As far as I can tell, there are two prevalent attitudes when it comes to this particular conundrum.
- Might Makes Right– I’m good at this game! Isn’t that a good thing? Why would you punish me by nerfing my character? Shouldn’t you be happy that I’m giving your game enough time and attention to master it?
- Not Optimized for Fun – Hey man, you’re the one who’s OP. That makes you the problem. As an advanced player making everybody else feel useless, it’s on you to bring your game back down out of the stratosphere and be a team player.
That in turn leads to three potential solutions.
- Nerf ‘Em! – Some key part of a build or strategy is gonna get hit with the ban hammer. Maybe that ultra-powerful weapon you got five levels too early needs to go. Maybe you’re getting assigned a “fun feat” rather than the “good feat” you loved so well. This tends to feel like butts for the optimizer, and is often difficult to implement fairly.
- Get On My Level – Why change one build when you can change every other build instead? All you have to do is help newer and less mechanically-savvy players learn to love crunchy rules! Once you’ve explained why their preferred playstyle was dumb and rebuilt their characters for them, everyone is sure to feel useful!
- Optimize Help – Putting up big numbers tends to be the thing that gets optimized. But making the most of a suboptimal playstyle or optimizing a support character tends to be uncontroversial. Good luck telling your local optimizer that their options have been reduced to “you’re always the bard” though.
I expect a fair number of “just target their weak saves” and “give a mix of strong and weak enemies” in today’s discussion. But let’s be honest. Most fights are physical rather than mind-affecting, meaning that saves are a sometimes-solution at best. Meanwhile, today’s comic dramatizes the one strong enemy + weak enemies option. Players may be stupid, but they aren’t dumb. They’re gonna notice that they’re fighting the training wheels monsters rather than the real threat.
All of the above brings us to today’s discussion! I confess that I’m a 2C type player (optimizer needs to change; optimize a non-combat class). But you might be a 1B (I’m good at this game, and you can be too!) Or maybe you’re even a 3D (POV I haven’t thought of + innovative solution that seems obvious in retrospect). Whatever your take, let’s hear all about it down in the comments!
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We have some really good players on my game group. Like, REALLY good, to the point that I know that I will be outclassed in dealing damage. So I don’t focus on that.
I personally favour more suport oriented classes: Like Clerics and Bards, that can help out of combat with spells and skills and can suport the group in combat. Now, suport in combat can mean: “Here take some buffs” or “There, all minions dealed with. You focus in the strong guy.” (Sleep at low levels and channel negative energy builds are fun.)
Other players like other aproaches. We have one that favours range attacks, to hit things that are out of the optimizers range and stay the hell away of monsters that can actually be a challenge for them. And then there is the kill stealer.
The kill stealer likes to do damage, he doesn’t do as much damage as the optimizers, but he still does a good amount, and here is the thing: If an optimizer doesn’t kill an enemy it will be at low health, so the kill stealer perfectly razonable damage is often enought to finish them out. I personally like the guys characters because when we buff them instead of the optimizer it feels like we have doubled the party’s damage outpout.
As a DM to acount for power diference I actually moved away from the Big Strong Monster + Minions. I instead like to use multiple lower hp and lower Ca with higher to hit and higher damage groups of monsters. Less Dragon Ball villains and more One Piece enemy crews. This way there is not just one monster to be destroyed by the optimizers or to only be a challenge for them while destroying the rest of the party. Also, it feels way less bad when half the group is killed in the first round instead of having the BBEG fall in one hit.
Personally I think it’s a balancing act and that it’s often a good idea to go with a mixed solution instead of going all the way in one direction.
The players of the more powerful characters tone their choices down a bit, and the players of the of the weaker characters get a bit of advice to tune theirs up a bit, reach some sort of comfortable middle ground. Maybe allow a bit of power differential, but one where everyone is genuinely significant and can contribute rather than one where the strongest are in an entirely different league than the weakest.
At the same time it can help if people have some degree of niche protection, So you can more easily give different people time to shine during different challenges.
How easy this is depends heavily on the system of course, if the game has one primary arena (combat typically) and is designed such that power is mostly linear it can be pretty difficult of course, while systems that are expecting more “arenas” make it easier.
For example say you are playing shadowrun with a Street Samurai fighter type, a Face con-artist, an eccentric Mage focused on healing and banishing spirits and a skilled Decker (i.e. hacker).
