when is to much.........well to much

[Celebrim]

And why not?

I'm glad you asked.

To answer this question we have to answer the question, "Why do we play RPGs?" And the obvious answer is of course, "To have fun!!! (and learn stuff, and meet people, and excercise our creativity...)" But of course, like any true answer this immediately raises more questions, such as, "Why are RPGs fun?" And the answer to that question is, "Because we are humans and humans like to play and in particular they like to play by imagining themselves in situations which are on some levels implusiable but on other levels plausible and they do this almost from birth without any prompting as part of the natural way that humans learn and interact with each other socially."

But eventually many people tire of these imagination games because they run into a very serious problem: in them, you are good at everything. All though its not immediately obvious, this problem saps all the joy out of childish imagination games sooner or latter. For one thing, as people get older, they increasingly like to be challenged and to overcomes challenges in their play, but when you can imagine anything you like, then it hardly is a challenge. Moreover, this leads to an inherent problem familiar to any child who has played cowboys and indians, storm troopers and jedi knights, cops and robbers, space marines and aliens or whatever kids play these days when their eyes aren't glued to a glowing recetangle. And that problem is, namely, "How do you determine who shot who?" For, if everyone is hyper-compotent you quickly have this discussion:

Kid #1: I shot you!
Kid #2: No, you missed. I shot you.
Kid #1: No, YOOUUU missed. I dodged and shot your head off.
Kid #2: No, you missed, I triple shot you!
Kid #1: This is pointless, let's just go chase girls and comtemplate fermentation.

However, a few happy souls, let's call them nerds, eventually discovered how to make the game fun, and they did so by discovering the first law of role playing: "Thou shalt not be good at everything." This profound law meant that you couldn't always hit, and you couldn't always dodge. Some mechanism had to exist to determine when you succeeded. At first they took turns, but this quickly grew boring because it was predictable and unchallenging. Then they decided to resolve conflicts with a game of 'rock paper scissors'. Eventually they moved on to polyhedral dice and complicated rule books, and role playing as we know it was born.

But every rule in every rule book and every die that has ever been thrown at every table pretty much exists to ensure Celebrim's first law is enforced.

Without it, then you are reduced back to taking turns or the inability to resolve who shot who. It's in the limitations on what you can do that all formalized games thrive. If you could move your peices any way you wanted, chess would be boring. The interest comes from overcoming your limitations. RPG's are the same way.

If I can meet someone in the real world who seems to be good at everything they do, then surely, someone in a world with magic would be good at everything, right?

Sure but the PC can't be, because it would violate the fundamental law. And the NPC shouldn't be, because the DM shouldn't be protagonizing himself. So, while it may be possible in the real world for someone to be good at everything, in the game world it should never happen.

I'm using basic logic here. And we're not talking about your everyday "gifted" person. We're talking about adventures, heroes, the guys with the guts to go out their and tackle the challenge. If your logic were applied to other situations, the "number one player" of any sports team shouldn't be allowed to play the game that they worked hard to become good at, because they're too good at everything.

Well, that's a wholly different issue. It's perfectly possible to play as a team of superheroes were everyone on the team is better than ordinary humans in everything or even better than extraordinary humans in everything, so long as no one on the team is better than everyone else at everything. You must be weak relative to the other players in the game at some sizable fraction of challenges to be poised by the game, so that everyone works together and everyone has fun. And you must be weaker than some of your foes in the game for essentially the same reason. Being better than a NPC at everything is not an issue because the NPC's are literally, as their name suggests, not playing.

 

[Dandu]

Remember that, in many cases, the DM is about 3 days more experienced than his players. That is, he bought the books first and they're all learning together. In many ways, this is the game group that the creatures in the MM are scaled for.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't there some innocuous creatures in the MM that will slaughter unoptimized parties?

 

[Grogg of the North]

There is also the question of balance. Not "game balance" as such, but balance around the table. If one player has an unstoppable battle monster and nobody else does, then the DM has very few choices. He/she can either challenge the combat monster and slaughter everyone else, challenge the bulk of the party and let the combat monster run roughshod over everything on the field, or come up with some reason why the mega-cannon only seems to aim at one character, ever.

This was a problem I recently faced in the game I'm running. One person devoted a great deal of his energy into becoming a better combatant and ignored all other aspects of his character (personality, goals, hopes). Everything that was done was to the betterment of his combat abilities.

