D&D 5E A simple questions for Power Gamers, Optimizers, and Min-Maxers.

[Celtavian]

They wouldn't, but inspiration is a problem much like rewarding "good RP" as always been. I've played with noobs and professional actors. Guess which ones usually get the RP rewards? (it's not the noobs). Sure, you can add all sorts of subjective "rules" to it, "guidelines" on what constitutes good play, but it's still the DM deciding that one character action is "better RP" than another. Worse off, it's usually not used to reward good RP, it's used to reward table behaviour that the DM determines is beneficial to the sort of game he wants to run. Some players may make completely in-character decisions and get nothing for no reason other than their decisions aren't moving the game in the direction the DM wants to go.

Of course that's sort of the extreme of what's wrong with XP and why so many players are just combat junkies. Yeah, killing the Orc is fun, but it's also mathematically more efficient to kill orcs than it is to complete quests, negotiate peace treaties or seduce the queen.

Power gamers may not care that a DM doesn't give them inspiration because you're not "inspired" by their character, but they don't need your approval to begin with. Their zealous gaming of the rules means they know what they can or cannot do. But they're not morons, they'll get the picture that you're purposefully not rewarding them, but that's not going to push them in the direction you want, it's going to push them in the opposite direction. They'll fall back on what they know: the rules and they'll use that harder, faster and more aggressively to their advantage.

If you're going to award inspiration or "role play" XP, do it because you actually like what someone chose to do. Don't do it because you don't like the way someone plays. That sort of passive-aggressive behaviour benefits noone. If you don't like the way someone plays: stop playing with them.

If I gave a substantial amount of role-play experience, I would develop a level equality problem. I and other DMs in my group have tried this over the years with little effect. The people that enjoy role-playing do it the most and the best and those that don't continue to lag behind. So I don't bother since the level equality problem would be more problematic.

I worry more about designing an overall experience everyone can enjoy including myself as DM. So many people seem to forget the DM needs to have fun as well or they won't be particularly motivated to run the game. That's why poorly designed rules irritate me so much as a RPGer that has spent a lot of time DMing. Poorly designed rules that allow for extreme exploitation ruin my experience as a DM and cause a lot disagreements as my players don't like toys to be taken away once they've used them. There are no perfect games though. Even the Fantasy Flight Star Wars game we play has major exploitable rules that are ruining the gameplay experience by making it too easy, and the rules don't even involve Jedi. I think game designers as a whole like creative design, but don't spend much time extrapolating the math past a certain, fairly low level.

 

[Lanefan]

If I gave a substantial amount of role-play experience, I would develop a level equality problem. I and other DMs in my group have tried this over the years with little effect. The people that enjoy role-playing do it the most and the best and those that don't continue to lag behind. So I don't bother since the level equality problem would be more problematic.

It can be, if more than a few levels; but a couple of levels variance isn't too bad - except in 3e and 4e.

I worry more about designing an overall experience everyone can enjoy including myself as DM. So many people seem to forget the DM needs to have fun as well or they won't be particularly motivated to run the game. That's why poorly designed rules irritate me so much as a RPGer that has spent a lot of time DMing. Poorly designed rules that allow for extreme exploitation ruin my experience as a DM and cause a lot disagreements as my players don't like toys to be taken away once they've used them. ... I think game designers as a whole like creative design, but don't spend much time extrapolating the math past a certain, fairly low level.

Agreed.

Every time I end a campaign I tweak a bunch of rules before starting the next one, in hopes the new one might go a level or two more before wobbling off the rails.

Lan-"mid-campaign rule changes have an annoying habit of butchering internal consistency"-efan

 

[The Crimson Binome]

It isn't meaningless. Over a campaign, for example, a fist and a sword would serve the same usefulness. However, in one fight you might be dealing with someone who has high HP. The extra damage of the sword would be helpful here. If you were fighting an enemy with low HP, but high AC, the first is better (for the purposes of this example.)

But wouldn't that still be power-gaming, then? If a sword is better against an enemy with low AC and high HP, then you're power-gaming to take the sword into that particular fight, and your performance suffers if you try to fight that enemy with a fist or a rock or a fish.

