Have more fun with powergaming
- Thread starter Elephant
- Start date
Doug McCrae
Legend
I think there's a difference between optimization and powergaming. I think optimization means excelling at whatever abilities your character has. Powergaming involves tweaking your character so that they're nigh unbeatable, or so that your abilities and how they intereact are just unfair. Most of the time it's not a problem. In my game I instituted a few rules to help control it:
-Only 2 base classes in total
-Only 1 prestige class
-In order to take a feat it has to be related to what you've been doing. This is true of classes as well. (For example, nobody can just cross-class into Wizard without studying under someone.)
I
-Only 2 base classes in total
-Only 1 prestige class
-In order to take a feat it has to be related to what you've been doing. This is true of classes as well. (For example, nobody can just cross-class into Wizard without studying under someone.)
I
Nifft
Penguin Herder
Elephant said:
I'd say it's powergaming in service of concept, which is another way of saying pick a concept and back it up.
If he were aiming to deal damage, he'd pick very different feats & maneuvers. Instead, he's aiming at a niche -- being the best duelist ever. He can disarm you, he can hit you and walk around you while you're unable to respond, and his pure concentration of will is a force of intimidation.
Rather than calling it powergaming, I'd call Phase 3 the synthesis of concept and powergaming.
Cheers, -- N
Piratecat
Sesquipedalian
Hey, welcome to the boards!Utokai said:
I really agree. I'm definitely an optimizer; I like my character to be competent at the things that fall under his "shtick." He shouldn't be good at everything, but I like to find a niche and fill it as best I can. Even so, I have no interest in "twinking" a PC out with the most optimized feats from many supplements. When something starts to bend towards breaking, I'll gladly talk to the DM and self-nerf before it makes any other players jealous.
Ravellion
serves Gnome Master
I think you're putting words in someone else's mouth. That "non-optimized roleplay, as you've chosen to label it", might or might not be the same as "immersive roleplaying".jdrakeh said:
To me, someone who roleplay's immersively, really gets into character, whether that character is optimized or not. On the other side of the fence, there exists a creature known as the "non-optimized roleplayer", that will deliberately build a severely hampered character, with some sob story attached to why life has been so hard on him, and hence is a complete deadweight in the party socially and in combat. Often his or her complete and utter failures will give him the spotlight he or she desires. I always wonder if they aren't just focus hogs that couldn't build characters well enough to upstage the other players that way, so they go in the opposite direction. Seeing as this generally greatly reduces the fun in pretty much everyone else's game, I consider this to be bad.
Pbartender
First Post
Piratecat said:
Exactly.
The way I look at it is... In the vast majority of D&D games (and most RPG games that I've played, at least), the player-characters are, essentially, professional heroes, adventurers, treasure-hunters and mercenaries. They know that, and there's no reason why they wouldn't have learned or picked up the skills (and feats, and classes, and spells, etc...) that would make them at least good, if not the best, at the profession they have chosen to pursue.
So long as the "powergaming" makes sense within the bounds of the chracter concept and campaign setting, I don't usually have a problem with it.
Even in Real Life, we see the equivalent of Power Gamers... All those "workaholics" who specialize and dedicate themselves to a profession to exclusion of all else.
In a game like D&D, it's the extremes at both ends that cause problems... People need to remember that it's not only a ROLE PLAYING game, but also a roleplaying GAME, and vice versa.
schporto
First Post
Ya know - that's an interesting different take...Pbartender said:
I like it. In life you have folks who focus on work, or focus on family life, or fail to focus on anything and end up being bad at most things, or the frightening few who can do both. In dnd, you have people who focus on char optimization, on role play, or both, or neither.
That really is a good analogy.
In the end there are as many ways to play the game as there are to lead your life...
As for on topic - well I like some character optimization. Being able to have that moment to shine, when you stop the advancing horde and all the other players turn to you and go, "wow. That was So FreakING COOL!!!" (Complete with it getting louder like that.) If you can get that little DM wince of 'ewww that hurt', that's an extra bonus.
But. If I was doing that all the time, I'd never get the joy of the surprise.
-cpd
jdrakeh
Front Range Warlock
Ravellion said:
Fair enough, but he's sure hatin' on something -- whether it's immersive roleplay or simply characters who aren't optimized to the teeth. I didn't type the dissmissive comments about the other end of the optimization spectrum that appear in the initial post.
My thoughts;
When I try to role-play a character, come up with a detailed backstory, attempt to interact with NPCs, I inevitably seem to be wasting the rest of the players times, and neither of my regular DMs have any interest at all in my character background. They've written an adventure, my task is to go through it.