And I soon ran into a scenario where either I could challenge that one character in combat and mop the floor with the remainder of the party or design sessions for the rest of the group and just let him cake walk everything.

So it really does help when everyone at the party has an idea of what's acceptable. Min/Maxing a little is acceptable. In fact I'd dare say we all do it to some degree. But there is a difference between "I dumped charisma since I'm a fighter." and "Look, I can punch out Asmodeus at level 4!".

But if everyone at the table is having fun, both GM and players, then that play style is valid. In the scenario I gave above, not everyone was having fun and it became a detriment. I will openly admit that I prefer role to roll. Playing Hale Lightbender, Mage of the 6th Circle, Advisor to the King and Royal Tutor is much more interesting than Wizard X / PrC Y.

 

[Empirate]

I will openly admit that I prefer role to roll. Playing Hale Lightbender, Mage of the 6th Circle, Advisor to the King and Royal Tutor is much more interesting than Wizard X / PrC Y.

Holy Jesus, this just crops up again and again and again and again. And again. I can't believe it!

Tell me: how did Hale Lightbender get into the august position he holds today, being and advisor to the king and all? By just being your average Joe the Wizard and throwing Fireballs at stuff all day long? I think not. I think he maybe specialized in Divination to the point he became a Master Specialist in that field, and later on joined the college of Loremasters, before officially receiving the title of Archmage. I could imagine this powerful Diviner using all the tricks in his extensive spellbook to make sure no harm comes to the kingdom, up to and including binding powerful outsiders, using Scry'n'Die tactics, provide contingent magic to his charge etc.

You see where I'm coming from? Just because you're roleplaying doesn't mean you get a free pass to run around incompetently and have the DM take care of how you end up an advisor to the king. Those things don't just happen to everybody, and if you want to play one of the movers and shakers, you better be actually able to do so.

 

[xigbar]

Holy Jesus, this just crops up again and again and again and again. And again. I can't believe it!

Tell me: how did Hale Lightbender get into the august position he holds today, being and advisor to the king and all? By just being your average Joe the Wizard and throwing Fireballs at stuff all day long? I think not. I think he maybe specialized in Divination to the point he became a Master Specialist in that field, and later on joined the college of Loremasters, before officially receiving the title of Archmage. I could imagine this powerful Diviner using all the tricks in his extensive spellbook to make sure no harm comes to the kingdom, up to and including binding powerful outsiders, using Scry'n'Die tactics, provide contingent magic to his charge etc.

You see where I'm coming from? Just because you're roleplaying doesn't mean you get a free pass to run around incompetently and have the DM take care of how you end up an advisor to the king. Those things don't just happen to everybody, and if you want to play one of the movers and shakers, you better be actually able to do so.

Everything here.

 

[emoplato]

Yeah, I am going with the Stormwind fallacy's assertion. Yes, there are those out there who just wish to own the game, but in all honesty this behavior can be held back by simply asking the player how does this fit with the character. I think that DM's ought to sit down with each and every player in order to ask what they have in mind not only in function but personality. When you look at these builds in many of the record boards there is no way they could reconcile all the aspects both with the individual and to the adventure in order to justify taking all of them. As for common examples such as the one in which started this I explained how you could stop them. The same is the case with many optimized builds they may have a specialty but situations/environments and other builds can be made to challenge them. If others lack allow them to change ,give them a proper plot exit, and/or split up the party.

 

[Eldritch_Lord]

Celebrim's First Law of Roleplaying is, "Thou shalt not be good at everything."

Character optimization breaks the first law directly by allowing builds that are good at everything, or indirectly, by allowing a player to be so good at one thing - say swinging a hammer - that every problem can be treated like a special case of hitting a nail. An optimized fighter that can slay any monster in a single round is an example of breaking the first law.

However, since the first law is also superior to the rules of any particular system, any rules system that allows you to be good at everything is also a bad system (at least in that respect, it might be worth salvaging though). In fact, arguably the entire point of any role playing system is to obey the first law. Stock 3.X played with most of the supplements and without modification fails this critical test.

Three points here:

1) You're conflating "character optimization" and "min-maxing" (i.e. making your character good at what he does) with some other adjective, whether "theoretical optimization" (i.e. making a character such a good one-trick pony that he isn't suitable for a real game) or "powergaming" (i.e. deliberating making a character more powerful than the rest of the party in important areas so you can 'win' the game) or similar. If a player says he is "optimizing his character for X" that doesn't in any way mean he's trying to do anything that would violate Celebrim's First Law, it just means he's trying to focus his character in a particular direction and make him good at it.

