It sucks, especially if you’ve got a game that you’ve played for a while and are trying to get a friend into. You have to carry them for a couple of months, because stuff that seems basic and instinctive to you wraps their mind into a pretzel.

Ultimately though, the skill that you’ve learnt by min-maxing in an RPG are only specific to that particular game. You go and pick up another game, well there’s another 500 skills you have to memorize the functions of. I used to love the min-max game in terms of that, but I have less and less motivation to go through that learning process with new games these days.

Compare it to being a FPS fan. Once you’re good, you’re pretty much good, and you only need an hour or 2 to get used to the different guns etc in a new game before you can dive right in.

I’d really love to see an RPG with more “building-block” typed skills that can be comboed together in very logical ways (the new Warden class in LotRO sounds like a step in the right direction), to cut down on all the crazy mumbo jumbo.

That said, I presently work in game development, so perhaps that’s the natural outlet for those who actually care about how games are put together, rather than looking stylish in stupidly proportioned shoulderpads. The act of thinking is vastly underrated by society at large, but there are still a few places where it’s valuable. Design and engineering, whether it’s of games or anything else with design intricacies, still needs people who know how to think.

But yeah, it’s hard to tell, maybe it’s a totally different kind of game, more of a simulator. Games were getting more and more advanced, i remember reading an article by Gygax where he decries the heavy skill based games like Loremaster. he seemed to like it simple. Spend 10 minutes rolling up a character then go at it.
But really the heavy calculations are almost more fun while I’m not playing the game than they are when I’m playing. I’ll catch myself spending hours on forums and making spreadsheets, arguing over details, and then I think “I could be playing the game right now”.

In some ways I think GW rewards this way of analyzing a lot more, while still keeping it simple. Since you can only use so many powers, there are so many different combinations of powers you can make and it’s easy to switch between and test them out. And more than one formula for everything. But at the same time, you can make a new max level guy and jump in and not think at all. Maybe you’ll get rolled by the team who did min max, but you might still have fun.