Perhaps you and your opponent were simply optimizing for different goals ? For example, it's possible that your goal was "defeat the opponent as quickly as possible", whereas his was "defeat the opponent while looking as good as possible (in order to derive maximum enjoyment from the task)" or "defeat the opponent whose challenge level falls within some optimal range, handicapping self if needed (in order to derive maximum enjoyment from the task)" . Your opponent may or may not have been aware of his true goals at the time.
My point is, it's kind of tricky to declare an action "worse than worthless" without having very detailed information about all of the actors involved.
If I am about to go and fence a bout, the color of the shirt that I wear under my jacket is of no concern to me-- but if I had spent significant time before the bout debating over what shirt to wear instead of training, it would become a damaging detail rather than a meaningless one.
Unfortunately, worrying about whether you should worry is also harmful for the same reasons. Luckily, that question should resolve itself more quickly, so it should be a net benefit.
However, in more difficult cases, worrying about whether your should worry is harder to resol...
Despite being at +13, this post has been somewhat controversial, with a positive vote ratio of only 73%-- I'd be interested in hearing what caused some people to downvote it.
My current feeling is that this comment should have been part of the original post-- I thought it was implicit, but evidently this was not the case. Therefore, I'm especially interested in hearing comments from downvoters who downvoted the post for reasons other than the above.
I've had many just such experiences in various sorts of gaming (World of Warcraft, D&D), attempting to teach less-experienced players how to play effectively. (I can elaborate if anyone wants.) I can attest that there's definitely a common attitude of "well, at most this is doing no good, and it's how I like to play".
In fact, one particular aspect of this is that people seem to place value on personalization — doing things their way. The problem is, if there exists some optimally-effective way of doing things, then most deviations are likely to make performance worse (quite often because, as the OP says, the modified/added action consumes resources or otherwise has an opportunity cost).
Here's an example from World of Warcraft:
In group content in WoW (i.e. teaming up with other players to kill big monsters — the high-end, maximally challenging game content), one of the key roles is the damage-dealer, or "DPS" (damage per second). One of the DPS classes is the hunter, a ranged attacker. The hunter's job is to deal as much damage to the enemies as fast as possible.
Like all DPS classes, hunters have a wide variety of damage-dealing abilities, with names like Aimed Shot, Arcane Shot, Serpent Sting, etc. Traditionally, damage-dealing classes use their abilities in complex, shifting sequences, called a "rotation", to maximize DPS. (The reasons for this are beyond the scope of this discussion.)
At one point, I was playing a hunter in high-end raid encounters, and consistently performing very well (doing significantly more damage than anyone else). I would often group with other hunters, who were not performing nearly as well. I often had conversations that went like this:
Other hunter: Hey, how are you doing that much damage?
Me: Oh, I just use Steady Shot over and over. Nothing else.
OH: Haha (they think I am joking)
Me: No, seriously. Look at the damage ...
I wonder what is the equivalent of the Steady Shot in real life that I keep ignoring...
Perhaps "exercise, go out to meet new people, and keep smiling"?
Yes, and what do you think I meant? Meeting people on the street, striking up conversations about D&D in general, and then lecturing them about how they are Doing It Wrong?
Less sarcastic reply:
While individual DMs and gaming groups may, of course, deviate from common practice to such an extent that what is outright detrimental in most groups is actually a direct path to victory in that particular group, such large deviations are relatively rare, in my experience.
In any case, by "play effectively" I of course meant "play effectively, given the circumstances". But some advice can be pretty general, such that "the circumstances" are so broad as to be almost any circumstances. For instance:
If you are a 10th level wizard, is it effective to take feats like Far Shot, Weapon Focus (crossbow), etc., and spend your actions in combat shooting at enemies with a crossbow?
No. It is not. Your performance will be sub-optimal in no less than three ways:
You will be much less effective, will contribute less in combat, than your other party members (assuming that they are not similarly crippling their effectiveness). This will make your party mates feel that you're deadweight, and will make you feel useless.
You will be much less effective than a wizard who specialized in proper wizard things, like casting spells. You will even be much less effective than a wizard who specialized in shooting things with a crossbow... and then cast spells anyway.
You will be much worse at shooting things with a crossbow than a fighter who specialized in crossbows. You will even be much less effective than a fighter who didn't specialize in crossbows, and then used crossbows anyway.
Is it possible to contrive some convoluted scenario, some bizarre set of "house rules", DM-specific practices, and other quirks, that conspire to make the crossbow-wielding wizard optimal in any of the above ways? I suppose it might be. You'd have to work pretty hard at it.
The fact is, if someone says "being a wizard and shooting things with my crossbow is how I like to play; there's nothing wrong with it, so don't criticize me", 99% of the time they are, in fact, making the manifestly and grossly sub-optimal choice. Unless their DM has imposed some hilariously twisted set of house rules by means of which that choice becomes optimal, the problem is almost certainly that they simply do not understand how D&D works — so basic a concept as some classes being more suited to some combat techniques than others, for instance.
P.S. Responses of the form "now I am tempted to build an effective crossbow-specced wizard", while amusing, do not constitute a rebuttal of my points. ;)
While D&D evolved from a strategy boardgame, it is still a role-playing game. As such, it includes storytelling elements, which, depending on your GM and the players' desires, may weigh far more heavily than monster-slaying.
Some GMs prefer to run their games as a straightforward dungeon crawl: encounter enemies, kill them, repeat. In this case, the optimal character would be the one who is maximally effective at slaying monsters, or supporting fellow party members who do so.
Other GMs introduce logical puzzles into the mix. In this case, while your cha...
There are things that are worthless-- that provide no value. There are also things that are worse than worthless-- things that provide negative value. I have found that people sometimes confuse the latter for the former, which can carry potentially dire consequences.
One simple example of this is in fencing. I once fenced with an opponent who put a bit of an unnecessary twirl on his blade when recovering from each parry. After our bout, one of the spectators pointed out that there wasn't any point to the twirls and that my opponent would improve by simply not doing them anymore. My opponent claimed that, even if the twirls were unnecessary, at worst they were merely an aesthetic preference that was useless but not actually harmful.
However, the observer explained that any unnecessary movement is harmful in fencing, because it spends time and energy that could be put to better use-- even if that use is just recovering a split second faster! [1]
During our bout, I indeed scored at least one touch because my opponent's twirling recovery was slower than a less flashy standard movement. That touch could well be the difference between victory and defeat; in a real sword fight, it could be the difference between life and death.
This isn't, of course, to say that everything unnecessary is damaging. There are many things that we can simply be indifferent towards. If I am about to go and fence a bout, the color of the shirt that I wear under my jacket is of no concern to me-- but if I had spent significant time before the bout debating over what shirt to wear instead of training, it would become a damaging detail rather than a meaningless one.
In other words, the real damage is dealt when something is not only unnecessary, but consumes resources that could instead be used for productive tasks. We see this relatively easily when it comes to matters of money, but when it comes to wastes of time and effort, many fail to make the inductive leap.
[1] Miyamoto Musashi agrees: