How to design a game where players don't seek to min-max

[Umbran]

It is a game, and people playing a game want to do well in the game. Players are typically pretty smart, and they will see the decent strategies pretty quickly.

So, if you don't want them optimizing on specific combat role focuses, you will need to make it so that doing so is not a winning strategy. If the Fighter is never required to *know* things, then he will not develop knowledge skills. If the wizard never needs to climb things, he won't worry about building up his athletic ability, and so on.

It is not enough for the GM to say, "I *want* the characters to be well-rounded." What you, the GM, wants in the characters is kind of secondary - they aren't *your* characters after all. And it isn't exactly fair to the players to make them create well-rounded characters that then kind of suck in actual play. If you put forth that well-rounded characters are what will be in the game, you then have to back that up with situations that call for it.

When was the last time you had an adventure in which the fighter needed to know things, and another character with greater knowledge skill wasn't around to answer the question? How do you make it so the characters need a skill themselves, and cannot reasonably lean on each other for support? Do you *want* it so that they don't lean on each other for support?

 

[Celebrim]

1. The "ideal" campaign, in my view, would not involve combat and combat alone, but rather it would be more of an "adventuring party simulator," and I'm already trying to develop rules to reflect that. To keep the game fun, there would still be a significant amount of combat; however, being big-time heroes who defeated the evil so-and-so of whatever won't make you exempt from having to eat, pay taxes, and otherwise manage your life. So far, I haven't seen any game like that.

Eating, paying taxes, and managing your life aren't usually problems that require a lot of rules. They are more about style of play. "Slice of life" style play can be fun with the right people, but my experience is that not everyone is into it and it doesn't really work well if you have more than 2-3 players. The more players you have, the less attention you can pay to any of them individually, and the more those vignettes start to seem like pointless book keeping to the players and the more they detract from the story everyone is committed to rather than interesting character development.

Even so, you're mistaken to think that those things will prevent min/maxing. Instead, if they are mostly color, they'll be ignored. If they are critical to success, one member of the party will designate his or herself the party clerk, and sacrifice combat ability for fantastic ability to manage finances, barter with merchants, do the taxes, and smooze the bureaucrats. Better yet, the party will simply do as my current PC's have done and hire an NPC clerk to manage the books for them.

As far as the classless system goes, I was thinking more in terms of how classes, as they're usually implemented, tend to narrowly limit what your character's function is, and how trying to go outside of that limit usually punishes your character more than anything else.

As a practical matter, classes usually do the opposite. Consider a case like the D&D wizard, and suppose that you could build classes by buying features by spending points. A true optimizer encountering such a system would spend nothing on buying BAB at all. If a D&D wizard could advance his BAB not at all, or at half the rate, it would be generally worth it. Whatever points would have been spent to gain any amount of attack bonus could be better invested in broader spell use, or more spell slots, or extra feats, or unlimited cantrips, or even higher HD. The penalty of never having a bonus 'to hit' could be easily averted by just avoiding attack spells that required a to hit roll. Similarly, since skills are generally weak in 3e D&D especially compared to spells, and since intelligence is the Wizard's forte to begin with, a truly optimized wizard would want to spend the minimum amount possible on the number of skills the class had access to or the number of skill points they had, and again investing the savings into something more useful to its spell use. Only a few skills are truly essential and those could be easily covered by the character's intelligence bonus. And so forth. I see classes proposed like that in the house rules forum all the time, and I have to tell them the designer the same thing every time: "It's not balanced. You are trading away things that aren't essential for things that enhance your core strength. Wizard is already a tier 1 class, and you are just building a better wizard." Much of what is great about a well designed class system (and I'm not saying that 3.X is actually all that well designed) is that it forces the player to 'spend points' on things that an optimizer might not spend points on, and thereby having a more well rounded character.

 

[Argyle King]

None of the rules you describe really get around that. In fact, you almost seem to have gone out of your way to make a system that encourages min/maxing and system mastery. Sight unseen, it sounds like a number fiddlers paradise on par with GURPS. In particular, your estimation that being classless supports the viability of well-rounded characters is exactly backwards. Classes support well-rounded characters. Removing the stricture of having to adhere to a class structure allows for maximum min/maxing.

Being classless promotes min/maxing? I dont agree with that at all.

 

[Umbran]

Eating, paying taxes, and managing your life aren't usually problems that require a lot of rules.

Paying taxes doesn't require a lot of rules? Tell that to the IRS! {*rimshot*}

 

[steenan]

A few random thoughts on the topic:

1. Make sure that the system you make does not go against what your players find fun. If they optimize because they like it, a system that prevents them from doing that will give them less fun. On the other hand, if they optimize because they feel it's necessary, it's better to remove the reasons of this necessity than to block optimization.
Also, when you make a game, clearly describe what is the intended playstyle and make rules that support it, instead of making rules that prevent players from playing differently. A lot of games have no rules to restrict min-maxing, but their focus is so different that people who want to play them see no sense in optimizing.