When I write up something that I find interesting, but turns out to be less-than-optimal, I *always* end up frustrated, and particularly so if the rest of the party has to waste resources covering up my character's inadequacies. (An Arcana Unearthed tournament con game I played as an Akashic comes to mind. Every other party member had to use a minimum of two healing 'potions' or spells on the useless peice of crap, and she managed to inflict a total of 4 hp of damage in the entire combat. A skill-centric character, in a game that required a single skill roll, which the party Magister rolled better on anyway. It's not juts that *I* didn't have fun, it's that my character ended up being a hindrance to the rest of the party, and detracted from *their* gameplay.)
So, in the interests of
a) not boring my fellow players,
b) not annoying my DM, and
c) not being frustrated and not having any fun personally, I write up my two page backstory, toss it at the back of my character and ignore it, just playing something effective. I regularly end up hopping around between a half-dozen books, finding feats, skill synergies, spells, alternate class features, etc. that fit my theme.
And yes, 'best damn archer in all of Middle-Earth' *is* a theme, as is 'unstoppable dwarven tank,' or 'Johnny one-spell magic missile specialist.' Just because Clint Eastwoods character in Unforgiven is the best damn gunman around, does *not* mean that the writer was a two-dimensional immature power-gamer.
Optimization has obvious rewards, but it also has it's downsides. It's all-too-easy to stomp on an optimized character, as many of them are highly specialized and require certain pre-conditions to function. The DM can easily control these factors, for whatever scenes he wishes to limit their potential. He's the one with the remote, after all.
I'm all for role-playing, and I've happily played LARPs where I didn't get any experience at all, since the play was the fun thing, not the advancement. (In fact, being such an optimizer, in games other than D&D, such as GURPS or Aberrant or Mutants & Masterminds, my character is often 'done' at character generation, and I have no idea what to do with earned exp anyway, since everything I wanted is already on the sheet...)
But for d20, gaining levels is the name of the game, and so I'm gonna make characters that are not only good at that, but also aren't holding the rest of my friends back in their quest to do the same. My fun is not more important to me than their fun, so I'll crunch the numbers, roll the dice and save the role-playing for writing up a neat-o backstory that nobody but me is gonna read anyway.
When I try to role-play a character, come up with a detailed backstory, attempt to interact with NPCs, I inevitably seem to be wasting the rest of the players times, and neither of my regular DMs have any interest at all in my character background. They've written an adventure, my task is to go through it.
When I write up something that I find interesting, but turns out to be less-than-optimal, I *always* end up frustrated, and particularly so if the rest of the party has to waste resources covering up my character's inadequacies. (An Arcana Unearthed tournament con game I played as an Akashic comes to mind. Every other party member had to use a minimum of two healing 'potions' or spells on the useless peice of crap, and she managed to inflict a total of 4 hp of damage in the entire combat. A skill-centric character, in a game that required a single skill roll, which the party Magister rolled better on anyway. It's not juts that *I* didn't have fun, it's that my character ended up being a hindrance to the rest of the party, and detracted from *their* gameplay.)
So, in the interests of
a) not boring my fellow players,
b) not annoying my DM, and
c) not being frustrated and not having any fun personally, I write up my two page backstory, toss it at the back of my character and ignore it, just playing something effective. I regularly end up hopping around between a half-dozen books, finding feats, skill synergies, spells, alternate class features, etc. that fit my theme.
And yes, 'best damn archer in all of Middle-Earth' *is* a theme, as is 'unstoppable dwarven tank,' or 'Johnny one-spell magic missile specialist.' Just because Clint Eastwoods character in Unforgiven is the best damn gunman around, does *not* mean that the writer was a two-dimensional immature power-gamer.
Optimization has obvious rewards, but it also has it's downsides. It's all-too-easy to stomp on an optimized character, as many of them are highly specialized and require certain pre-conditions to function. The DM can easily control these factors, for whatever scenes he wishes to limit their potential. He's the one with the remote, after all.
I'm all for role-playing, and I've happily played LARPs where I didn't get any experience at all, since the play was the fun thing, not the advancement. (In fact, being such an optimizer, in games other than D&D, such as GURPS or Aberrant or Mutants & Masterminds, my character is often 'done' at character generation, and I have no idea what to do with earned exp anyway, since everything I wanted is already on the sheet...)
But for d20, gaining levels is the name of the game, and so I'm gonna make characters that are not only good at that, but also aren't holding the rest of my friends back in their quest to do the same. My fun is not more important to me than their fun, so I'll crunch the numbers, roll the dice and save the role-playing for writing up a neat-o backstory that nobody but me is gonna read anyway.
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