Dungeons and Dragons Power Balance Issues
Vložit
- čas přidán 19. 06. 2024
- A lot of people complain about power balance and OP characters in Dungeons and Dragons and Roleplaying games, so I'll throw in my 10 cents on the issue. I also talk about a Paladin who would complain all the time.
- Hry
Allow me to save you from your revelation about Legolas and Gimli:
LOTR is a campaign that started with four players, the hobbits. Gandalf is an NPC guide to help new players get through the first adventures. Arriving at the inn where they meet Strider is when they pick up a new player who's playing baby's first edgy PC. When they get to the formation of the Fellowship, two of the previous players had to drop out, but two new players (Legolas and Gimli) join the group.
These two are old hands, and probably friends of the GM. They know that the newbies have had a great time and built a solid rapport between their characters, so instead of trying to worm their way into the core of the Fellowship storyline, they deliberately pick characters who do the same thing (kill baddies) but from two competing races, and decide collectively that their characters are going to have a rivalry arc which will eventually end in them being friends, as a symbolic statement at the end of the story.
That's why Legolas does all his trick shooting and sliding down stairs on a shield- he's really rules-smart and has built his character to be able do do cool shit like that, while Gimli's player optimised for raw numerical offence and defence. TL;DR: yes they were both powergamers, but they were also the *best* roleplayers in the campaign, as they made sure their rivalry added to the campaign without taking away the focus of the original story.
Fucking amazing comment!
ingenious
Give this poster a cookie.
Look up DM of the rings, basically this idea
This deserves more likes
I'm 6'2" and my players consistently make 6'3" characters
this is great
Power move
Ha
I have a guy in my party who often tajes goliath and always says:And Im 8 ft tall! And then they find some armor and he wants to take it...
Me:well, you cant wear the armor, its too small
Him:Thats stupid, why should it be so small?
Me: you always said how much taller you are than everyone else. Deal with it
Big Brain, make a shorter character to make you look better IRL
Someone I GMed for specically asked to roll stats with 1d20, and ended up with 21 strength, 2 intelligence and the rest mediocre. The Roleplay from this character was legendary
That style of character creation is perfect for a "silly" game. My GM has us roll 1d20 for each stat, we choose which stat a number goes to, and then we can tweak the numbers by reallocating points. There is a limit to tweaking though, no going past 20, you can only move points x amount of times, etc. The characters that came out of that were actually quite compelling.
I was in a silly one-shot where everyone did that, but you had to roll stats in order. My highest was a 13 in charisma, lowest a 1 in constitution
Ryan Lybbert
How did your character survive with a -5 Con mod?!
@@eddiemate I didn't. I was one shot by a trap with a fairly low DC and damage, as I only had 3 HP
Spirt like
I ran a game once where everyone tried to be the most useless member of the party. It was..odd.
I had an NPC in a game called Randohr Bluntfoot a Dwarven rogue that was super loud and didn't realize it. After I explainedthe. concept f him one of my players tore the character sheet of his dragon born cleric in half and asked me to erase NPC under where it said player and write his name instead...
Oh my god the TALL party! I'm playing in that one (well the same idea): I'm playing as a Tiefling who looks terrifying but just wants people to like him (he talks with the Big Scary Voice and everything) so the DM said I could be extra tall (6'6") just to sell it. The Paladin found out and changed his race a couple hours before we started to dragonborn just so he could be 6'8". THEN our wizard died when we were level 4 (in an obvious suicidal character way), and became a dragonborn Sorcerer, and was 6'11". Lastly, our monk later changed their character (because they were bored of being a weird social outcast orphan), and became a 7'4" Goliath Warlock. My 'ultra intimidating but nice' Tiefling became the shortest party member in 4 sessions.
Oh lord... Yeah... I don’t know what the deal is with height contests, especially when you can’t even see your character and it doesn’t change anything.
@@justseffstuff3308 C'mon man. You know what they say about guys that role play tall guys, right?
@@Pandaman64 |----|
I actually made my human cleric short (like 2 inches taller than being a small category), since my intent was to make her a bubbly ball of happiness (because most, if not all, short women I know are adorable balls of happiness). I never actually followed through with making her happy and such, so she was just a shortie.
Which made it hilarious once we realized that she was the defacto tank that wades into front line melee combat to protect all of the arcane casters and the Archer.
Due to a horribly failed solo mission that caused many direct and indirect innocent casualties (Direct casualties were from servants deaths when the kitchen floor collapsed, due to the cleric accidentally setting the basement on fire. Indirect casualties were from citizens dying from the magic plague after she accidentally burned down the mansion without retrieving the magic maguffin that would cure people immediately, rather than relying on the immune system), and the recent death of her deity, my poor little cleric is now a pile of guilt, PTSD, and depression.
She's still short.
time to reroll as the shortest halfling and ask your gm to set your next adventure in a halfling city! Queue the big scary characters having to squat uncomfortably in a cheery little tavern while the halfling talks to people and the lady/male halflings NPCs swoon over how short he/she is.
I've had characters that did tons of damage and just wanted to the the higher damage dealer. They didn't argue but kept one upping one another. That all ended when our Dragonborn fighter (who wasn't one of the two) suplexed a fire giant off a bridge......
What happened
@@meocu5434 They probably learned a lesson that damage isn't everything. There are other ways to be cool.
In game, stupid
This is my favorite exchange ever.
@@meocu5434 the Dragonborn fighter suplexed a fire giant off a bridge
"Even in single player video games, you still have to balance the game"
I think Just Cause would disagree
Thats just not true. Sure in Just Cause you are op but you can also do alot of cool and funny shit. If you would be op and played a game like dark souls it would be lame. And if you would die doing anything in JC it wouldn't be half as much fun.
Bernd Arndt I mean in Skyrim I do glitches to make myself immortal to do achievements and just kill whole cites for fun
@@DunkTasticMan you are the traditional BBEG who occasionaly helps due to being trapped in a world for eons, forced to relive the same events over and over again.
I've had games where a character felt really underpowered compared to the rest of the group. Yeah, it's co-op, so your party mates' strengths are your strengths, and taking joy in them pulling off cool stuff is important. But feeling like dead weight with nothing to contribute does suck, and I don't think that you have to be an unpleasant player to not like being in that position. Oh, and height story. The campaign our group is currently running we're all 11 (or our race's equivalent of 11), and we have a dragonborn the size of a 14-15 year old, a furbolg the size of an adult, and then a 2.5ft kobold and a 2ft gnome. A lot of carrying happens...
The real question is, why is that gnome at adult size?
@@AGrumpyPanda unusually large gnome?
@@AGrumpyPanda I thought the real question was how that gnome and kobold can stand being in the same party...
@@AGrumpyPanda Not sure which edition you're using but I'm fairly certain gnomes are about 3 - 4ft in 5e so... not adult at all
@@SooyoungFTW Gnomes have always been about 3-3.5 feet tall.
I'm sensing a lot of hostility towards a certain person...
Is it bad?
That's a glorious username you've got there.
I don’t get who you’re talking about
@@hostiusasinhostilityhostil7853 LMAO WAIT I FORGET WHAT WAS MY USERNAME-
4:00
My friend was a Paladin and a whiner...and our GM gave him a magic hammer to get him to shut up about not having a magic item (joke is: the hammer actually did nothing but glowed slightly and we never found out til game ended)
IamtheJiminator! LOL. That's awesome!
Best fucking DM
One person in my party bought a magic dagger. What was magic about it?........ It glowed. Biggest. Ripoff. Eeever
I had a magic dagger that spoke whenever it wanted and would say random shit depending on the roll
hey he atleast looked gud
"I also have the power to look into the future only better than Kyle." Eric Cartman
One of our players (who has now left both of our campaigns he was in) was really a master at putting together maxed out character builds. And rules haggling his way into getting his way when he misinterpreted rules, but that's another issue. It really started to not be fun as other players when you can only do 1/4 the damage on your 30-second turn as the rogue can on his 5-minute turn.
Still, it was clear that the guy was crucial to the party winning in the DM's difficult encounters. When my wizard hit 5th level, I made a decision. The game was unfriendly to all my offensive magic, so I decided I'd instead Haste our rogue and take him from the stratosphere into the mesosphere in every encounter. And it worked. I became pure support for one guy. Doing what I could for the good of the party. Then I got 4th level spells and could be a little more independent. (4th level is the golden zone of D&D spells if you ask me.) I started Polymorphing and Banishing enemies myself (Divination wizard with low portent roles is awesome). The rogue was not so happy I wasn't hasting him anymore.
In a recent encounter (now we're in double-digit levels), I decided that Hasting the rogue was the best option again...until the enemy tried to escape, and I needed to trap it in a Wall of Force. I knew this would be bad, and it was. Because I dropped concentration, the rogue lost Haste which meant he also lost a turn from temporary exhaustion. I never heard the end of it. It was like I'd committed a personal sin against him. I took Haste out of my prepared spells after that.
This was one of the last straws before we were tired of playing with him. I also learned after he left that the DM had been scaling our encounters into the realm of superdeath to try to compensate for the absurdly powerful rogue.
I guess the lesson here is don't buff the alpha gamer, because you can't take it back. Whether it's with spells like Haste or giving them too many magical items or giving them rules exceptions, they only want to go higher and higher, and the ENTIRE TABLE will suffer for them being nerfed or passed over for some boon.