2. In general, system complexity encourages optimization. The more factors affect each activity, the easier it is to create an overpowered (or underpowered) character. On the other hand, if there are no inter-dependencies between mechanical pieces of a character, it's easier to just create the character one wants to play. In other words, the system doesn't have to be minimalist to reduce optimization, but it needs to be transparent.

3. Why do your players optimize? The best approach is to ask them. But there are three factors that are very probably at work here:
- If the game has combat in it, the combat is lethal and the combat may always be used as a fallback if another approach fails (failed at sneaking? fight the sentries! failed at negotiation? beat them and take what we want!) then there is a strong pressure towards giving combat efficiency the highest priority. If you want to change that, reduce the pressure. Make default result of failed combat less severe and default results of won combat less useful. Make other approaches better at achieving goals. Make escalating to combat less efficient.
- Specialization is a natural way of differentiating characters. A group of all-round characters makes it harder to feel a PCs individuality than a group of specialists. In rules-light games, characters may be differentiated in fiction, but in a rules-heavy game it doesn't feel satisfactory to have the same mechanical tools as everybody else. That's why people specialize.
- Active abilities are much better tools for characterization than passive ones. That's why most people prefer characters who have many of them. If you want to have less offense-focused characters, make defensive abilities as interesting and flavorful as offensive ones. Give options and choices in defense and make the defense give more than prevention of negative effects.
- Many games treat combat as something that the whole party does together, while for other activities (eg. negotiation, knowledge, tracking etc.), one competent character is enough. This results in attributes not useful in combat becoming dump-stats and pushes the game towards simplifying and shortening non-combat activities (because only one player is active while the rest of players wait). Change this dynamics, either by simplifying combat (to a single roll?) or making other activities more complex and engaging to all players, and you solve the problem of optimizing for combat.

4. When designing a system, envision a session played with your game. Note down what are the important activities taken by players. Clearly write in the rules what things that are not important. For things that are important, think about what the stakes are and make sure that rules reflect that.
For example, if you want the players to care about pathfinding skills and managing resources during journey, make simple (so that people are not bored by it), but solid rules for it. If choices between finding shortcuts and minimizing risk of getting lost, or between discarding armor to take more food and risking hunger, exhaustion and death when food runs out are as meaningful as choices and risks in battle, people will think about it when making characters. If you give no rules for it, make the rules too complicated or give them no "teeth" (strong, mechanically enforced consequences), the whole thing will get handwaved and ignored.

5. Neither classed nor classless system inherently promotes or prevents optimization. But a badly made classless system encourages players to only focus on a few important skills while ignoring the rest (solution: only have the important skills), while a badly made classed system encourages players to focus solely on what is useful for their class (solution: don't have universal character statistics/resources that are only useful for some classes).

 

[Umbran]

Being classless promotes min/maxing? I dont agree with that at all.

Promotes may not be the right word. "Enables," would probably be better.

With classes, you can assign powers, abilities and such so that a character *must* be rounded. You can make sure a fighter, on top of fighting abilities, has some social and knowledge skills as well, for example.

Classless systems, by and large, do not do that. I guess one could design a classless system that does enforce rounding in its own way, but that is not the norm of design today. Classless systems emphasize player freedom of design choice - and that includes freedom to specialize.

 

[Argyle King]

Promotes may not be the right word. "Enables," would probably be better.

With classes, you can assign powers, abilities and such so that a character *must* be rounded. You can make sure a fighter, on top of fighting abilities, has some social and knowledge skills as well, for example.

Classless systems, by and large, do not do that. I guess one could design a classless system that does enforce rounding in its own way, but that is not the norm of design today. Classless systems emphasize player freedom of design choice - and that includes freedom to specialize.

I do agree that classless gives freedom of choice.

However, I don't see how that further enables min/maxing. If the choices provided have both benefits and drawbacks, the choices are meaningful. Likewise, if a system (or campaign if you want to look at it from the viewpoint of a DM actually running the game) doesn't make one method of problem solving always seem better, the choices are also meaningful. Sure, a player can still specialize in one area, and their character will likely be phenomenal at that one area, but there are going to be a lot of other areas in which the character struggles. Upthread, I believe it was mentioned that a party could optimize together; make characters which cover different areas. That does work to an extent, but it's relying on a pretty heavy metagame gamble that the party will always be together; that all characters will be functioning during every problem faced.

One of the main reasons I disagree with what is being said is quite simply because -in my experience- some of the games I've played which seem to encourage min/maxing the most have been games with classes -more specifically, D&D. Though, that being said, I think a large reason why that has been my experience has been because the choices haven't always been meaningful when playing D&D; some choices are very obviously better than others. Likewise, one method of conflict resolution (combat) tends to be supported more than others; in those cases, focusing on that one method is better than other choices. It's one of the reasons why people harp on the D&D 3rd Edition Bard not being very good (even though I personally disagree.) It's also one of the problems I had with D&D 4th Edition; even though I've come to be able to enjoy that edition of D&D, some options are simply objective worse than others for attempting to resolve a problem. The easiest example is given in the first DMG talking about the party attempting a skill challenge to disable a trap during combat... why would I ever attempt that when I can use a few at-will attacks to destroy the trap and be done with it without any risk of making the situation worse?

