My thoughts exactly. The first commandment of multiclassing in 3rd is “Thou shalt not lose caster levels”. Also, Wizards are easily the most OP base class, if played well. Multiclassing them into anything without wizard spell progression is just a waste.
OTOH, using gestalt rules to make a Wizard//Rogue isn’t half bad, even if a little short on HP and proficiencies. I prefer Barbarian or even the much ridiculed Monk in place of the Rogue.
No offense to you guys, but this is why I don’t play RPGs with other people. Instead of playing a role almost everybody is trying to make “efficient” “overpowered” characters as if it was some sort of a competition which you can win. I think entirely the other way around, I would make my character a wizard because and only because this career choice matches his personality, background and so on, and multiclass only when it looks like my char really would. And would not give no heed to efficiency and power. It would be the DMs job to match difficulty level to our characters, not the other way around.
I will have to invent an RPG where all armor has the same AC, all weapons the same damage, so that players don’t try to make overpowered optimization monsters but plain simply choose whatever matches a characters style, background, culture, or the players general sense of coolness. Thus, for example, a player would be comfortable with a fighter character that wears no armor and carries only a rapier because he is a D’Artagnan type swashbuckler, that is his personality, background and style.
Instead of playing a role almost everybody is trying to make “efficient” “overpowered” characters as if it was some sort of a competition which you can win.
I typically play storytelling games (like Dread) in order to get the story as uncontaminated by tactics as possible.
It would be the DMs job to match difficulty level to our characters, not the other way around.
This simply does not work. The issue is matching the players to each other, not the difficulty to the characters. The three primary dimensions are time spent talking vs. fighting, plot vs. autonomy, and competence. Mismatch between the players on any dimension will cause conflicts. It’s everyone’s responsibility to form a group with accord on desires, and then the DM’s responsibility to deliver sessions that line up with their desires.
There’s a concept in game design called the “burden of optimal play”. If there exists a way to powergame, someone will probably do it, and if that makes the game less fun for the people not powergaming, their recourse is to also powergame.
Most traditional RPGs weren’t necessarily envisioned as competitive games, but most of the actual game rules are concerned with combat, optimization, and attaining power or prowess, and so there’s a natural tendency to focus on those aspects of the game. To drive players to focus on something else, you have to make the rules of your game do something interesting in situations other than fantasy combat, magical attainment of power, or rogue-flavored skill rolls to surmount some other types of well-defined challenges. All of these things can make for a very interesting game world of a certain flavor, but in that game world, some kinds of players and characters will inevitably do much better than others, usually the ones that have some progression to a god-like power level using magic.
The flexibility afforded to the DM allows people to hypothetically run their game some other way, and many succeed, but the focal point of the game is defined by the focal point of the rules. They can decide to make their game center more around politics, romance, business, science, or whatever else, because they get to choose what happens in their world, but the use of an RPG system implies that the game world will be better at handling the situations the game has more rules, or more importantly, better-defined rules, for. The rules of a game are the tools with which players will build their experience, even in a more flexible game like an RPG.
A few friends of mine invented a system that I’m helping them develop and playtest. It’s somewhat rough at present, but the intent is to make rules that center more around information and social dynamics. In playtesting, people naturally gravitate toward situations the game’s rules are good at handling, so a lot more people are interested in being face characters than otherwise have been. Through some combination of the system and the person running the game, the rules will define what people naturally gravitate towards. This doesn’t surprise us when the person running the game is replaced by a computer that follows the rules exactly, and tends to be true to varying degrees based on the flexibility with which the rules are interpreted.
If there exists a way to powergame, someone will probably do it, and if that makes the game less fun for the people not powergaming, their recourse is to also powergame.
This is the recourse if they disliking powergaming a little. If they dislike it a lot, they play with someone else, or if they cannot then not.
Note: I have nothing against a competitive spirit, just 1) I think it is not an ideal avenue to exercise it 2) OP characters are simply boring, too narrow and predictable, walk around in full plate and carry the heaviest weapons, or shoot fireballs all the time and so on 3) it makes them “unrealistic”, although in fantasy a better term would be “unmovielike” or “unnovellike”.
It is just hard to convey in the rules system that just because I am a medieval noble I won’t walk around everywhere wearing 40 kg of metal, hauling a huge sword and shield around just because it gives me the best stats. It would be uncomfortable, unfashionable, ridiculous and socially unacceptable but how would you encode that in rules?
