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Message: <blockquote data-quote="takyris" data-source="post: 2553151" data-attributes="member: 5171">I'd say that all are legit, but with caveats:I've seen several builds that are suboptimal for long periods of time in order to become hugely powerful at a given level -- some combinations of feat choices and class abilities that clicks really well once you've gotten to the right level. In fact, I've done it myself:When I played the horribly DM'd "Speaker in Dreams" game, we made 5th level (I think) PCs, and I made a 5th level guy that I had wanted to play for awhile, a paladin-monk. Lots of fun, great to roleplay, and he died fairly early on because our awful DM (he DMs another group, but only DM'd our group this one time, and was never asked to do so again) overlooked several skill possibilities and just tossed us into combat. (For those of you tempted to hijack the thread by attacking my attack on the DM, let me just ask if (blacked out for spoiler purposes) [spoiler]a) You've ever played Speaker in Dreams with three bone devils, not one, because the DM didn't understand that there were three different places where one might meet the singular bone devil and instead had us meet the bone devil in all three places, b) You've ever had the DM declare that your once-per-day attacks, big-money spells, and expensive-ammunition attacks automatically fail, only to later say that "you think they might work now" because he didn't want to have the fight happen right then, so he just arbitrarily had everything we did fail, and then later admitted doing that, or c) You've had the DM actually raise his hand and declare, "This is the hand of plot! The hand of plot says that you cannot get into this building until you've cleared the Temple of Pelor!"[/spoiler].So, when my fun paladin-monk guy got ignominiously killed, I came up with a completely minmaxed character who would have, well, stunk at lower levels, and had just reached the level where he had everything I wanted him to have. He was a dwarven fighter4/cleric2 with: Magical Armor with Magical +1 Spikes, Weapon Focus:Armor Spikes, Weapon Specialization:Armor Spikes, Improved Grapple, and a fully charged Wand of Silence. His tactic was to cast Silence on himself, charge an enemy spellcaster, and grapple the poor fellow to death. It worked pretty much every time I did it, and made several encounters laughably easy.That character was legit on paper, but, had I come into a campaign where everyone else had built up their characters from level 1, I would have been more powerful than those people, most likely, because I built the character with the concept of Level 6 in mind the whole time, and, in the backstory where this guy was level 2, he was pretty lame, since had some weird feats that didn't really help him a whole lot yet.It's not a problem that a DM can easily solve, since I think that the problem of having an organic Level 10 guy be less powerful than a planned Level 10 guy isn't as bad as the problem of having a Level 10 guy adventuring with a Level 1 guy. But it's one that I do watch out for. At the very least, I tell my players that the characters will be around for awhile, and that it might not be a bad idea to make a hypothetical 20th-level build of themselves and work toward that. Some players hate doing that kind of thing, and I certainly don't force it, but other players benefit from that kind of planning -- at least enough to mitigate the effect of playing with guys who *always* have that kind of planning.</blockquote>

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