Example: You envision your character as being a skilled, veteran demon hunter. In your character's backstory, he faces off against the fiends of the Abyss and wins; he is reknowned for his demon-hunting prowess. The game's plot and action also incorporates this assumption of competence.
Ok, so what if you envision your character as a consummate diplomat, secretive yet suave... and all you have on your character sheet are stats like "stabbing people" and "being really strong, in order to stab people better" ? Would you say that such a character sheet "does not support the vision" of the player ? Note that the player's diplomatic skills would be absolutely useless in combat; and that, depending on the plot, it may be highly unlikely that diplomacy will play any significant role during the course of the game. In fact, in D&D specifically, combat is overwhelmingly more likely to occur than negotiations.
Are you saying that the player should never choose to play a suave diplomat with lots of points in diplomatic-type stats, because "bad feelings would result" ? I have anecdotal evidence to the contrary; though, to be fair, as a GM I do acknowledge that incorporating such characters into the overall campaign can be challenging.
...enduring defeat after defeat in a longer-running campaign is less fun.
I sure hope you never play Call of Cthulhu...
Are you saying that the player should never choose to play a suave diplomat with lots of points in diplomatic-type stats, because "bad feelings would result" ?
Upon rereading your comment, I think I understand you here to be asking whether I think people should play suave diplomats with points in diplomatic-type stats but no competence in combat. Is that correct?
If that's your question, then I do indeed antirecommend such an approach. For one thing, as you say, it's difficult to incorporate such characters into the campaign (if the campaign fea...
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: