D&D 5E Dealing with optimizers at the table

[TwoSix]

You don't. They have to want to change.

They don't want to play the same game as the others. You're not going to change them.

Agreed. The problem here isn't that these people are optimizers, the problem is that they're bad players. A good optimizer know that table harmony and satisfied DMs lead to getting better results in play.

 

[LordEntrails]

They are bad players for the existing table.

You can have "bad players" that all they want to do is role-playing and social pillar stuff if they are sitting at a table of combat-only players. Or dark story players among rainbow and unicorns, or...

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Me, I assume that players will optimize because they're incentivized to do so by the very nature of the game. (If you're not at least somewhat skillful, your character may die.) So I craft and run my game accordingly. Those who optimize can test their skills. Those who don't optimize have a slightly higher difficulty level to deal with which they then rise to the occasion to mitigate. My game doesn't lack for "story" or roleplaying either as a result. We really can have it all.

Yeah similar here, and like, in my experience, with adults who are decent humans, the optimizers help and cheer on the other players. Like the non-optimizers will often ask me (as an optimizer) or one of the optimizers for advice when they're making a bigger level-up decision.

What was very interesting re: 4E was that pretty much everyone worked out how to optimize without any help. One player I know has never read a D&D forum in his life devised a particularly good Rogue build (one of the non-optimizers too), just by picking stuff that made sense. 5E is a little trickier for that but the same player plays a Warlock with Agonizing Blast and whilst nothing else about the PC is optimized (I mean, CHA is his highest stat but... patron, pact, and other choices are all non-optimal) he's often doing the most damage as even he could work out that spamming Eldritch Blast with that was working extremely well.

 

[CleverNickName]

Slight tangent: how "new" is this phenomenon? I don't remember character optimization being an issue when I was playing D&D in the 80s and 90s. The first time I heard someone refer to another character as "a munchkin" or a "min/maxer" was in the early 2000s with 3rd Edition. Now it's fairly common, even expected, in some groups.

And it felt really sudden, too...it didn't seem like there was a build-up to it to us. It seemed like overnight, my players went from:
"Hey check out my new character, he's a dwarf fighter and his name is Huxley Fabernak and he's the youngest of his clan, and he has a short temper when people make fun of his height so he fights with giant polearms"

to

"okay so my fighter has the ABC class variant from Unburied Magica and the XYZ racial variant from Rolo's Book of Baddies, so he gets the spells of a sorcerer, and according to the erratta he can cast this one spell which lets him qualify for the feat that lets him qualify for the weapon that lets him qualify for the prestige class which lets him qualify for...huh? His name? Oh, I don't know...hadn't thought about that yet. Call him Bob or whatever."

Of course, my players are a rowdy and shifty lot, so my experience shouldn't be used as an indicator of any trends (they hiss and recoil at anything considered "trendy.") Still, this focus on optimization feels new to me. Is it really new?

 

[overgeeked]

Slight tangent: how "new" is this phenomenon? I don't remember character optimization being an issue when I was playing D&D in the 80s and 90s. The first time I heard someone refer to another character as "a munchkin" or a "min/maxer" was in the early 2000s with 3rd Edition. Now it's fairly common, even expected, in some groups.

And it felt really sudden, too...it didn't seem like there was a build-up to it to us. It seemed like overnight, my players went from:
"Hey check out my new character, he's a dwarf fighter and his name is Huxley Fabernak and he's the youngest of his clan, and he has a short temper when people make fun of his height so he fights with giant polearms"

to

"okay so my fighter has the ABC class variant from Unburied Magica and the XYZ racial variant from Rolo's Book of Baddies, so he gets the spells of a sorcerer, and according to the erratta he can cast this one spell which lets him qualify for the feat that lets him qualify for the weapon that lets him qualify for the prestige class which lets him qualify for...huh? His name? Oh, I don't know...hadn't thought about that yet. Call him Bob or whatever."

Of course, my players are a rowdy and shifty lot, so my experience shouldn't be used as an indicator of any trends (they hiss and recoil at anything considered "trendy.") Still, this focus on optimization feels new to me. Is it really new?

As far as I can tell, it kinda started in AD&D2E with kits, but gained momentum in the Skills & Powers era, then hit its stride with 3E and 4E.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Slight tangent: how "new" is this phenomenon? I don't remember character optimization being an issue when I was playing D&D in the 80s and 90s. The first time I heard someone refer to another character as "a munchkin" or a "min/maxer" was in the early 2000s with 3rd Edition. Now it's fairly common, even expected, in some groups.