If it's okay for the sword to be best in that situation, because you plan on balancing everything in aggregate over the course of the campaign, then the total number of character customization options is going to be constrained by your ability to include an equal number of each scenario. That's at odds with the premise of including loads of customization options. It's probably even over-constrained, and unsolvable for the condition of making all options equally good. If there's any mechanical difference between two options, then the best you can get is a pretty good balance between them, which means one option will be best (by however small a margin) and the power-gamer will find that option.

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

Yay for unsolicited input after the fact. Your opinion has been noted and filed under "busybody trying to stir things up". Have a good day sir.

My apologies, I tend to leave posts open and write them during gaps in work, and I didn't spot that you two had reconciled.

 

[dave2008]

Totally didn't read the thread. Just hopped on, read some of the posts, but not a lot of them, figured I'd throw my opinion in.

Munchkin - A combat twink, cares little for the game itself, only seeks to be the most powerful creature, "My fiendish half-red-dragon troll weretiger took a few levels in monk so now I flurry for 5 attacks in a round, count as a magical weapon, and my claws deal a base d8, picked up rogue to throw skill points into control shape skill and sneak attack oh and I'm basically immune to everything but acid damage over 10 points and being banished since I'm an outsider... Backstory? Uh..... Fiendish Troll mated with a red dragon natural weretiger? I dunno man, it's awesome and practically can't die. Oh, I'm ALWAYS in hybrid form."
Power Gamer - Key distinction, gamer, wants to make the most powerful CHARACTER they can, "I am the most powerful wizard the world has ever seen!" "I am the greatest swordsman in all the planes!" "I am the greatest thief to have ever lived!" Yes, they still use munchkin combos and tactics, but it's to serve an end a character would have, sure the motivations are usually the same as your cliche villains, but at least they exist and are thematic.
Optimizer - They have a character concept, and they want to be effective at what their character would do; "Ok, so I'm playing a noble knight kind of character, I like action surge and second wind, so I'll pick up two levels of fighter and grab the extra fighting style to pump ac, but then I'm going straight paladin from then on out so that I can get aura of protection and have insurmountable saves."
"Average" Player - not actually the average player, my experience bares out the 80% combat junkie estimate someone made earlier, but conceptually the average between "make it broke or gtfo" and "gimp my character and I'll play the DM instead, ultra-rp" player types. They will be the ones making your Gokus and Narutos and He-Mans and Legolases and Striders and so on. They'll grab something they think is powerful and use it when they can, but otherwise it's about having fun and being pretty close to what works for the game and what works for the character.
The Role Player - Totally built for the character, options are what a character who does not actually regularly adventure would take, "Well my character is a cloistered scholar type, so my 1st level spells are find familiar and unseen servant, with mage hand, mending, prestidigitation, and message for cantrips." Not that they're ineffective, they do take good esoteric skills with good potential for utility in RP and exploration, they just are playing a character that doesn't really think of themselves as an adventurer per se, but rather a person who is going on an adventure for some reason.
The Social Engineer - Intentionally gimps their character and builds "suboptimally" but it's not actually suboptimal in the sense that they intend these choices to be effective, but not in the traditional mechanical view of effective, "I have my unseen servant pull the knot on the chandelier above the duke and his men as they threaten us." They take spells that optmizers and munchkins and power-gamers normally turn their noses at and try to use them in ways one wouldn't normally expect, trying to play the DM rather than the system.

I really feel that, fundamentally, both the RP nerd (trying to think of a similarly pejorative way to say this as munchkin is typically used pejoratively) and the munchkin are the same person are just different manifestations of the same kind of mindset, "I'm going to find a way to beat the game" with the munchkins looking to exploit all the rules of the system and rp nerds seek to exploit rule 0.