When you kick them out, use their character as a villain or an NPC. Should feel quite cathartic.
Best way to shut up a guy like that? Portent then power word Kill...
You'll never see someone more lost for words than that.
I’m in a group with an overpowered player, he’s not an alpha gamer, the DM just gave him some overpowered magic items. And at 14th level is doing about 100dmg a turn( he’s a bard) while every one else does about half that. (Including the Wizard)I’m not complaining, he’s saved our asses more times than I can count, but it’s just annoying when he always gets the kill. And since my guy is only really good at combat it makes me feel like dead weight.
@@___meph___4547 The problem is whiny Alphas... ya know what, let's just call them Omegas, because they're trying too hard to be cool and the end of fun for everyone else, possibly even the game too...
.
The biggest problem with Omegas is they're not part of the party vs GM dynamic of the fights. They want to dominate every encounter, even if it's against one of the party members who doesn't want to go along with whatever they're doing. It's basically them vs the GM *and* the party, which is no good in what is generally a cooperative game.
Bad offensive magic at spell level 3?
Did you play a mage that couldn't cast fireball?
There is a Druid In my party with a magical scroll that can ascend anybody who reads it to godliness, but it is a dead language that requires a lot of knowledge to learn. What the dm forgot, was that my character could learn comprehend languages, a level 1 spell
Xander Searcy ohhhh
Xander Searcy
What happened next?
But wait....its a magical scroll with magic words godliness .....Comprehend language says and I quote. "Magical writing cannot be read, though the spell reveals that it is magical."
Read magic is also a 1st level spell and allows you to read and cast a magic scroll without having to know it’s language.
@@jesternario Read magic does not invoke the magic on the scroll or books though unless it's a curse
i once played played a Wizard who forwent all other spells in order to focus entirely on maximizing the power of his magic missile. good times.
So stuff like bestow curse + MM? cool
i did a similar thing, went with an evocation wizard and built/bought/found a bunch of wands of magic missile, and when he hit 10th lvl the MMs were dealing upwards of 90 dmg/ shot and he had 5 wands, with the lucky feat losing one even after using it at max charges was really hard, so his spellbook was mostly geared towards utility, with control abilities, AOEs and buffs because when it came to sigle target dmg nothing even came close to the sheer dmg output of those things and then he got 2 lvls in fighter for the small heal of SW and of course action surge to bump that up to 180 dmg excluding the simulacrum doing the same thing, We called it the Dakka wizard build.
Here's a story for you guys from me as a newb (Still am)
I was joining a campaign halfway through, level 1 and no magic items. I asked, "Hey, can I get at least one so it can be somewhat fair?"
The gm gave me a flexible metal staff that can talk. It was also indestructible (This comes in later)
Later in the game, we were fighting a lich in a flat plain. It casts antigravity for 50 ft in the air, and our party goes STRAIGHT UP.
After the spell wears off, I roll to use my staff to help break my fall. I roll a nat 20. I use the STAFF AS A CATAPULT AND LAUNCH MYSELF AT THE LICH'S FACE.
Me using myself as a projectile was the most damaging attack against the lich and I took no damage.
Iconhawk I wish I had a good GM
LV 1...Lich...somethings odd...
@@J4ckC4ver Later in the game .... I assume a few level-ups had happened. :-)
Archer530 Gaming Best thing you can do is become the gm and be good to your players, otherwise, you’re stuck with who your gm is and you’re at their mercy
(Thunderous Applause)
When I started dming I had a good chunk of player experience under my belt. To avoid the dreaded powerplay scenario I told all of my players that their characters should at least have one flaw and that a fun character is better then a good character. So now I have a cleric who has a massive sweet tooth and a monk that is almost brain dead (he rolled a 3 during stats rolling).
Hilarious. I had an idea for a character with a bad weakness.
Those are not flaws. I have a drunken master who is drunk all the time.
Character flaws are interesting.. the flaws should be something about the character's behavior. Something that they will or won't do almost no matter what (unless something is forcing them or other players are trying very hard to convince them not to.. or some other thing in the evolving story changed progressed their character).
It forces you to remember that YOU aren't your character. YOU might know it's stupid to do x,y,z and really effective to do a,b,c.. but your character might not know or behave that way. If you set the expectations at the beginning that players would obey their character's descriptions.. including their flaws, it can help players remember this.
I like the trope of being hopelessly curious about everything.
"Hey, I narrowly avoided that trap! but... how does it work?...."
*Wizard uses detect magic*: "Wait! I sense some unusual magic around that door!"
Curious Character: "Oh!? I wonder what it does!"
Obviously, you can't have them throwing themselves off cliffs and into traps without any form of caution at every chance.. but the flaw can be very fun and interesting.
I have a 20 STR, 32-year-old character with the mind of an 8 year old.
...He's the only Good-aligned character in the party, and so tries to be the voice of morality.
To roll a three, wouldn’t you have to roll all ones on the d6s?
I had a bad power gamer in one of my campaigns and because I was the only one who had a Neutral Evil character, at one point I had literally every other player begging me to kill him but he was much stronger than me so everyone just kept helping me up my stats by buying me weapons and stuff just so I could kill him and this made him really mad so at one point he tried to kill me and for some reason he decided to do this near a cliff side so I just pushed him off and once he died everyone cheered and shouted "DOWN WITH THE TYRANT" and I'm like "oh my gog guys, he's right here, that's super rude"
Arcadia _
DOWN WITH THE TRYANT!
I tried to do that on Pathfinder. It went poorly and the only reason I escaped was because my character did his shenanigans in secret. The player knew it was me but her character didn't.
I had a serious powergamer in Pathfinder. He was new, like me. Yet, just because I love the class and want to master it so badly, I played an Earth Kineticist, he played a Magus (With the archetype that allowed him to become a spontaneous caster). He DID NOT like the fact that I did around 30-50 damage per hit, and the fact I get multiple attacks since the Kinetic Blast counts as a weapon. He constantly argued with me about how it wasn't even legal and tried strong arming me into thinking it's a weak class. He tried to get me the change my class to something weaker, but I wouldn't have it. Eventually, one experienced player came along and wouldn't accept that bullshit. Once he was gone, the game got much more fun and entertaining.
I once played a lv5 NE Barbarian lv 1 stonelord in a group of LG Paladins and a fighter. They were all bound that they wanted me dead and they each wanted the credit for it. So they agreed they’d have to do so Solo. The DM tried to counter this by giving me free Stalwart Defense, Adamantine Skin, +2 Con and Str. Basically, the DM forced me to be OP to compensate for my weird party of first time players (Who I was SUPPOSED to be mentoring xD)
This is a fun story
I wish I had a group that all wanted to be "the tall one" your description had me in tears and the fun I could have with that party in game.
NiLowther is Warlock different in 5e from 3.5e? I love Eldritch blast, endless usage, little defense against it.
NiLowther Jeez. I just wish I had a group.
HoloW _ same lol. (No my siblings and dad don’t count)
i'd normally choose to be the shortest one but if i was in a group trying to do the same would be funny
Reskin the hill giants as commoners and have a Borrowers campaign!
As far as power balance, I think D&D has two problems: everyone wants to be effective in combat, and it used to be far less balanced than it is now (prior to 4e and 5e).
5e has a specific problem: dealing damage is king.
- Save or suck spells are very unlikely to land compared to previous editions (even a creature with no bonus to that saving throw has about a 35% chance to break Hold Person each round), and powerful creatures can break them for free with legendary resistance.
- Healing spells are far less effective than damaging ones by design (unless bonus cast on an incapacitated ally).
- Buffs are fine, but are seldom as useful as dropping a fireball or similar.
- Most powerful non-damage spells, such as Fly or Invisibility, have severe limitations in how creatively they can be used. A lot of that comes from the Concentration mechanic - no more flying through the dungeon as an invisible gas cloud unless you have multiple casters cooperating.
As I said, damage is king. Beating the enemy to death with a magical hammer always works. So the question becomes: who deals damage the most effectively? Every player wants to be that guy. And, if one of your players brought something really good, like a Hexblade with devil's sight and agonizing blast, you can't reasonably stop him from doing damage without knocking him out of the fight.
Some classes just have better tools for dealing and avoiding damage than others. This is why barbarians are often regarded as a stronger class than fighters in 5e - better damage and damage resistance. The boring but effective dragon sorcerer is more useful than the fun but unpredictable wild magic sorcerer. And so on.
The DM can do something about this. Problems that have more than one solution are a good start, especially if some of those solutions don't involve combat. Enemies with very high resistances but specific weaknesses are great to showcase a particular character or force players to fight creatively. But players themselves can't fix the problem, and DMs often don't know the problem even exists.
I like concentration not eating up an action like it did in 3rd ed, but hate how many spells use concentration for their duration, because you can only ever have one going on and many of these spells had regular durations in previous editions.
Arguably control is king, forcecage is one of the best spells in the game for a reason, and hypnotic pattern is arguably better than fireball at 5th level, and definitely better once you get past 7th level or so
@InfernosReaper
I hate that too.
Needs a feat to increase concentrations.
The mechanics in a cooperative board game differ from RPGs in one important point:
Board games are stacked against the players so hard every player is important to winning. Even if you never get to use your character's special abilities, you have contributed to the solution and probably have done a few awesome things.
This is different in RPGs where it is possible your character ends up basically useless, because the other characters are better at your field of expertise. Nothing kills investment in a game faster than the game telling you that you do not need to be there.
