RandomCasualty at [unixtime wrote:1162980638[/unixtime]]
Well, there's a difference between bad choice of tactics for one battle and a bad character. Choosing poorly in one battle and getting screwed for it generally doesn't make people upset. After all, they can just adjust their strategy next time. Figuring out your character totally sucks and is inferior in every way is different. That problem won't just go away with better planning next time. You're stuck wtih that character until he dies or you abandon him. Now suppose you like the character personality and don't want to just send him packing for a new min/maxed character, then what? That's where the ill feelings come from.
A couple of points:
1) The player intentionally made his character so it was a solely melee wizards and thus didn't have spells in other areas. That was his character concept, and it tanked. After the combat, we talked about it and realized that it wasn't really all that effective. It wasn't that they took a bad strategy or anything like that.
2) Like I said, in that situation, I would want to be "stuck" with my character concept and if he dies, it's no big deal. Trust me, there would be for more "ill feeling" if you outright banned a class to me rather than having a character concept die in the game. And, like I brought up in my previous post, the banning of a class due to it being underpowered would send up red flags to me about the DM that would cause me to want to leave the group.
It feels to the other player that sometimes (especially in a group of optimizers), that the other PCs have pushed out his character and are draining the fun from the game.
Like K said, if your group is freaking out about that, you can always as a DM give the character a magic item via storyline. The moral of the story is that it doesn't need to blow up into an outright banning/houseruling of a class just because you think it is underpowered.
And, as I said earlier, really a new player is more damaging via "balance" than a class selection. (ie. A player making bad choices is most likely going to kill the group than playing a fighter.) Thus, do you kick out the new player? With that mentality, getting you character killed off because the guy is new to the game is probably more "fun-draining" than anything else.
The other situation tends to arise when you've got one optimized character of the same class as a non-optimized character. So like if one guy is the fighter and is playing a straight fighter 15, and the toher guy is a fighter/barbarian/dervish with better feat selection, the straight fighter is probably going to feel slighted, because he's inferior in every way.
In that situation, I'd be fine with it - I wouldn't feel slighted. I understand that getting a character with simplicity in mind doesn't mean that I would have the most powerful character. Also (well, I don't have any other way to put it so I will just say it), I'm an adult: I don't freak out if someone is getting more pie than I am. And frankly, most groups I've gamed with usually have the same mentality.