"R U TRIGGERED" and all its subvariants were radioactive toxic waste and turned a valid and important psychological concept into bullying vector that for a time had nearly universal acceptance.
I still see vestiges of "le epic bacon" out there but it's mostly confined to aging :grillman: types and some :up-yours-woke-moralists: cultists and a few contrarian carninist edgelords that want to "trigger the vegans." Yes I know all of the above have a lot of overlap.
eh, i'm used to it
i got it in the neck in the "ttrpg pet peeves" thread when i said i don't like playing with or dming for power gamers :shrug-outta-hecks:
I don't either. My group's big enough where I don't have to put up with them.
When was that thread? Was it recent?
about 3 months ago i think
kinda stuck in my head because of how bizarrely defensive people got about it
Some power gamers got mad, I suppose.
It just isn't fun for the rest of the group if a template stacking half this half that and half something else with a questionable build that uses dubiously balanced sources can't really fit in with the story but can do that much damage per round while being basically invincible and the DM has to adjust to the powergamer's powergaming at everyone else's expense.
yeah, i get that for some people scouring a bunch of splatbooks for cool stuff and building out a complete powerhouse is half the fun.
But when Korgoth the Destroyer is throwing 5d8s at level 2 and can 1 round things well above their CR, Dave the Elf with his slightly better than normal stats kinda has nothing to do while they turn everything into marinara sauce
I am fine with character optimization if it's a character concept that actually fits in with the setting and the rest of the group, where some choices made aren't directly to "do more damage."
That's often a way to screen out powergamers before they can even do their worst: ask them about their character, about what they are known for in the setting and how others see them. An early red flag is a list of what they can do, not what they are.
fair, though even if they fit in, having one character that's significantly better at combat to the point that the rest of the party might as well not be there is... kinda boring to play with in a standard DnD style game with it's focus on fighting
in games with more of a focus on rp, it's more tolerable
In my experience, if an unmitigated combat min-maxer doesn't get enough combat, they get bored and so they start fights and sabotage social interactions just so they can show off the template they found on the internet.
In some weird cases, there have been such things as social min-maxers too, and they can get annoying if they want all the spotlight and can try to force story outcomes with stupidly high rolls.
I try to have both combat and socialization in my campaigns and in both cases I try to make sure everyone has a chance to shine.
yeah, when i'm dming my own games i focus way more on the rp
the extreme of it is when i dm for my girlfriend, we usually go 2 or 3 sessions without a single combat encounter lol, helped by our rampant system hopping
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i would simply not build dave the elf so poorly :shrug-outta-hecks:
Yes the problem is clearly the rest of the party and not the one person who sucks the fun out of the game
there is room in the system to make a functional character without the half this half that template n onsense
you just have to not exclusively take bad options
"anyone who doesn't do 5d8 at level 2 is clearly exclusively taking bad options"
can you actually do 5d8 at level 2 even that seems like an exaggeration
notice i never specified a system for the fictional scenario you insist on taking apart
That's the good thing about Shadowrun: basic not-even-min-maxing optimization gets dicepools close to 20 (up to 30 for soak tests), while the most absurd powergaming only gets mid 20s pools for most things, and that's it, it never goes higher because the investment required to improve further is basically unattainable. Like it's so generous that with only a couple of exceptions any concept character can be made viable with minimal investment, even if the concept requires wasting a ton of resources on something silly. It's not like D&D where everyone starts out ludicrously weak and then scales weirdly with tons of trap options or bad choices and a few random broken interactions between splat book prestige classes, or where characters can be permanently fucked by bad RNG if they're rolling for stats instead of using fixed arrays or point buy.
I one managed to roll 56 dice (before crits) on a single spell. But it was some ability that let you use life to add power to your spells and I killed my character doing it so my party could escape.
I think some of the older editions allowed for higher dicepools like that, yeah. 5e mostly tightened it down, though an edgelord build can unsustainably push into the 30s if paired with strong enough minmaxing and with lucky exploding crits could theoretically get up into the 40s.
Yeah that was 1e and it still took my whole life pool to pull it off.
I miss shadow run but I don't miss adding all those dice. Do new additions make it easier? I'm sure it would be easy on VTT but I don't think any of them have great support for it.
I always just used chummer's built in dice roller or a discord bot. I think roll20 has full shadowrun 5e integration but I hate its interface so much that I stopped using it and would just use a discord channel with occasionally posted reference material instead.
New editions are so poorly written that most people who are fans of Shadowrun don't recommend playing them. I haven't checked out 6e, but 5e's layout was abysmal. Stuff like sections of rules that frequently reference other rules that were 30+ pages apart for no reason, and lots of links to the index were wrong.
When I ran Shadowrun for around 1-2 years a while ago, we gradually built up a houserule document that ended up being over 30 pages long.
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