Optimization and optimizers...

[Gorgon Zee]

So, I do a lot of optimization for my day job, and a couple of concepts there I think are useful in the context of this discussion.

The second is CONSTRAINTS. You must have constraints to optimize within, and although those can be just the rules system, many players optimize within a self-imposed constraint. Here's some I've done, and my son has done, playing 4E

• I want to play a very drow-y drow, every feat or item that I take should be drow-related if at all possible.
• I want to play a paladin/thief who can switch between defender and fighter role at any time.
• You pick the two classes that work least well together, and I will build a hybrid of them

The first turned out to be extremely effective at mid-levels as the feats were awesome (clouds of darkness thrown 60' with a free teleport into them? yes please!) and attacking will is stupidly effective. The second was a mediocre defender, but at epic levels was a great striker, able to do 12 full-strength attacks in an alpha strike. The last my son and I both had terrible characters that underperformed the rest of our group, but not so badly as toy cause an issue.

So, if you find you are GMing for an optimizer, maybe suggest a constraint for their character. Maybe ask them if they have the skills to build a character that can buff any other character to be a powerhouse? Or see if they can build a cleric that can wipe out he nastiest hit point loss you as a Gm can throw at the party? Most "bad" optimizers want to be the kill-monkey, but you never know, maybe one might accept the challenge!

 

[Bill Zebub]

TBF if you're going to have a long ongoing campaign you're still going to have to win the large majority of fights you get into.

Sure, but the distinction I was making was that in the style of game I like you don't know which fights are winnable, so you typically try to avoid them.

Also, there is a middle ground between "winning" the fight and TPK: some, but not all, of the party die.

 

[Distracted DM]

I've softened my stance on optimization from in the past, where I thought it was a pox on the hobby. Optimizers are not only perfectly fine but helpful in a lot of instances. It really helps to know the upper limits of your game, and nobody else does it better.

They only become problematic when they try to make non-optimizers feel bad about their character choices.

As others have said, it can also be problematic when trying to challenge the party properly. Using too much, challenging the optimized characters, results in the other characters getting thrashed. Using too little means the encounters are cakewalks.

 

[Thomas Shey]

TBF if you're going to have a long ongoing campaign you're still going to have to win the large majority of fights you get into.

The percentage gets cut down a bit by morale checks, rules which actually support fleeing as a viable option, and players being encouraged to negotiate or avoid fights where possible (including evasion rules). And by the incentive structure and being informed ahead of time that some foes encountered will be too tough for them, so they should watch out and USE those evasion and flee rules.

But if an average fight has an 80% chance of victory, you have about a 3.5% chance of winning 15 of them. So even with the odds stacked as LITTLE as 4-1, a TPK is inevitable in relatively short order if you play a game with regular combat. If the odds are close to 50/50, TPKs are more likely than not in any session with multiple fights.

Though the dynamic can play out very differently outside the D&D sphere.

In games like RuneQuest, you can have combats where its pretty unlikely someone will go down, because the combination of skill, damage and armor makes it most likely that the opponents are going to go down--but the way critical, special and fumble results work its always possible. That combination means you want to put down opposition as fast as possible before one of those probability gusts come up, but if you fail to do that, you're not likely to lose a whole party, just a single character or two.

That may well be undesirable for various reasons, but if you go in expecting it, it doesn't bring the whole campaign crashing to a halt the way TPKs tend to.

 

[Thomas Shey]

This has a practical application: Running convention games. In any combat heavy system, I make a point of asking how optimized peoples characters are. If some are and some are not, I tell the optimized players I will be playing tough on them. If all are optimized, I ask if they want me to run the game as written and see how fast they can squish the encounters, or if they want me to play mean and really challenge their builds. That way we can all have fun.