There is also a very different aspect : time.
A board game is one game. At the end, everything is scrapped. Victory or loss, technically it's the same. There is rarely character developpement moral decision, there is only subtle interpretation. The game is known, the aim at the beginning is clear and shared by all player. And finally, most of the time you cannot win alone, so there is no interest in doing so.
RPG are different in the sense that you invest far more time and personnal opinion on them. Each decision can have a long lasting impact, taht annoy you for several months. poeple are far more concerned with what is happening in the game. Losing feel like a true loss as you cannot hjust start again : it will be different character, a different story etc.
Yeah, I like seeing people like you, who 'get it', why having an approximation of balance, having different classes and features and spells be closer to each other is important. Heck, even having multiple spell casters that are the same have an issue with being able to contribute, beyond just game balance. If one spellcaster casts a spell that is powerful enough to basically put a combat encounter or other challenge in the bag, then even if the other character is a spellcaster who has spells that are just as powerful, they still aren't needed, and can't contribute much other than finishing up the already basically won encounter.
And you can just give that player plot hooks or items to make them stronger, or have them tweak their character
@@punishedwhispers1218 What does a plot hook have to do with that?
@@schwarzerritter5724 They could be infected with Lycanthropy or are teaming with draconic energy after getting hit dead on with a breathe weapon, any number of things
The worst ones are the ones that make the super-powerful characters, *and then chew out the rest of the party* because some of us like roleplaying more than pouring over stat blocks :/ I mean, if that's your thing, enjoy your thing. But don't shit all over everyone else's thing, especially if the person in question genuinely doesn't mind being weaker.
I want to make a sorcerer that tries to be diplomatic but cant really hide is destructive nature from those close to him, and by destructive I mean seeing his enemies crushed, burnt, electrocuted and all-round made dead with little regard to inanimate surroundings
To avoid this problem, ask the table one question: "Y'all fans of Critical Role?" That's how you can tell whether you're dealing with players who enjoy role play (If they answer "Yes") or maybe more of The Old Guard (If they answer "eh" or "no" or "What's that?")
My Brother-in-law runs two campaigns. As a 3rd~4th Edition player, I naturally made a powergamey character who was all about combat, but that didn't mesh well with a group who formed due to mutual love of Critical Role, so I dropped the group.
I came back to the second game with a silly, stupid feral Triton shark druid girl with mediocre stats who occasionally does something ill-advised and is more about character. She works WAY better in the group dynamic.
@@Kohdok That's why I made a Forge Cleric in 5th and love it: you have a lot of starting points for a strong characterization AND you are a monster in combat.
Of course, I believe I've kinda screwed it up making my character a cautious and methodical artisan/scholar, while the rest of the party is made of goofballs, so I will be dragged into whatever crazy plan they have in mind, but still...
I will admit I want my characters to be super powerfull in at 1 stat. Besides that I don't care that much.
@@xthor86 when I make a character I prefer to have the 1 super powerful stat be the top stat the class I'm gonna use requires but if I can get the other 2 stats pretty high then It would work better but as I am a cautious type player I usually play classes like rogues and such that have a 20 Dex, 18 con and 17 wis while I have like a 13 Str, 15 Int and 10 Wis (unless I role like a god and get 18 for all 6) but that is nothing compared to a character someone I know made who became the actual God of Dragons and kicked another god off his throne for having the same name as him but before he got that far He had a homebrew weapon that just made him slaughter a lvl 19 at lvl 3 course it was a dream sequence that gave half XP but he just took it down in 1 hit with the Paladin's Overwhelming Strike dealing 12 D20 damage (the base damage was 4 D 20 for the specific weapon which was a 4 pronged lightsaber) and a critical 20 roll. I was happy when that campaign ended.
Never had a tallboye complex but I often have players who, obnoxiously, desperately want to be "the cool one." So they build their character thinking they'll play a Jack Sparrow or Tyrion Lannister character, never stopping to think that the reason they like those characters so much is that the script is WRITTEN to make them look cool, not improvized with a table of people who would probably also like their character to be the clever, or cool, or special one. Nobody else really cares about your desire to always have a witty one-liner or to perpetually win in a battle of wits and isn't planning their actions around setting you up to deliver them: that's what you don't have in common with your favorite characters.
As a general rule, if you build your characrters based around how others will perceive you instead of how you're gonna play them, you are cheating yourself out of a good time.
My character frequently cracks dry jokes, especially when no one else finds it funny. As the Int 5 (in edge of the empire, which is comparable to 18 int in D20 systems.) character my character is frequently the planner and situation solver. Just he has a pressence of 10 and a willpower of effectively six, so he's not the sharpest spoken tool in the box, nor the most composed. Thus it can often be an advantage to a character that isn't inherently charismatic, but often has a lot to say.
That’s... /ridiculously/ good advice. Thank you.
I still remember the time when one of my characters died so I was allowed to let my new one enter any way I wanted to.
Cue the players entering a room in the abandoned house they were searching for supplies. There was a few bookshelf, nothing of much value visible. A desk though, was standing in the middle of the room and a weird muffled sound coming from underneath. Suspicious of any sort of trap they slowly sneak towards the table, only to find a scrawny long haired man with glasses tied up and gagged underneath it.
He was too useless for the marauders, so he was left for dead tied up in an abandoned house. Feels bad for lawliet, the socially awkward druggie pianist assassin.
My buddies tend to play by allowing everyone, including NPC's to have enough time to think of responses. If you want a cool character it really shouldn't be a problem, you might just need to think of what a 'cool' thing to say in that situation is, and sometimes that takes time, eventually you'll grow to know what your own character would say in most situations.
The GM is so powerful, he even works under water!
It actually happened to me, where I felt like someone else did everything my character did but better.
I played an early UA Artificer Gunsmith and a friend played an Arcane Archer. Since I had a gun, the GM said there was an ancient civilization my character researched so I had magitech stuff others didn't, and his character was an ancestor of that civilization, so he had a gun as well.
Since Gunsmiths basically only had class features that make them shoot the gun good, the arcane archer basically did that plus all other kinds of things I could not content with. Only leg up I had as an artificer was having magic items. As our GM thought about it, he realized how my character totally feels redundant and underpowered next to this arcane archer dude.
I don't know, it sure felt like I couldn't really do much with my cool gun when all my options were basically "You shoot but it does more damage" while he can shoot his gun better, has special shots that do all sorts of things, can shoot faster/more often and on top of this is decent with most weapons, can tank and has more hit points.
This basically killed the campaign because the GM did not know what to do with my character.
I played an Artificer once in a magitech-heavy setting - my solution was to essentially be the group free magic upgrades shop. Artificer + highly available magitech = team kitted out in super good magitech. Someone joked that I could more-or-less be their "power armor mechanic," which gave the idea. I was thinking about a personal power focus at first and am glad I changed strategies, worked out very well.
UA is unbalanced, untested stuff. that's gonna happen if you as a DM allow your players or if your DM allows you as a player to, use that stuff
I only had one game with a complainer... 6 hour games were 3 hours of him complaining... UGH... it wasn't even valid complaints... he was a Human/wizard [trying to soul bind demons], I was a halfling/sorceress, and when I used "charm person" to get information from a captured bandit he accused ME of "slavery" which was illegal in town... and he was "Soul Binding" demons perminently
but demons are evil its okay to bind them
@@objectivityguy5399 . Humans are evil too
I don’t see how someone captured and charmed is close to slavery but ok.
@@eddiemate ehhh they are both kinda like slavery since soul bind forces the demon into servitude against its will and charm is basicly mind controlling someone
roy ben
I’d argue that charm makes them more likely to help the person who charmed them.
ur videos make me appreciate just how reasonable and well-adjusted my gaming group is
That is physically impossible
I know, right?
Same. I've been playing D&D for 25 years and have never had a dysfunctional group - probably because I wouldn't tolerate it for longer than about 30 seconds. I play with people who want everyone to have fun, so we just do whatever we want and it all works out great.
Though, as a DM, I do have difficulties with some players who want to be more fun than other people, but it's never about being "better," "more powerful," or "winning more;" it's more about who can get more of the story to be about them.
sounds like a group I would want to start my TRPG career in.
Same
DM: "I made a maze for my PCs!" Wizard: "I cast Etherealness" *Curb your Enthusiasm starts playing*
Phase spiders: im gona end this mans hole career
In my Rolemaster campaign I had the party looking for a number of artifacts that would help them against the coming waves of the BBEG's minions. I had designed locations to delve that would involve puzzles, riddles, physical challenges... and then one of my players' new characters (That I had thoroughly reviewed and expressly approved!) just disintegrated walls, magically unlocked doors, and exerted his magical will over intelligent barriers. - So I threw a lot of demons at them, and he obliterates them in batches...
Thats where you put your maze into a specialized anti-magic field. I did that with a labyrinth. It blocked anything that involved other plains, or teleportation. Except for the minotaur, it could do that all day. My players had fun with that one.
Maybe don't DM 13th level games if you're not ready to balance your adventure around the abilities PCs get at 13th level.
I just wanna say I appreciate the detail you put into the anvil I absolutely love it
That's what caught my attention, too. I wasn't expecting an accurate London pattern.
