DM's: How do you deal with powergamers?

[roguerouge]

Learn from the Comic Books, My Friends

Say it with me: "With great power, comes great responsibility."

How do you really get under Spidey's skin? Threaten Mary Jane or his Aunt. You need to saddle this cleric with his very own Mary Jane.

The trick to dealing with this issue is to give him minions. Get him emotionally invested in them, either because they fawn all over him, or because it feels good to be a father figure, or because the church fathers will be upset if they die. Then threaten them.

If you're invested in minions, they're no longer a meat shield. His response will be to start investing resources into protecting them, thus bringing his power back to normal.

And the best part is, you're rewarding his investment in the game, you're forcing him to game outside of his safety zone of power manipulation, and nothing makes a RP-centered player happier than to have minions to subvert....

 

[chriton227]

One thing to remember about Rope Trick is that you don't want to take anything like a Bag of Holding or Heward's Handy Haversack into it. Putting an extra-dimensional space in an extra-dimensional space is a "bad thing"(tm). This tends to really limit the use of Rope Trick in my games, since one of the first things that my players tend to buy is a Heward's to make digging out a scroll, potion, or other item simpler and to save weight.

A single targetted dispel magic can ruin a lot of buffs too, since it would have a chance of dispelling every individual spell on his character. Reaving Dispel from PHB2 would be even nastier, since he would also take damage for every spell dispelled.

Remember that rounds he spends buffing are rounds that are burning from the duration of the first buffs he casts. Some of the best buffs available to a 8th level cleric are rounds per level, and with only 8 rounds, you can't afford to waste much time.

Also make sure he is abiding by the "one swift action per round" limit. If he is not in the Rope Trick, there is also the possibility that the enemies will hear him casting and bring the fight to him before he is ready. There are a surprising number of creatures in the MM with good listen checks, and a door only muffles the sound so much. They don't even need to attack to make things more difficult; locking/barring the door and spreading caltrops can cause him to burn more time off his buffs, or the opponents can spend time buffing themselves.

It sounds like much of the problem is that he knows too much about the situation before hand, so he is having an opportunity to prepare the perfect spells and is getting to control the engagement. Throw him some curveballs - bring the fight to him, plant fake information, impose tight timelines (news comes at dinner of the evil cult preparing their dread midnight ritual), blow away his preconceptions (all it takes is a Disguise Self spell for that red dragon to look like a white, or some well placed illusion spells to make the hostage look like the captor and vice versa). He will soon have to make a decision between being awesome in a very narrow set of circumstances, or being good in a much broader set of circumstances. You control what circumstances he encounters, so you can influence his decision.

Some other more specific counters: if he is in heavy armor, odds are his balace skill is in the crapper. One Grease spell would ruin his day. The Reflex save may prevent the initial fall, but to move he still has to Balance, and while balancing he is flat-footed (and in Full Plate and Shield he will be eating a hefty armor check penalty). Touch of Idiocy doesn't allow a save and could put a serious damper on his casting ability. Ray of Enfeeblement can do the same to his strength, potentially causing himto be pinned to the ground with his own armor, and an empowered Ray of Enfeeblement is only a 3rd level spell (would give a -7 to -15 penalty to his strength from an 8th level caster). A Tanglefoot Bag is a touch attack that will give an automatic -4 to dex and -2 to attack rolls, plus slowing or stopping his movement and interfering with spell casting. Even a Flask of Alchemist's Fire can cause problems since the ongoing damage will interfere with casting, and can set up for Pyrotechnics centered on his character. Clerics tend to be lacking in AoE damage, so swarms would be good opponents too, ones that would let some of the other characters have time in the spotlight.

 

[BSF]

Our sorcereress player on the other hand is getting annoyed by his constant "advice". She's a casual gamer and prefers roleplaying. She tries to perform well in combats, but his constant suggestions are getting on her nerves. What's worse is they are all levelling this week and he made several comments last session about the spell she needs to learn. He said it so many times during the game that it's as if he's trying to build her character for her in order to powergame the entire group. The last time she levelled I appreciated his help, but now that I see the impact of powergaming, I'm not thrilled about letting him give her advice. I told her we'll level her up before the game so he won't bother her with spell selection suggestions.

Thanks for the advice, it was great!

This is potentially a bigger trouble spot. Do you have the DMG II? If so, look over it for the differences in playstyles. Barring that, you could also pick up Robin's Laws of Good Gamemastery. Both cover the same ground in regards to playstyles.