A better example might be to compare the various D20 versions of Star Wars to Edge of The Empire. While both do have classes, Edge of The Empire offers far more freedom to pick up abilities outside of your class while also offering far more freedom to progress the way you'd like to inside of your class, yet I would hands down say it is far more balanced than the D20 SWs games which had a more rigid class structure.

 

[System Ufera]

I just got up, and have yet to really *wake* up, so for now I'll just address this one...

Eating, paying taxes, and managing your life aren't usually problems that require a lot of rules. They are more about style of play. "Slice of life" style play can be fun with the right people, but my experience is that not everyone is into it and it doesn't really work well if you have more than 2-3 players. The more players you have, the less attention you can pay to any of them individually, and the more those vignettes start to seem like pointless book keeping to the players and the more they detract from the story everyone is committed to rather than interesting character development.

Well, I'm trying to make my game into something I've never seen before, which is, as I've said, an "adventuring party simulator." Still, given that I'm already aware of some of these problems, I'll probably make the rules regarding these issues deal with the party collectively (like as a business), as opposed to on an individual basis, to cut down on the drudgery.

As a practical matter, classes usually do the opposite. Consider a case like the D&D wizard, and suppose that you could build classes by buying features by spending points. A true optimizer encountering such a system would spend nothing on buying BAB at all. If a D&D wizard could advance his BAB not at all, or at half the rate, it would be generally worth it. Whatever points would have been spent to gain any amount of attack bonus could be better invested in broader spell use, or more spell slots, or extra feats, or unlimited cantrips, or even higher HD. The penalty of never having a bonus 'to hit' could be easily averted by just avoiding attack spells that required a to hit roll. Similarly, since skills are generally weak in 3e D&D especially compared to spells, and since intelligence is the Wizard's forte to begin with, a truly optimized wizard would want to spend the minimum amount possible on the number of skills the class had access to or the number of skill points they had, and again investing the savings into something more useful to its spell use. Only a few skills are truly essential and those could be easily covered by the character's intelligence bonus. And so forth. I see classes proposed like that in the house rules forum all the time, and I have to tell them the designer the same thing every time: "It's not balanced. You are trading away things that aren't essential for things that enhance your core strength. Wizard is already a tier 1 class, and you are just building a better wizard." Much of what is great about a well designed class system (and I'm not saying that 3.X is actually all that well designed) is that it forces the player to 'spend points' on things that an optimizer might not spend points on, and thereby having a more well rounded character.

If I'm understanding this correctly, most of what you're saying actually supports what I'm saying, that classes force a focus on a player character and punish the player character for going outside that focus. Your last sentence makes sense, though, that a well-designed classless system could force players to branch out, but even that seems less than ideal. One of the things I'm trying to do with my game is allow players to make the character they want to play, and not be guaranteed to be punished for it. You want to make a strict warrior? You can do that. You want to make a strict wizard? You can do that, too. But if you wanted to COMBINE the two, and make a battlemage? You can also do that! You won't be as good at either fighting or spellcasting as a strict warrior or wizard, but you'll be good enough.

On a side note, my game originally had a sort of a class system, though it wasn't quite like DnD's. It was modular, in that there were a whole bunch of mini-classes which your character could buy with XP, and those mini-classes then granted you access to special edges which you could then buy with further XP spending. The idea was that all your choices would be pieces of an overall concept for your character. Eventually, I was persuaded to abandon the mini-classes and instead give the edges some prerequisites, due to the way the mini-classes seemed to complicate things and needlessly take space on the character sheet.

 

[Argyle King]

On a side note, my game originally had a sort of a class system, though it wasn't quite like DnD's. It was modular, in that there were a whole bunch of mini-classes which your character could buy with XP, and those mini-classes then granted you access to special edges which you could then buy with further XP spending. The idea was that all your choices would be pieces of an overall concept for your character. Eventually, I was persuaded to abandon the mini-classes and instead give the edges some prerequisites, due to the way the mini-classes seemed to complicate things and needlessly take space on the character sheet.

Star Wars: Edge of The Empire works sort of like that. I think the focus is different than what you're going for, but it's at least worth looking at how that game handles "class" while still offering freedom to branch out. If nothing else, it'll give a different viewpoint to see things from.

 

[Zhaleskra]

I find that min/maxing is often self-punishing. What you trade off for in exchange for optimization in one thing (or a few), makes you bad at nearly everything else.

I admit it's taken me several years of gaming to come to this conclusion.

There is of course, always the option of letting the players know what kind of GM style you have, and telling them if their playstyles don't fit that. Unfortunately, there are some who believe "there's someone with a game, they have to allow me". I've run into that, even after I told someone his playstyle would not work with my GMing style. He . . . had bigger problems than just that, in my opinion.