Now, your analysis sounds a lot like a traditional libertarian market analysis: choices flow from incentives. But in this case, there is an omnipotent dictator so it is nothing like a market—if a DM dislikes powergamers, he can easily drop astral dragons on them, while treat non-powergamers well. And if his / her circle is largely non-powergamers, it works well. Because of the ominpotent nature of the DM, it is not a market nor like a sport nor any comparable thing, not even like a videogame. It is like a story, telling it as you fit or as you have agreed.
Nevertheless you are right that perhaps rules could encourage it. Hm. Maybe I should take an idea from Game of Thrones. Real power is not a spell or weapon but political, social power which is gained through intrigue which the player must personally roleplay and acquire, not just roll a dice and get. Once a traditional powergamer gets surprised the same way how Ned Stark was, that another player with low stats and bad gear can still make 100 city guards attack him because he is a social, political powergamer, a lesson will be learned.
The system you mentioned sounds interesting too.
It is not strongly relevant, but I also hope to fix some traditional fantasy / RPG terminology and gear for better historicity. Longswords should be renamed side-swords and bastard swords renamed longswords. Generally, paying attention to the Historical European Martial Arts folks and nobody should design a medievalist fantasy game or reading a novel without skimming wiktenauer.com
At least if people want to powergame, setting up actually medieval rules, like prices and availability of gear, would put a break on it.
I think you’re confusing two different genres—games and realistic simulations. As a matter of fact, it turned out (after much wailing and gnashing of teeth) that accurate simulations tend to make lousy games. Essentially the problem is that they need to optimize for different incompatible things. This was discussed to death in the gaming world.
Note—you can certainly have good games which focus on e.g. political and social power and not on getting a full plate set with the ability to cast unlimited fireballs. But they are not going to be accurate simulations either.
Well, I was left out of it so you could give me some pointers that would be nice. I was just thinking it over myself. AD&D was infamously bad as simulation, in a “not even wrong” sense, you could literally not have a fight in the game mechanics that looks anything like normal fencing (i.e. 20 rounds without damage then one killer wound, instead it would be a death from a thousand cuts bullshit), so almost every other tabletop RPG e.g. Shadowrun or Vampire The Masquarade improved on that tremendously, which improved to me the fun factor to extent that it did not feel stupid at least, but indeed in itself did not max it out. I figured out, to max it out, it is not realistic simulations you want but movie-like or novel-like. Simulate a really good movie, not real life. So study the craft of writing, screenwriting, learn the trade of writers, and base the rules on that. This is where I am currently. Where to go from here?
Not that AD&D does any better, but if you’re in a fight and you’ve exchanged blows twenty times without serious damage, at least one of the fighters isn’t trying to win. Realistic personal combat (other types of combat can be more drawn out) is like Hobbes’ state of nature, or a cannibal elf: nasty, brutal, and short.
The problem is—well, there are several problems here, but the main problem is that it’s really hard to build a multiplayer game that’s actually fun but that looks and plays like realistic fighting; the winners haven’t had time to play, and the losers feel betrayed. You can do it in single-player games, where there’s an endless supply of mooks to shank and no particular requirement that killing your avatar take you out of the fight for more than a few seconds, but you usually end up with a very hard game.
Aiming for cinematics rather than realism is indeed the correct approach, but this wasn’t clear in the tabletop RPG world for a long time; I suspect that has something to do with its roots in the strategy wargame genre, which values realism very highly and has the structure to mostly get away with it.
I found the rules of Shadowrun the most realistic and also playable, Second Edition if I remember right, I didn’t keep up - I just hate the setting and the artwork with a fury. I don’t remember all the exact details, but splitting damage into stun and health, having damage an effect on your abilities, rerolling sixes so that with good luck a weak weapon can do a lot of damage, damage modified by weapon skill (accurate aiming), adding inborn ability to learned skill together (not the most realistic but better than nothing), having dice pools reflecting what you pay more attention to, and the cleverly cinematic karma pool, are all things that seem like cinematic realism to me and IMHO playable. If only the rules were more open source like the d20 and used in different settings that make more sense… having both technology and magic is not necessarily a bad idea but somehow the Shadowrun world manages to make it very childish, and the novels that introduced the world are pretty much the weirdest fantasy I have ever read, just who comes up with the idea of a fundamentalist Christian hero who is also a peacenik hippie and refuses to use weapons in a cyberpunk-magical world?...
just who comes up with the idea of a fundamentalist Christian hero who is also a peacenik hippie and refuses to use weapons in a cyberpunk-magical world?
