Alright, this weekend we played some 6e Fantasy HERO and we killed a NPC* who was one of my character's Complications.  My character took a 15-pt. Hunted Complication, and the GM took off with it and this became the main bad guy for this part of the campaign.  This was really cool and it fit naturally with the campaign world.

OK, now I used my character's saved and earned points to completely buy-off the Hunted Complication and not replace it with another equal point cost Complication.  This was a 15-point Complication and in HERO you can do a lot with 15 points.  I took some ribbing from my min-maxer friends over this character development choice.

Have you made non-optimized character development choices based upon the flow of the game and campaign?

Do you think that this was a foolish choice and it was a waste of a significant amount of character resource?

* = Actually, my character faced off with his nemesis and hit him in the head for 8 Body right off the bat, which nearly took him down right there.  My character sliced him in the chest twice after that and the enemy went down!

Sure. I once allowed for the DM to  virtually take away the magic user portion of my F/MU for nearly the whole campaign because it was directly tied into the overall arc of the campaign.

Your decision is something that they have forgotten since the advent of 3.x in my opinion and should be something that is focused on more than than the school of min/maxing and character builds.

Quote from: Drohem;540869Have you made non-optimized character development choices based upon the flow of the game and campaign?

Tons of times.

QuoteDo you think that this was a foolish choice and it was a waste of a significant amount of character resource?

As long as you do not play with fucktards, and I don't think you do, no, I think is not a foolish choice.

In real life we make tons of suboptimal choices and we waste our potential endlessly.

Every single game I have ever played.

My main D&D character over the last 30 years is a thief who threw away a +3 frost brand in return for a luck blade (no wishes left) because I prefered the weight of it.
The same guy that discharged an entire deck of illusion to escape from a Githyanki and who has 2 NWP slots dedicated to human languages no one ever speaks

You play the character the game is incidental.

QuoteHave you made non-optimized character development choices based upon the flow of the game and campaign?

Yes, mostly. I will not shy away from playing powerful characters, and draw the line between "heavily flawed but still made of adventurer material" and "dirt farmer", but I'd rather pick an interesting character and see where it leads me than one that's guaranteed to be more powerful.

Um...I got like 2 guys in 3 groups that really optimize.  all the rest of my players play the character, not the build.

Yes, of course I've done it plenty of time, playing hobbit cooks with no particular adventuring skills in MERP, choosing to go for Bard in AD&D 1e when the better characters were single-classed humans (obviously), up to sacrificing my character for purely RP reasons in VtM. It's never a bad choice when you come out of it with the feeling you role played the character well and thus added something cool to the game being played. I'm also not opposed to optimization at all when it makes sense for the character, however (Ewok grenadier in SWd6 for the win).

Quote from: Drohem;540869* = Actually, my character faced off with his nemesis and hit him in the head for 8 Body right off the bat, which nearly took him down right there.  My character sliced him in the chest twice after that and the enemy went down!

Sounds like the the NPC should have been the one with the Hunted complication.

Quote from: Exploderwizard;540924Sounds like the the NPC should have been the one with the Hunted complication.

Well, it was pretty frickin' sweet!  There were a couple of rounds of getting close enough for us to finally cross swords, but in the first round of squaring off against each other I landed the head blow which rocked his world and nearly killed him and then followed up with two slashes to his chest to take him down.  My character's companion was busing fighting off two small demons but I took the extra time to decapitate my nemesis and proclaim my victory with an awsome Presence attack.  It actually caused one of the demons to flee!

But that's the breaks with these type of deadly combat systems.  The swift end to the fight ended that campaign session for the night because the GM didn't really have anything else planned; he thought that the fight would last longer, especially with the demon duo.

What goes around comes around though because we started up a session from another HERO campaign with a different GM.  My character is a noble lord who is fighting with several other lords against two traitorous lords who killed our Baron and ruler of our kingdom by assassination.  Each lord brought their army to the battle, but the traitorous lords accepted my character's ancient challenge to personal combat.  The war was to be decided by a six-on-six combat, which consisted of five lords and seven champions.  My character was doing great in the fight, and decapitated one of the traitorous lords on the field of battle without having been touched yet.  However, the second traitorous lord landed a critical blow on the chest which nearly took me out of the fight with one shot, LOL!  Luckily, my character was a noble with cash so he had good plate armor and Combat Luck (gives extra protection).