Greenfield
Adventurer
I've said it many times: You can't convince power-gamers that power gaming is wrong by trying to outpower them. All you do is convince them that they didn't have *enough* power.
My own best advice is to simply start saying "NO", loud and clear. Start by saying no to D&Dwiki and homebrew rules and classes. Those are house rules for somebody else's house.
Follow up by saying no to anything from a book or source you don't have access to. As in, a book you own, not simply something someone will let you borrow at the game table.
Make up some of your own house rules to curb the abuses. One good one I've seen is to establish that Prestige Classes are, for the most part, like private clubs. The secrets of the craft are taught only to people of note. That is, you have to actually be prestigious to be invited in. And some of these private clubs have rivalries, and take a dim view of someone who tries to join an opposing club, or tries to join too many.
My own best weapon in players-gone-wild situations is to know the rules you're using, and be ready to enforce them. A lot of abuses rely on liberl or loose interpretations of the rules, or on simply ignoring the inconvenient parts of the rules. Look at what they're doing with a critical eye, spot the creative interpretations and put your foot down.
If necessary, do a hard audit on the characters. See if they actually qualify for all their nifty advantages, and if they actually paid the price.
Now anybody can make a mistake, and a certain amount of error is going to happen. The penalty for toomany "mistakes" in this area (particularly the ones that weren't committed by mistake) shouldn't be "go back and fix this". It should be "Go back to the beginning and start over".
You started out too soft. Now you have to be extremely hard. Once you have the runaway horses reined in, you can give them some slack again, so long as you keep things under control.
(Know that my favorite DM ability is the one I call "Dispel BS"!)
My own best advice is to simply start saying "NO", loud and clear. Start by saying no to D&Dwiki and homebrew rules and classes. Those are house rules for somebody else's house.
Follow up by saying no to anything from a book or source you don't have access to. As in, a book you own, not simply something someone will let you borrow at the game table.
Make up some of your own house rules to curb the abuses. One good one I've seen is to establish that Prestige Classes are, for the most part, like private clubs. The secrets of the craft are taught only to people of note. That is, you have to actually be prestigious to be invited in. And some of these private clubs have rivalries, and take a dim view of someone who tries to join an opposing club, or tries to join too many.
My own best weapon in players-gone-wild situations is to know the rules you're using, and be ready to enforce them. A lot of abuses rely on liberl or loose interpretations of the rules, or on simply ignoring the inconvenient parts of the rules. Look at what they're doing with a critical eye, spot the creative interpretations and put your foot down.
If necessary, do a hard audit on the characters. See if they actually qualify for all their nifty advantages, and if they actually paid the price.
Now anybody can make a mistake, and a certain amount of error is going to happen. The penalty for toomany "mistakes" in this area (particularly the ones that weren't committed by mistake) shouldn't be "go back and fix this". It should be "Go back to the beginning and start over".
You started out too soft. Now you have to be extremely hard. Once you have the runaway horses reined in, you can give them some slack again, so long as you keep things under control.
(Know that my favorite DM ability is the one I call "Dispel BS"!)