Why I Am the way that I am (...difficult...)
So just as a bit of background, some of you might be wondering just why I can be so difficult and such a stickler about "building a character, not a set of numbers" and why I crack down so harshly on min/maxing.
What follows is a background story about why I am the way that I am and is purely optional to read.
When I first started "serious" gaming (i.e. where we actually played by the rules and weren't 14 yr old kids laughing about how drunk we were getting at the taverns all the time) it was in college and I played with two good friends I nickname "The Crunch Brothers". These two guys were great roleplayers and a blast to be around, but they took the most pleasure in bending a game system over the barrel. They would just sit around, the two of them, and crunch the numbers. They were the kind of guys that would just spend an afternoon tweaking builds until they could solo gods at mid-levels.
One was always a cleric, the other always a mage (both of them considered the most powerful classes in D&D). I on the other hand liked playing Bards, Rogues, Fighters, Samurai...basically everything considered Tier 4 or Tier 5...bottom of the barrel. Especially back in 3.0 when we were really doing the heavy gaming I would spend all my feats/skills etc. trying to be THE BEST at stealth or THE BEST at bluffing, basically a typical skill monkey but the system as it was designed was entirely against me. They were nice and would try to help me get a bit of the spotlight but when the gauntlet was down and brown stuff hitting the fan, those two would step in and clean house. Not only with a couple of buffs could they out bluff and out stealth me, but they could also do it while solo-ing a dragon that should have been waaay out of their league.*
I had fun with them because they were good friends and we had a laugh but from a gaming perspective it felt very hollow. I thought I was making this badass adventurer that could save the day but these guys quickly regulated me to just being the pack mule that they would sometimes indulge and let me swing a sword when it wasn't critical to the mission.
Frankly, it sucked though but because I was stubborn I refused to just pick a mage or cleric or druid to compete with them (although even if I did they would often insist on picking your stuff for you because they crunched everything and knew what worked and what didn't so there wasn't a lot of wiggle rooms in builds in their parties). I consider myself a decent gamer of board games in general so I KNEW the rules were against me but I refused to give up and got crushed time and time again...
Anyway now that I'm a GM I get to set the theme/story etc. The GM that we played with ran more of a loosely linked arena where all his time was spent on developing "awesome encounters" and the fights were epic (they had to be to keep pace with the Crunch brothers) but the storyline was pretty lacking. "The King says go here and recover the McGuffin." We go there and go through dungeons and fight after fight but nobody had any depth, there were no emotional charged scenes of loss or remorse or love or laughter. It was a popcorn blockbuster, a thinly veiled excuse for action scene set pieces. I loved hanging with my friends, but I hated the way the game was played.
(NOTE: That's not to say EVERY game was like that. My high school gaming group was very different and many were VERY story oriented...I have some pretty epic Hunter: The Reckoning tales...)
So now that I'm a GM, you could say I'm overcompensating but I say that I want to make characters, not numbers. I am not one of those GMs that just shrugs and says "oh well, it's in the rules, go ahead and bend the whole game system to your every whim. For me, it is ALWAYS Characters first, Story Second, and game mechanics dead last after some other stuff I haven't bothered listing.
HOWEVER I like having game mechanics as a framework to help determine the odds of success/failure and because I buy Hero Lab that crunches everything for me it is easy to get you guys audited down to the penny. In addition by paying such close attention to your character sheets it really helps me get a better understanding of who you are.
SO here I am as a stickler for game mechanics as well as a watchdog for people trying to exploit the system. It's a hypersensitivity that leads me to intentionally imposing handicaps and restrictions. BUT I do it out of love. Love for the story, love for the game, and love towards you, the concept of a player (not you specifically, you specifically I could take or leave ;D). I want everyone to know that you don't have to go the easy route, you don't have to sit down and analyze cost/benefit ratios to have a good time in my games. What you need is a strong character in mind and make your character creation decisions to support that strong theme.
So from my perspective if I tell you X should be Y, if you are building it around a strong character concept you shouldn't care at all and while I appreciate a bit of efficiency don't tell me you're a good looking guy natural born leader and have a charisma of 10 because you can squeeze more points out of your character if you raise skills instead of attributes.
And also I hate loopholers and system breakers and hope they all rot and die.
:P
*The old Shivering Touch shenanigans. For those who don't know, Shivering Touch was a spell that did DEX damage, not HP damage. Dragons, despite being big bundles of HP and armor, typically had average (8-12) in DEX. One or two castings of Shivering Touch dealt enough DEX damage to drop a gargantuan ancient dragon to 0 DEX which, as per 3.0/3.5 rules instantly killed it. Yes, it was that retarded. Also the attack had no saving throw against it and was a touch attack (which meant that the +40 armor that the dragons had was useless as it could only use it's non-existent or negative DEX to AC)