If the Decker is much more optimized than the Mage and therefore the electronic defenses need to be significantly stronger than the watch spirits the Mage is banishing before they can raise the alarm, then that isn’t much of a problem and vice versa.
I also think Dummy A.I have a point in encounter design. If the powerful one beats 4-5 foes where the rest beat 1-3 each, but all the foes are dangerous for everyone then that typically feels better than the powerful pc having their own special foe to fight that no one else can touch.
Called it. 😀
Looks like Divine Herald might need to start casting Ascension to keep the party engaged.
https://www.aonprd.com/SpellDisplay.aspx?ItemName=Ascension
For starters, nobody in my group is prone to _excessive_ optimisation. Sure, we’ve got those who are very good at that aspect of the game, and will always be effective in combat, but not so much that it’s a problem. A previous campaign, we had a real combat-monster barbarian, and that was great… put him in the front line alongside the paladin, and the rest of us provide whatever support suited… sniping, crowd control, buffing.
Because “optimise help” can have a lot of depth. Those two characters… they made a great front-line, and we knew they’d be doing the grunt work in combat. But they’re also vulnerable to being surrounded and overrun by numbers, and that’s where the rest of the team can excel… spellcasters doing battlefield control to kill or repel minions, ranged strikers finishing off wounded targets or preventing enemy mages from being effective (it’s hard to maintain concentration spells when someone is using you as a dartboard).
And yes, as Vegetalssfour notes — the question is very combat centric, since combat is one field where everybody is expected to participate actively. Outside of a fight, specialised skill helps a lot with allowing everybody to have their niche… the stealthy people can do their thing (and the non-stealthy people can maybe provide distractions), the talky people can do their talking (and would the barbarian _please_ keep stop talking), etc. Shadowrun (and most cyberpunk games) is good for that… strong archetypes that offer rich out-of-combat niches.
On that note, it’s not something that D&D does all that well, but I do like games that encourage characters to have a reasonably broad and eclectic set of skills. I think I’ve mentioned the idea of “hobby skills” here before… a house-rule for D&D 3.5e whereby characters got a free skill point per level to spend in non-core skills for that character… typically craft, profession, knowledge. That kind of thing usually doesn’t matter much, but it creates opportunities for someones fun choice of hobby-skill to put the spotlight on them. I seem to recall Eclipse Phase had an “interests” category of skills, so your characters might have skills like “martian breweries”, or “celebrity gossip”.
Not shown is the flip-side of this comic, where the DM produces an actual challenge for Divine Herald… But forgets that said ‘challenge’ is more of a ‘TPK’ for the rest of the group.
Woolantula is missing as the party mascot! How dare!
Don’t worry. He’s there. That hell beast had Swallow Whole.
Hopefully Woolantula wasn’t in the top half of the hellbeast.
This kinda reminds me of an interesting point I’ve once heard about 1v1 games – that they are inherently more balanced than traditional games. Sure, you have to take a different approach on encounter design, but on the other hand if there’s only one PC then all the PCs are you on the same power level.
Anyway, here’s one solution to the “problem” of one player being much better at optimization than everyone else (although it needs to be implemented at session 0) – get the optimizer to play support. That way, everybody wins. The optimizer can go do terrible things to the mechanics, but instead of overshadowing the other characters, they’ll make them shine brighter.
As a GM, I must confess that I usually do exactly what’s depicted in the comic and just give the weaker players some weaker monsters to fight while the optimized players deal with the big boys. It usually seems to work out okay, but on occasions when I’ve received complaints my solution has been to help the useless-feeling player(s) better optimize their character; I am therefore a 1B, though I also wouldn’t be above “gently suggesting” that the min-maxer(s) try a support class, if it came to that.
I myself greatly enjoy optimizing characters and well know the satisfaction of eking out another 1% increase to average damage or +1 bonus to Diplomacy checks or what-have-you, and therefore would never *dream* of forcing a min-maxer to make deliberately suboptimal choices.
That said, there have been some, shall we say, less than perfectly balanced TTRPGs I’ve GMed for, and in such cases I’m more than happy to ban the blatantly overpowered character options. Finding a busted synergy that allows you to instantly kill anything in a 3-mile-radius can be fun, but definitely not something to bring into actual play.
