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

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Sure, but I am not trying to figure out the perfect game. I am just curious if people can accept being equals or do they need to feel "better." If a power gamer will only enjoy having a character that is "better" than everyone else or better than the game expects then there is no point for a "balanced" game for them.

The question is simple: Does a power gamer need to power game to have fun?

I power game because it is what my character would do, because it makes sense for what any adventurer would do in such a dangerous world. I wish I didn't have to. I wish there was a good in-game reason for many characters to make different choices without it simply being that the character is bad at understanding how the world works.

I don't like games that require a significant degree of system mastery before you can get into really playing it. I prefer games where there is minimal difference in power between a min-maxxed character and the obvious sort of character that a new player would make. I much prefer playing the actually game that takes place after the characters all meet in a tavern, rather than the character-creation mini-game that is like homework everyone has to do before they can start playing the real game.

 

[Warmaster Horus]

Discussions like this always remind me of the Kurt Vonnegut short story, Harrison Bergeron. In that tale the US has amended the Constitution making it illegal for anyone to be smarter, better looking or capable than anyone else. Intelligent people's trains of thought are interrupted by neural radios, the strong carry heavy weights and the beautiful wear ugly cosmetic appliances all in the name of equality.

 

[nswanson27]

I am not really interested in how to construct such a game or what it would look like. I am interested if power gamers and optimizers need their characters to be "better" or can they have fun if their character is equally as effective?

Hmm.., "better" than what, exactly? I guess I've played plenty of games where every player built and played their character very well - I think those are the games I enjoy the most. I wouldn't say any comparative factor played into that. Is this what you mean?

 

[Sunseeker]

while I question the mathematical plausibility of such a game, I probably would give it a go. There are certainly times I'm bummed I can't get more creative with certain editions because some options are so ridiculously bad.

 

[matskralc]

No that is not what I am going for. I want meaningful choices too. But what if the higher damage weapon also ha less of a chance to hit,or what if the through the life of a campaign the increased damage of large weapon is offset by increased number of attacks from a light weapon, or if the difference between a light and heavy weapon is only 1d6 vs 1d12 throughout a campaign?

A complex choice is not necessarily a meaningful. Your example is just a more complicated form of Hemlock's analogy. There is no meaningful difference between "every weapon does d8 damage" and "every weapon does d8 or d10 damage, but the d10 weapons hit 18% fewer times".

Basically there is always a cost benefit analysis to an individual choice, but ultimately they all basically even out so everyone is equally as effective (or nearly so) as everyone else. Basically minimizing, if not completely eliminating, the difference between a "bad" build and a "good" one.

This does not make any sense to me. If everybody turns out to be equally effective, then you aren't performing any cost/benefit analysis. You're simply choosing a preference. If a scout and a fighter are equally effective, then all you're doing is picking which one you like better. If two shirts are equally effective but one is blue and the other is green, you're simply deciding which one you like more. There's no cost/benefit analysis to be made.

 

[Lanliss]

A complex choice is not necessarily a meaningful. Your example is just a more complicated form of Hemlock's analogy. There is no meaningful difference between "every weapon does d8 damage" and "every weapon does d8 or d10 damage, but the d10 weapons hit 18% fewer times".



This does not make any sense to me. If everybody turns out to be equally effective, then you aren't performing any cost/benefit analysis. You're simply choosing a preference. If a scout and a fighter are equally effective, then all you're doing is picking which one you like better. If two shirts are equally effective but one is blue and the other is green, you're simply deciding which one you like more. There's no cost/benefit analysis to be made.

The hypothetical game is just an example to prompt the question. If you are a power gamer, would you be willing to play a game where everyone is different, but equal? Or, as a power gamer, do you refuse to play a game where you can't be better than others?

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

No, I want to understand is the "fun" in building a character out of many options or is it only "fun" if that character is actually better than everyone else (or at least the assumptions of the game).

I can answer part of your question: "being better than everyone else" is not part of the fun for me.

For me, the core of the fun lies in exploring a complex web of interconnecting constraints with meaningful differentiation, and finding points which are locally or globally optimal. It's a form of constraint solving (a creative exercise). In fact, powergaming for me is mostly a solitary exercise--in actual play, I powergame to an extent automatically (I instinctively avoid Witch Bolt for example) but I don't want to take the spotlight off other people so I wind up e.g. building a truly excellent support character who enables others to function well (bardlock) but can also step in and save the day when everyone else is down and out. Spotlight is primarily a social thing, more about letting other human beings declare decisions to the DM than about the mechanical effectiveness of a PC, but there is also a mechanical aspect to it which I avoid. (Giving mechanically-effective characters a detached personality which makes them willing to hold back is one way I try to split the difference.)