However, I feel that a "everything balances out in the end" kind of system wouldn't allow players to feel like they could genuinely take part in a world they could believe. Consider; is a handgun balanced compared to a fist, a high-caliber long range rifle balanced to a hand gun, a drone balanced to a high-powered rifle, so on and so forth. The world we actually exist in isn't balanced, and so to make a system so disjointed from reality (the mop and katana objection for example) breaks immersion for a lot of people. Think about it like this; in an all-balanced system the player who makes a character that wields powerful magic is going to be dissatisfied when the guy sitting next to him makes a ninja that wields chopsticks (surf ninjas anyone?) who is just as effective as him in combat. "But the magic user will have out of combat abilities thanks to magic that make him useful there" is easily countered by "and so would the ninja that uses chopsticks." In this hypothetical system, each class would need three categories of abilities; social, combat, exploration. martial types would have intimidation and feat performance social abilities, while casters and charlatans would focus more on being silver-tongued, martials are going to focus on reacting quickly and movement options, casters and charlatans will focus on detection and avoidance, and then all the varying combat options of course. It's not that power-gamers and optimizers are going to be dissatisfied because they can't be powerful, per se, but rather what they think should be powerful won't be.

So, for instance, the mage casts fly and flies over the castle wall with impressive magic, the ninja puts on some climbing claws and scurries up the wall. Both characters have options for overcoming pretty much any obstacle, and so there is no benefit for having sacrificed option x for option y. Why bother worrying about components and being able to cast or anything like that, when I can just play a mundane that requires a few common nonmagical items to accomplish the same thing?

Think about it from the perspective of other systems too; shadowrun is a good one, do I go ultra uber magic, barely human cybernetic organism, or the equipment monkey that has a gadget or gun for every conceivable situation? What makes this system so good is that you can be awesome with any avenue, but at a cost. If you go full magic, you're not gonna have a good time with implants and artificial limbs, if you go artificial limbs you can just forget about magic, and if you're an equipment junkie you can kinda sorta dabble a bit in both but your credits are tied up in guns, ammo, and toys so you're not going to, outside of storyteller intervention, have the funds and resources to invest in either one while maintaining a diverse and useful inventory. Or world of darkness vampires; unless you're eating vampires left and right in some sabbat game gone horribly, horribly wrong, your choices have consequences that also come with some benefits. You can absolutely play a social nosferatu, but you'll want to invest in a lot of obfuscate. A mental brujah? Bruh, celerity is the great equalizer in physical combat. A physical tremere? Dude, I shouldn't even need to give an example, thaumaturgy was kind of a bit broken lol in 2eR.

The point I'm trying to get at is in a system where things are generally balanced out there aren't going to be real drawbacks, and it won't be realistic. Life isn't fair. It's just not. Being strong is going to get you a lot farther than being able to take a baseball bat to the face as being intelligent is better than being wise because knowing how to do things is objectively more useful than knowing why to do things, and let's not even talk about appearance versus personality, the world around us all is evidence of the disparity between attractiveness and likability (Kim Kardashian, rest my case). If there's no ACTUAL drawback to my choosing to be a chop-stick wielding ninja rather than a magic slinging wizard, then why not play a bare-knuckle boxing technomancer?

Balance is good, don't get me wrong, but a lot of balance, in my opinion, is the drawbacks associated with the benefit. A gish build that is good in melee and magic is probably going to be lacking social and exploration options, and a utili-bard is probably not going to pump out damage like a great weapon fighting smite-monster paladin but if you need to know something or talk somebody into or out of something they are your guy. If you want to undertake such an endeavor, I think you'll find providing drawbacks for objectively more powerful options is going to get you better results than trying to average efficacy between all potential options. Make stuff that is objectively more powerful, just make sure it can backfire or is situational.

Sorry for the long-ass post by the by, and if I'm reiterating points others have already made, I apologize.

Wow, this too long for me to read right now. I will have to get back to it later.

 

[smbakeresq]

Inspiration is a poor mechanic. There are so many ways to gain advantage at higher level that an inspiration doesn't do much the higher level you get. I've had to modify inspiration to make it useful at higher levels. A powergamer still wouldn't care.