I’m mostly “2C” myself as well (it helps that playing a force multiplier is actually a fairly strong thing in 5e), but I do have some “B” tendencies – I wouldn’t FORCE another player to change their build or character, but I’m happy to provide advice if they want it, pointing out things they might have overlooked or helping them pick an effective direction for their character.
I also try to temper my powergamer tendencies by explicitely giving the GM veto and retcon rights over my character build. When I pick something I know is particularly powerful, I’ll let the GM know and they can ask me to pick something else if they feel it’s too much, or if they thought it was fine and later realizing it wasn’t, they can ask me to change it. Last session I played with my Paladin/Sorcerer I finally pulled off the famed Quickened Hold Person + Double Crit Smite combo, and it was awesome, because it had been cleared beforehand that this was something I would be capable of and I had worked with the GM to ensure he was ready to deal with it, as well as with the rest of the party to ensure they didn’t feel overshadowed by it.
It’s all about compromises. That’s how a group works best.
Depends on the game, but mostly I tend towards a possible 3D: imbalance within a party provides a lot of interesting story opportunities to explore power, responsibility and interpersonal relationships. As such, the trick is not to ensure that everyone always feels equally useful but that everyone has an equal opportunity to be interesting in the narrative. It’s not about weaker enemies, but different, easier objectives. One of my and my players’ favourite fights I’ve run, one of the PCs slaughtered their way through several thugs in quick succession whilst another spent most of their time wrestling with one to avoid being thrown off the edge of a boat and a third dodged an angry chef with a knife whilst trying to launch a rowboat. For the more combat-capable character, the task was “kill the enemies before they kill my friends” and the stakes were mainly “my friends get hurt”; for the others, the tasks were as I described above and the stakes were immediate personal survival or an escape route for the party. The enemies were the same, the scale of engagement was tailored.
Now of course this probably works best in games where that imbalance is an assumption going in. If I had to run a game of AL 5e or something equally compulsorily-generic, I’d probably go 2B with an emphasis on the social contract for the strong character.
The main issue here is where one player is stepping into another player’s area of competence (usually big damage numbers, since that’s pretty universal). My group is very small, 2 players and a GM (including yours truly), and our current game has 4 main stats. We do not have the luxury of stepping on each other’s toes, we need a sneaky, ranged fighter and a tough frontliner, we need a smart guy and a social animal. So our session zero generally involves deciding amongst ourselves what roles are needed and who’s taking what combination.
I am the “all of the above” (1/2)(A/B/C).
I limit my optimizer instincts with a character concept (why yes, I am playing a bard) but I optimize within that (do I have counterspell, Banish, and fireball? Yes, yes I do.). I also asked the others “hey, what are we lacking”…which is why I have Expertise Tracking and have managed to track a djinn through a city.
In combat, on my turn(and only on my turn and usually over a telepathic link) I will give a brief ….well, not order per se, more like suggestion, as to tactics. Like “I’ll deal with caster, go kill the golem!” Or “these are hypnotized! Drag one off and gank it as a group” with a bonus action of “Seriously, you wake them all up again and I will Banish you while we divvy up loot!”
Out of combat I try to nudge the other players a bit. “As a lore bard I can learn other classes spells, but I don’t want to step on your toes. SPELL looks really cool but I won’t take it if you’re going to use it.”
As the negotiator/face, I’ll ask people what they want and drop hints. “OK, warrior is after a new sword, Priest needs some scrolls, how about utility things? Like if I run across Boots of Elvenkind or Goggles of Night?”
Priest (flips through book):”oh, those are unattuned? Boots please!”
Tabaxi-archer (smugly):”I already have 60ft darkvision”
Me: “OK, thought you might want 120ft”
Tabaxi:”Wait, they STACK?!?”
I am, without a doubt, 1B.
As a DM, this has often translated to “Feeling underpowered? What character idea were you trying for? Would you like some help optimizing?”, with the understanding that sometimes the answer is “Nope! I prefer feeling useless or pretending to not understand the rules, and I hope that Rule of Cool alone will keep me in the forefront of the party.”
As a player, though, I’ve sometimes been met with “Aw! It’s so cute that you think that petty things like dice rolls actually matter at my table.”
As a pla
I’ve run into very few truly broken characters, but in my experience, the solution is: ‘if your character isn’t optimized, what is it built for instead?’ There must be some reason they went with the build they chose. If they have a goofy feat that seemed fun, give them chances to use that feat effectively; and even if they aren’t doing the most damage, they’ll feel good.
