Power players

>one is trying to make broken characters to destroy any sense of difficulty whilst others are just in for the role play and such.
I had a serious optimiser in my party, too. Well, two, and two would be optimisers but who just weren't very good at it.

Fortunately all of them were good folks, so the primary optimiser willingly chose to be a monk, and make the best monk they could, while the other went and specialised in gunslinging.

Both were non-optimal classes, but because their characters were tuned so well, they were on par with the paladin and oracle.

Then I just threw about 5 social/skill encounters at them for every combat, and they loved the game.

See if your powergamer will mind taking a non-optimal class so they're on the same power level as the others.

Make sure that for every combat there are other scenarios in which the other players can shine, too. Another thing is to avoid making what Exaltedfag would call "white-box" scenarios, meaning combat situations in which there are two (or more) big or small groups that want to kill each other and will not settle for anything less than the eradication of the problem party during the combat.

An example that I can provide you with is this: party needs mcguffin to save NPC, other group wants to stop them from getting to the mcguffin. Said mcguffin is inside a bulletproof glass case that can be opened by a lever: now the group has to get to the lever and has to be careful that the other group doesn't pull it/gets the mcguffin before the others do when the case comes off. What good is the optimized build do to the player, if the other part of the group fails? This is where teamwork will come to the surface and in the end the group will have to come up with a good strategy to obtain the mcguffin and save their friend.

This. The best way I've seen to deal with powergamers is to pick a system where the optimal route is easily seen by everybody. For example, most classless systems where if you want to get better at something you spend your xp on things that help you with that thing. Long term, you grab all those things, so planning ahead gives little advantage.

Compare that to D&D where there are trap options. Options which look like a good thing to take at this level. But they look you out of other things. Things which, while less powerful now, are prerequsites for much better things later. So planning ahead gives a big advantage.

I have also seen two types of minmaxer who don't cause problems:
- Support minmaxer. They aren't directly killing enemies, just helping the rest of the party kill them through heals, buffs, etc. Sure, you have to make the encounters harder, but other players don't feel like the support PC is outshining their PCs in a fight.

- The suboptimal minmaxer. They pick a concept for their character that looks weak. Then they minmax the fuck out of it. Normally the end result is a character about as powerful as any other PC. Occasionally they get unlucky and the concept is actually decent, leading to a PC stronger than the rest of the party.

First, explain to him the basics of why power gaming is bad. If this doesn't convince him to stop you should probably not play with him, but since you will anyway:

The way to stop people from power gaming is to take away the value of what they are doing. So, if what they want is to be the best at dealing damage and killing things, you make that irrelevant. Make all enemies either minions with 1 hit point, or bosses who have to be killed by doing specific actions, puzzle type bosses like in video games, where damage output is meaningless.

If they want to make a character who cannot be hit by attacks and show off their giant armor class penis, stop attacking them. NEVER once roll an attack against them. Or alternately, make all attacks auto-hit, but the first one will make them much crazier and be a lot more hilarious.

Remember that you control everything. Being the game master is more than just deciding which stat blocks you use. You can change the entire reality of the game to make what they are trying to achieve irrelevant. And you can mention this occasionally, just say it calmly when they bring it up, that it is their fault this is happening. When they complain that they never get to do damage, just say, "Well, you do so much damage, I had to make damage irrelevant or the game wouldn't be fun or fair for anyone else."

If this still does not get through to them, keep it up until it stops being fun and then stop playing with that person because they are not ever going to stop being a pain in the ass.

This is the most passive-aggressive shit I read in a long while. Wow.

>First, explain to him the basics of why power gaming is bad.
But it isn't, you're just a retarded That Guy.

Na man. This stuff thens to rot games. I had it happen to me. Maybe Jonney PG isnt trying to be an ass, but players will start feeling shitty when they overshadowed in everything.
Ever played a video game where someone is on a whole another level as you are. Its just dull.
It sounds like you may be too passive to be a good Gm
Powergamer can happen in any setting with any amount of crunch.