Nevertheless. Finding brokenly strong combinations is indeed part of the fun for me, whether or not I actually spend time in play exploiting those broken combinations as a power fantasy. In an ideal game, there are lots of variations and almost every class is amazing in its own way: think Master of Magic here, and how there's some kind of amazing 11-book strategy for every school of magic. 5E is pretty good from this perspective because you can build amazing Champions and amazing Rogues and amazing Wizards. They're not all amazing to the same degree or in the same way, but they're all amazing and interesting. Another example of this kind of game is Master of Orion (the original), where your randomly-generated tech tree practically guarantees that every game will have some way to beat the pants off the computer, but the strategy you used last game probably won't be an option this time around. The opposite of this paradigm is a game like Galactic Civilization where the choices you make are basically just rock-scissors-paper up different-but-similar tech trees. GalCiv was written this way so that it would be possible to write intelligent AI opponents, but a side effect is that the actual game is uninteresting to people like me. There aren't any meaningful choices.

Dave2008, I used an example earlier w/ blunt weapons vs. piercing weapons, and you denied that that was the effect you were going for, and implied that ranged vs. melee specialization was more what you were going for instead. I don't see a distinction though. I suspect that any system you found balanced would look boringly simplistic to me, just at a higher level of abstraction. If 50% of the monsters you meet are kitable with ranged attacks and 50% require melee attacks to kill, I'll suss that out pretty quick even if you hide it beneath layers of math and indirect rules. Then one of two things will be true. Either:

(1) There will still be a mix of ranged and melee PCs which (locally or globally) meaningfully optimizes a party's tactical options to allow them to beat the enemy more effectively than a party which doesn't plan for those tactics in advance; OR
(2) All mixes of builds are equally effective, and the only interesting decision points occur during the game itself.

#2 isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it does make complex chargen seem kind of pointless.

What this adds up to is that I'm highly skeptical that you could build a game which would seem balanced to you, and seem balanced (non-exploitable) to me, and also have fun and interesting chargen choices (to me).

Case in point: As GURPS 4E progressed, it moved more and more towards an effects-based point-buy system designed to ensure that no matter how a given effect (like damage) was produced, it cost the same number of build points. Instead of multiple psychic disciplines wherein e.g. psychokinesis is better at ripping monster's heads off but psychometabolism is better at turning you into animals that could rip people's heads off (which has benefits and drawbacks compared to the direct approach), it became more of a system where "ripping heads off" was a power that just cost X points, and the details of how it happened were considered unimportant fluff.

Some people love that kind of thing. I hate it, and it's one of the key things that got me started looking again nostalgically at AD&D's system of classes and levels, which eventually turned into giving 5E a chance. Constraint-solving is interesting.

 

[ccs]

The question is simple: Does a power gamer need to power game to have fun?

That's like asking the rest of us wether we need to breathe in order to live.
The answer is YES.
YES.
YES they do.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Or it's de facto - and assuming the perfectly balanced game, the choices also don't matter. Now, you're bringing this back into the realm of reality in 5e ... but I was focusing on why this type of differentiation wouldn't matter if you accepted the hypothetical (that it is balanced). Sure, in 5e, you don't know what monsters you will encounter, but in a perfectly balanced game, then you can't have the different damage types outshining each other!

That gets into a tangential topic, of whether a choice is meaningful when the difference is based on information you don't have.

If you're about to descend into an unknown region, and you don't know that the region is full of white dragons (rather than red dragons, or some other monster), is your choice of whether to bring the flametongue or the frostbrand a meaningful choice? I would posit that it is, because that choice will have a direct impact on what happens (unless the DM is cheating, and changes the enemy type after you make your choice, but a bad DM can ruin anything). And that's what I mean when I say that that choices should be meaningful. Fire damage is meaningfully different from cold damage because it can possibly change certain outcomes.

If you were somehow guaranteed that both weapons would be equally effective over the course of the campaign, then I could see how that choice wouldn't actually matter in practice, but I can't imagine how you would go about guaranteeing equal efficacy without also just making the damage type purely cosmetic. Fortunately, any such guarantee would be purely in the realm of meta-game knowledge for the character making the decision, so we're forced to ignore that information anyway.