Maybe you should google how to think for yourself, mother fucker
*I'm not talking about MMOs by the way, y'all don't wanna see my fully unhinged, 
- tier rant about that fundamentally misguided genre of WoW-clones
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I'm going through a terrible time and am feeling compelled to share my aggressive thoughts 
Meta-gaming is a fucking blight, death to America
Listen, I try to play any crpg and they have a billion options with no way to tell what's good or not and I get choice paralysis. Just give me a fucking build already 
30 skills but you have no idea which ones will actually be checked.
this was fine when i was 12 and was going to re-play the game five times but that's not how life is anymore.
my first 6 hours of any crpg consist of me making a character that seems cool, playing for an hour, then saying "ooohhhh, but what if I....." and starting over to make a new character.
it turns into 12 hours if I make a character I really like, then I meet a companion and they're cooler than me + the class I made. I remade my first character in BG3 this way, because I was a cool dragonborn barbarian, then I met Karlach and went "well, I'll never be as cool as her. main menu..."
I do things for fun
For example, Pathfinder just came out with rules for playing as a Minotaur, which naturally run as Large (basically taking up twice the space as a Medium character), but using the mythology behind the Minotaur, also gave them feats that allow them to talk with cattle and oxen and also be very stealthy
So in my newest game, I made a Minotaur investigator who is incredibly good at sneaking around and solving mysteries on farms
Their name is Barnabas Surehoof to the party, but on the sheet it's Cow-lumbo
"Oh, and just one more thing!"
There are several Investigator feats that are named after stuff from famous detectives and that is one of them!
Also, I did cut a crooked landlord in half because he is also very competent with axes
here are my aggressive video game thoughts:
let people have fun instead of turning entertainment into some kind of protestant self-flagellation session. you aren't building character by playing elden ring no matter how good you are or how much you fail and try again. its ok to have a power fantasy sometimes. i hate this 4 chan attitude that you have to suffer to play video games, like games are some kind of divine test of character and willpower and value as a human. i will always play easy mode, i will never play ironman permadeath modes no matter how many streamers scream about it into a camera, dark souls should have an easy mode, sekiro should have an auto-parry, elden ring should have objective markers instead of relying on meat gates killing you until you find where to go next (i have never found the maiden i gave up after getting killed by that horse knight guy on the way to the tree right after that first camp every fucking time, fuck elden ring), FPS games should have auto-aim since twiddling a stick is nothing like aiming a gun, titanfall should have had more smart pistols. being good at video games will never translate to another skill in my entire life unless i play an FPV drone sim. if i wanted to spend my time on something that would improve myself it would not be fucking video games. don't even get me started on multiplayer FPS games, i swear they are a psy-op to make men more toxic. competitive sports were invented by bronze age slavers to trick their peasants into training for war.
The video game Stormworks translated (over time and a community college course) into a job. Video games should not feel like jobs (MMO developers will not see the light of heaven).
That said, if you come at a co-operative tabletop RPG where everyone else is playing roleplay characters that are not min-maxed and you come with a net build that uses rules from a splat book from 1990 (I assume this thread is about RPGs generally and not cRPGs)
I think there are limits, though. If you don't want to interact with the mechanics of the game at all, maybe just watch a lets play?
let people have fun instead of turning entertainment into some kind of protestant self-flagellation session.
counterpoint: let games be difficult without whining about how they are not 'accessible'. why should dark souls 'have' an easy mode? why should elden ring have objective markers? if you want to engage with the worldbuilding/actual non-gameplay parts of a Dark Souls or Elden Ring, watch a Let's Play or read the wiki.
just don't play the easy mode and you can still wank yourself off about ur l337 g4m3r skillz, and also neurodivergent people or just people with less time to dedicate to perfectly mastering the art of pressing the b/circle button to the exact timing of every bosses idiosyncratic attack sequences can enjoy the media in an interactive way unfiltered through obnoxious amateur youtuber meme narration. like in any other context yelling 'well just go read a book then' at someone asking about accessibility options in a piece of media would be considered blatantly ableist, idfk why its different for video games.
the problem with that is that dev time is limited and they're not going to put resources into the highest or lowest difficulty being a well designed good time because gamedev is happening under capitalism. that's how you get tedious damage sponges or a dexterity challenge so trivialized that the mechanical design is irrelevant.
hard on purpose games are serving a market segment and asking them to dilute the niche thing they're trying to make to cater to players who have a thousand alternatives is really weird to me. there are wheelchair accessible nature trails and we probably need more of them but no advocate would suggest building those at the direct expense of hiking trails challenging and interesting to able-bodied people, so why are people like this about games?
I don't stsrt by googling the best build. I start by googling the plot so it doesn't distract from min-maxing while I play
Do not enjoy games the way you like. REPEAT, YOU ARE ENJOYING YOUR GAME WRONG 
I start off by googling “booba mods” and seeing how realistic the smut is
googles the best way to respond to this
I don't really care about the best class or build, but with my current levels of free time, I at least want to avoid wasting time sinking effort and time I don't have into a non-viable character, or even a suboptimal one that just makes the game way harder. If I get 20-30 hours into a game and find out that the character/build that most appealed to me is either super hard to play through the game, or basically requires a huge time commitment to get to the point where it suddenly gets good, I'd probably just drop it.
I'm pretty sure I've trapped myself at the end of a couple of games where my build just doesn't get past a particular point (but was fun up to this point). I had a save that was just before the last fight of Divinity: Original Sin. I think Deus Ex: Human Revolution had this annoying this where the entire game was about stealth and hacking and stuff and then the boss fights were based on combat abilities only because the boss fights were outsourced and the outsourcing company apparently didn't realise people wouldn't spec full combat classes.
etc.