It is on attacks, but less so on saving throws and other things to avoid really bad things. Personally I rarely use inspiration on attacks, a missed attack is less fatal then many saving throws. Occasionally if a player has an inspired idea I just give them the save without rolling.

By the time you reach higher levels you have toned down the power gamer or driven him out of the group.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[dave2008]

Totally didn't read the thread. Just hopped on, read some of the posts, but not a lot of them, figured I'd throw my opinion in.

Munchkin - A combat twink, cares little for the game itself, only seeks to be the most powerful creature, "My fiendish half-red-dragon troll weretiger took a few levels in monk so now I flurry for 5 attacks in a round, count as a magical weapon, and my claws deal a base d8, picked up rogue to throw skill points into control shape skill and sneak attack oh and I'm basically immune to everything but acid damage over 10 points and being banished since I'm an outsider... Backstory? Uh..... Fiendish Troll mated with a red dragon natural weretiger? I dunno man, it's awesome and practically can't die. Oh, I'm ALWAYS in hybrid form."
Power Gamer - Key distinction, gamer, wants to make the most powerful CHARACTER they can, "I am the most powerful wizard the world has ever seen!" "I am the greatest swordsman in all the planes!" "I am the greatest thief to have ever lived!" Yes, they still use munchkin combos and tactics, but it's to serve an end a character would have, sure the motivations are usually the same as your cliche villains, but at least they exist and are thematic.
Optimizer - They have a character concept, and they want to be effective at what their character would do; "Ok, so I'm playing a noble knight kind of character, I like action surge and second wind, so I'll pick up two levels of fighter and grab the extra fighting style to pump ac, but then I'm going straight paladin from then on out so that I can get aura of protection and have insurmountable saves."
"Average" Player - not actually the average player, my experience bares out the 80% combat junkie estimate someone made earlier, but conceptually the average between "make it broke or gtfo" and "gimp my character and I'll play the DM instead, ultra-rp" player types. They will be the ones making your Gokus and Narutos and He-Mans and Legolases and Striders and so on. They'll grab something they think is powerful and use it when they can, but otherwise it's about having fun and being pretty close to what works for the game and what works for the character.
The Role Player - Totally built for the character, options are what a character who does not actually regularly adventure would take, "Well my character is a cloistered scholar type, so my 1st level spells are find familiar and unseen servant, with mage hand, mending, prestidigitation, and message for cantrips." Not that they're ineffective, they do take good esoteric skills with good potential for utility in RP and exploration, they just are playing a character that doesn't really think of themselves as an adventurer per se, but rather a person who is going on an adventure for some reason.
The Social Engineer - Intentionally gimps their character and builds "suboptimally" but it's not actually suboptimal in the sense that they intend these choices to be effective, but not in the traditional mechanical view of effective, "I have my unseen servant pull the knot on the chandelier above the duke and his men as they threaten us." They take spells that optmizers and munchkins and power-gamers normally turn their noses at and try to use them in ways one wouldn't normally expect, trying to play the DM rather than the system.

I really feel that, fundamentally, both the RP nerd (trying to think of a similarly pejorative way to say this as munchkin is typically used pejoratively) and the munchkin are the same person are just different manifestations of the same kind of mindset, "I'm going to find a way to beat the game" with the munchkins looking to exploit all the rules of the system and rp nerds seek to exploit rule 0.

However, I feel that a "everything balances out in the end" kind of system wouldn't allow players to feel like they could genuinely take part in a world they could believe. Consider; is a handgun balanced compared to a fist, a high-caliber long range rifle balanced to a hand gun, a drone balanced to a high-powered rifle, so on and so forth. The world we actually exist in isn't balanced, and so to make a system so disjointed from reality (the mop and katana objection for example) breaks immersion for a lot of people. Think about it like this; in an all-balanced system the player who makes a character that wields powerful magic is going to be dissatisfied when the guy sitting next to him makes a ninja that wields chopsticks (surf ninjas anyone?) who is just as effective as him in combat. "But the magic user will have out of combat abilities thanks to magic that make him useful there" is easily countered by "and so would the ninja that uses chopsticks." In this hypothetical system, each class would need three categories of abilities; social, combat, exploration. martial types would have intimidation and feat performance social abilities, while casters and charlatans would focus more on being silver-tongued, martials are going to focus on reacting quickly and movement options, casters and charlatans will focus on detection and avoidance, and then all the varying combat options of course. It's not that power-gamers and optimizers are going to be dissatisfied because they can't be powerful, per se, but rather what they think should be powerful won't be.