2) For the bazillionth time, 3e core is no more balanced than full 3e, and in fact is less so. At the higher levels of optimization, core casters can easily outdo everyone because there are fewer counters to their tricks and fewer ways for the martial types to compete, and almost all non-core casters are more limited than core casters while non-core martial types receive significant boosts both in options and in power; for every celerity or Incantatrix there are dozens of good options that improve and expand the game without making characters overpowered, and barely any non-core features in and of themselves are on the same scale as planar binding, glitterdust, and the like in terms of pure effectiveness or versatility.

At the low end of the optimization scale, lack of power/options and gentlemen's agreements can hold the classes in rough parity regardless, so there is no benefit in excluding all of the varied and interesting non-core options for power reasons in that case. I'm sure that 3.Celebrim looks quite a bit different from 3.5 and that your group has its own playstyle, which is part of the gentlemen's agreement: people who play in your group agree to play with your rules, both mechanical houserules and group rules of conduct, and asking people to optimize to the benefit of the group and the game rather than to their detriment is just as much a part of that kind of agreement as "we buy the DM pizza for dinner" or "no out-of-character talk during combat" or the like are.

3) You can optimize for many different things. You can optimize a class's strengths, for instance optimizing a barbarian/frenzied berserker to take him from being merely a tough and strong warrior to a practically unkillable warrior who kills mooks by the score. You can optimize a class's weaknesses, for instance optimizing a fighter/rogue/duelist as a noble character by taking those martial classes and attempting to make him good at both combat and diplomacy without sacrificing too much of the other. You can optimize for a theme, for instance making a pyromancer via a sorcerer/favored soul/mystic theurge with every single possible fire-related spell and feat you can find, even though it's not the most powerful option and in fact is relatively weak overall.



An optimized fighter is not necessarily one who is good at everything and who solves everything through violence. It can fall at many different places on the scales of power, well-roundedness, and flavor. Even an optimized full caster isn't necessarily good at everything--I've optimized clerics before who could buff their team through the roof but had no offensive capabilities on their own, wizards who could completely shut down enemy mages but had no defense (or offense) against mundane threats, druids who tried to be as bear-y as possible (summoning bears while wild shaped into a bear commanding a bunch of bears while...) without regard for combat power, and summoners and necromancers who went for the highest possible volume of weaker minions instead of the fewer, stronger ones because they were trying to rebuild towns, support infrastructure, provide labor, and the like.

Painting everyone who optimizes characters with the same brush (and a not-very-complimentary brush at that) is really doing us a disservice.

 

[Celebrim]

Three points here:

1) You're conflating "character optimization" and "min-maxing" (i.e. making your character good at what he does) with some other adjective, whether "theoretical optimization" (i.e. making a character such a good one-trick pony that he isn't suitable for a real game) or "powergaming" (i.e. deliberating making a character more powerful than the rest of the party in important areas so you can 'win' the game) or similar. If a player says he is "optimizing his character for X" that doesn't in any way mean he's trying to do anything that would violate Celebrim's First Law, it just means he's trying to focus his character in a particular direction and make him good at it.

That's fair. I'm perfectly happy to recognize a difference between acceptable and appropriate character optimization and extreme cases which break the game. I simply didn't have any wildly accepted and recognized language for making that distinction, and was hoping that people would understand that by 'character optimization' I meant the sort of cases referred to by the original poster - namely being able to inflict hundreds or thousands of points of damage in a single turn (before or well before the high epic levels) so that you could easily defeat a CR equivalent foe in a single action.

2) For the bazillionth time, 3e core is no more balanced than full 3e, and in fact is less so.

And for the bazillionth time, I know that and never said that it was. However, also for the bazillionth time, the fact that 3e core is not well balanced is not a defense of adding in other unbalanced things.

Quoting myself:

One example of that very tension will be a refrain that's either already in this thread, or would be shortly. Some one is sure to say (or have said, I didn't look): "Yeah, but there are far more broken builds than that." or "The most broken thing in core is a single classed wizard" or "You just think that fighters shouldn't get good stuff" or "As long as there are CoDzillas, then I need to do this."

There are two separate problems here. First, we'd like to give non-casters more non-broken options. Secondly, we'd like to have optimized spellcasters be less broken. Neither problem is addressed by giving broken options to non-spellcasters.