A liberal/progressive trying to make a “sympathetic” fundamentalist Christian, i.e., one sympathetic from the prog point of view.
I can recommend a book—A Theory of Fun for Game Design. Or look e.g. at debates between strategy grognards and people who want to have fun throwing heavy metal at each other (on screen, that is). Or look at the evolution of long-lived games like WoW—simulation inconveniences are ground away and you’re left with pure-game design.
AD&D was infamously bad as simulation
You have to think in terms of abstraction layers. AD&D is a high-level simulation and I don’t think rounds were ever meant to represent actual attacks and parries in a swordfight. Not to mention that are you asking for realism from a game that involves wizards and dragons..?
. Not to mention that are you asking for realism from a game that involves wizards and dragons..?
Realism is a poor term, but yes. The fantasy genre is strange. The very term would involve that anything goes, yet in practice what we usually have is a version of the Medieval world with the modification that the kind of legends they tended to believe in are actually true. The problem is usually having far too many wizards and dragons, Tolkien got it better with four and one, respectively, that is roughly how many of them would a superstitious medieval guy expect. So it is realistic more or less from the angle of the medieval guy who would expect to find dragons in Cathay and wizards in Hyperborea yet his ideas of a swordfight are either very realistic or he is dead.
Consistency may be a better word, not consistency with itself, but consistency with how it modifies actual reality. Let’s call it Consistent Deltas. If it is a fight between two monsters with 143 tentacles and 5 beaks I don’t care how it is, as I have nothing to compare it with. But if it looks like a real human using something that looks like a real sword… then it should work more or less it works here.
And yet another twist—“here” does not necessary mean real reality, but believable movie / novel reality. The kind of illusions we usually believe, where veterans of battles don’t deal with PTSD and don’t kill themselves five year after retiring.
Thinking of it as a high-level simulation is new to me, perhaps true, in that case we really needed DM’s who can describe it so...
But if it looks like a real human using something that looks like a real sword… then it should work more or less it works here.
That’s the simulation argument, but I don’t think it applies. Go up one abstraction layer.
You have a conflict between your party and some creatures. You need to represent this conflict balancing (at least) three different things: (1) Resources (stat points, swords, spells); (2) Skill (ability to utilize the said resources); and (3) Luck (to prevent this from becoming a spreadsheet exercise). You can’t overdo on any of them—if resources dominate, the game becomes the search for the Sword of Pwnage. If skill dominates, the items in the game lose their attraction and you might as well play chess. If luck dominates, people tend to get frustrated and unhappy with their powerlessness.
Game mechanics are an attempt to balance all these demands and have the result be fun. For emotional engagement you also want to tie these mechanics to familiar tropes, but it’s just decoration. If the mechanics are not fun, arguments “but this is realistic” do not work. Imagine your character catching some intestinal disease so that for the next three or four days all he can do is run to the latrine every half an hour and that’s it (and no, you don’t get to wave a magic wand and say “Four days pass”). Realistic—yes. Fun—not so much.
Hm, okay, I get it, you are working from a bit of a different premises. I play both tabletop (rarely) or computer games for the immersion, for the feeling of being in a very different world. I don’t really care about excitement, winning or anything, if I wanted that I would just take a first-person shooter but in my mind RPGs are markedly different category. To me it is pretty much literally an interactive novel or movie.
I think you are working from premises that everything that is called a game is a game, is not different in essence from a shooter, or playing chess or basketball. There are rules, winners, losers and suchlike, excitement, overcoming challenges and all that.
If you work from these premises, then you are right, but from that angle there is no point in being such a thing as an RPG genre at all. “Immersion and suspension of belief in a different world that is like a movie or a novel” and “the excitement through beating challenges according to rules” are IMHO two very different categories of things. In this sense RPGs don’t even exist, because to the extent they are role-playing and thus the immersion, suspension of disbelief, and simulation elements are there, to that extent they are not fully games. In fact there is even a term “that is a too gamey move” where players pursue efficiency according to the literal letter of the rules and end up with something that is against the spirit / is too unrealistic in the simulated universe.
