There are two sides of the coin to the One True Build problem and their ilk. On one side, there's the fact that for a person who has a Play To Win/Powergaming/Optimising attitude, the system does encourage the one true build. The other side is that the problem comes up significantly more if the players in a campaign have such an attitude.
Once again, I will say that, as somebody who's been around since before the Broken-Winged Crane was published, who has read RPG complaint threads and remembers the wealth of anecdotes from the old White Wolf Boards, your experience that this is an ethos which needs to be deliberately embraced,
is aberrant.
The entire problem of Paranoia Combat, expressed in a nutshell, is that the Paranoia Combo is both dull and a
necessary base competency package. Doing otherwise puts you at constant non-trivial risk of death from threats that are entirely expected and reasonable in-universe, but whose poorly-balanced lethality is massively out of scale with what you expect as a player.
The Paranoia Combo is
not representative of a Play To Win/Powergaming/Optimising/Whateverthefuck buzzword mindset you want to call it. It is representative of a "I would like to be assured of living long enough to actually take a decent shot at telling the story I made this character for," mindset.
You have one anecdote of a campaign where it wasn't necessary. Bully for you. Your anecdote is insufficient compared to the dozen that I alone can recall, to say nothing of the
real veterans in this thread who have been arguing with you, of people (some of them veteran gamers themselves) who tried to play the game either unaware of paranoia combat or who didn't think it was a big deal, stepped on a landmine and had to bury their character in a paper bag.
People have told you this, in so many words, in so many ways, for
so many pages now. You simply keep restating your experience ad nauseum, as if it
actually matters. You're either not listening, or you don't care to engage with the argument that people are actually having. I no longer care. I am entirely done with you.
