If you start playing an RPG by googling "best class" or "best build" - fuck you

For me the most fun part of RPGs is learning how all the systems interact and exploiting them to make my own OP or goofy build. Kinda like putting together a puzzle through experimentation and playing the actual game where the puzzle is the real goal. Of course, a lot of games don’t actually have deep enough systems to play around with and exploit.

Some people simply don’t care about the puzzle aspect and just want to play the actual game in the most frictionless way possible, that’s totally fine too. There’s no right or wrong way to have fun, judging people for not having fun the exact way you do is childish and kinda reactionary tbh

Haha, you are consumed by video games. Have a wonderful, terrible time.

I don't want to waste a bunch of time and I hate reaching the midgame and suddenly finding out my build is completely terrible so now I gotta start over because modern day developers love "friction" which means I don't get to respec.

I also want to have fun and some classes aren't fun, but you only figure out which ones are a ton of fun after a couple of hours, hours I'd rather spend doing side quests or exhausting dialogue trees or having fun.

I like winning in a game, I don't like reading thru skill trees and planning out builds for the future, it stresses me out. I enjoy that someone else has done the work for me so I can focus on the things I find enjoyable. It eliminates choice paralysis.

A lot of games have unfun aspects that people have figured out how to effectively bypass. I have skipped so many poorly designed shopkeeper-minigames due to running a build that allowed me to make a bunch of money or the like and thus skipping some unfun aspect of the game.

I have a tendency to waste a lot of time on inventory management and min-maxxing figuring out what is the "best" by a few percent. This isn't fun for me, but I can't stop me from doing it. Finding a build online stops it however.

None of these things impact your experience of the game. However I agree min-maxxing and this approach to having to create "the best" character is prevalent and it influences game design. Games more and more require you run a "good" build to be able to participate in it, which then encourages meta play which then in turn encourages games to require more "good" builds.
My favourite game in a long time was inscription, because it allowed you to do busted combos and make janky cards. I wish more game designers would allow you to be op (without just giving you a "godmode")

I only do this for terraria and the calamity mod. Shit is complex af without a guide on weapons

Do not enjoy games the way you like. REPEAT, YOU ARE ENJOYING YOUR GAME WRONG

*I’m not talking about MMOs by the way, y’all don’t wanna see my fully unhinged rant about that fundamentally misguided genre of WoW-clones

no i do actually please share us your rant. this world doesn't have enough hate for wow clones.

look man im not picking my way through the 200 subclasses that wrath of the righteous has for some reason

often i will just look for a cool build whos concept i like and then once i have as better idea of the mechanics i will tweak it how it like

if you play an rpg and dont choose the proletariat because it is the best class you are a lib

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

I start off by googling “booba mods” and seeing how realistic the smut is

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.

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

counterpoint: im an idiot and i dont wanna have to restart halfway into the story bc i made a doodoo character

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.

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.

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

I can't hear you over the sound of my overflowing currency tab

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

Googling "worst class" and picking that to play.

I hate the meta, but my favorites just mysteriously happen to be meta

I picked Decker in the crpg Shadowrun games and got THOROUGHLY shut out before I got to the first boss, I regret not googling that one lmfao

Okay but what if I tend to start games with a boring class that leaves me thoroughly unsatisfied before looking up a build that is, at the very least, visually interesting

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.

googles the best way to respond to this

https://www.google.com/search?q=hexbear+best+class

I don't like to look up best builds but I do like to look up all the information I can on a wiki. Building a spreadsheet is half of the fun.

Counterpoint: I like breaking games and doing cool stuff, as well as learning stuff in general. Baldur's Gate 2 is an exceedingly boring game for me unless I do stuff like Wild Mage unlimited casting, for example.
I can and do challenge myself with much more interesting things than just repeatedly engaging in the same gameplay loop by solving math problems from textbooks.

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 :(

If every class isn't viable in some way, what are you even doing designing a game? Like unless someone is going for an extremely silly build, most things should work, and if they don't, the player should be given the tools within the game to know how to change and improve things for themselves.

I'm going through a terrible time

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!

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.

no more half measures walter

Can't enjoy rpgs because of this. I am a compulsive meta gamer.

Tbh I sometimes do this, except "most interesting", because too many games have situations where some cool sounding meme class is objectively worse than everything else. Sometimes because they have situational abilities that seem like they have a lot of roleplay potential but they only made 2 situations you actually get to use it in in the whole game. Playing Pillars of Eternity as anything but a Cipher means missing out on 30% of the lore. You don't get equivalent cool options with other classes.

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.

the "meta" has thoroughly fucked people's brains, they're minmaxing single player games now too

idk let them do what they want to do

like i hate rpgs, but i gave up on my campaign to send every rpg developer and player to the gulag years ago, and now i'm barely even seething when someone mentions an rpg

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.

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.

I really love crunchy systems for tinkering with builds and I'm loathe to deprive myself of that by having all the secrets unveiled right away. I think it is fun to look up builds that are either thematic, play with a weird mechanic, or otherwise interesting off-meta builds. It would be cool if there were like resources for "build prompts" like, make a mobility-focused caster that uses touch spells, or try to make a tank that relies on control.

But also sometimes I'm not very interested in a game's system or would rather just play through the story, but still don't want to turn on easy mode so I can do a little tactical stuff or whatever, so I'll just look up a build that looks good.

ok ok I'm not gonna use the claiomh solais

This is why I, as GM, will purposely throw shit at you to counter your nonsense.

TTRPG MinMaxer “optimum build” nerds get in the sea. It’s a cooperative game, assholes!

I don't start out this way, but I'll seek build optimization advice if I start getting thrashed.

I'm sorry I'm just really tired from work

I always just go with my own build

Videogames are an inherently antisocial medium of entertanment. The RPG has taught entire generations of people to treat interacting with others as a purely mechanical exchange. Having children waste so much of their formative years on such a dehumanizing simulacra of the world and humanity has served as a great tool for the capitalist order to erode their empathy into nothing.

In Yakuza 8 i wish someone told me that sujimancer is 1000% useless

My policy is to look up as little as possible. If I know I'm missing something obvious and have spent a half hour on it, then I will Google it. Managed to get through most of Elden Ring without spoilers recently.

Edit: also depends on the game I suppose. If I don't really like the game I am more likely to Google.

Agreed, though sometimes a nudge can help, depending on how jank the game is.

On MMO's: Paragon in GW needed a buff for a while, but I was more bitter that instead of buffing my favorite class, they ignored them to the point of giving them few cosmetic options.

Uncritical support for the protracted people's war against youtube guide makers.

I just start fresh and try to resist looking up guides for as long as I can. I usually give in at the 5-6 hour mark, depending on the type of game.

Lookin' forward to your next game

kor "best build"

jk love you, comrade

I always get FOMO 'cause what if I mess up and make some unfun, unplayable trash build

I'll stop doing this when games stop giving me tons of unbalanced build options, punish sub-optimal builds with difficulty spikes, and don't let me respec without penalty. Looking at you, Owlcat.

I get it, but this is a problem of game design in RPG's. If a developer gates the fun behind success, expect meta builds. I think this is why Disco is such a great game, some of the best moments are when you spectacularly fail a check and can still progress.

If you don't get Fie up to 100% evasion are you even Trailsing