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Message: <blockquote data-quote="System Ufera" data-source="post: 6473807" data-attributes="member: 6671268">Hello, everyone! As some of you may know, I'm designing my own system from scratch. After a decent amount of testing and player commentary, I've been made plainly aware of players' tendencies to focus solely on what what their character does (and at that, only actively, as in very little attention is paid even to defenses), and with no focus on anything else. I've intended from the start that this should NOT make an optimized character, but every character that's been made by players has been ridiculously over-powered in one area and entirely incompetent in other, even related, areas, and even character's I've pregen'd for my players tend to go in that direction once the players get a hold of them.Now, granted, I've recently had to start over in terms of player content, and so there's admittedly little for my new players to invest in, but before I start re-making content, I want to know what's out there in terms of design techniques for promoting better-rounded characters over min-maxed characters. Currently, what I'm using to reach for that goal is the following:-There are 5 "defenses" (similar in concept to DnD 4e), each based on a set of two basic attributes (there are nine attributes in my game), and most of the attributes are secondary, or even tertiary, for the character archetypes that would have these defenses (for example, a brave warrior would want a high Morale defense to keep from getting scared, and Morale is based on Resolve, a primary attribute which otherwise does little else for warriors).-Every check to determine success/failure in my game combines the values of two attributes or skills (plus other values, if applicable) to determine the character's chances of success in accomplishing what they set out to accomplish.-Damage in my game is primarily determined by an attribute's modifier (the attribute divided by five), which determines the number of damage dice rolled, but a small static bonus to damage is based on another primary attribute's modifier-Many "edges" (the term my game uses instead of "feats") require as prerequisites some investment in attributes or skills that are tertiary at best to the characters that would most likely use themIn addition, my game further supports the viability of well-rounded characters by being classless, with each and every option purchasable (via XP) to any character that both meets the prerequisites and has the XP to spend on it.Apparently, all of that isn't enough, since my players still seem to be min-maxing as much as possible. Any help in discouraging complete min-maxing will be appreciated.EDIT: It seems that there's some additional confusion regarding exactly what I'm trying to cut down on. I'm not saying that I'm trying to cut down on optimization of all kinds,  but rather, I'm trying to cut down on specifically the sort of  optimization where players will create characters that have invested in  only an extremely narrow set of stats. I realize that, to an extent, optimization is both good and necessary; however, as elaborated on the second page, I'm trying to make my game such that a truly optimized character will be at least somewhat rounded.</blockquote>

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