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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Benly" data-source="post: 4404409" data-attributes="member: 67591">The problem is that unless you actively split up the party and give the strong characters strong opponents and the weak characters weak opponents, there is no way that you can keep a player who is in a similar niche to another PC but built very poorly from feeling frustrated at the fact that he is blatantly ineffective compared to his partymates.There is no hyperoptimization in the party I am about to describe. The two "competing niche" characters were a beguiler 3/warlock 2 and a warmage 5. Now, warmage is not an optimizer's class - I've heard it described by overzealous CharOpters as a "tick on the ass of arcane casting" - but it is quite solid at what it does, which is blow things up, which coincidentally was pretty much that player's concept. The beguiler player had taken a level of warlock "so he'd have something to do against undead". The biggest problem here was that the warlock player had had bad experiences with a jackass CharOpter of the "if you don't take your PC to the bleeding edge of numbers you're a bad player and a liability to the team" variety, and so was stubborn about refusing advice from people experienced in the mechanics regarding how to make his PC able to do what he wanted him to do.In any fighting situation, the warmage would output quite solid damage. The beguiler could plink for crappy damage; his first-level beguiler spells were largely ineffective against fifth-level foes. Socially he was quite capable (and a fantastic roleplayer despite occasionally shaky mechanics), but whenever there was combat to be had, the player would grow increasingly frustrated - he knew what he wanted his PC to be able to do and it just didn't work. It's not that the player didn't like combat, it's that he just couldn't match up to any other player despite having a strong character concept. Meanwhile, the warmage player had been fortunate enough to have a character concept ("halfling who makes things explode") for which there was a very obvious and easy fit in the rules, and one which was not a "trap". He was entirely satisfied with how combat played out, because his character did what he wanted her to: called up flaming spheres and threw around magical zappery.If you have miraculous suggestions for how the DM should have somehow rigged encounters so that the beguiler player wouldn't have ended sessions frustrated, I'd love to hear them. In the end, the only solution that worked was an extremely friendly and supportive chat about ideas that might mechanically reflect his character ideas better than what he'd built along with an offer of a rebuild. In other words, optimization - what I like to call "white hat optimization", as opposed to the "FULL CASTER OR YOU'RE WORTHLESS" school of "black hat optimization".</blockquote>

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