So, for instance, the mage casts fly and flies over the castle wall with impressive magic, the ninja puts on some climbing claws and scurries up the wall. Both characters have options for overcoming pretty much any obstacle, and so there is no benefit for having sacrificed option x for option y. Why bother worrying about components and being able to cast or anything like that, when I can just play a mundane that requires a few common nonmagical items to accomplish the same thing?

Think about it from the perspective of other systems too; shadowrun is a good one, do I go ultra uber magic, barely human cybernetic organism, or the equipment monkey that has a gadget or gun for every conceivable situation? What makes this system so good is that you can be awesome with any avenue, but at a cost. If you go full magic, you're not gonna have a good time with implants and artificial limbs, if you go artificial limbs you can just forget about magic, and if you're an equipment junkie you can kinda sorta dabble a bit in both but your credits are tied up in guns, ammo, and toys so you're not going to, outside of storyteller intervention, have the funds and resources to invest in either one while maintaining a diverse and useful inventory. Or world of darkness vampires; unless you're eating vampires left and right in some sabbat game gone horribly, horribly wrong, your choices have consequences that also come with some benefits. You can absolutely play a social nosferatu, but you'll want to invest in a lot of obfuscate. A mental brujah? Bruh, celerity is the great equalizer in physical combat. A physical tremere? Dude, I shouldn't even need to give an example, thaumaturgy was kind of a bit broken lol in 2eR.

The point I'm trying to get at is in a system where things are generally balanced out there aren't going to be real drawbacks, and it won't be realistic. Life isn't fair. It's just not. Being strong is going to get you a lot farther than being able to take a baseball bat to the face as being intelligent is better than being wise because knowing how to do things is objectively more useful than knowing why to do things, and let's not even talk about appearance versus personality, the world around us all is evidence of the disparity between attractiveness and likability (Kim Kardashian, rest my case). If there's no ACTUAL drawback to my choosing to be a chop-stick wielding ninja rather than a magic slinging wizard, then why not play a bare-knuckle boxing technomancer?

Balance is good, don't get me wrong, but a lot of balance, in my opinion, is the drawbacks associated with the benefit. A gish build that is good in melee and magic is probably going to be lacking social and exploration options, and a utili-bard is probably not going to pump out damage like a great weapon fighting smite-monster paladin but if you need to know something or talk somebody into or out of something they are your guy. If you want to undertake such an endeavor, I think you'll find providing drawbacks for objectively more powerful options is going to get you better results than trying to average efficacy between all potential options. Make stuff that is objectively more powerful, just make sure it can backfire or is situational.

Sorry for the long-ass post by the by, and if I'm reiterating points others have already made, I apologize.

Thank you for those definitions - would you mind if I put them in the OP? Not sure I will, but maybe. Also, I don't think the issue is completely about balance, but clearly a lot of people look at it that way.

 

[smbakeresq]

I think you have to though. The power gamer ruins the fun for the rest of the group and the DM, and as DM if I am spending 2 hours to get ready for a session I will not let you ruin it.

We have had players refuse to heal the power gamer in game, saying their in game attitude would not be approved by their religious order.

 

[thecasualoblivion]

By the time you reach higher levels you have toned down the power gamer or driven him out of the group.

Seriously?

From a purely mechanical standpoint, in 5E, the statement isn't true. There is a big enough difference between optimized and vanilla in 5E to matter, to say nothing of the gap between optimized and unoptimized, and the gap widens at higher levels. You might not be able to mitigate with optimization the arbitrary randomness of 5E's overwhelming focus on die rolls, but you can certainly build a character that is objectively and significantly stronger than the one the player sitting next to you has.