The phenomenon is ancient. We had it happening in the early and mid 1990s, and I heard tales of it happening in the 1980s.

The difference now - indeed any time after about 2000 with D&D - is that instead of figuring it out for yourself, you can just get on the internet and find a build that someone else came up with, and which is often way more broken than even a serious munchkin could have before.

I have a player who is a "recovered munchkin" by his own admission. He didn't start that way, but he quickly got into optimization, couldn't stop, became a bit of game-ruiner aged 13-17, then as he got a bit older he realized how bad he'd got and stopped. He still likes to make powerful characters but now makes it fun for everyone, not just him, and doesn't go as far. He does love to message me ridiculous builds he find though.

EDIT - The stuff he figured out by himself was a joke compared to 3.XE-era internet stuff. Like in 2E he realized you could completely legally have a Dwarf Fighter/Speciality Priest of Clangeddin with a kit and weapon specialization, despite Speciality Priests, Kits, and Weapon Specialization all being theoretically forbidden from multiclassing - he just found very specific and clear exceptions for all three cases. He later further enhanced the character with Combat & Tactics stuff, most of which he could only access because he had weapon spec. None of this remotely "broke the game" of course. He seemed powerful but him at 10/10 next to a 9th-level Mage, who has more impact on the course of most adventures? The Mage by miles.

Rifts and Shadowrun were total bait to this guy of course, but his worst behaviour and when we did have real issues was entirely in Cyberpunk 2020, where he played a ridiculous Solo who burned 8 EMP down to like some tiny amount of Humanity and just killed everyone and everything with dual-wielded .50 Desert Eagles, electrothermally-enhanced, spitting some kind of silly ammo, with special implants (all fairly cheap and legal from early Chromebooks and Solo of Fortune, though I think ETE enhancement was CB3) so he could independently target his pistols/cyberarms with no penalty. Obvious armoured head-to-toe in subdermal armour, eye-visor, bulletproof trenchcoat etc, carefully maximizing the layering rules. That might not have been so bad except the player actively tried to turn every situation into a running gun battle, no matter what the rest of the group wanted to do, or what plan he'd actively agreed to.

He is of course an extremely successful lawyer in his real job now...

 

[Wolfram stout]

Slight tangent: how "new" is this phenomenon? I don't remember character optimization being an issue when I was playing D&D in the 80s and 90s. The first time I heard someone refer to another character as "a munchkin" or a "min/maxer" was in the early 2000s with 3rd Edition. Now it's fairly common, even expected, in some groups.

And it felt really sudden, too...it didn't seem like there was a build-up to it to us. It seemed like overnight, my players went from:
"Hey check out my new character, he's a dwarf fighter and his name is Huxley Fabernak and he's the youngest of his clan, and he has a short temper when people make fun of his height so he fights with giant polearms"

to

"okay so my fighter has the ABC class variant from Unburied Magica and the XYZ racial variant from Rolo's Book of Baddies, so he gets the spells of a sorcerer, and according to the erratta he can cast this one spell which lets him qualify for the feat that lets him qualify for the weapon that lets him qualify for the prestige class which lets him qualify for...huh? His name? Oh, I don't know...hadn't thought about that yet. Call him Bob or whatever."

Of course, my players are a rowdy and shifty lot, so my experience shouldn't be used as an indicator of any trends (they hiss and recoil at anything considered "trendy.") Still, this focus on optimization feels new to me. Is it really new?

I may be ninja'ed here, but;
1st edition: If you had better stats you could take better classes (ie Paladin or Ranger over a fighter). This was mitigated a lot by xp tables and RP requirements.
2nd edition: Kits. Yikes. Some of the Kits provided big power boost....of course some were just dumb with the power downs they provided.

But you are right, the language was not the same. The type of character breakdowns started with the rise of MMORPGs (which is also 3.x era). That might be a coincidence but that is how I remember it.

 

[TwoSix]

They are bad players for the existing table.

You can have "bad players" that all they want to do is role-playing and social pillar stuff if they are sitting at a table of combat-only players. Or dark story players among rainbow and unicorns, or...

Can't agree. If the DM takes you aside and asks you to do something different for the sake of the table, and you're like "Nah, bro, I'm gonna keep doing what I'm doing", then that crosses over from "bad fit" to "bad player".