Whiners are really bad, but not the worst. And most alpha gamers are tolerable. But the worst person I’ve ever encountered (we’ll call him Jim). Jim used every single book published in 5e to his advantage. When we had to create characters he’d go over each and every book, class, and race to create the most optimized build, to the point of where he was taking advantage of loopholes he created himself, just because nobody would do that kind of thing. After he created his character (it took about three hours on average) he’d have the most optimized spells for the game. And he would make the best move he potentially could.
‘But Kieth’ I hear you say, ‘Wouldn’t it be good to have a person who’d spend hours (though a little annoying) on a character that’d help your team the most in any situation?’ You’d think so, but no. He’d always get about a 30 on his initiative because of his loopholes, so he’d go first in the battle every time. Him doing the optimized turn takes him about 10 minutes to half an hour (not joking). One of the worst parts? The fact that he would do the best move possible every time. What? Your character is grappling the boss? Too bad, I really wanna do an empowered meteor swarm. Sorry you’ll die, but I’ll do like 200 damage so it’s worth it. This would happen all the damn time. He would kill the rest of the team if he had to, just to make a cool move. I’m sure I don’t have to explain why we kicked him out of the group after the fourth campaign in a row that ended in him getting all of us killed doing his ‘cool’ attacks, then dying later because he had no backup.
The term for this is "munchkin"
Also, I would submit that a good gm would have reigned this in from the start. Setting limits and establishing expectations is critical for avoiding this.
As A DM Your DM needs a hard slap to the back of the head Idc what the books say or dont say DM is law and has the right to over rule anything found in any of the books one of the first things you will read in a DM.Guide is this book is a guideline nothing here is set in stone DM has final say on all decisions
@@duburakiba This.
And original poster, can I just ask, how is it that you didn't just take steps to break him where his weaknesses are? Convenient ambushes that target casters first, enemies with abilities to take him out of the fight early, mage slayer teams, or situations he has to roleplay, talk, or cooperatively puzzle solve his way out of instead of blasting? I mean, even at (especially at) high level, there are plenty of mage wreckers out there. That beholder antimagic is no joke.
this was just an example I usually Run High Level Campaigns with a lot of things being immune to Standard Spells Forcing My Casters to think outside the box an encouraging them to do combination attacks and custom spells that require Team work and collaboration and all of my puzzle areas are Indestructible so no just breaking it and moving on and i dont want to break them so much as Teach them that no amount of muckin will ever be as effective as team work
In our party we had a little powergaming competition that ended spectacularly in a fight against a Mindflayer. The Cleric casts blade barrier at the 'flayer's location and the 'flayer counters by levitating above it and also putting itself out of reach of melee attacks. Next action the Cleric responds by summoning a Greater Earth Elemental from the roof of the cavern above the 'flayer and commanding it to "jump" (ie fall) at the 'flayer and have it make a grapple check on the way down. After adding the cumulative damage the 'flayer took from falling, being pushed through a blade barrier and having a Greater Earth Elememtal land on it, we declared the Cleric the winner and got on with the game.
I fail to see how this is powergaming. Nothing about stats or absurd magic items. Just two book spells used creatively. I might question the elemental appearing in the air but it could be valid. This is a clever player.
You will find lots of people with stories of encounters being solved quickly and easily by clever players using spells or skills in unique and imaginative ways. This is awesome.
I do appreciate how you all quickly moved on but I have had many times where a gm will realize a player has outsmarted him and decides to either outright deny a valid action or quickly change the encounter cause the dm wanted a half hour dice melee slug fest. That's annoying.
Right behind you there, Scott. I mean, I've killed fully grown dragons at level 11 by abusing the +20 from Pathfinder's true strike and using a significant portion of my WBL to obtain a magical ballista, a folding boat, and essentially a magical megaphone. Shot the bolt into its' throat, enlarged the boat and basically ripped its' head from its' neck. The DM was pissed, but mainly because he wanted to use that dragon to deal with my bullshit. (I was an ifriti sorcerer with 24 cha (magic items) and I'd obtained plenty of necromantic minions and extra magic items through swindling and conniving bullshit, due to me having more charisma than a goddamned succubi in a room full of pent-up jocks) The rest of the party was asleep, and woke up the next morning to find a bloody (literally, not metaphorically) skeletal adult dragon wrapping itself around my tent.
Me: "How much damage does a dragon take when a pirate ship erupts into being halfway down its' esophagus?"
other players: *sounds of excitement, amusement or annoyance*
DM: "...You son of a..."
While it's fun, keep in mind that the summon elemental spell cannot summon anything on a surface capable of supporting it, must be within line of sight and within a range. it also does have a cast time of 1 round (assuming 3.5).
I think that really if you communicate with your players on their characters, then you can make it so they are all “the wheel” in a way by making them all amazing at something, showing them that they all are great. Then from their you can show them how to mix and be more versatile instead of just being the most damaging
Someone in my group edited their pdf to be 200 feet tall and as thin as a pencil
That's a tall document
I once had a player whine about being hit by monsters after deliberately putting himself in harms way in order to give another PC flanking bonuses.
In my first DM experience with my friends, I had one player who knew 5e DND so well that he created a monster at level 1. His character was so powerful my enemies I made couldn’t touch him. The rest of the party was mediocre at best. But he was huge.
So I was faced with this half orc barbarian who was overpowered in combat... but also narratively driven. The player really wanted the character to be properly role played. And he wrote an extensive amount of lore for the guy. One of the points is that he rebels against his orcish half, trying to care for as many creatures and allies as possible. It was one single line in the lore he wrote, but I exploited the hell out of it.
I crafted an elaborate boss fight in the middle of their campaign. An armor piercing, heavily armored spearman enchanted to get rid of all of his disadvantages and deal three dice worth of damage each strike. His hp was whatever I felt, and I finally called the fight at 150 hp on the boss. A single strike from the boss would take one of the players to under half. And the npc bard had to focus hard on healing to keep them alive. I tested them. They hit it as hard as possible and barely survived.
Finally, I looked at the barbarian and said “this will be every fight from now on, you realized. The challenges will only grow from here. The bard’s face pales, and your party is in disarray. Only you stand strong after this fight. And you wonder to yourself... if this really is worth the potential cost.”
After that, there was a shift in his character and how he fought. He focused on defending the party rather than hitting 30 damage strikes. He planned out a fight to keep the spellcasters alive and helped coordinate the first time players he was with. He knew I was scaling encounters to him, and his character was protective. So it was the only thing he could do.
It was a wonderful, narrative centered decision. It also made the story better, and the encounters more entertaining. Now that I new what they could handle, I could go all out. The session was great after that bit of improv. That’s the moral of the story. xD
Congrats, this is some high-level GMing
I absolutely love this and im going to use it against the min-maxer i have in my campaign. Its beautiful. You sir, are a god of DMs
...Finally, I looked at the barbarian and said “this will be every fight from now on, you realized. The challenges will only grow from here. The bard’s face pales, and your party is in disarray. Only you stand strong after this fight. And you wonder to yourself... if this really is worth the potential cost.”...
That can very well backfire on you. The players I used to play with in Living Greyhawk (3.5 RPGA) would take that as a challenge and try to meet with it equally rather than be scared at the threat. Most of still properly roleplayed but were also strategy players so most always took the optimal path and taught others how if they wanted know how. The DM's ran their games the same way though. Funnily enough a lot of the modules of our region were written by locals so Keoland regional modules were notorious for being very difficult and I've heard some players avoided playing in the Keoland areas. Personally many would call me a "powergamer" but I always made sure I had a "programmed" weakness that could be exploited if I wasn't careful, like being a elite-tier archer that could make a barbed devil run in one ranged attack but if I was cornered into melee or was grappled I was a goner.
Every character has a weakness DM just need to know how to exploit it
@@DarkAvatar1313
That barbarian needed a wakeup call. Anyone who can solo encounters will up the difficulty of future battles meaning the weaker players who aren't as good get thrown under a bus as mentioned in this video.
The game should be about the group evolving not just each individual character. It should be about their interactions with the world and relying on their allies.
Good roleplay beats good dps any day of the week. Because good roleplay will be remembered.
0:22 Other Joe: hey Ben you wanna play a Zombie game?
The GM has infinite powers in the same way Jafar does when he wishes to be a genie. A GM without players has no powers and is thus beholden to the wish (although they can warp the wish to their own entertainment and usually also the players)
Never understood people who want OP character stats at LV 1. Having a really crappy stat or two makes the RP aspect so much more fun and challenging. My monk has 4 charisma because he took an oath of silence as a child and is just now breaking it. I never would have thought of that character quirk without that god awful roll, and watching him learn social conventions, and even words, is so much fun!
You might want to check out Zee Bashew's video about weak characters, he goes into this sort of thing a fair bit.
you don't need to understand so long as you respect them
Heh, that’s perfect.
"Me want me big power. What? Dungeon Master put real challenge in front of us that we can't just steamroll? We have to actually work as a team now? What the Hell? Stupid Dungeon Master, giving me challenges."
The fun for me in games (not just D&D but in general) is taking few resources and going up against a monumental problem, so I have to use a little to do a lot. That's what I love. My Investigation check didn't reveal any traps on the door? Okay, well I still don't trust it so I'm gonna tie a rope to the handle, step back, and pull. The door opens, fire shoots out, my team and I are unharmed, and we know about the trap now. I've never liked "God mode" in games. Ever. To me the ideal game has you at maximum strength about halfway through, so you can spend the remaining half testing your abilities on new challenges.