In short, figure out what fantasy their character was made to fulfill, and let them.
Now, if the fantasy they wanted was ‘be the guy that does the most damage,’ then maybe 1B is the way to go after all. But in my experience, if they wanted to be the best, they’d already be diving into the rules.
As both a DM and player, I’m seriously about game balance. If there is a rule or mechanic that is going to throw the balance off then I will build a character to offset that or, as DM, just not incorporate it into my game. It’s a big part of my homebrew.
I’ve only given one player an OP weapon. It came from a movie and I really didn’t think it through. Once I realized how OP it was, I simply removed it from the game through a mini-story arc. Of course I let the group know I screwed up, just so no one else got excited about trying to bring Mourneblade into game.
I’m a old gamer (70 is way to close for my comfort). Been at this since the late 70’s. Only a couple groups during that time had MIN/MAXers in them and the DMs were always able to set up the game so they didn’t dominate. I’m a fairly draconic DM and if I think a players build is going to weigh the game toward them dominating, I’m going to be pruning that character before it gets played. I want EVERYONE to have fun, including me and I will do my best to make sure that happens
This is one of the reasons I always encourage new DMs to get to know the system they game in really well, and then make it theirs. If there are game mechanics that just don’t work for your play style then take them out or modify them. Just make sure new players know that there have been modification, so they don’t get bent out of shape not being able to play their usual build.
See, I solve this issue by not doing games that allow for complex builds and using a system where there’s a lot of non-combat stuff, so anyone who’s strong in fights is significantly weaker outside them. Heck, some of my available classes are just straight-up noncombatants with no bonuses for fighting whatsoever.
There’s a solution you missed: Don’t be mean. No matter how strong your min-maxxed OP character is, it’ll never be stronger than you and everyone else. 200 damage per round is pretty terrifying until it turns out you need 600 to win. But if a OP player demonstrably can’t win the fight on their own and chooses to leverage the TEAM aspects of this team game their playing, everyone wins. It’s a matter of mindset. If the OP player is being mean enough to make the other players feel useless, you have bigger problems than the imbalance.
It’s not always about the damage Spider-Man.
I’ve spent a lot of time doing optimization competitions over on the Giant In The Playground forums. And the easiest way to get me excited about building a sub-optimal character is to frame it as a specific challenge.
“How many knives can you throw per round, while taking as many aberration-themed character options as possible?” (28, IIRC)
“Could you build Dante from Devil May Cry in D&D?” (Hell yes!)
“Build me something that uses lots of alternate class features and never takes a prestige class.” (Monk, here we come)
In fact, in general, optimizing to match some external character is often the most fun I have with a game. Dante, Virgil, Atriox, the highly endangered northwest pacific tree octopus; heck, the main reason I love HERO 6E (aka, no optimization ceiling, the game) is how well it lends itself to this. I have entire folders on Google Drive full of monsters, vehicles, and characters I’ve ported over from Halo, Resident Evil, Worm, and a few other franchises, comparing their stats to what’s already in the game to make sure they’re ‘accurate’.
Sorry, got a little sidetracked there. I guess where I’m going with this is that the reason I optimize is for a challenge; as long as I give myself a more specific and unique challenge than “find the strongest combo” I’ll be happy as a clam and (hopefully) in line with the rest of the party.
I’m not much of a mechanically minded person, but I do have a couple of die hard optimizers, one of whom I’ve come to refer to as a “stat monkey”. For reference, due to the way the system I’m using handles initiative, the stat monkey gets basically an extra turn before EVERYBODY ELSE.
I try to mentor other players to the level they want to play at, and will do my best to also play at that level. If everyone isn’t having fun, then something needs to be fixed, but it is never really at the cut and dry 1 or 2.
The problem isn’t optimization, IMO, it’s stepping on toes. If I’m the big-damage-numbers guy, I won’t be mad about the party face diplomacy-ing other foes to avoid combat or the wizard save-or-sucking everyone so I can stab them. The problem only happens if the wizard starts throwing around fireballs that out-damage me, but I think that’s a sign that there was a Session 0 discussion that should’ve happened but didn’t.
