Peasant Railgun

I think of a spectrum of RPG participants. At one end you have the mini-maxers, who want to squeeze every advantage possible out of the rules, and at the other end you have the story tellers, for whom the rules are a just framework to hang a story on. I've always been at the story teller end and while I appreciate the ingenuity in the peasant railgun I'm not very interested in playing a game where it features. If I'm going for slapstick I'd rather have a setting that explicitly encourages and handles it (e.g. Paranoia). OTOH, navigating different player desires is one of the big challenges of RPGs, and if people at the table really want to play a certain I think it has be allowed to an extent.

Not exactly tabletop, but this is the issue I have with every Pathfinder build I see for Wrath of the Righteous. Everyone dips into these nonsensical combinations to get a better armor rating, etc. So then you get a Paladin that decided to become a witch for part of the campaign for “reasons”. You can roleplay something, sure, but it’s rather forced by the numbers.

Pathfinder 1e had so many books and character options for broken builds that my table came up with this rule: if you can't hold the books your character needs in one hand for a minute, you can't play that character. Gives me warm and fuzzy memories :D