Remind your powergamer that not everybody has the same playstyle and that you appreciate the value that both players (with differing playstyles) bring to the table. Occassional or solicited advice is good. But too much unsolicited advice starts to sound like a judgement from one player to the other, even if it isn't meant as such.

 

[Greg K]

I simply ask the powergamer not to continue doing it. If they cannot curb their desire to powergame, they are shown the door.

 

[BSF]

One thing to remember about Rope Trick is that you don't want to take anything like a Bag of Holding or Heward's Handy Haversack into it. Putting an extra-dimensional space in an extra-dimensional space is a "bad thing"(tm). This tends to really limit the use of Rope Trick in my games, since one of the first things that my players tend to buy is a Heward's to make digging out a scroll, potion, or other item simpler and to save weight.

This is potentially problematic. Pedantically speaking, the rules do not directly support this. I don't want to dive into a rules debate, there is a completely different subforum for that! But it is a good idea to let the players know how you will adjudicate some of these things in advance. Otherwise you need to have a very good group of trusting players that accepts that you are not out to arbitrarily 'get them'. If you have that trust, that's great. Otherwise communication in advance goes a long way toward avoiding other issues.

 

[Olaf the Stout]

Firstly I would suggest talking to the player about the situation. You may solve the problem without needing to do anything else.

Some other suggestios are:

Implement the rule that PC Clerics must permanently get rid of a PHB spell of equal level for every non-PHB spell that they want to add to their list. Otherwise Clerics just get stronger and stronger every time a new book comes out. I stole that one from Piratecat for my group. It works well for us.

Try dropping a few Dispel Magics on his character. It sounds like his PC gets reasonably buffed up. Getting rid of a few of his buffs might take him down a notch or two.

Finally, ask him to cast some buffs on the other PC's every now and again. The PC Cleric in the group I DM for shares his buffs around all the time. If the other PC's get buffed up you won't be so afraid to throw something a little more challenging at the group.

Olaf the Stout

 

[justinsluder]

I am the powergamer. I killed 2 gestalt pc's (3 HD each) with a single gestalt npc (4 HD total).

I mean, if my little greenbound lions can scare my party just because not a single one of them had a magical slashing weapon, then something is very wrong.

 

[delericho]

No one else has the time or cares that much about reading every inch of every book to build the most efficient character like he has. People just want to build a cool character and play it. There's no way I would ask everyone to start powergaming

In that case, you have a real problem. You can probably still get a fair amount of mileage out of "keep the challenges many and varied", but you can't just boost the ELs faced, because a fair challenge to the power-gamer will be death for the other characters. In that case, you're going to have to talk directly to the power-gamer player and ask him to tone his character down to match the other players. He may well not like this - because why should he be punished for knowing the rules well? - but he might be persuaded it will make for a better game for all.

but I realize I have to because I know guys that optimize like this always forget about... just plain common sense issues like "your nonmagical armor would break if you grew an extra pair of arms". :\

Actually, per the RAW it doesn't, any more than it would if the character were Enlarged. The same magical effect that allows the character to gain another pair of arms will take care of the non-magical armour. (Usually - I have a feeling that post-errata, if the character polymorphs into a form with additional arms, the armour will merge with the new form and become useless, but I'm not sure as I don't use the errata IMC.)

 

[Herzog]

Since you mentioned that you are a DM who likes to focus on the story instead of combat, I suggest you construct your adventures in that style.

When the ultimate solution to the adventure isn't just to kill the BBEG, being a powergamer doesn't help you that much.

Introduce challanges like narrow bridges, needing to climb walls, traps that trigger on weight, etc.
Try to find situations where he needs the help of the other characters to overcome the challange.

And when it does come to a fight, earlier methods of grease, touch spells, etc. should be reasonably effective against him.

Of course, the restrictions on books used mentioned earlier stand.

Personally, I start off every campaign with core only. Then, during character creation, if someone wants to play a race or class or wants to take a feat or spell not mentioned in the core books, I do the following:
1. Does it fit the campaign?
2. Does it seem to be balanced?

if any of these two is no, I don't allow it. Simple as that.

I do have a campaign where players have characters that are more powerfull then average. But then, since I try to balance all options for all characters, I get to increase the EL of the encounters.

Of course, should someone stay behind on the power curve and
1. get frustrated by it
2. be unwilling to deviate from the character concept to increase in power

I will be facing a simmilar problem as you are.
Oh well, I guess I'll face that when it comes around.

Herzog