As for huge discrepancies that’ll catch attention no matter what…in most systems I’ve played, you have to try pretty hard to *create* a discrepancy like that. Not just one player optimizing, but everyone else ANTI-optimizing. Pessimizing? Whatever. There are exceptions – 5e Coffeelock says hello – but in every group I’ve played in, powergaming like that is a good way to eat 100d12 damage with no save as the gods tell you to stop being a dick.
As these things tend to be looked at by their results, tactics can play a large part too.
I’ve seen perfectly strong characters seem weak because of their choices in combat or resource management. Rushing too far ahead which makes them the only target for an encounter for a round or two or just not using abilities they have at all.
Especially with games like 5E, I tend to see the mid-combat choices playing a bigger part than the character build. I’ve played in groups where a player that is missing a session can elect another player at the table to play their character in combat for that session. That PC’s effectiveness can easily swing from weak to near OP.
Hmm yes, that issue is while now that Pathfinder 2 is a thing, I can never go back to the horrors of previous editions (three words: Divine, metamagic, Nightsticks).
(Sorry 4e, you do balance ok, it is just… potions stopping to work without surges… its not you, its me.)
If I would get to chose, I’d be very careful about B. Trying to play someone else’s toon for them is a no-go for me. And that explicitly includes ‘suggesting’ mechanical choices. Advice is one thing, but in sufficiently unbalanced games, that can quickly turn into ‘bad wrong fun’ territory.
I’ll point out again Ars Magica’s “troupe” system where basically every player has several characters.
Basically, the players as a whole play a Covenant of Wizards. So a Covenant is made up of three types of people: the wizards themselves, who have arcane powers, some extraordinary companions who do not know the magical arts but may have magical powers or abilities, and then ordinary servants, which are basically normal peoples. Players each have at least one wizard and one companion. Servants are part of a pool.
Now the trick is that wizards spend most of their time locked up in their labs, working on reading books about magic, performing experiments, designing spells, and writing books about magic. All these activities literally take months — the basic time unit for how long a given lab work lasts is the season, so three months. And you don’t get to play elves who live for centuries. There are longevity potions you can make to slow down aging and let your mage live longer so that they can progress further, but basically mortal lifespan is your level cap as a mage.
So the mages very seldom get out of their labs to go adventuring, because time spent traveling and adventuring is time not spent becoming a better mage.
What this means is that an adventure will have one, maybe two players using their mage characters, while the other players bring out their companions or even play some of the servants. Once the adventure is concluded, the mages that went out are only too happy to get back home and return to their studies.
Companions and servants, though, they don’t have such a massive timesink. They progress by improving their skills, something that adventuring is good for. Wizards also benefit from improving their skills, of course, but not as much as they benefit from improving their arts.
So the next adventure, it’s some other player’s wizard’s turn to get out, while and so on.
In effect, there’s always a power differential but there’s a rotation between players for who gets to be at the top. The best optimized wizard player? Well to make sure their wizard stays optimized, they’re just playing a servant this time.
test…
I’ve been trying to post since yesterday morning this but kept getting ‘server misconfiguration’ error messages, even though it seems others can post…
If it repeats what someone else already said, I’m not going to rewrite it now 😉
Alright, let’s try it bit by bit…apparently there’s something in the body of the post that the server is choking on but I can’t for the life of me see what that might be.
In online games that allow PvP, I’ve found that the loudest calls for ‘nerfing’ come from the fighter types who can’t believe they lost to a well played ‘other’ class.
I far prefer PvE over PvP for just that reason, but many times the ‘nerfs’ affect the PvE much more than the PvP since monsters don’t get penalized.
In many games, including DnD, the whole system is designed around a party combining their strengths to offset their weaknesses and becoming ‘greater than the sum of its’ parts’ instead of two competely different classes whaling on each other when they’re not designed to do that without major changes, and it’s the spellcasters that normally end up getting penalized because the fighters can’t reliably ‘one shot’ them before they get a major spell off and that’s somehow ‘unfair’. I’ve largely given up on multi-player online games for just that reason.
THAT was odd…the post wasn’t as long as some others but breaking it up let it go through…I blame aliens
From my experience, the key thing is not so much how powerful the strongest character is, but how widely they can spread their damage. It doesn’t really matter if they can one-shot most foes if they can only one-shot ONE foe per turn, and there are several other enemies to fight. My Ancient Aliens campaign has a Kineticist who hits extremely hard, but only once per turn, and he’s still vulnerable to nat 1s and concealment. As long as a few mid-level enemies are on the field, the theoretically weaker PCs don’t seem to have a problem with it.