I am willing to admit that most players want more gaming and less role-playing than I, both in tabletop and computer games, though. In fact I wondered why doesn’t anyone makes a strategy videogame I would personally like. It would be like Medieval Total War 2, but without this hugely competitive aspect of everybody trying to conquer the known world ASAP. It would be more like just running your country. Sometimes there are wars, then you try to win them, but you are not trying be a second Alexander. You just try to keep your country in good shape. So pretty much like real history (or an optimistic reading of it). For example, amending the engine so that everybody teams up in alliances against factions that conquer more than five provinces would do it.
To me it is pretty much literally an interactive novel or movie.
There is no bright line (nowadays) separating games from interactive movies and there are certainly hybrids around. The problem with good full-immersion games is that they really hard to make, I think the screen and the controls actually get in the way and a good book is able to achieve better immersion because your imagination has more freedom.
Usually, if you want to experience a game just for the story, you can put the difficulty on Easy, one-hit everything and travel the game world. Some very successful games—like Skyrim—aren’t so much about “winning” as they are about constructing your own experience.
The landscape of games is pretty varied, though. If you want to “realistically” swing your sword you can play the Witcher series; if you want a Medieval-ish open-world sandbox without much pressure to conquer anything you can play the Mount & Blade series; Civilization-style games offer country management without the necessity to conquer everyone else...
everybody teams up in alliances against factions that conquer more than five provinces would do it.
No offense to you guys, but this is why I don’t play RPGs with other people. Instead of playing a role almost everybody is trying to make “efficient” “overpowered” characters as if it was some sort of a competition which you can win.
I generally don’t play “optmized” characters, but the fact that there are some character types which are more optimal for most purposes (surviving games, making DMs cry, etc.) is well acknowledged. One can have fun discussing those issues independent of any characters one actually plays in a game.
There are however, some circumstances where it really does matter. Say for example one is playing a very high intelligence wizard in D&D 3.5. The fact is that throwing fire balls at everything is very fun, but not at all effective compared to battlefield control and buffing. So if one has a wizard who likes doing that sort of thing, you need an in game explanation for why they enjoy solving things with explosions so much.
It is also worth noting that in some games, the problem of optimal characters gets so severe that it makes it for some arrangements of characters where it is extremely difficult or impossible for a DM to match something that corresponds to the difficulty level of all the characters. A genuine threat to some characters will be the same level that makes other characters useless or dead. The 3.5 Tier list was made to try to help understand and fix this problem. So these issues do impact real game play.
My thoughts exactly. The first commandment of multiclassing in 3rd is “Thou shalt not lose caster levels”. Also, Wizards are easily the most OP base class, if played well. Multiclassing them into anything without wizard spell progression is just a waste.
OTOH, using gestalt rules to make a Wizard//Rogue isn’t half bad, even if a little short on HP and proficiencies. I prefer Barbarian or even the much ridiculed Monk in place of the Rogue.
No offense to you guys, but this is why I don’t play RPGs with other people. Instead of playing a role almost everybody is trying to make “efficient” “overpowered” characters as if it was some sort of a competition which you can win. I think entirely the other way around, I would make my character a wizard because and only because this career choice matches his personality, background and so on, and multiclass only when it looks like my char really would. And would not give no heed to efficiency and power. It would be the DMs job to match difficulty level to our characters, not the other way around.
I will have to invent an RPG where all armor has the same AC, all weapons the same damage, so that players don’t try to make overpowered optimization monsters but plain simply choose whatever matches a characters style, background, culture, or the players general sense of coolness. Thus, for example, a player would be comfortable with a fighter character that wears no armor and carries only a rapier because he is a D’Artagnan type swashbuckler, that is his personality, background and style.
I typically play storytelling games (like Dread) in order to get the story as uncontaminated by tactics as possible.
This simply does not work. The issue is matching the players to each other, not the difficulty to the characters. The three primary dimensions are time spent talking vs. fighting, plot vs. autonomy, and competence. Mismatch between the players on any dimension will cause conflicts. It’s everyone’s responsibility to form a group with accord on desires, and then the DM’s responsibility to deliver sessions that line up with their desires.