I'm sure that 3.Celebrim looks quite a bit different from 3.5 and that your group has its own playstyle...

True.

...which is part of the gentlemen's agreement: people who play in your group agree to play with your rules

Huh? That is abusing the definition of a 'gentlemen's agreement'. In context, a gentlemen's agreement is an agreement to not do certain things which are permitted by the rules for the sake of greater enjoyment. I have no such agreement. Players are free to min-max within the constraints of what is available to their heart's content, and I have 3 (of my 6) players actively doing so - to the overall greater health of the game IMO. So yes, the player's agree to play by my rules, but that's hardly what is usually meant by a gentlemen's agreement.

You can optimize for many different things.

True, but irrelevant. Since its only things that violate the first law that bother me, and not the act of optimizing within a system itself, what you optimize for isn't something I worry about. I identify the cases I'm concerned about explicitly - either a character that is both broadly skilled and exceptionally so (a typical god wizard, or CoDzilla) and a character that is so good at something that they become Johnny One Trick. Simply making a character skilled at something doesn't violate the first law, and your further discussion seems to indicate that you are still talking about the first point that you raised. Because its addressing a position I don't actually have, I can agree with a lot of it without harm to the position I do have.

Painting everyone who optimizes characters with the same brush (and a not-very-complimentary brush at that) is really doing us a disservice.

I'm not aware that I did so, but if you got that from what I said, then I apologize. I was speaking specifically of the sort of extreme character optimization spoken of by the OP. I do not think that citing Pun-Pun as a more broken character than an optimized Hulking Hurler, diminishes the claim that the Hulking Hurler is a problem build. Repeating myself again:

Character optimization breaks the first law directly by allowing builds that are good at everything, or indirectly, by allowing a player to be so good at one thing - say swinging a hammer - that every problem can be treated like a special case of hitting a nail. An optimized fighter that can slay any monster in a single round is an example of breaking the first law.

- emphasis added

 

[Eldritch_Lord]

That's fair. I'm perfectly happy to recognize a difference between acceptable and appropriate character optimization and extreme cases which break the game. I simply didn't have any wildly accepted and recognized language for making that distinction, and was hoping that people would understand that by 'character optimization' I meant the sort of cases referred to by the original poster - namely being able to inflict hundreds or thousands of points of damage in a single turn (before or well before the high epic levels) so that you could easily defeat a CR equivalent foe in a single action.

Most of my objections farther down in the post stemmed from the overly-broad definition of optimization you were using; if you only meant "I don't like optimization that breaks the First Law" and not "optimization is what breaks the First Law," I have no further objections.

And for the bazillionth time, I know that and never said that it was. However, also for the bazillionth time, the fact that 3e core is not well balanced is not a defense of adding in other unbalanced things.

Quoting myself:

There are two separate problems here. First, we'd like to give non-casters more non-broken options. Secondly, we'd like to have optimized spellcasters be less broken. Neither problem is addressed by giving broken options to non-spellcasters.

My mistake; I'd thought you said adding a lot of supplements to stock 3.X made it less balanced, rather than stock 3.X including the supplements was unbalanced as a whole. With that statement, I agree.

Huh? That is abusing the definition of a 'gentlemen's agreement'. In context, a gentlemen's agreement is an agreement to not do certain things which are permitted by the rules for the sake of greater enjoyment. I have no such agreement. Players are free to min-max within the constraints of what is available to their heart's content, and I have 3 (of my 6) players actively doing so - to the overall greater health of the game IMO. So yes, the player's agree to play by my rules, but that's hardly what is usually meant by a gentlemen's agreement.

Well, "don't break things" isn't a gentlemen's agreement, it's the particular level of optimization allowed that is. By "play by your rules" I meant following a particular group's optimization guidelines--in your case, players can optimize however you wish given available sources, while another DM might ask PCs to keep attack bonuses, saves, and AC within certain ranges to make encounter building easier, and another DM might allow any optimization at all as long as you have a sneaky/fighty/blasty/sneaky role setup in the party. I wasn't referring to houserules or allowed sources or anything like that.

 

[Empirate]

I would prefer less optimized games. They appear to be more than who can wtfpwn to all the fun and role play HP 97 and excitement.

So you haven't actually read a word that has been said in this thread. Welcome to the boards, anyway.

EDIT: Oh, it's spam. Reported.