Where I think it gets more serious is if the OP character can make lots and lots of attacks, like in machine-gun archer builds. Then there is more show-stealing potential.
As a GM, I do sometimes use my narrative tools to try to balance things emotionally. In one high-level kind-of-oneshot, two PCs had similar gimmicks, but one had drastically higher accuracy and damage (many-shots Gunslinger vs a thrown-weapon build). I made narrative jabs at the more powerful character killstealing (such as their bullet knocking the other’s thrown weapon out of the way in slow motion) and had enemies express greater fear of the weaker PC. I also sometimes use a bit of fudging for balance. If a weaker PC knocks a major foe to 2 HP and the more potent PC is about to go and will definitely finish things, why not erase 2 HP and give the weaker PC the kill? It’s all about managing vibes and spotlight.
In the D&D party system as intended, it’s not ‘kill stealing’ so much as “I’ll set ’em up and you knock ’em down” but that concept seems to have become lost along the way.
I prefer online game systems where if anyone in the party kills a monster then everyone in the party shares the XP, everyone gets a chance to do the ‘killshot’ eventually but it’s the total of damage dealt and buffs cast that allows that shot to happen in the first place.
I’m a 2C with new players (I just can’t optimize compared to experienced ones), my group had a few 2As. When things get too extreme in the non-support department, the GM had to step in. There was no specific nerf, just a “come back next session with half the damage potential”. Which happened.
In the end, it mostly works. Although I must confess, a very good friend of mine tend to bring the same min-maxing in many different builds… so I know that, for Pathfinder, I’ll never beat him in initiative, perception, tankiness, or diplomacy checks. Even if I try to specialize in those. I tend to focus on damage or support so that I still get my niche.
I liked the other suggestion further up-thread to “optimize for a concept.” This is the classic “build Spider-Man” or “make spiked armor work” type stuff.
Optimizing the sub-optimal lets you scratch the itch while still staying on-par with the rest of the group.
I’ve done the ‘take the fun feat’ several times. Or the ‘take the fun race/class combo.’ And some people just can’t seem to understand that. I have a character named Lurog. Lurog is an Arrowsong Minstrel. Lurog is also an orc. Here’s how the convos in the forums usually went:
Them – Oh, you’re making an orc? Here’s a barbarian build.
Me – I want to make him a bard.
Them – But he’s an orc. Whatever, here’s a two-handed weapon build.
Me – He’s supposed to be an archer.
Them – Oh, he’s a HALF-orc! Ok. Here’s an archer build.
Me – He’s a full orc.
Them – But…. but the racial strength boost…. *brain has short-circuited*
Dude is gonna hit HARD with that compound bow, lol.
Even harder than you think. The archetype lets me take a few Ranger spells. Ranger spells such as GRAVITY BOW.
And thanks to a Tuned Bowstring, I never have to worry about running out of Inspire Courage.
Which is part of the fun of doing things just a little differently than expected 🙂
I think I mentioned before that one of my favourite characters I played way back when was a Dwarven Bard with just enough CHA to cast spells that helped…some…and a ‘doombox’ accordion that the DM gave a special morale penalty to anyone that heard it, including the party 🙂
Let me guess, he played polka.
Dude, telling the optimizer ‘you’re always the bard’ is the way to get him to pick red tongue skald (pathfinder 1se).
You’d be facing everything he thinks of as allies not only gaining rage song and rage powers but also rogue talents. and you better not let the monsters hit his summoned fluffies. they all share the ‘Linnorm Death Curse, Tor’ rage power…
If the rest of the party gets useful buffs, problem solved. 🙂
If the battlefield is clogged with summoned critters, that’s its own can of worms, lol.
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/martial-caster-disparity
Which one is it (1/2, A/B/C/D) when the true OPness comes from team moves involving two or more PCs, only one of which was deliberately optimized for this but which does require some minimum buy-in, and support at the time of move, from another PC?
For example, I’m currently in an Avatar Legends game. We have one PC lightningbender who can do powerful but inaccurate blasts. Then we have another (my) PC who is a not-that-powerful but super-accurate waterbender (in the first session, he disassembled a low-grade mech at a distance), who offers to set up streams of water the lightningbender can shoot at, channeling the fury right into the enemies’ weak points.