There’s a concept in game design called the “burden of optimal play”. If there exists a way to powergame, someone will probably do it, and if that makes the game less fun for the people not powergaming, their recourse is to also powergame.
Most traditional RPGs weren’t necessarily envisioned as competitive games, but most of the actual game rules are concerned with combat, optimization, and attaining power or prowess, and so there’s a natural tendency to focus on those aspects of the game. To drive players to focus on something else, you have to make the rules of your game do something interesting in situations other than fantasy combat, magical attainment of power, or rogue-flavored skill rolls to surmount some other types of well-defined challenges. All of these things can make for a very interesting game world of a certain flavor, but in that game world, some kinds of players and characters will inevitably do much better than others, usually the ones that have some progression to a god-like power level using magic.
The flexibility afforded to the DM allows people to hypothetically run their game some other way, and many succeed, but the focal point of the game is defined by the focal point of the rules. They can decide to make their game center more around politics, romance, business, science, or whatever else, because they get to choose what happens in their world, but the use of an RPG system implies that the game world will be better at handling the situations the game has more rules, or more importantly, better-defined rules, for. The rules of a game are the tools with which players will build their experience, even in a more flexible game like an RPG.
A few friends of mine invented a system that I’m helping them develop and playtest. It’s somewhat rough at present, but the intent is to make rules that center more around information and social dynamics. In playtesting, people naturally gravitate toward situations the game’s rules are good at handling, so a lot more people are interested in being face characters than otherwise have been. Through some combination of the system and the person running the game, the rules will define what people naturally gravitate towards. This doesn’t surprise us when the person running the game is replaced by a computer that follows the rules exactly, and tends to be true to varying degrees based on the flexibility with which the rules are interpreted.
This is the recourse if they disliking powergaming a little. If they dislike it a lot, they play with someone else, or if they cannot then not.
Note: I have nothing against a competitive spirit, just 1) I think it is not an ideal avenue to exercise it 2) OP characters are simply boring, too narrow and predictable, walk around in full plate and carry the heaviest weapons, or shoot fireballs all the time and so on 3) it makes them “unrealistic”, although in fantasy a better term would be “unmovielike” or “unnovellike”.
It is just hard to convey in the rules system that just because I am a medieval noble I won’t walk around everywhere wearing 40 kg of metal, hauling a huge sword and shield around just because it gives me the best stats. It would be uncomfortable, unfashionable, ridiculous and socially unacceptable but how would you encode that in rules?
Now, your analysis sounds a lot like a traditional libertarian market analysis: choices flow from incentives. But in this case, there is an omnipotent dictator so it is nothing like a market—if a DM dislikes powergamers, he can easily drop astral dragons on them, while treat non-powergamers well. And if his / her circle is largely non-powergamers, it works well. Because of the ominpotent nature of the DM, it is not a market nor like a sport nor any comparable thing, not even like a videogame. It is like a story, telling it as you fit or as you have agreed.
Nevertheless you are right that perhaps rules could encourage it. Hm. Maybe I should take an idea from Game of Thrones. Real power is not a spell or weapon but political, social power which is gained through intrigue which the player must personally roleplay and acquire, not just roll a dice and get. Once a traditional powergamer gets surprised the same way how Ned Stark was, that another player with low stats and bad gear can still make 100 city guards attack him because he is a social, political powergamer, a lesson will be learned.
The system you mentioned sounds interesting too.
It is not strongly relevant, but I also hope to fix some traditional fantasy / RPG terminology and gear for better historicity. Longswords should be renamed side-swords and bastard swords renamed longswords. Generally, paying attention to the Historical European Martial Arts folks and nobody should design a medievalist fantasy game or reading a novel without skimming wiktenauer.com
At least if people want to powergame, setting up actually medieval rules, like prices and availability of gear, would put a break on it.
I think you’re confusing two different genres—games and realistic simulations. As a matter of fact, it turned out (after much wailing and gnashing of teeth) that accurate simulations tend to make lousy games. Essentially the problem is that they need to optimize for different incompatible things. This was discussed to death in the gaming world.
Note—you can certainly have good games which focus on e.g. political and social power and not on getting a full plate set with the ability to cast unlimited fireballs. But they are not going to be accurate simulations either.
