helping new players/powergamers relax

[DaveMage]

So how do you get players to let the concept drive the mechanics instead of having the mechanics driving the concept?

All will get the concept. Not everyone will find that concept to be fun.

 

[focallength]

Isnt schlitz the beer the fat guy (sorry forgot his name) tries to get at the end of super troopers?, finds out they dont have any and ends up asking for "whatevers free". That crud is the stuff they scrape off of the stuff they scrape off of the bottom of the barrel.

 

[Jesus_marley]

A man buys a house on a lake and it is only after he has moved in that he discovers that it has a pier. One day he decides to go for a short walk and he ends up out on the pier. As he walks along he finds he is fascinated by the sparkling water shining between the slits in the wood. He continues to walk along oblivious to everything else, falls off the end and drowns.

"cuz when you're out of slits, You're out of Pier.

 

[Tyler Do'Urden]

The way I handle the problem Glass Jaw was describing is not to allow any books that I, as DM, do not have. I started doing this in 2nd ed. because of a player who wanted to use the Complete Elf Cheese... (Yes, it is just as bad as you may have heard.)

Bah, that book isn't a tenth as bad as people make it out to be. Take out the elf with the strength bonus, and it gave me no problems... then again, after I did away with exceptional strength and rescaled the strength stat to 31, even that was no big deal...

 

[Viktyr Gehrig]

Take out the elf with the strength bonus, and it gave me no problems...

Your group never used kits, did they? The Elf kits were bogus.

 

[Tyler Do'Urden]

Your group never used kits, did they? The Elf kits were bogus.

Actually they used every kit in the book. None of them caused any problems- especially since we were using them along side Skills and Powers, Faiths and Avatars priests, every Fighter that came along was a Berserker or Cavalier, every wizard was either a Wildmage (or a Book of Elves multiclass), and we had the Complete Barbarians, Ninja's, Bard's, Paladin's, and Ranger's in play...

Oddly, all this "power creep" never gives me any problems, and I don't understand why people whine about it so much. Of course, I operate by the WIGFTGIGFTG principle, which means that if they're using it, I'm using it too- usually more effectively than they are... oddly enough, the only overpowered 2e material I ever had to change was the Str stat system (which I rescaled) and the Complete Fighter's brawling, martial arts and critical hit rules- which I replaced with the ones in Combat and Tactics.