This isn’t the first campaign I’ve set up “twin tech” (to borrow a name from Chrono Trigger) moves for, whether narrative or for actual mechanical effect. I recall one of my players, when I was GMing, set this up for great effect: in a system where action economy was exceptionally vital, in the last battle of an epic-long campaign (going against an optional but suitably high level end boss), he finally unleashed a super move he had been building up to the entire time. Technically, the effect was quite simple: everyone else got another free turn, immediately on that initiative tick.
This was a 9 PC party, so that’s 8 free turns. (I believe the system anticipates, and balances costs for, typical party sizes of 3-6.) This was in FFRPG 3E with the party a bit beyond level 64; in D&D terms, think “level 20 with plenty of epic boosts” – and IIRC, everyone else had their super moves charged too.
Suffice it to say, that abruptly became the last initiative tick of the battle.
I honestly disagree with both 1 and 2. I think it is on the DM to balance the game according to the party. And that also means A, B, and C are also all solutions I dislike. B is a bit closer to what should be done, but you shouldn’t force them out of what they’re doing – find ways to make what they want to do work. People play ideas, not strictly classes. See what help you, as a DM, can provide them to help make sure that their character can perform. It might be small tweaks, it might be a multi-class suggestion, or it might be incorporation of a particular spell into their toolkit. Never force a person out of what they want to play – and more importantly than this, see first point – balance the game according to the party. Create combat scenarios that work to every characters’ strength, or at least rotating combats that can give different characters a chance to be in the combat spotlight.
In the game I ran for several years, it was a very high difficulty game, but I always wanted to let people run a variety of character concepts. One of the big things I brought in to help me balance everyone was the idea of scaling magic items that were based entirely around their class/archetype/playstyle. These could provide simple numerical bonuses to gameplay altering changes that entirely morphed how abilities worked for the intent of feeding into how the players wanted to play their characters. And after doing it, I don’t think I will ever run a 5e/pathfinder/similar game without them.
This was something that let me kind of bring other players up to the level that the powerful players were, without directly nerfing the powerful ones.
But I did also make a ton of unique fights (Literally hundreds, I think over the course of the game, I made over 300 unique enemies) – for every big fight, I made sure I could target at least 4 different saving throws (Usually 2 major and 2 minor saves), and I designed them in a variety of ways to play to different strengths – some examples:
Instead of a single big bad, try having a group of 4 or 5 powerful individuals in a fight. This can help emphasize crowd control and split damage abilities. It also makes it easier to include enemies with crowd control capabilities, without letting up on enemy damage.
Create fights with differing damage to life ratios. A fight where an enemy does an extremely high amount of damage but has little life can give advantage to high movement characters and high initiative characters. In contrast, low damage but extremely high health fights can give healers an opportunity to shine for the endurance fight.
Create mechanics that place a greater emphasis on the terrain. If lines of sight and traps are relevant in a fight, it can play hell with your typical power gamer – even moreso if the players can use those traps to their advantage.
Damage counters can also be significant ways to tamp down your power gamers. If there is punishment for hitting an enemy too hard (I.E. the enemy gains a damage boost based on health lost since last turn), that can be huge.
Enemy mobility – if the enemy is flitting all about the battlefield, suddenly it becomes very important for players to lock that person down – whether via magic or grappling. Terrain again becomes huge in this situation.
And perhaps, most importantly of all – intelligent enemies. Make your big enemies smart. Give them ways to suss out the details of what the party can do. Then they have the ability to counter or target dangerous players in ways that feel appropriate – and you can force players into defensive playstyles. Which is also important – the player needs to have options available to them that aren’t just ‘hit hard’. Give them some magic items that require actions, but provide powerful defensive or utility benefits. Give them versatility in their magic items. Create scenarios that force their hands in different ways.
For example, in the final fight of my game (where my players were like level 35 in a 5e game), they were fighting against:
Reincarnated Karsus, wielding multiple fragments of the rod of law
Klauth, who’d had his magic for increasing his size/age category amped several fold by Karsus (But who was mostly occupied with fighting Titania)
8 champions of Karsus (All ~level 30 characters)
Several dozen high level fighters/paladins/etc (All ~level 20 characters).