Wont the Powergamer just be annoyed that the non powergamers where not up for the task.
Or really, its a non powergamer holding said lever while the powergamer dos the work. So the npg is even more out of the game then before

PG isnt bad. Its bad when there is only one person in the group thats doing it. I joined a pf game where everyone was a werewolf angel, vampire, twin shield user.
I hated it
really hated it.
but these guys and girls in 30-50's enjoy this powergaming bullcrap.
So im like hey throw me a maxed out build and ill play along for a time being. It was an experience I wouldn't want to repeat but it showed me what I enjoy from games.

Dont be a piece of poo. If anything I would do this but the other way around.

>WOW Jonney. Your attacks are so godly you just cleave though the whole lot of them. Body parts are flying so fast that this guys arm knocks this guy off the roof.
>Super Jonney, their attacks just ping off your chest. This one guy runs up to you and SLAMS his dagger into your back. The blade snaps off and gos sailing up. He watches it go meeting your eyes. He is fixed to the spot, while that blade is still falling. How do you respond.

>Powergamer can happen in any setting with any amount of crunch.
Yeah, and you can burn anything if you get it hot enough, but gasoline is a hell of alot more flammable than asbestos. Some systems encourage players to be powergaming assholes and study the rules autistically, and some make it easy for everyone to be on a similar page and power level without much effort. Some games are fun, and some games are DnD shit.

Clearly you have't played Rifts or WoD ever in your life.

Moron.

That literally has no fucking bearing whatsoever on that user, or ANY of the anons in this thread who are telling OP to play literally ANYTHING besides DnD because OP's problem is powergaming and DnD is literally built to encourage powergaming.

Are you baiting, retarded, a DnD defender drone, or did you just accidentally post your reply in the wrong topic?

Moron.

>Powergamer can happen in any setting with any amount of crunch.
Yes, they can.

But the damage a powergamer can do varies between systems. The smaller the gap between the powergamer and everyone else, the less of a problem the powergamer is.

Um... nobody mentioned Rifts or WoD at all in this entire thread. Is there a point to mentioning them, or are you just pulling the "there's something worse than my pet system so my pet system is great" card out of your ass. Moron.

>Wont the Powergamer just be annoyed that the non powergamers where not up for the task.
Not if they play it smart and the encounter is ended not in mass bloodshed but by a much more fun chase-scene. (Be it the enemy chasing them or them chasing the enemy)

>Or really, its a non powergamer holding said lever while the powergamer dos the work
Then there might be the problem that an NPC as powerful as the PC trying to switch the lever contests this and does not allow the player to open the case holding the macguffin. Either way, the encounter will turn more interesting than when it's just the powergamer wailing on the enemies.

No, I'm pointing out there are other games with even worse powergaming design than D&D and that people who just blame it all on D&D are ignorant morons who don't actually play games at all, because if they did, they wouldn't just be saying "don't play D&D, play THIS, or THIS, and you won't have these issues". But they don't do that because they're too fucking stupid to realize all they're doing is saying "play anything but D&D and you'll be just fine" when there are even worse trap option games out there than D&D.

At least suggest a game to play, like FATE, GURPS, Basic PRG, Runequest, or something where he won't actually HAVE this fucking problem that everyone in the thread blames solely on D&D.

Well no. Its the player who isnt fitting into the group. If they guy gos and plays in any other setting its going to be the same
SHOOT he could play fate:acc and all his actions resolve around being forceful.
>I forcefully threaten the guy so thats a +5 to my roll.
>I forcefully charge them +5 to my roll
>I forcefully pull that rope. I don't have a stunt for it, but my im a strongman att can make me spend a fate point so thats a +3 with a reroll or a +5
>Im so goodlooking as my trouble that everyone is always looking at me making it hard for everyone to stealth.

Even my precious d6 open can be played like that.
>Knowledge skills are for the weak!

>Get told not to play DnD because it's super crunchy and encourages power-gaming
>Try another game that's super crunchy and encourages power gaming
>Be too stupid to realize these are the exact same problems DnD, the topic of this thread, had and try something else.

Please, I have a little more faith in OP than that. It's not hard to put 2 and 2 together and go "hey this new thing looks like it has the same problems as the last thing I hated, maybe I should direct my search elsewhere."