I just built a monk who is perfectly average in all respects but his speed and strength, which are only slightly above average. Literall tens and elevens with twelve in strength and dex.
He's also a quiet, collected, understanding pacifist who only fights when absolutely necessary to defend himself or others, but he's a bit of a stickler for rules. A pretty good cook, too.
The biggest reason why balance is important is obviously for play experience.
If your character is consistently underpowerforming versus every other character in the group, even though you optimized it and played it as good as could be done, then the class is obviously too weak.
Everyone wants to be able to contribute to the group.
It's the same reason why unemployment has so many negative psychological effects, lol. People who feel they can't contribute to society in a meaningful way tend to feel less valued.
Same with groups. People love to be valued for something, whether it being healing, damage dealing, utility.
SinerAthin other then I'm 4th Edition the biggest discrepancy (assuming a similar level of mastery of the rules) isn't really about straight up power, it's about narrative power. The whole Quadratic Wizard thing is a misnomer. It's not a math thing, it's about the magical characters ability to change the narrative, be it in an encounter or in the larger story. If Elrond was a DND Wizard the trip would Have been 20 minutes. Teleport frodo to mount doom, drop ring, teleport away. It's that sort of ability to change the nature of the story that usually makes even good players feel undervalued. Even at the encounter level, magic can bypass challenges rather then overcome them. And that is usually where people feel X or Y is too strong, when really they mean it has too much affect on the narrative of the encounter or over arching story.
Power balancing should be considered when there's a small number of players(2-3) or a large number of players(7+) but when you have 4-6 each one can cover certain things that the others can't(depending on what they choose)
"The biggest reason why balance is important is obviously for play experience"
Exactly .. and that's why the GM/DM is bothered by it.
They are (or should be) the person at the table who is most concerned with ensuring that players have fun and they are also likely to be the person most aware of how the rules of the game affect this. For this reason if there's a lurking time-bomb problem with a classes play-style and power scaling it's the DM who will probably be most bothered by this.
It's not even a matter of Power, it's about how key parts of character classes can get in the way of freely enjoying the story compared to others.
Ranger companions for instance.. By the time the campaign reaches high level content Ranger pets are .. well they're frankly pants!
It's no fun whatsoever if after months of play your beloved fuzzbuddy (an integral part of the class and quite possibly the reason you chose it,) scales so badly against the content that it constantly gets one-shotted.
I agree, as much as 3,5 and Pathfinder has a lot to offer it also is too easy to just break the game. Find that race that is really just overpowered, find that class that at level one is as powerful as most are around level 5.
If I end up with someone that overpowered I congratulate them on winning the game before it even started and suggest that they make another character because said character is vetoed.
The balance in 5e limits the game but also makes it fun for everybody. As in that yes everybody has a job to do, specialisations and specific feats/abilities that make them different. But they are not going to break the game.
And for a DM that is nice to, instead having to deal with that one player that found the right combination of exotic race and exotic class that outclasses everybody by 20 levels. You all are in the same boat.
Masticina Akicta Generally this is a person issue not a game issue. If you have 'that one player' then probably it's time to have a talk with them. One option is to have them optimize suboptimal concepts, it's something my group has adopted at times. If you are sitting down to play a game with people you like and get along with, it should be solvable. Where as the restrictions placed on you by a more 'balanced' game aren't solvable by you and your friends unless you want to rewrite the system. Ultimately it seems to me one way or another every group has to choose. Do you want a more versatile toolset that requires more work (both in creation of characters and adventures) and requires consensus on goals at the table, or do you want a more restrictive toolset that is more user friendly. It's up to you and your group. But in my experience if you have that 'one guy' and talking to him doesn't fix things, the game isn't going to change that. He will find a way to be disruptive eventually.
Players who want to be the best are not the worst, believe me. The first time I tried gm-ing my group did not care about the game, period. I was using the “Lost Mine of Phandelver” adventure from the starter pack because it was my first time, and in the first session we got through ONE BATTLE, and that’s it. If you’ve ever played that adventure, you know that the first battle is with a small gang of goblins, and once there is only one goblin left he tries to escape. One of the players(who had never played before, this was their first time) asked if he could “seduce the goblin.” At this point, I was internally screaming “help” as the player rolled for how much the goblin loved him and asked what modifier to use. So honestly, a whiny player isn’t that bad. 😂
always seduce the goblins. forgotten realms need more gob lovin.
Honestly this was more your fault than the player's
Thats not bad. Try gming the game with the succubus bard who flirts with every single npc they meet.
"5e is mostly balanced"
*Laughs in Stunning Strike*
Ten strikes per short rest, each and every one of them forcing a con save or Stunned.
@@VilleKivinen to be fair the dm can also put in more enemies with high constitution like monstrosity's instead of only giving encounters where its really ez to hit a stunning strike.
Stunning strike is a poor mans hypnotic pattern on objectively the worst class in the game
@@chrisdin4109 worst class in the game in what way exactly? Sheer power? Utility? Roleplay potential? You say objectively but how do you quantify a class's value over others?
@@MoonPatch Mechanically, it's the worst class in the game in pretty much all areas. Damage per round compared to other martials ect.. there's been videos a out it. When you crunch the numbers on monk it's bad.
In my campaign, we have a fighter... that doesn't fight. He'll be in the fight for a couple of rounds, but as soon as his life is in danger or the fight isn't going his way, he will literally walk away from the fight. There was one time we were fighting a rocktopus (that's it's actual in-game name) and he goes first in combat. He decides, "I want to tame the rocktopus!" and fails. So the rocktopus attacks and we all start to gang up on it and our fighter literally turns around and starts to walk away and not fight it. Or when we had to bring back one of our dead party members (it was his fourth character) back to town to revive him because there was a cleric in town that would revive one of us for free, he was actually going to leave the group, as in the actual group, until we convinced him not to, because he didn't want the character revived and the complicated process it took to bring the character back to life involved putting a dead body in our bag of holding. He also doesn't participate in fights and then proceeds to grab the twenty 50gp gems in the monster's horde and doesn't share nor tell the other characters about them.
Honestly, from what you described, it sounds like it wouldn't be a big loss if he left.
Seriously, wanting to leave the Group because you don't want another player's character ressurected is just... ugh.
I think it's very important to learn the difference between "power gaming" and "optimization", as sometimes it can be very, very hard to tell the difference between the two. I myself have been bowled over by groups of players that just had more experience, knew the game better than me and destroyed everything in their path with little to no effort. It was horrible, and they all walked away with smiles and enormous cocks waving about--- while I practically cried at all of my hard work having gone to waste.
Excellent video! :D
Thanks!
Power gamers care about the power of their character at the expense of everyone else's fun. In fact, I had to deal with power gamers who actually were *terrible* optimizers.
Hey Writer. I have a piece of advice for you and anyone who runs into a situation like that. I am assuming you were DMing. Death is an opportunity to reroll, it's not a big deal, and in an organic world it happens all the time. No punishment or loss of stats, and if you REALLY want your character back, just distribute everything the same way and say your old squad gives you their loot. If you are not afraid of PCs dying in your story then you don't worry as much about bogus power spikes. In this group, if I threw out a threat I felt was challenging but appropriate and they steamroll it just throw in a wrench, preferably something chaotic but powerful. Say some death slaad or something. It WILL fight them but they have a good chance of deterring/distracting it and run. See if they can handle it, or flee and then tailor accordingly. If they manage to overcome the RIDICULOUS challenge just keep scaling upward.
They walked away with smiles, how was your hard work wasted? ^^
it does remind me of this one guy, a friend we'd never played with yet, but who had played with other groups, wanted to DM for us. We jokingly talked about making the most OP builds we could (this was 3.5), and he, all smugly, went: "I'm a veteran DM, optimize as much as you want! In fact, you'll need to if you're going to survive!"
We believed him, so we rolled up to the table with the cheesiest cheese you could find. My character was a Psychic Warrior who used some ludicrous (but legit) loopholes and feature combos to get unlimited psy points, for instance. It was the most broken character in the group by far. Turns out the DM had been... well, not lying, but severly overestimating his own experience. His time spent with a group who was new not only to P&P but gaming in general was in no way indicative of the group he found himself with.
It wasn't even just the OP characters. He'd gleefully talk about this magically darkened room, where we could hear creatures lurking just beyond, his anticipation at us striding into the darkness palatable. And I'd say "We build huge fires at the entrance, put down a gust spell to blow all the smoke in, and just suffocate them out of there." He had no clue what to do!
He soldiered on though, and took every session as a learning experience, refusing to let us re-roll to less OP characters.
What a guy.
He sounds like a great dm in the making
There's a manga called Quick Start!! where one of the girls makes her character taller when she finds out another player's was just a few centimeters taller than hers. Her whole thing is that she keeps developing crushes on NPCs and setting canon characters.
my group also had a situation where everyone wanted to be the tallest, except for one guy. We didn't get too absurd with it and none of us changed the heights we'd chosen initially on our own. The result was that there were 4 characters who were nearly 7 feet tall and the one average height guy looked like a dwarf beside them.
I've honestly never understood going into an rpg to feel powerful or have perfect characters. Honestly my favorite part of roleplaying is to be able to connect with the characters. An important part of a good story is the characters and if all the characters are perfect people it'll just be boring,
i mean you know those characters you connect with do become powerful and perfect in their own way eventually what your saying makes no sense.