 

[iserith]

This is where defining terms comes in. I’m not talking about the obvious steps of race/class synergy. Or really even playing with the action economy a bit. That’s not optimizing to me. It’s optimizing when it breaks the game. Twilight and Peace combo. Coffeelock. Regularly doing double the max crit damage of other characters. Trivializing combat. Constantly overshadowing the other characters. That’s when it becomes problematic. That’s the level of optimizing I’m talking about.

To my knowledge things like the coffeelock require a very bizarre understanding of how the game works. For Twilight and Peace combo, how does one multiclass into the same class? That doesn't sounds right to me.

Overshadowing other PCs in combat isn't really a big deal in my view. Some characters are better in certain pillars of the game than others. My ranger isn't as good in combat as another player's barbarian, but that barbarian pales in comparison to my exploration options.

I don't really know what you mean by "breaks the game" though. All of my players are big on optimization and the game doesn't break. You'd have to tell us a lot more about how you structure and run your game to be able to get any useful advice. I suspect you might not be running an expected amount of combat challenges per adventuring day and also suffer from too many players. That can make things wobbly for sure. The optimization of two out of seven players not so much.

They treat D&D time as a video game. They don’t engage the story any more than absolutely necessary. The rest of the table prefer character heavy roleplay, immersion, and exploration. The two optimizers don’t care about anything but combat.

So new question to the thread. How do you convince and avowed optimizer to stop? This is a player who said, and I quote, “not optimizing is dumb.” And has legit said things like get good and learn to play. Not directly to the non-optimizers that I’m aware of, but has said as much about them. These two literally don’t care they’re directly causing the rest of the table to have a bad time. I’ve tried pointing them to support roles like Treantmonk’s god wizard, but as that’s not a “big spotlight” character there was no interest. The idea of Twilight and Peace was a big hit because they’d never worry about dying again.

The "story" is whatever the PCs do over the course of the game. You may be referring to your "plot," "metaplot," or your quirky, cagey NPCs. If they're engaged in the combats, but less engaged in other scenes, and you have five other players there, what's really the issue, provided they're not disrupting these moments? Maybe try to add a little more combat to your game and put some actual stakes in your "heavy roleplay" and exploration scenes. My optimizers are fully engaged in all pillars simply by virtue of there being something on the line that they want. You're not just bs'ing with the quirky, cagey NPC - you're trying to get information that is critical to finding the lost treasure (for example) and you might not get it if you don't do this well.

You don't get an optimizer to "stop." You channel their knowledge and energy by altering your game to include their strengths and interests. And perhaps even change your expectations and attitude about how they enjoy the game. Since you have control over your own game design and how you perceive something, this is the only guaranteed way to change things. You have no control over other people, and in this case apparently, can't even stop playing with them. So control yourself and your game design.

 

[FrozenNorth]

So new question to the thread. How do you convince and avowed optimizer to stop? This is a player who said, and I quote, “not optimizing is dumb.” And has legit said things like get good and learn to play. Not directly to the non-optimizers that I’m aware of, but has said as much about them. These two literally don’t care they’re directly causing the rest of the table to have a bad time. I’ve tried pointing them to support roles like Treantmonk’s god wizard, but as that’s not a “big spotlight” character there was no interest. The idea of Twilight and Peace was a big hit because they’d never worry about dying again.

Not sure how helpful this is, but show them they are wrong. Repeatedly.

If they are using tortured interpretations of the rules. Nope them. Coffeelocks don’t work. Why? Because it’s dumb. They bring up Sage Advice? Sorry, but I’m not bound by what Jeremy Crawford thinks. RAW? Between rules as written and common sense, common sense always wins.

What about stronger characters that AREN’T based on disputable interpretations of the rules. For the most part, their strength is based on certain commonly-held assumptions of the campaign world and the game. Challenge those assumptions. Especially challenge the assumptions that stem from treating the world like a JRPG.

Does the player basically use their familiar as living trapfinder and generator of advantage? Why wouldn’t the familiar conspire with the BBEG to stab such a jerk in the back?

Elves and Half-Elves are the best ancestry eith a lot of flexibilty and access to Elven Accuracy. So what happens when the characters NEED to visit the Dreamlands to solve a problem and Elf Ancestry ensures that the character can’t be put into magical sleep? For bonus points, have enemies attack the other characters while they are asleep so the optimizer has something to do.

The occasional really long adventuring day will let short rest classes shine.

But overall, I agree with the other posters here. What you have is a fundamental disagreement about what is fun in the game. Best is for each of you to go your own ways before things become even more acrimonious.