>FATE, GURPS, Basic PRG, d6 open Runequest.

yep all good games
[spoilers] I dont even know why im shilling so hard. I put in as a name as a joke once and its never stopped. I need help. Someone please [/spoilers]

So yeah, basically playing the "dnd is innocent because worse games exist" card. You could have just come out and said that.

That's like saying Call of Duty is a great game because Duke Nukem forever exists. Why ever play other games when there's the slim possibility you'll accidently take a look at something worse then keep playing it anyway for some reason?

Not once did I say D&D was innocent. I DID call out you faggots for not suggesting good games and instead letting him stumble around and possibly into even worse games.

D&D is not the worst system I've seen for powergaming problems.

I forget its name, but the worst system I've seen had the following:
> During creation you chose a class. That affected what magic powers you had
> One class had powers that became better as your dex improved. The other classes didn't.
> Combat order worked with characters declaring actions from lowest initiative to highest, then resolving from highest to lowest. With initiative being rerolled each round.
> End result that my highest possible initiative roll was lower than the lowest possible on the two characters with dex based magic.
> If we got enemies around my initiative, the two dex magic PCs killed them easily.
> If we got enemies around their initiative, I couldn't do anything. If I declared that I was going defensive, nobody would even try to attack me. If I tried to attack my target would go defensive and someone else would try to attack me. So I had to choose between going defensive (at a penalty because I'm changing my declared action) or take the hit, take penalties to all my rolls until healed, then try to attack a fully defensive target who started off with high dex. Either way, I wasn't likely to hit.

Every single combat went that way. Tracking initiative was annoying enough, even with the GM having a program on his laptop to handle initiative rolls, that I don't blame him for never trying to outnumber us.

>TFW shit like this makes me unironically believe "popcorn" or "bouncing" initiative systems are the best initiative systems on the planet.

(One person moves first then has to pass initiative to someone on the other "team". After this enemy has moved, it has to pass initiative back to someone on the player's team who hasn't moved yet, ect.)

>TFW you forget to post an image for TFW

Bouncing initiative is fun with aggro-draw or defensively-based team powers, because it gives a team the ability to protect someone who's getting focus-fire'd. You can't have one side spend all their offensive power on one target and kill them before they can react, because only one target from either side can make a move before the other team gets to respond.

The RP portion of RPG is the best way to curb power gamers. Alot of times, they are doing it to show off and be center of attention. But the flip side to this is that they are almost always a shit fucking roleplayer. Show them that powers are only a small portion of the game. Example I had from a game I ran a while ago:
>friends want to play, ask me to DM
>they invite a new guy. I know him only as the guy who autisticly drones on about teirs in smash bros and how he reads online guides all day for the best way to win games
>pic related
>game day comes for character gen and he says he already rolled his, even though I said point buy
>he's already bragging about this broken ranged character he has
>game starts and he's bullying other players with stats
>he's causing everyplace to have haste, 2 attacks, and inflated stats, and all around making fights trivial for him, but deadly for everyone else
>pretty much just murderhobos, and then teleport away and leaves the others to deal with the fallout
>finally had enough, send out the wench
>he's is literally tripping over his words, making a complete retard of himself
>laughing stock of the whole group
>tries to just kill anyone who talks to him, group sees it and is disgusted with him
>he PM's me that this is bullshit, he shouldn't have to be talking so much
>I try and do the manly thing and talk about what he wants in the game and if he knows he's power gaming
>tells me to fuck myself, and if the isn't allowed to exploit the system, then he's out
>tell him to enjoy the rest of his day

>bouncing
Ooo... sounds like an interesting read . What system is it?
Thats so much worse then the ones who do it just for fun. Really you should have got him to change his stats to point buy.

His 3 18's he rolled were changed to point buy, I just forgot to add the greentext tgat he made a huge fit about "amputation his class" because he couldn't have int,wis,and cha at max score because "I got really lucky! I swear I can take a screen shot of the dice roller later and prove I rolled these", even though I said no rolling.

Rolemaster.