In my party, two of my players were capable of absolutely massive amounts of damage – over 20k in a single round was not outside either of their capabilities (Power scaling got wild in that game). These two players definitely had the greatest amount of raw power in the game, and one of them was a wizard, and extremely powerful utility. Without a doubt they were absolutely more powerful than the other players. But those other players all had their strengths. One was able to do cleaving splash damage, with no target cap, which allowed her to wipe out most of the field of the level 20s. Another had several ways to screw with enemies in ways that did not require magic. Another was an insane healer. Another was a monk with retaliatory attacks and returning reactions. And the last two had very good survivability and ways to force saving throws. They all had strengths, and they all had a very high amount of value in that last fight.
And for the power gamers, one of them had a weakness in mobility – easy to exploit. The other’s main weakness was their passive defense. So I forced him to use his spells defensively with an overwhelming offense. He had, at one point, cast like 9 walls of force in one round (I said power scaling got wild, right?) to protect himself, and still almost ended up dying.
Additionally I gave Karsus a bit of a time rewind. If he took too much damage, he would instead essentially ‘rewind’ that turn and only take 5% of his health instead. Bear in mind, 5% was still a couple thousand points of health, but it helped lower that ceiling, and move the players away from super-nuking him.
Combine all this, and we had a situation where, while especially one of the powerful characters shone, having been down literally any single one of those characters out the gate would have drastically changed the outcome of the fight (There were like 2 deaths in the fight).
A little rambley, but point being – it is completely within the DM’s capabilities to balance a game for a party, even when you have some players with the capability of outputting 10 times the single target damage of others.
I’m probably a 1D most of the time. During character building, I absolutely optimize for extensive capability. Then during play, I tend to only rarely pull out the stops, mostly playing to the character’s personality rather than optimized tactics.
Optimize, but with restraint? Only use “that technique” if the party is about to wipe?
I like the idea, but the reality often leaves me wondering why my badass swordsman doesn’t always use “that technique.”
Pff, if you can’t beat up the Monsters while buffing up your Party Members to your own Level you are not Powergaming hard enough.
Like a Moon Druid that Casts a Buff Spell like Faerie fire while turning into a Beastly Killing Machine.
Or the Light Cleric running Bless, with Death Ward Precasted on our frail Wizard while Chucking Fireballs.
Or the XBow Battlemaster Fighter kicking Ass, while giving the Rogue a Second Attack via Commanders Strike.
Or the Sorcerer upcasting Hold Person on 4 Enemies, so the Fighter and the Paladin can Autocrit them.
This is why I as my Groups Powergamer always build my Character last. Shure I can build a Powerfull Character anyway, but if I build a Powerfull Character with good Synergy with the Other Characters, it makes the Group far more effective and Dangerous in Combat, than if I had a “Loner” Powerbuild with absolutely no Synergy.
Personally, my characters being optimised tends to work out fine because the other players love watching the dipshit antics I commit with them, plus I have a tendency to fade into the background when I know it’s not my moment
I’m a 3D.
3. Fanatical Creation. I’ve mastered this game and have too much Ideas, so I’ll build four possible optimized characters for every game and help everyone else prepare an optimized character or three as well. Also, I try to give every character a peculiar theme.
D. Balancing Indecision. I never can decide what I want, so I design characters with peculiar optimizations, such as a melee combat focused bard that is able to hold his own. Therefore, my over-optimized character is only rarely more powerful than the standard.
For mild cases, I would suggest the solution lies in varied forms of challenge. It is very hard, in D&D, to build a character that is excellent at everything, so if you vary what kind of challenges you throw at the party you will sometimes get cases where the OP character simply cannot apply their OP-ness to the challenge at hand. In other words, if one of your players has a very big hammer, give them challenges that are shaped like screws or that require gluing.
Additionally, if you are running smart and reactive adversaries, you can occasionally justify throwing challenges that are engineered to be specifically difficult for your OP player (don’t do this too often, though, or the player will start to get annoyed). Like in Discworld, where theoretically the fact that Sergeant Angua is a wifwolf should give her an overwhelming advantage, but in practice this is greatly reduced because it is public knowledge that the Watch has a wifwolf in their ranks and so any criminal with a modicum of sense makes sure to acquire torches, silver weapons, and scent bombs.
> you vary what kind of challenges
It’s important to remember to put in Linguistics checks every once in a while. 😀