, those bugs have to be legitimate - and not willful misinterpretations.
I also agree with you that the writers of these books clearly didn't know what was going on in other books, and/or didn't care to explore all of the rules interactions. Although I fail to see how someone could write up Aptitude without thinking of how dumb it would be to have people using grappling feats with a blowgun. Or the game balance problems with letting people use feats that were supposed to go on a light mace (low damage, low crit chance, sucky weapon) on a great crossbow instead (missile, high damage, high crit, cool exotic weapon). Just bad game design.
Look at it this way: It balances crossbow-users with every spellcaster ever. Well, a little.
(A non-optimized wizard can easily do anything an optimized fighter can do, and probably better, AND it can do a lot of other stuff.)
I feel, as many optimizers do, that a character's abilities should reinforce his story, not expose it for a farce. I think it's disappointing, embarrassing, and poor roleplay when a character's background writes checks his statistics can't cash.
Which is why my characters tend to be nobodies. Once, I played a dwarf who was a fish cleaner until several minutes into the campaign.
...That didn't end well, actually. So don't go so far that you can't get your character adventuring.
I see problems when...(2) when some players are just uninterested in optimizing or unable to do it, which leads to the same problems. Again, if your group is all at the same level of optimization, nobody's going to be superpowered or underpowered, depending on how you look at it.
I've been there. Back on the GitP forums (where I first donned the mortal mantle of GreatWyrmGold), one of my first threads asked why the monk was weak.
Wrex was running a game of 3.5 a while back, where it was constantly mentioned that my character was unoptimized. Some people thought I was doing it on purpose or something like that, which was really annoying...
Or maybe they were just refusing to help.
(2,3)
Excellent points, and another argument for
starting as a nobody. I'd argue that they are really the same point, though.
~~~~~End of Argument~~~~~
This marks the end of the argument, so that this doesn't spiral too far out of control.
I'm agreeing with points on both sides, so I'm not technically arguing!
Anyways. Who's GMing again?