Well, a part of the games is to be able to take a role that you do not have in real life. I can be weak and fail a lot in real life, I do not need to be shit at stuff all the time in games as well. I think I would prefer to play with a smaller group in order for there to be more room to share for everyone in the game. However I guess if that would fail, I would probably have to train on setting stuff up for others to shine.
It is also worth pointing out, a lot of people are not all that good at role playing in the first place. Then again, I think a lot of the builds I would want to make would suffer a fair bit for not being focused enough. >.> Then again, most of the stuff I would want to do with the Warlock would result in Eldrich blast being good anyway.
D&D is strange. I never expected Warlock to be what would end up interesting me the most. Elf seems hard to get away from however, due to only needing 4 hours to rest. Rather useless in a group where the other players do not have the chance to also finish their rest in 4 hours however.
Well.. I suppose I can imagine being an elf bard. And everyone else has been really hurt, so they need their rest. However this stupid monster suddenly comes for the attack. And now you are in a deadly battle on your own. Using Zone of Silence as to not wake up your companions. Hopefully ending the battle where you manage to slay the monster, but you yourself are now on like 1 hit point. All bloody and horrible looking. But you did it. Everyone else is now nice and awake. But even that would be kinda unfair to the rest of the players? Or would it be tense, as your party needs to keep moving the next day. But they also need to get their resources back or they will probably die.
I guess even if they are not involved, it would still be made into a tense moment. As their well being, and ability to preform the coming day would hang in the balance. Best would be if the elf bard, would at that point not be able to really do much said next day. So the rest of the party can then make up for the solo battle by getting more action themselves that day.
Why even bother rping when you’re gonna get killed by a soft slap without the mean to fight back?
@@justnoob8141 wow this comment is from 3 years ago. If you're playing a character who'd get insta'd in a fight its usually good motivation to like, find solutions that don't end in fighting. Creativity.
@@urayami3164 I try, all of them failed. Miserably.
I like to use stat rolls because when I get a bunch of high stats I feel like a natural born hero and that's fun, but when I get a bunch of low stats, I become that person who decides to be a hero despite sucking, and that's also fun. I actually really like when I play as a bad character and have to challenge myself to make it through a campaign. The threat of dying or failing important tasks is suspenseful and interesting. Plus, if I die I can always make a new character. The problem is that most players are stupid and think that being the sucky person in the group is bad and means you're a bad player and that in turn the game is going to suck, when in reality it adds depth to the campaign, and it actually makes you a better player to succeed, despite character flaws. This causes most players to cheat at stat rolls and that's why I use point buy when I DM.
Ohh man I love it when I get a really great character in most stats but just have this one stat I compeltly butchered! It is fucking hillarious. I was in a game where we could role with 4 dices and pick the tree hights like normal plus add one because we were supposted to be pretty strong. Now the only downside was that we had to role for the stat alone and couldnt change it. So we roled for strenght and that was what we got no switching. I ended up with a rogue that had an 18 in strenght but a 4 in dex and a 7 in int.. but another 18 in con and charisma or maybe 17 dont remember doesnt matter. It is to date one of the funniest characters I have ever played. It was this gigantic dude that was dumb as a door but wanted to be a ninja so badly and it was brilliant. Most times I tried to sneak by litterally walking in front of the people and just screaming "I am invisible!!!" In their face. This either ended up in a fight or them being too intimidated to disagree with me and just let me pass..it was amazing
personally, i am ok with having low stats. my issue is when i feel like the weak link in a group, especially if i don't have ANYTHING i can specialize in. for instance, if i pick, lets say fighter, and none of my stats roll above 11, and the group has a wizard that can blast enemies apart, a paladin with a 20 in constitution, and a melee that can deal more damage than me in a turn, i feel utterly useless, so i would, inherently, not have fun playing the character. especially when alot of the campaigns i play assume the players know what they are doing, and are quite powerful. IE a level 10 boss with 750 hp and can deal upwards of 1000 damage throughout the fight, if i have a weak character, i WILL die in that fight, and i will just be getting in the way, and probably wouldn't even do well as a meat shield for a healer, because a lot of the attacks were AoE
This is not how psychology or game design works. If your character cannot contribute in any meaningful way to the party it will feel and be inherently unfun for that player. If your fighter tanks worse and deals less damage than the barbarian next to you and they also get a bunch of other special abilities to use you just feel like there is no point even playing. Every character needs a way to be useful.
yea, your character needs SOMETHING that makes them feel useful, or they feel like nothing. there is a character i have played that was outmatched everywhere, and using magic was outlawed by the empire we were fighting, so my being a draconic sorcerer was actually detrimental - my damage was moderate at best(outpaced by fighters), i was squishy, and was easy to call out on magic as i am covered in dragon scales as an elf
Dear Tim, another simple way to stop cheating when rolling stats is to have the rolls observed by the GM.
I remember back in the good old days when we had a RPG club and we were playing Drakar och Demoner, a swedish game (In english, its Dragons and Demons, guess where they got that name from), and we all made new characters in the room, rolling our stats in front of the DM, exept this one guy who made his character in the other room, and would you know it, he somehow rolled 18 (mind you this was 3d6, place the stats in order) on 8 out of 9 stats, and the ninth stat was Size, and there he "only" had a 15.
The rest of us were normal schmucks, stats ranging from 4-16, someone might have gotten a 17.
Gues who had fun? Us, the people playing the actual characters. Guess who didnt have fun? The guy who brought a cheated Combat Monster. Why? Because we treated him just like that. The character never spoke, never did anything. Theat player only wanted to see high numbers. But since we played actual Characters, and he didnt, he mostly sat quiet and rolled his high numbers during combat. And he delivered silly amounts of damage with every roll, and there was no fuss. Another character delivered a third of that, and was rewarded with a detailed description of what his characer did, how the mighty blow felled the beast, how blood splashed on the nearby wall rom the monstrous attack, and so on.
And then the combat monster did his big numbers, removed one enemy, and over to the next character whos daring actions, succeeding or failing gloriously, felt epic.
Lot of good points, though I think you left out one. NPC parties with PC classes. If a class is horribly unbalanced and powerful it also works against the party if there is ever an enemy of that class.
If for instance high level magic is broken it means you can basically never fight an enemy wizard, lich or monster with high spell casting levels. Other wise the entire party be wiped out with a single spell. Wish for instance is insanely strong but has draw backs that might stop a PC party from using it.
However NPc's rarely live beyond an encounter and have no qualms about using their best magical items, spells etc to get rid of a party.
I've been watching your videos a lot the past few days. They're making me remember the one time I tried to play D&D. It was a really cool idea, but I couldn't stand the personalities of any of the other people in the group. I keep running into that problem when I want to indulge my geekier interests. :sigh:
it's pretty hard to find a group you like playing with, but once you find one it's so much fun
This sounds like a "it sucks. keep trying" issue.
I've actually encountered a rather creative response to alpha gaming before.
The sort of game I was playing had a pretty DM vs the Players dynamic, and it was expressed in the story as a literal god of evil stalking our party to try to screw us over however it could. It's a setup that I'm confident only worked because our DM had such a fun and creative sense of humor that everyone went along with it.
Anyway, the twist on this setting is that there's something like a "karma" system where our party was also protected by a benevolent god...embodying failure. So whenever any single character did a little too well compared to the rest of the group-from rolls or otherwise, it's treated as a dip in our patron god's protection and the evil god jumps in accordingly.
Sometimes it's just a mundane thing like one guy who rolled 2 natural 20s in a combat situation when (everyone else rolled below 3 at least once) had to take a triple-roll disadvantage check when he used intimidation during negotiations the next day (justified in-story as the evil god hitting him with a minor disease that caused sneezing fits while he talked).
Sometimes, it's more scary such as our rogue suddenly becoming drunk right in the middle of sneaking through enemy camp.
It created this weird atmosphere where rolling really good was just as dangerous as rolling really bad. When my half-elf died from a potion of Enlarge Person being mislabeled as a potion of Invisibility, I ended up deciding to start creating the most bizarre of characters just to see what kind of shenanigans my DM could throw at me through the evil god given the right context.
That actually sounds hilarious, the only other thing I'd have done is have the benevolent and evil god as the same being, just with a Sheogorath mania/dementia angle to it. Cheese for no-one and all that.
Go on?
I feel like this should be in r/dnd, so many good stories can come from this
"I've never run into balance problems." - Someone has obviously never played 3.5.
All systems are broken, he just doesnt know where to find the levers.
Or maybe he never played it beyond the first couple levels? Or did, but didn't really notice that spell-casters and maybe some other classes in 3.5, I don't remember much, but, it's usually non low-level spell-casters that make most of the power moves in most editions of the game, and it's usually spells that swing the game dramatically, and rarely non spells that do.
I've never really ever played in a group where spells didn't dominate the gameplay after the first couple character levels. More spell slots and more powerful spells, sometime exponentially more powerful ('quadratic' wizards). I kind of get disappointed in the powershift in DnD. Except 4th, but it stinks in a different way, giving too many things to do, or rather, so many things happen in combat in 4e, and also pathfinder, both editions. I wish 5e or 3e were more balanced, mainly through spells being less 'quadratic'. It'd prevent a gap from widening between casters and non casters, and make multi-classing more viable, as passing up on the next tier of magic spells wouldn't be as much as a nerf.