To be fair most games don't make failure fun. In a real life TTRPG, a character with low skills in everything is probably more fun than some god character with perfect 20s. It makes for interesting stories. But video games have a hard time replicating that, I guess
There are very few games where you can go wild with your skill points and still make it through the game in an interesting way. Disco Elysium is a good one. There is no good build and min/maxing is detrimental since your inner voices will start feeding you misinformation at higher levels.
I really like Dark Souls 2 as well. Equip two shields, power stance with daggers, use a whip, anything's viable if you want it to be.
Also I tend to use lightning stuff in Kor! I really like how all the element type things are good, but lightning is just so cool. I hope you feel better soon goadstool :(
In a real life TTRPG, a character with low skills in everything is probably more fun than some god character with perfect 20s. It makes for interesting stories.
Ah, another good opportunity to shill Thirsty Sword Lesbians because it allows you to advance the story by failure and because failing checks is actually a way to gain XP. Also, all characters are thirsty sword lesbians.
In Forbidden Lands, you gain the special resource for doing extra cool stuff and casting spells by failing rolls. Characters are not necessarily thirsty sword lesbians though.
I hate the meta, but my favorites just mysteriously happen to be meta 
I like to do the opposite in fighting games, making sure to try and make an underused fighter shine. Also, take care and get well!
counterpoint: im an idiot and i dont wanna have to restart halfway into the story bc i made a doodoo character
aaa
I'm going through a terrible time
ehh, it depends on the game.
shit like Elden Ring where you get a bunch of free full respecs to do whatever the fuck you want with, hell yeah I'm gonna do whatever
Path of Exile where if you fuck up the placement of your 123 passive skill points you essentially have to either grind your tush off for 50+ hours or reroll and redo the same 20+ hour boring ass campaign again if you want to do anything meaningful post-campaign, I'm gonna look up a guide
if games respected my time more i'd do it less, but otherwise lol, lmao, even.
if you play an rpg and dont choose the proletariat because it is the best class you are a lib
Depend on game. If this is an rpg like Baldur 3 hell yeah i agree, you can respec basically everything but race anyway later.
If this is about anything based on pathfider, so-so, pathfinder perks are so fucking confusing, and in some versions classes are very unbalanced (yeah you fuckers who make Rogue Trader classes, fuck you and fuck you triple for nerfing the only ones which were even remotely not absolute tedium to use)
If this is about hack&slash games sometimes mistakenly called "rpg", yeah no, you choose wrong and you can waste dozens of hours of gameplay.
the "meta" has thoroughly fucked people's brains, they're minmaxing single player games now too
i do enough thinking for myself i just want to play a game
Me playing a recent pokemon gen and not knowing what types half the pokemon are, or what the type advantages even are for any type introduced after gen 2.
Literally the only type added in between Gen 2 and Gen 9 has been Fairy (Gen 6) and Stellar (Gen 9 Tera Type) lol
TTRPG MinMaxer “optimum build” nerds get in the sea. It’s a cooperative game, assholes!
i don't get RPGs where more than half the ruleset is about combat, most the class features are about combat and then people get pissy when some players come up with characters that are very good at combat, seems like all the incentives are fucked; i hate those kinds of games so i never play them, but if 95% of the features are about combat, what are you supposed to do? make a fighter that sucks shit?
this tbqh, i simply just don't play ttrpgs where most of the mechanics are slapping big numbers onto a wargame minigame, can't have minmaxers when there's nothing to minmax 
We had one of those minmax guys at a call of Cthulhu table once and the keeper grinned widely every time he tried to shoot at the unspeakable horrors. If anything being the big musclehead with a revolver did save our asses in some hot chases against mermen and when i was busy turning half my body into tentacles. By the end of it he was having fun too, and being a minmaxing asshole actually meant he was roleplaying his character. Just because combat isn't the be-all and-all and can only solve minor problems when you deal with the eldritch. So when shooting was the answer he would have us covered and when it wasn't he would just get us into trouble just like any good himbo would.
Having the guy specifically at the table, after some bad experiences with DnD really opened my eyes that you CAN actually make lemonade out of lemons if the rules themselves allow for it.
Used to have a friend who did this, every game we played they tried to find the most optimal way to play and once received they got bored because USUALLY the most effective thing is just to do an endless loop of something basic.
Which was funny when we played Warframe, because in that game the most optimal way IS to do all the flippy cool shit. Meanwhile they were hiding behind a box using a sniper rifle, because it was the most effective weapon in all other 3rd person shooters 
incredibly tiresome
If you insist we play Pathfinder 2nd edition, I will google just that. I don't have the time to learn that monster of a system.
I do this for old RPGs since a bad spec basically means you're fucked and have to restart. For example planescape torment basically only has 1 good build and its a narrative game anyway so wanted to experience the story unimpeded. Fallout 1 has some super wrong builds you can do.
But yeah sure for modern RPGs its hard to softlock them like old ones so there I apply cool factor instead. Modern RPGs are cool cos I can actually roleplay what I want rather than have to adhere to a games completely broken and obtuse mechanics.
Started Elden Ring blind, somehow gravitated towards bleed, had a quite enjoyable time playing offline. Once I was done my first run and let myself look more around online I learned that people hated bleed builds, but also that I had been doing my bleed build wrong because apparently I never realized that bleed scaled with arcane. I just did a dex claw build and had fun and then the second time I did it "right." Only wrong build in Elden Ring is the one 
made.
People hate bleed because it's extremely effective.
I'm sorry I'm just really tired from work
Tabletop, DnD, board games, and minecraft. Also Animal Crossing.
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