- Okay, let's do this.
Around two years ago,
I made a video called
"Why You Should Build Your D&D Character Wrong."
This has made a lot of people very angry
and been widely regarded as a bad move.
I made that video because I was annoyed at people telling me
that I built my character, Aisling, wrong.
What I didn't realize at the time
was that by making this video,
I was unknowingly entering a battle
that the D&D community had been waging for many, many years.
Well, I've learned my lesson and I've changed my mind.
So, today, I am asking that you join me
while I roast my past self.
(twinkling music)
If you haven't seen the video in question,
I will put it into the cards for you.
But the short version is
that I was trying to convince people,
particularly people who usually
optimize their character builds,
to consider intentionally building
a weakness into a character,
like picking suboptimal spells,
choosing attribute scores
based on character instead of class,
or choosing multiclasses
that don't necessarily compliment each other.
I had reasoning for this
and we will get to why that reasoning was not great.
But first, I wanna explain the context for this video.
The first thing to understand is
that I was pretty new to D&D.
I originally started playing D&D in 2019
after falling in love with Critical Role.
When I made that video,
I'd been playing for about a year in just one group
and I hadn't done much DMing yet.
This, obviously, colored my perspective.
The other thing to keep in mind is that people
genuinely were really shitty to me about Aisling.
Even though I said over and over that I was happy with her
and that the other players at my table were happy with her,
people just could not stop themselves from telling me
that I was having fun with my friends incorrectly.
And I'm not gonna lie,
it made me mad and I got defensive.
But the lesson I took away from that experience
and the message of that video,
that's where I screwed up.
(gentle music)
I watched my own video back
to figure out all the stuff that I messed up.
So let's go down the list.
That's right, I want you to play a character
who isn't optimized.
(woman screams)
I know I can hear the old guard screaming.
I made this joke because I was envisioning
my generation of players,
you know, the blue-haired-and-pronouns crew,
the Critical Role generation,
whatever you wanna call us, as the new guard.
But as I've learned more about the history of D&D,
I've learned that the true old school players,
the people who played basic D&D and AD&D,
have a reputation
for prioritizing roleplay and storytelling.
While it's the new school of D&D, that is 3.0 and onwards,
that has trended towards optimization.
Basically, I was lumping everyone
who came before me into one group
and showing my ass by admitting
that I didn't understand the history
of what for me was a new hobby.
I am suggesting that it is okay, and even good,
to try creating a character who has complexity
and doesn't look like every other D&D character
that anyone ever makes.
Okay, I have no excuse for this.
This is just shitty.
I'm basically saying that if you optimize,
your characters aren't unique.
And that is both rude and completely false.
It is very silly to suggest that not being able
to create a character that is both unique and effective
somehow makes you more creative rather than less.
I, of all people, shouldn't be out here acting
like it's the race/class combo
that defines how unusual a character is.
A truly inventive player would have no problem
designing 10 half-orc barbarians
that have different personalities
and different backstories.
I mean, I'm the one out here
creating nothing but elves and tieflings.
So who am I to throw shade?
Weaknesses leave room for growth.
I have said this before, lots of people have.
But a character having flaws and weaknesses
can be one of the most compelling parts of a story.
It gives the character something to overcome
and somewhere to grow.
I'm missing a really obvious thing here,
which is that optimized characters do have weaknesses.
That's why so many wizards are easy to hit.
And why so many strength-based characters
have low intelligence or charisma.
Weaknesses are literally built into the game.
Because if you were good at everything,
that would be really boring.
Not to mention that there are plenty of weaknesses
that you can write into a character's personality
without necessarily baking it into their build.
Your PC can be selfish, or cowardly, or naive.
You absolutely do not have to intentionally build
your character ineffectively
in order to create flawed characters.
Some of the right choices might not line up
with your character's backstory or personality.
This is actually me perpetuating
another really common amateur mistake in the D&D community.
And that is prioritizing the flavor
of your mechanical choices
over the actual impact on gameplay.
For example, just because you want your character
to play music doesn't mean that they have to be a bard.
If you wanna play a super-intelligent singer
who spent their youth doing rigorous,
magical vocal training,
who carries a spellbook full of sheet music,
a wizard would suit your concept better than a bard.
