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Message: <blockquote data-quote="5ekyu" data-source="post: 7328991" data-attributes="member: 6919838">jester david"Power gaming is the only one that gets a pass. " Honestly, even on this thread i do not see folks lining up to give DISRUPTIVE power gaming a pass. See plenty of responses even mine that say disruptive behavior of any sort is a problem. "Because we all already know how to handle the guy that does something stupid and declares "But it's what my character would do." The DM just rolls their eyes and says "Rocks fall. Your character dies. Now roll one that isn't an assclown." No debate is needed. "If some Gm fiat works for you in handling disruptive players, OK, so why dont you use that for power gaming?Me, i do not deal with disruptive behavior IN GAME. behavior is a player issue not a character issue so i deal with problems at the player level. i do not have to warp the in-game world to try and reach the player. usually talking is enough - even if that reach is to decidce we are not on the same page and not looking for the same thing.I think the big disagreement is that for some people they want to throw a larger amount of powergaming under the disruptive behavior bus than is broadly accepted."The DM does need to account for their party. And a *good* DM will know all the strengths and weaknesses of their party and be able to devise tactics to counter and challenge them. But that's advanced DMing. That takes system mastery not every DM possesses. You're effectively blaming the DM for not being as good a power gamer as their players. And, of course, there are always more players than the DM with a much higher collective intelligence. To say nothing of online builds and the like. The DM will seldomwin that particular arm's race."Actually i am not blaming the Gm. its part of the GMs job, we both seem to agree on that. Whether or not the Gm is able to do that job has no bearing on whether the player is at fault. Whether a player is judged to be "disruptive" or not should not be dependent on whether or not trhe GM can handle the situation well. You cannot get to a slope where if the Gm does not account for ABC we judge abc to be disruptive when a player does it and maintain any coherent dialog.Just because a Gm has not figured out how to "adjust for" 5th level wizards and sorcs having fireballs does not mean those players throwing fireballs and killing a kobold swarm is *disruptive* and deserving of the jester-sack-of-rocks new character solution. It just means the Gm has yet to evaluate the difference between tier-1 and tier-2 and is likely going to have a lot of problems as many challenges will be now beaten. those climbing challenges - fly spell. Dang that disruptive wizard sorcerer. PC gets a curse - dang that disruptive PC and their remove curse."Example: I have a five man table. Average party level 8. I need an encounter that will challenge them. Go! "A gm has players and they have characters... if all the Gm knows when trying to design an 8th level adventure is their levels - the Gm is at fault."A power gamer only has to worry about one thing: their character. The DM has to worry about multiple characters, multiple encounters, the overall plot, NPCs, and so much more. There's only so much time. "yes and the more that time is spent focusing on the players' characters the better i find the results turn out. As for the time thing - the PCs are set week after week while the encounters vary quite a bit, so the Gm actually has the "planning" advantage. I almost always know my PCs much longer than they know their adversaries."The problem is power gaming increases the workload. It changes the balance of the encounter from the default presented in the rules and the default assumed by adventures. Suddenly, running a published adventure is harder because you need to reevaluate every single encounter to account for that one person. "The default balance assumed by adventures is just a default, nothing more. there is NO expectation that it will match up well for any given party. That is where the Gm comes into play. As i have said, every single encounter and challenge (whether boxed or not) A Gm needs to evaluate based on his players' characters. this can be as important, **well likely even more important** for sub-par characters than for over-par characters. After all, having an easier time of a fight because a character or two or all are overpar is one thing, but having the party blown away and possibly TPK because they are sub-par is usually seen as a much worse outcome.A Gm who does not recognize the need to evaluate canned encounters based on their specific party and capabilities will have a lot more bigger problems than a powergamer wiping things up easily.  "To say nothing of having to "cheat" by increasing monster hit points and the like. Using higher CR monsters is problematic because their damage output and special abilities are more deadly. A solution is to throw more monsters at the players. But then that also gives out more experience, increasing the rate players gain levels. So the DM has to potentially "cheat' twice, increasing the challenge of fights and reducing the rewards just to "balance" things with one player. "Adjusting monsters, encounters, rewards to make them appropriate for his campaign and players' character is not by any means cheating for a GM. That is just a non-starter."If one player is simply better than the others, why does it matter what the source is? If DM favourtism is bad, then so is the same result at the table from one player finding a broken combination or min/maxing a character."Gm favoritism is bad when it is not treating players equally **in violation of the campaign guidelines they agreed to**, not because it lets one character be more powerful than another in actual play. in actually play it is common for characters to be more powerful in one thing than another and back and forth. Sometimes though, even if the characters are "equal" on paper or in system the players may not be as skilled/focused/devoted and even then the characters may "play" at different power levels. it is not "the same result" at the table... one's result is an breech of the trust and agreement of the participants... the other is people just doing what was agreed they could do. But it does look like you have your own particular definitions and axes to grind so i think we will just have to agree to disagree on how much different the Gm handing the cool stuff to one player and a player playing well are even if they end up resulting in similar damage outputs per round.</blockquote>

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