Well, I was left out of it so you could give me some pointers that would be nice. I was just thinking it over myself. AD&D was infamously bad as simulation, in a “not even wrong” sense, you could literally not have a fight in the game mechanics that looks anything like normal fencing (i.e. 20 rounds without damage then one killer wound, instead it would be a death from a thousand cuts bullshit), so almost every other tabletop RPG e.g. Shadowrun or Vampire The Masquarade improved on that tremendously, which improved to me the fun factor to extent that it did not feel stupid at least, but indeed in itself did not max it out. I figured out, to max it out, it is not realistic simulations you want but movie-like or novel-like. Simulate a really good movie, not real life. So study the craft of writing, screenwriting, learn the trade of writers, and base the rules on that. This is where I am currently. Where to go from here?
Not that AD&D does any better, but if you’re in a fight and you’ve exchanged blows twenty times without serious damage, at least one of the fighters isn’t trying to win. Realistic personal combat (other types of combat can be more drawn out) is like Hobbes’ state of nature, or a cannibal elf: nasty, brutal, and short.
The problem is—well, there are several problems here, but the main problem is that it’s really hard to build a multiplayer game that’s actually fun but that looks and plays like realistic fighting; the winners haven’t had time to play, and the losers feel betrayed. You can do it in single-player games, where there’s an endless supply of mooks to shank and no particular requirement that killing your avatar take you out of the fight for more than a few seconds, but you usually end up with a very hard game.
Aiming for cinematics rather than realism is indeed the correct approach, but this wasn’t clear in the tabletop RPG world for a long time; I suspect that has something to do with its roots in the strategy wargame genre, which values realism very highly and has the structure to mostly get away with it.
I found the rules of Shadowrun the most realistic and also playable, Second Edition if I remember right, I didn’t keep up - I just hate the setting and the artwork with a fury. I don’t remember all the exact details, but splitting damage into stun and health, having damage an effect on your abilities, rerolling sixes so that with good luck a weak weapon can do a lot of damage, damage modified by weapon skill (accurate aiming), adding inborn ability to learned skill together (not the most realistic but better than nothing), having dice pools reflecting what you pay more attention to, and the cleverly cinematic karma pool, are all things that seem like cinematic realism to me and IMHO playable. If only the rules were more open source like the d20 and used in different settings that make more sense… having both technology and magic is not necessarily a bad idea but somehow the Shadowrun world manages to make it very childish, and the novels that introduced the world are pretty much the weirdest fantasy I have ever read, just who comes up with the idea of a fundamentalist Christian hero who is also a peacenik hippie and refuses to use weapons in a cyberpunk-magical world?...
A liberal/progressive trying to make a “sympathetic” fundamentalist Christian, i.e., one sympathetic from the prog point of view.
I can recommend a book—A Theory of Fun for Game Design. Or look e.g. at debates between strategy grognards and people who want to have fun throwing heavy metal at each other (on screen, that is). Or look at the evolution of long-lived games like WoW—simulation inconveniences are ground away and you’re left with pure-game design.
You have to think in terms of abstraction layers. AD&D is a high-level simulation and I don’t think rounds were ever meant to represent actual attacks and parries in a swordfight. Not to mention that are you asking for realism from a game that involves wizards and dragons..?
Realism is a poor term, but yes. The fantasy genre is strange. The very term would involve that anything goes, yet in practice what we usually have is a version of the Medieval world with the modification that the kind of legends they tended to believe in are actually true. The problem is usually having far too many wizards and dragons, Tolkien got it better with four and one, respectively, that is roughly how many of them would a superstitious medieval guy expect. So it is realistic more or less from the angle of the medieval guy who would expect to find dragons in Cathay and wizards in Hyperborea yet his ideas of a swordfight are either very realistic or he is dead.
Consistency may be a better word, not consistency with itself, but consistency with how it modifies actual reality. Let’s call it Consistent Deltas. If it is a fight between two monsters with 143 tentacles and 5 beaks I don’t care how it is, as I have nothing to compare it with. But if it looks like a real human using something that looks like a real sword… then it should work more or less it works here.
And yet another twist—“here” does not necessary mean real reality, but believable movie / novel reality. The kind of illusions we usually believe, where veterans of battles don’t deal with PTSD and don’t kill themselves five year after retiring.
Thinking of it as a high-level simulation is new to me, perhaps true, in that case we really needed DM’s who can describe it so...
Thanks for the book idea.