Learning to look past the flavor
and see each class, ability, and spell
for what it actually does in the game
is a really useful skill
that inevitably leads to better builds
that are more closely aligned
with what the player actually wants.
What's the point of being given choices
if some of them are wrong?
If it's not against the rules, it's not wrong, period.
Okay, I get what I was going for here.
But the implication of this statement
is that if no choice can be wrong,
every choice should be right,
which kind of implies that every choice should be equal.
And if that were true,
what would be the point of having choices at all?
We might as well just play premade characters.
Of course, some choices are gonna be smarter
and more effective.
And, thankfully, D&D is really complex,
so there isn't just one choice that's right
and one choice that's wrong.
Your character build choices interact with each other.
It's not like optimizers
are just copy-pasting one perfect character.
Min-maxing is a complicated puzzle.
And figuring out which choices play well with other choices
is a crucial part of what makes strategy games fun at all.
I am not telling you how to play.
I don't like when people tell me how to play,
so I would not wanna do that to you.
And yet, that's basically what I did, nice.
But that is not all.
I left the biggest way that I screwed up for last.
And this grew up is so widespread in the D&D community
that it has its own name.
After the break, the Stormwind Fallacy.
- Welcome back to "Interpretive Dance, Interpreted."
Up next, a beautiful piece
called "Sponsored by World Anvil."
(audience clapping)
(gentle French music)
A strong start.
Her movement clearly communicates
that World Anvil is a toolkit for writers,
game masters, roleplayers, and world builders,
to help them organize and document the details
of their world.
(gentle French music)
Beautifully executed,
despite critics' accusations
of the umbrella symbolism as contrived.
(gentle French music)
Each of these precise movements,
obviously, represents a different World Anvil feature,
Wiki-style articles, interactive nestable maps,
timelines, stat blocks,
and ooh, family trees.
(gentle French music)
Truly an incredible and undeniable display of artistry.
One can almost see the tabletop gaming session
run through World Anvil.
The built-in dice rollers,
support for stat blocks and character sheets,
and easy privacy tools
so DMs can share some information
while still keeping their secrets.
(gentle French music)
The freedom of her body perfectly represents
how you can try out World Anvil for free.
And as she stands proud in the final moments of the dance,
even the untrained eye can see
that they can take 40% off any annual membership
with the code Ginny.
(audience clapping)
Spectacular.
This has been another episode
of "Interpretive Dance, Interpreted."
And what a privilege it has been to share
this moment with you, goodnight.
(gentle music)
- The Stormwind Fallacy,
also known as the Roleplayer vs. Rollplayer Fallacy,
was created in 2006, by Tempest Stormwind,
a user on the now-defunct
Wizards of the Coast community forums.
Stormwind was labeling and disputing an assumption
that he and many other players had noticed in D&D discourse.
His claim is as follows,
"Just because one optimizes their characters mechanically
does not mean that they cannot also roleplay
and vice versa."
He goes into more detail in the post,
specifically noting that since D&D
both has rules and is a roleplaying game,
each player is doing some measure of optimization
and some measure of roleplaying,
even though their priorities and interests
in those areas might vary from player to player.
Some people mentioned this fallacy
in the comments of my video.
And looking back, I absolutely see
how I played into this common misunderstanding.
I was drawing a direct line
from a sub-optimized character build to better roleplay.
When, in fact, there is absolutely nothing
about building your character wrong
that makes roleplay easier, or harder,
or affects the quality of the roleplay.
Doing the things I suggested in that video is not wrong,
but it's also not better.
It's just a choice.
By targeting that video towards players who like to min-max,
I was reinforcing this irrational idea
that optimization and roleplay are mutually exclusive.
In short, I was wrong.
So what changed?
(gentle upbeat music)
We've established that less than two years ago
I was being loud and wrong.
I mean, probably more recently too, but that's subjective.
So what happened in that time to change my mind?
Well, two things really.
First, I spent more time in the tabletop community.
The longer I've been playing D&D
and talking about it online,
the more people who watch and engage with my content,
the wider the range of experiences
I've gotten to hear about.
More than anything, this has just affirmed
one of my core beliefs about tabletop gaming,
every table is different.
This is one of those phrases that gets parroted so much
that it's practically lost its meaning.