The fact that people can powergame D&D more easily has nothing to do with its design and everything to do with its popularity. A lot of players have solved D&D because they play it so much. This lets them go into a campaign with predetermined knowledge of the dominant strategy, and it also makes them want more and more splat material and complexity because they've become blind to the complexity that's already there. Give those same players a new system, even if it's not a particularly good system, and suddenly they get scared and confused. Their strategies are no longer dominant, if they're even still usable. Even simple rules fluster them because they haven't been practicing with them for years. The basics are more than enough to keep them occupied as they put their minds to a brand new challenge. Again, this doesn't mean it's bad to play D&D. It means it's bad to run a game that your players know too well.

>The fact that people can powergame D&D more easily has nothing to do with its design and everything to do with its popularity.

i don't believe so.
i really think you are wrong.
i think it's mostly due to the games themselves.

i ended up optimizing way more for pathfinder than for 5e and yet i read articles about how to optimize characters for both games.And in both games i had very little idea about how to use a dominant strategy at first, yet i did go for it.They are both popular.

pathfinder, like D&D 3.5, is a game that strongly encourage you to build a better character by introducing you to a lot of modular options strongly uncorrelated with the character flavor and backstory.
pathfinder is filled with options, redundant options, comboes,hidden options, and, worst of them all, bad options that end up cursing anyone who chooses them.
5e offers you less choices and they are mostly balanced against each other, so when the new player picks options "because it sounds cool" it actually ends up making his character do 5% less damage rather than making it unplayable.
more importantly, due to more limited daily spells and how skill points work, if you make a good character you won't completely steal the scene to someone else.
wizard in pathfinder D&D 3.5 can just choose to be better than someone else at their job.

>The fact that people can powergame D&D more easily has nothing to do with its design and everything to do with its popularity.
It has plenty to do with D&D's design. An easy way of demonstrating this is to compare different editions of D&D. Can you powergame AD&D? Sure, but unless using optional rules, you can't BREAK the game. Can you make a gamebreaking build in 4e? I'm not intimately familiar with 4e myself(never gotten a chance to play it, though I would like to try), but everything I've read says no. Meanwhile, 3.5 is so easily broken that you can do it by accident just by picking cool looking options(hey, want to play a shapeshifter who has a bear companion?). FFG's WH40k line isn't nearly as popular as D&D, but everyone familiar with them knows that tech priests and (lategame) psykers tend to be the most powerful options unless you're playing Black Crusade, in which case chaos marines are operating on a whole different level when it comes to combat.

4e is a special case. Optimizing doesn't break the game, but it is very much expected. Everyone is supposed to be optimizing all the time - both in terms of choosing feats and powers and in terms of equipment. The game is built under the assumption that everyone will be optimized, and it breaks down if everyone just picks whatever sounds cool. You have to just know that that +3 weapon with a really cool bonus effect is trash to be sold or smelted the instant you get a plain +4 weapon. So it's kind of the inverse of the case with 3.5 where the game is probably fine if you don't optimize and broken if you do.

There are several systems that can easily put a stop to this.

>Apocalypse World
Constantly rolling your best stat? Enjoy never marking experience and getting fucked over by the consequences even on a 10+.

>Tenra Bansho Zero
Constantly trying to game the mechanics? Enjoy never getting any Kiai and easily being outpaced by even the weakest member of the group.

>Marvel Heroic Roleplaying
Constantly using your best move? Enjoy never getting any PP and being the most boring guy around.

design interesting encounters based around their strengths

>and it breaks down if everyone just picks whatever sounds cool
No, it still works perfectly fine if everyone just picks whatever sounds cool, unless they have one of a few very specific combinations of bad tastes. Such as all of them being VtM/VtR fans and wanting to play vampires.

You need to pick whatever makes your attack bonus as high as it can possibly be, because even the minions are designed to have highly optimized characters miss them half the time. If you're less than highly optimized, an already slow combat system becomes absolutely glacial. Some feats are traps and some are such taxes that DMs have to hand them out for free or else make the players mad.

>inb4 MM3 math, I'm assuming that you're using that already, though that's certainly not a given.

The books themselves point out that you should put your highest score in your primary stat, and beyond that the gap between optimized and not optimized is nowhere near as big as you make it sound, especially in Heroic. I'll concede that, come Paragon and Epic, the little things can add up to something a little more noticeable, but it's still not the catastrophe you make it out to be.