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This really hits me hard.
The first D&D group I was with (in highschool, we were playing 3.5) was
frickin' awesome.
Our characters were all
flawed as shit, and the concept of "optimizing" was completely foreign to us.
I was a lawful evil cleric of a fire god, wielding a censor, and had the highest strength at 16. Our druid was a total idiot that thought he could sneak attack, and once,
in the middle of a conversation with an NPC guard, smacked the guy in the face with the butt of his Morningstar, and knocked him out cold from a crit. With practically
no reason. And the best part was me getting to say "
I'm the evil one! Why are
you knocking out guards?"
The second best part was our other cleric, who was chaotic good, and worshipped the mortal enemy of my god, kept trying to hit on my character, while ignoring my explaining as to the immoral implications of such, just so you understand what a total clusterfuck this group was.
Anyway, [/rant], it was fun.
But that
ended once a particular person tried to join the group with a fucking full-orc with 22 strength, 18 dexterity, and no less that a modifier of at least +2 on everything else.
And claiming he rolled this character fairly.
He pretty much dominated every single encounter, and when people complained about it, he blamed
us for not having min-maxed characters like he did.
We
should have just stopped playing with that guy, but instead, we made different characters, and it was never that fun again.
I whole-heartedly support the idea of a flawed character. I
love characters designed to fit a theme, and not just to abuse the system, or follow a guideline.
And people getting on each other for a
backstory is just plain dumb. If they have a problem with it, they can just change some names around, or something. Nobody cares if you've been the supreme emperor of a country that nobody's heard of before. Roleplaying that one may actually be pretty fun, to think of it.
But yeah, in that original group, if someone wanted to take a feat, they did. If the GM asked why they should have it, the player could respond with "Cause I want to" and that was it.