But I don't wanna just pay lip service here.
I wanna actually talk about what this means.
We're playing a game where even the rule book
tells you that you don't have to follow the rules.
Hearing stories from other D&D players
every day on social media has truly driven home
how vast the differences between tables are.
People will regularly comment on my videos
describing a game so foreign to me
that I almost can't believe we're playing the same game.
My goal with my videos has always been
to help as many people as I can
to have more fun, more fulfilling games.
And I know that my advice won't suit everyone
no matter how hard I try,
and trust me, I try very, very hard.
But even if I can't help everyone,
I wanna do my best to not hurt anyone.
And by now, I've seen firsthand how frustrating it is
for people who enjoy both roleplaying and optimization
to constantly be told that those things can't coexist.
I can only imagine that those people feel just as frustrated
as I did being told that I had built Aisling wrong.
And for that, I am truly sorry.
The second thing that helped me understand
is just that I played in more games.
Aisling was great for the table I was playing her at.
At that table, combat was pretty loosey-goosey.
Many encounters were more focused on problem solving
than on methodically shaving off hit points.
And, most importantly, the other characters at the table
were also largely built by folks who were going,
"Ooh, that spell sounds interesting."
With the context I had for that video,
I could see why I thought my suggestion
was clever and thought provoking.
But since then, I have played in and DMed a lot more games.
One-shots and guest appearances, mini campaigns,
other long-term, ongoing games.
And this has shown me that suiting your build
to your specific game is absolutely essential.
It genuinely sucks to bring a story-focused character
with weak combat skills
to a one-shot that ends up being all combat.
And it turns out,
playing a character who can really fuck shit up
with a greataxe is very, very satisfying.
Looking back on that video now,
I can see why people who play in a group
that does a lot of optimization would hate my suggestions.
Because a character like Aisling in a game like that
would either hold everyone else back
or get left in the dust.
And, likewise, bringing a highly optimized build
to a casual, loose game,
like the one where I played Aisling,
would also cause trouble.
It would make encounter balancing much harder for the DM,
and it would likely result
in the other players feeling overshadowed.
Whether you wanna min-max or not,
whether you wanna research your builds
or just pick stuff that sounds cool out of the handbook,
everybody at the table needs to be on the same page.
I made the mistake of trying to advise people
to align their builds with my goals.
But the only people you should be aligning
your character's goals with
are the other players at your table.
(gentle music)
I know I have a reputation for being some blue-haired,
woke, millennial snowflake
who wants everybody to have a happy,
little friendship circle
and always think about each other's feelings.
And that is not true.
My hair is clearly green now.
But yes, I think D&D should be fun.
And yes, I think everyone should do their best
to be empathetic and understanding of their fellow players.
And yes, Reddit, I have bubbly, preschool teacher energy
and I'm not ashamed of it.
But in this specific case,
I just wanna set the record straight,
I don't think optimization is bad.
I don't think roleplay and optimization
are mutually exclusive.
And it turns out in hindsight,
I don't think anybody should change their way
of playing to build their character wrong.
That was a stupid thing to say.
So here's my attempt to balance the scales.
If you watch that first video
and found yourself nodding along and saying,
"Wow, Ginny is so right,"
if you take pride in ignoring
or even rejecting optimization,
then I hope this video has challenged you.
I hope it's shown you that there is nothing stopping you
from optimizing and building a complex character.
And if you're interested in exploring a side of gameplay
that you haven't dug into yet,
then I hope you try something new.
Or don't, because it's your game.
And if you're already having a good time,
then who am I to ask you to change it?
The thing about spewing D&D thoughts
for 10 to 15 minutes every week for literal years
is that sometimes you will say something
that you later change your mind about.
I'm sure there's plenty I've said on this channel
that I don't stand by anymore.
And I think that's good.
I don't wanna be the kind of person
who doesn't change my mind when I learn new things.
So thanks for hearing me out.
And next week, back to spewing D&D thoughts
that I might later regret.
By the way, I got to act in a web series, called "Headless,"
alongside Matt Mercer, among other amazing cast members,
and the trailer just released on Monday.
So go check it out here.
And keep your eyes peeled
for my spooky ass as Verla Wolfson.