I normally disliked doing this, but one of the things I was virtually forced to do when running Scion 1e was to be very picky what opponents went up against which PCs. This is because the way that system's attacks and defenses worked, at Demigod level and up, it did not require much for the differences to be insurmountable; this didn't mean that the characters were necessarily trying to show each other up, it just meant they might be emphasizing different attributes, some of which were relevant in combat and some in other things. The demigod with Epic Charisma 5 and the one with Epic Dexterity 5 had invested the same in attributes all other things being equal, but the first was (mostly) going to be far less dangerous in combat than the second, and the gap was very much nontrivial.

So I had to be selective about what I put up against who, and more importantly for this discussion, the players had to accept those pairings. If the Epic Dex character went after the opponent targeting the Epic Chr one, chances are the latter one would go down fast, and the Epic Chr character would have little or nothing to do in the fight. The result would be even worse if I decided to be irritable and have the Epic Dex character's opponent go up against Epic Chr character, because barring the latter pulling a cute trick, they were probably get beat like a drum.

So, essentially for things to work right, the players had to play along.

 

[Seramus]

So, essentially for things to work right, the players had to play along.

Yeah, Scion 1E was absolutely infamous for being a Paper/Rock/Scissors system. There was so much to love about the setting as a whole, but things could spiral into madness very quickly if your players were not either A) very creative or B) willing to indulge the system and bring Scissors against a Paper challenge.

Some of the most popular house rules, like Johns Scion Resources or Scion 2.0, tried to address this by allowing Purviews themselves to count as a dice pool instead of specific Attributes, or used One Hit Resolution mechanics like Strength adding to attack so that strong characters could even hit Dexterity characters. One of the iconic characters, Eric Donner, literally used a gun and couldn't hit squat.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yeah, Scion 1E was absolutely infamous for being a Paper/Rock/Scissors system. There was so much to love about the setting as a whole, but things could spiral into madness very quickly if your players were not either A) very creative or B) willing to indulge the system and bring Scissors against a Paper challenge.

Some of the most popular house rules, like Johns Scion Resources or Scion 2.0, tried to address this by allowing Purviews themselves to count as a dice pool instead of specific Attributes, or used One Hit Resolution mechanics like Strength adding to attack so that strong characters could even hit Dexterity characters. One of the iconic characters, Eric Donner, literally used a gun and couldn't hit squat.

Yeah. Scion 2e has a couple fixes for this (one I like better than the other), but to some degree it still exists (a character with different Scale on his Dexterity can miss someone who doesn't, but if he does hit he's going to hit dead on and potentially pulverize them. Approaches address the issue you talk about at the end but I kind of consider that a cure worse than the disease).

 

[overgeeked]

They only become problematic when they try to make non-optimizers feel bad about their character choices.

Yeah. And it’s worth noting this doesn’t have to be an active thing the optimizer does. Simply having an optimized character in a game with non-optimized characters can make the non-optimizers feel bad about their character choices. Being constantly outshined sucks.

 

[Seramus]

Yeah. Scion 2e has a couple fixes for this (one I like better than the other), but to some degree it still exists (a character with different Scale on his Dexterity can miss someone who doesn't, but if he does hit he's going to hit dead on and potentially pulverize them. Approaches address the issue you talk about at the end but I kind of consider that a cure worse than the disease).

Rich wanted Trinity and Scion to have the same core mechanics, but both games were in development at the same time, and Trinity had priority. So there were times where the Trinity team would send us changes to their core mechanics, and Neall had to rework whole sections to work with those changes. It caused a lot of mechanics to not quite jive with each other.

All the love to the Trinity team of course! But one game really should have finalized their core mechanics before the other started building around them (even including the original delays on Scion 2E before Neall came on).

 

[overgeeked]

As others have said, it can also be problematic when trying to challenge the party properly. Using too much, challenging the optimized characters, results in the other characters getting thrashed. Using too little means the encounters are cakewalks.

Yep. Optimizers make the game harder to run. If your goal is challenging the PCs, you have to work that much harder. If your goal is non-trivial fights, they make it that much harder.