"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.
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