D&D General DM Says No Powergaming?

[iserith]

(for example, I hate Revivify and have banned it)

You monster!

 

[tetrasodium]

You asked for specifics and that’s my take. It’s not simple, you need to see it in action. Also, many types of players can be problematic but this thread is about avoiding power gaming at the table. The answer is personal and will vary by person. I’m an optimizer that some folks might consider a power gamer, and others a total noob. Which is why I think “no power gaming” isn’t going to work.

I don't know if I agree with that. If a GM said something like that during a pitch/introduction/session zero I personally would take it as an invitation to step up myself to engage in the conversation that I need to flesh out the game style & group dynamics they are aiming to foster.

Spoiler: For example

• Lets say I wanted to play a caster but focus on being a force multiplier that makes the rest of the party shine like the sun but depends on them doing the lifting after I turbo charge them or debuff the monsters... It makes the whole group effective & everyone feels awesome in ways that none of us could be on our own.
• Tell me about the current group makeup?...
  • ok cool what kind of defenses & dpr does Alice & Bob have?.
• What kind of needs do you think the group has needing to be filled?
• etc

I regularly play shockingly powerful PCs that only shift out of first gear when it looks like the group is rushing towards some form of a bad end & even then I might still hold back a few of my pocket aces to be sure that I don't make other party members feel like a sidekick or sherpa.

It's not going to work for the gm to simply say no powergaming and it doesn't matter what else how much or how eloquently the GM says to expand on it because it requires the player to carry their end of a good faith discussion. Cassandra can't be the model for acceptable levels of player involvement here.

 

[haakon1]

I take the approach of telling what rules are allowed, not banning rules.

In my case, it’s the 3.5e PHB. Anything beyond that needs to be requested and approved. I’ve actually only said “no” once* in 20 years of DMing 3e/3.5e with 5 different groups, like 40 players total.

Having to think why you want something special and explain why it is good for the group deters power gaming ever getting started, in my experience.

* The “no“ was in a “campaign” we canceled after 2 sessions. For a 1st level party, a player who was literally a lawyer wanted a character of a reptilian humanoid species with tons of special abilities that I never heard, that had never existed in my setting (Greyhawk) and had rules only in 2e - he couldn’t tell me exactly where the rules were but “remembered” most of them.

I said no, because I don’t have rules for it and it doesn’t fit my campaig, but if he really wanted to play a reptilian humanoid, he could play a Kobold or Lizardfolk. But if he did, there would be role playing consequences, especially until he made a name for himself, as many humans and allied species viewed Kobolds and Lizardfolk as man-eating monsters.

Also, he‘d start out more powerful than the other PC’s, I believe ECL 4 (Equivalent Character Level 4), but he’d earn XP slower, as a 4th level character, and couldn’t level up until he reached XP for 5th. So, RP challenges, early power, slightly weaker as time goes by. Possible - as someone who’d played a lot of 2e in his first 3e campaign and first with me as DM, I’d let him try, but it wasn’t the easiest choice.

He said OK, he’s in for Lizardfolk. He was strong in combat, and played like a monster, eating bodies of human NPC’s they found who had been killed by an orc ambush, getting only a little push back from his human and elf compadres.

When they reached a walled human village, the villagers refused to let him in. With Diplomacy and vouching by the others, they let him, but made him stay in a barn, and made the vouching humans and elf “guard” him.

In the second session, he wanted to use captured Chainmail armor. I said it had to be altered to fit by an armorer, to fit his different shaped body and especially tail, and they‘d need to travel to a bigger town to find an armorer. He got mad.

We didn’t have a third session, and we were, I think, all OK with that.

I think I was doing a variation on the improv “Yes and” with “not exactly and there will be logical consequences of playing an unusual character“. I mean I was OK with his character literally being 4x as powerful as the others to start, but as a role playing choice by him, not as a “power because I want it” choice, and only under the stipulation that everything has logical consequences.

 

[Faolyn]

That's never made sense to me. Why would any patron (or  god) make a deal with a mortal that's so one-sided that the PC can keep what the patron gives them no matter what?? It just reads to me like an excuse to let the player do whatever they want, because that's easier than adjusting the character sheet.

If you make a deal with a patron, the patron is getting something out of it. An archfiend gets your soul. Other patrons get something similar out of the deal. Perhaps the act of making a deal weakens the walls between worlds, letting these beings have greater access to the Material Plane. Perhaps a GOO or Archfey gets your psychic energy or rides behind your eyes and gains your knowledge. Perhaps noble genie ensures that their element gets spread around a little bit more on the Material than it normally would be, thus making the Prime one step closer to joining their elemental plane. Perhaps an undead/undying patron is satisfied with you spreading negative energy around the Material.