Shoot, pardon my rant, I just have a bit of frustration with the power of DnD's higher level spells and the game balance issues they cause. They create gaps between characters' effectiveness, and make the CR a joke after about tier 1, and they often bypass many creative problem solving opportunities. Spells are the sand of high level DnD, they get every where, and do nearly everything. And to make it a little worse, spell-casters like wizards can learn spells from all of the different schools so they can be powerful in all the types of situations the schools of magic cover. Even limiting wizards and sorcerors by having to choose which schools of magic they can use would limit the degree to which these casters dominant gameplay, as well as create potential for two spell-casters to have different types of spells from each other.
I'm kinda new to d&d like I just joined last year , so far I'm love d&d because it makes me think a lot more than actually school , so when I found your channel, i enjoy your videos like how much you say is what I see in my group and it makes me smile so thank you for Making awesome videos
Just found your video's a couple days ago. These are funny as hell, yet so true. Seen the same things over the years. Been watching off your video's every day so far at work. Cant stop laughing
I had a player that was jealous of a Fighter/Cleric who rolled quite high stats (though not high enough to be a Paladin in the edition I was DM'ing). I watched the guy roll it. The jealous player refused to roll stats in person and since he did settle on stats that were fair, I didn't press the issue. Realistically, though, if he had taken the opportunity to roll while I observed, he probably would've done better.
Over the course of the game, he complained about his class limitation/features, didn't understand the edition we were playing (which was old-school D&D and over-complicated in places), complained that the potions he had weren't specifically put there to overcome a specific obstacle (because I love it when players use magic creatively; like your frog story), complained that he couldn't play his character as intelligent as himself because INT was his dump stat (for a Barbarian). He asked for a bunch of items and class abilities that, on the surface, were fairly benign, but I had to spend a bunch of time considering them to decide if they were OP. Then complained that the compromise I ended up reaching had too many drawbacks. (I just wanted something resembling neutral power-buoyancy)
On the other hand, he was a damn good DM, could act and do voices, carry on entire conversations seamlessly between several different characters. He only suffered from creating several DMPCs that were OP.
in one of the first campaigns i played the Gm made use roll 5 D6s to roll for "beauty" basically the result would be a difficulty check for the opposite gender and homosexual members of the same gender to resist your persuade rolls were flirting was at hand, basically a way to encourage players to roleplay as casanovas, i went around and rolled 5 sixes, but since i was new, really shy and pretty awkward socially it never got used, also my character could already mind control people with a bunch of spells because lol sourcebooks so why going through the hoops if i could cast .spells for that (and i suck at flirting, even with imaginary women preprogrammed by a teenage guy).
That sounds... like a really awkward social setting to be in. I'm glad to have a mixed group currently and we're all LGBTQ-friendly, but including anything even remotely flirty or sexual is more than I'm comfortable with DM'ing. I'm exaggerating a bit, I'm sure, but it's weird and cringy to roleplay that sort of thing in any sort of detail. I always make it clear at the start of a game that sex is not something I want to discuss or roleplay beyond the vaguest of double entendre.
At most, I'd want an interaction to go like this:
"I'd like to make a Diplomacy check to convince her to tell us the thing. I'm extra flirty about it."
"Okay... make a Bluff check first and you'll get a bonus."
"Got it. And the bonus helped me get the Diplomacy check."
"Cool. Your character lays on the seduction thick and she's enamored with you. After an evening of whispering romantic nothings into each other's ears and a fantastic night in her bed, you convince her to tell you the thing in confidence."
"In the morning, I wish her a good life and thanks for the one-night-stand and I leave to meet up with the party."
If the player suggested at any point in there that we roleplay the hours I just glossed over.... nooooope.
dms that can do voices are great, as are players for that matter. unfortunately i can't, because if i do, my throat starts hurting rapidly, and i need to have a voice to be able to use the walkie at work in the event that either A) someone needs me for something(frequently) or B) i get injured and need someone to come help me.
as for the OP - how is this for using magic creatively. i was playing a drow sorcerer, i had the feat spell sniper - my spell ranges are doubled. our ship was attacked, and sinking in open water. the attacking ship was 150 feet away, and there were noted to be sharks in the water in the region. so i cast Melfs Minute Meteors. each party member who hadn't already jumped off the boad(there were 2) were instructed to grab onto one of my 6 meteors, then i sent the two hurtling towards the enemy ship. because they grabbed the meteors prior to my launching them, they didn't impact, so they landed on the enemy ship. i the stood on two of the remaining four, and launched myself, rolling a nat 20 on my balance check, with all 4 meteors under my feet, landing in a could of smoke and fire(i had fire resistance, so i took 4d6 damage as a level 13 draconic sorcerer). this scared the crew enough to all run below deck, where i used a cone of cold to kill off most of them. we then went and got the 3 remaining party members out of the water before they got too chewed up by sharks.
@synthetic, I get what you're saying about creative uses of items/magic and problem solving. i made a dungeon that had only one combat encounter as a one of with multiple problem solving/trap/escape room encounters. rooms manipulating encumbrance and interacting with metal. a room that possessed intangible/invisible items that where magically hydrophobic. And the combat encounter involved a separating barrier and a teleporter that only allowed switching of two equally sized characters. Swapping a mage to fight elementals with a paladin to fight undead etc
The result was disheartening, with one or two people solving most problems while the others sat around. Characters didn't seem as important and very few roles had to be made apart from a few strength and arcana checks to find and move items.
Clever use of magic/abilities is the best.
A friend of mine told me a story of his psion that he played awhile back. Focused on telekinesis and teleportation powers.
He had a few damaging powers as well, which he used to good effect for the most part, making minion heads explode so the barbarian could focus on the bigger threats...
But there were two big encounters where he really stepped up and used what he had...
The first, was basically a mini-boss. Cultist shaman doing some kind of ritual at the top of a cliff. He rolled out the portable hole they'd been stuffing all of the random non-magical equipment they'd picked up over the course of the campaign, adjusted the position a bit, then said "I'll be right back guys." Teleported to the top of the cliff behind the shaman, and used the Telekinetic Thrust power to shove him off. Nat 20. GM rules that the guy fell into the portable hole. Rolled fall damage. Dead shaman. GM lesson learned, positioning and weight is important. Psion teleports back to the group and strikes a mortal kombat victory pose.
The second, was the final boss of the campaign. Weighed too much to be telekinesised out the window. The rest of the party beat him down fairly easily, but when they thought they killed him, the GM had everyone roll perception. Psion beat the check and noticed a flash of light from the big bad's ring. His wounds healed in an instant, and the fight basically started over. Psion correctly identified this as a Ring of Nine Lives (9 charges of a Contingencied Heal spell which goes off when you hit 0 or fewer HP) So on his next turn, he used the "Retrieve" power. Level 4 teleportation power which lets you teleport an item to your hand. If it is held, the holder gets a will save. Big bad fails the save. Psion takes the ring, puts it on, flips him off, and runs like hell.
Yeah, your "tall people" issue is a little weird, but I've encountered something like it.
I had a play group at one point (I was the DM) who were /obsessed/ with knowing the most languages. I kid you not, the barbarian had 16 intelligence so they could start with 5 languages off the bat, and then put a skill point into linguistics at every level.
And I do every one of my games using point buy, so they sacrificed actual important "barbarian" stats to do this. It's actually beyond me why they thought it was so damn important lol.
And speaking of point buy, I realized after my first game that rolling for stats was something I would never do. In fact, the DM of my first game told us to roll for stats, but I actually just used point buy for my character and told him I'd rolled the stats. He was pretty trusting, but there was one person at our table who had two 18s and their lowest stat was a 13, BEFORE racial bonuses and penalties. And he definitely did it so he could be the biggest, baddest dude in the party.
Fortunately the DM seemed to realize this, and so took many opportunities to try and intentionally humble the character, and nobody minded much at that point because when you play bullshit like that 24 strength, 20 constitution, level 6 bloodrager, the bullshit comes back around when you get taken out in one shot by a magical trap because you charged ahead of everyone else for first dibs on loot. :P
Evan Huizenga >bloodrager
I smell the works of paizo publishing...wonderful!
At which point, you make everyone in the game world fluent in common, and give them chances to improve the actually important stats.
Barbarian stats?
Well, it is their stats, and he was a barbarian. So it was his barbarian stats.
I really like rolling stats mostly because i play preeetty sub optimal characters while most people play stuff that makes sense. (Gnome barbarian is one of my favorites) but theres been a couple times where i have rolled insanely well (in front of the dm) and i would just ask the dm if i could sack a couple stats to 9 or 10 just so that i wasnt good at everything
point buy is boring
I find playing FATE (yes, there's an RPG system called FATE; not talking about the video game [and Jim Butcher helped write it!]) alleviates these problems a bit, because one of the core tenants is that all the players are competent. No rolling for picking up a fork or checking to see if the ground still exists. Makes it easier to focus on story, and gives way to cool and epic moments. (and the FATE coins/compulsions are hilarious too!)
Party of slender men. 10ft tall & 100 pounds. "I wonder why everyone runs away from us! Is it my three piece suit?"
I've TOTALLY had a whiner in my party before. A player wanted to make a special snowflake OC so I suggested that he make a human Sorceror instead. It was my first game so I said NO YOU CANNOT PLAY AS A GOLEM. I am too inexperienced to handle that at the table.