That’s the simulation argument, but I don’t think it applies. Go up one abstraction layer.
You have a conflict between your party and some creatures. You need to represent this conflict balancing (at least) three different things: (1) Resources (stat points, swords, spells); (2) Skill (ability to utilize the said resources); and (3) Luck (to prevent this from becoming a spreadsheet exercise). You can’t overdo on any of them—if resources dominate, the game becomes the search for the Sword of Pwnage. If skill dominates, the items in the game lose their attraction and you might as well play chess. If luck dominates, people tend to get frustrated and unhappy with their powerlessness.
Game mechanics are an attempt to balance all these demands and have the result be fun. For emotional engagement you also want to tie these mechanics to familiar tropes, but it’s just decoration. If the mechanics are not fun, arguments “but this is realistic” do not work. Imagine your character catching some intestinal disease so that for the next three or four days all he can do is run to the latrine every half an hour and that’s it (and no, you don’t get to wave a magic wand and say “Four days pass”). Realistic—yes. Fun—not so much.
Hm, okay, I get it, you are working from a bit of a different premises. I play both tabletop (rarely) or computer games for the immersion, for the feeling of being in a very different world. I don’t really care about excitement, winning or anything, if I wanted that I would just take a first-person shooter but in my mind RPGs are markedly different category. To me it is pretty much literally an interactive novel or movie.
I think you are working from premises that everything that is called a game is a game, is not different in essence from a shooter, or playing chess or basketball. There are rules, winners, losers and suchlike, excitement, overcoming challenges and all that.
If you work from these premises, then you are right, but from that angle there is no point in being such a thing as an RPG genre at all. “Immersion and suspension of belief in a different world that is like a movie or a novel” and “the excitement through beating challenges according to rules” are IMHO two very different categories of things. In this sense RPGs don’t even exist, because to the extent they are role-playing and thus the immersion, suspension of disbelief, and simulation elements are there, to that extent they are not fully games. In fact there is even a term “that is a too gamey move” where players pursue efficiency according to the literal letter of the rules and end up with something that is against the spirit / is too unrealistic in the simulated universe.
I am willing to admit that most players want more gaming and less role-playing than I, both in tabletop and computer games, though. In fact I wondered why doesn’t anyone makes a strategy videogame I would personally like. It would be like Medieval Total War 2, but without this hugely competitive aspect of everybody trying to conquer the known world ASAP. It would be more like just running your country. Sometimes there are wars, then you try to win them, but you are not trying be a second Alexander. You just try to keep your country in good shape. So pretty much like real history (or an optimistic reading of it). For example, amending the engine so that everybody teams up in alliances against factions that conquer more than five provinces would do it.
There is no bright line (nowadays) separating games from interactive movies and there are certainly hybrids around. The problem with good full-immersion games is that they really hard to make, I think the screen and the controls actually get in the way and a good book is able to achieve better immersion because your imagination has more freedom.
Usually, if you want to experience a game just for the story, you can put the difficulty on Easy, one-hit everything and travel the game world. Some very successful games—like Skyrim—aren’t so much about “winning” as they are about constructing your own experience.
The landscape of games is pretty varied, though. If you want to “realistically” swing your sword you can play the Witcher series; if you want a Medieval-ish open-world sandbox without much pressure to conquer anything you can play the Mount & Blade series; Civilization-style games offer country management without the necessity to conquer everyone else...
That’s Total War Shogun 2 :-)
I generally don’t play “optmized” characters, but the fact that there are some character types which are more optimal for most purposes (surviving games, making DMs cry, etc.) is well acknowledged. One can have fun discussing those issues independent of any characters one actually plays in a game.
There are however, some circumstances where it really does matter. Say for example one is playing a very high intelligence wizard in D&D 3.5. The fact is that throwing fire balls at everything is very fun, but not at all effective compared to battlefield control and buffing. So if one has a wizard who likes doing that sort of thing, you need an in game explanation for why they enjoy solving things with explosions so much.
It is also worth noting that in some games, the problem of optimal characters gets so severe that it makes it for some arrangements of characters where it is extremely difficult or impossible for a DM to match something that corresponds to the difficulty level of all the characters. A genuine threat to some characters will be the same level that makes other characters useless or dead. The 3.5 Tier list was made to try to help understand and fix this problem. So these issues do impact real game play.