It's also fully possible that giving a warlock some magic takes up very little of the patron's energy. Plus it's possible that, because patrons aren't gods, they can only give the magic; they don't have enough control over it to channel it to their warlocks the way that a god can channel it to their clerics.

And this is without having the warlock actually RP their devotion or what form their initial pact took--which is and should be up to the DM and player. I don't blame the books for not specifying what activities warlocks should perform in order to appease their patron. Not only would it be impossible to cover every type of activity for every type of patron, but it would logically include some very unsavory things, like human sacrifice--which flies in the face of the idea of heroic characters. The hexblade player in one of my games decided on their own that their sword wants blood and wants the PC to consume it. I'm more than happy to continue with that idea and have already worked out with the player a possible way this could go (Ravenloft, dark powers checks, transformation into monstrous form, yadda yadda).

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

Fiction first. There are consequences for your actions.

And the classes "ficiton" consequences should mostly balance out. There isn't an equivalent for a Wizard, Bard, Druid, or Sorcerer. That's a problem with taking away Warlock and Cleric magic (which isn't mechanically supported in 5e, anyway).

 

[Micah Sweet]

If you make a deal with a patron, the patron is getting something out of it. An archfiend gets your soul. Other patrons get something similar out of the deal. Perhaps the act of making a deal weakens the walls between worlds, letting these beings have greater access to the Material Plane. Perhaps a GOO or Archfey gets your psychic energy or rides behind your eyes and gains your knowledge. Perhaps noble genie ensures that their element gets spread around a little bit more on the Material than it normally would be, thus making the Prime one step closer to joining their elemental plane. Perhaps an undead/undying patron is satisfied with you spreading negative energy around the Material.

It's also fully possible that giving a warlock some magic takes up very little of the patron's energy. Plus it's possible that, because patrons aren't gods, they can only give the magic; they don't have enough control over it to channel it to their warlocks the way that a god can channel it to their clerics.

And this is without having the warlock actually RP their devotion or what form their initial pact took--which is and should be up to the DM and player. I don't blame the books for not specifying what activities warlocks should perform in order to appease their patron. Not only would it be impossible to cover every type of activity for every type of patron, but it would logically include some very unsavory things, like human sacrifice--which flies in the face of the idea of heroic characters. The hexblade player in one of my games decided on their own that their sword wants blood and wants the PC to consume it. I'm more than happy to continue with that idea and have already worked out with the player a possible way this could go (Ravenloft, dark powers checks, transformation into monstrous form, yadda yadda).

The issue as I see it is that, without providing guidance in the book, they are saying that no PC has to listen to anything the DM has to say about how their pact might work. They are functionally super powers, whether the DM wants that in their world or not.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

whether the DM wants that in their world or not.

If the DM doesn't want them, they can ban the class.

 

[Micah Sweet]

And the classes "ficiton" consequences should mostly balance out. There isn't an equivalent for a Wizard, Bard, Druid, or Sorcerer. That's a problem with taking away Warlock and Cleric magic (which isn't mechanically supported in 5e, anyway).

Maybe don't decide to betray your patron/god? And if suffering consequences for your own actions is somehow unfair, there are plenty of ways to make other classes suffer for making choices.

 

[Micah Sweet]

If the DM doesn't want them, they can ban the class.

How about they want them as the fiction in the text depicts, and not as people with irrevocable super powers and a "patron" that exists solely to define the theme of said super powers.

 

[Faolyn]

The issue as I see it is that, without providing guidance in the book, they are saying that no PC has to listen to anything the DM has to say about how their pact might work. They are functionally super powers, whether the DM wants that in their world or not.

First, that's no different than how any other spellcaster works. How do rangers get their spells? If they stop doing rangery things, should they lose their spells? No, of course not. Bards wouldn't lose their spells if they never touched a musical instrument again. Sorcerers don't lose their spells if they go no-contact with their great gramma dragon. Wizards don't even lose their spellcasting if they actually lose their physical spellbook--they would wouldn't be able to switch their spells out for different ones, but they'd still have all their slots. Why should warlocks be any different by RAW?

Secondly, that's rather assuming that all or most DMs aren't capable or willing of figuring it out for their own games, or that all or most PCs are unwilling to work with the DM and the game as a whole and/or are inevitably going to not care about their patron. This assumes that you're going to have a DM that says "OK, your patron wants you to do X" and the player refuses and the DM is helpless to respond.

If you do have a player like that, then maybe the DM should just cut them loose from the game, because they're being generally uncooperative.