Exactly as you said: I made him the younger brother of the Count of a port town (WHO GAVE HIM STARTING WEALTH BY THE WAY) gave him knowledge of any water-based spells, gave him Longsword proficiency, I EVEN gave him an excuse to command the town's guardsmen during an attack!
He quit on his own funnily enough - I never kicked him from the game. One time he had requested extra quest reward. I gave him a Superior Potion of Healing on top of the extra money and he asked for TWO. He then went on to publicly assault someone only for the guards to arrest him. "WOW THAT'S BULLSHIT! IF I FAIL MY PERSUASION CHECK TO LOWER MY BAILOUT FEE, THEN I'M LEAVING!" He rolled a 4 (mod of +4 CHA) and we never saw him again. He instantly quit the game.
I know you said this was your first game, but it's a good one to learn from your mistakes. NEVER force a character of your own design onto another player. If the player came to the game with something you think might be overpowered, you can certainly say no and explain why, but let the player come back with their own character. Even if you gave them a bunch of stuff, turning them into YOUR OWN special snowflake, if they don't enjoy playing the character, yeah, there's going to be issues later.
If you did this to me, I wouldn't even sit down for the first session. I would just pack my things and leave.
Riplee86
Thanks for the thoughtful advice. You have to agree that he was a whiny brat of a player though.
He did say that he suggested it. He's a first time DM, I would honestly make a bunch of preconstructed characters and hand them out for some kind of a one-shot to get them into the game. If a player wants that much crap at level one, they've got to realize what is and is not realistic for their power level.
I like your username. lol
I will say that during some games I've been a bit of a power gamer but there is one thing that really really pisses me off. I go out of my way to make this really cool idea for let's say an Ice Wizard. I really think it's a cool idea any super powerful then the DM decides okay because you did this I'm going to throw every creature that is immune or resistant to ice against you and only that.......... it's not so much whining about the encounters not being tailor-made for me and more about the fact that they are tailor-made to go against me 100%. For whatever reason you're not fighting Bandits you're fighting ice Bandits was one of the dumb ones I have seen
Merrick Johnston I’ve had characters that the gm decided to balance by making them borderline vegetables after getting hit in the head. I’ve had a GM straight up tell me I failed a NAT 20. Granted some GMs don’t really understand the concept of “my world, their story” and try to make the players pawns
Alduin Dovak how tf did they bullshit there way out of you failing a nat 20
That's just terrible DMing. I loved customizing fights to be challenging to groups that weren't well-rounded. I had a party of all melee combatants (only one spellcaster, a halfling cleric who hid inside of the fighter's bag of holding until he was called upon to heal). I put them up against a lich that was about their level. It was challenging because he used spells like Web and Hold Person before casting his damaging spells. The Samurai, Fighter, and Barbarian eventually triumphed, but it was mostly because they had a high amount of hit points and plenty of patience. That said, I would never put my players against an enemy tailor-made to ignore damage from one particular player (like the ice bandits).
Merrick Johnston I think that would actually be an interesting encounter for later on in the campaign. Your characters have built up a reputation in the area, and most people know there is a specialized Ice Wizard traveling about. If local bandits are likely to hear talk of someone like that, then taking measures to specifically counter you would be a reasonable move on their part. Early on, this makes no sense, but having it as a later encounter would be a good way to show that adventurers have a noticeable impact on the world.
I've tailor made encounters that are resistant to fire (we have a lot of fire based dmg from all of the players) just make it interesting. Not always of course, but I literally did it this last session to give our cleric a chance to shine (it was an encounter with undead and the fire guys usually do so much dmg that our cleric kinda just plays healbot and I wanted to give him a chance to really lean into his war domain stuff) but my firebender kept complaining about being useless (resistance means half dmg so you're still doing plenty of it!) and eventually I got sick of it and just gave him his true flame (a 5/day charge of magical flame that ignores fire resist) that he would have gotten on levelup. I feel like I shouldn't have because he might complain a lot in the future in the hopes of getting shit but whatevs. TL:DR it's fun once in a while (or can be) to challenge players but having it all the time sounds rough and that sucks
Don't stop your a great story teller! (0:58 sound changed to lower level ;) just had to mess with you as well :D ) I can't begin to tell you how many times your stories made me laugh !!
I make a game where players start out with no classes and do stuff to get their class by buying stuff and fighting, so my game usually balances itself out, and they have a shared inventory so usually no one complains.
Also I make it so the players who do easy or hard can be in the same game by making easy gamers have a slight advantage by most enemies targeting tougher characters.
First character I ever played was given to me as a parody character,
A homosexual dwarf who was an Ex exotic dancer...
I got to roll for stats
I had 3 17s and the rest were above 13...
And my most serious character had the most average roll of having 15 14 14 12 12 9. Thanks to High Elf ABI, i got two 16's and go for a int-Rogue who is the D&D version of CSI agents. (as of not +9 investigation on level 7 is decent)
I had a lizardfolk. I got 2 18's, 1 16, and the rest 14's and 1 13. But until our DM decided that Lizardfolk shouldn't have a +3 to unarmored AC (It was our original interpretation, but we're arguing about it and I'm constantly looking at the rule books, but y'know.) And that's when I decided to try whining and debating. Both didn't work.
i tihnk i once had an elf ranger that literally rolled 12 on everything (after acocunting racial mods) so it was like 10 dex, it was 3.5 DND) , he was..underperforming until the GM decided to check wtf was happening and saw my stats, took an eraser erased my dex and changed it to 18 with no background nor backstory, just flat out erased and replaced the stat, it was a really nice gesture but for some reason it totally killed my immersion in the character (i was planning on undertaking taking side quests and looking for intraplanat archery masters to improve it anyways).
17, 16, 15, 12, 10, 6
Draconic Bloodline Dragonborn Sorcerer with 2 breath attacks and 2 resistances with 17 str, 8 dex, 14 con, 12 int, 9 wis and 17 char.
At lvl 1. 2 attacks that do a guaranteed 1d6 damage and a potential 2d6 damage and well as having elemental bonuses. Plus two elemental resistances. Plus a natural 12 armour class. I think you can see the problem, especially early game.
I GM a group of six people. One guy, his character's name is Milton, constantly rolls high. Like, we're talking he can't roll anything below a 13 on a bad day. We tried swapping out his dice for ones that we bought ourselves and know are fair, because we thought he was cheating. His characters, as one might expect, are ridiculously overpowered.
It's gotten to the point where his character actually 'breaks the game'. Like there was one time where I had an hour and a half of sidequest to get a key to a door, and he rolls a nat 20 with like +7 strength or whatever it was. So, I let him have it and they skipped a big chunk of that story arc, skipping almost to the final boss. I've had to improvise hours worth of gameplay due to things like this that he does.
He's become a legend among our D&D friends, because some of the stuff he's done is just unreal. He's summoned spaghetti out of thin air, he's persuaded goblins to be his pets, he's punched enemies out of this dimension, he's stolen thousands of gold worth of items. This man can't be stopped. He's told me before that Milton will soon ascend to godhood, and then he'll challenge me, the GM, for ultimate power.
I've tried ramping up the game difficulty, cultivating boss fights to be extra hard, random encounters happen more often when he's on low HP, but no attacks seem to hit him. Outside of fudging the dice (which I really don't like doing) What the fuck do I do?
Tarrasque
Strahd riding a Tarrasque
Just say no to insane things he might do, like force a door important to the story for example. If you let him do things continually that have the chance to break the story, that’s more chances to break the story, even if you make the dc 20 + his stat modifier, if he does it 20 times, at least once he is going to break the game. Even if a natural 20 is a natural 20, it’s only a nat 20, it can only do so much, so you can’t let him skip over major parts of the story. Alternatively, you can give him disadvantage in these checks and give him a 1 in 400 chance of success.
And then with things like the door, I will often have magical barriers that bounce their weapons off doorways if they try to break the plot, just dont overuse this. The same can be used with high level casters that break the game, use wards that block their spells and either they dont use it, or they have to track down and destroy the ward earning the right to use the spell
Millton sounds like the new Dos Equis Most Interesting Man in the World.
I will confess to puzzlement at anyone allowing someone to roll for stats without seeing the roll, let alone accept a bit of paper they brought into the session as their 'roll'
5:20 favorite scene by far lol I love your goofy animations it's my sense of humor.
Yeah... I actually agree with Puffin here. Power Gamers aren't the problem; Alpha Gamers are the problem.
I honestly don't have problems with someone that wants an optimal and powerful character in an RPG, but it becomes a problem when it's done to the extent of trying to one-up the rest of the group or one-up the GM. Heck, I admit that I like looking up homebrew and third-party and splatbook stuff to make awesome characters that feel cool, but I never want to end up doing it to the point of being untouchably powerful outside of a Deus Ex Machina. It's a detriment to the rest of the party when there's an Alpha Gamer trying to be a one-player-party, but rarely will it be bad if a Power Gamer has an optimally specialized character that does some thing really well and most other things not well.
One thing I do different than most DMs is I work with my players to optimize their character based on what they want to become. It's a long process because I stay extremely vague and try to bait their thoughts and move in the direction they want to head. I play Pathfinder mostly, it's my favorite system but I wouldn't wish the years of research I had to do on anyone. I just want them to feel connected to their character, so getting it as close to what they envision despite their lack of player experience is ideal.
I stuck with the 27 points and the 15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8 rules. Though the 27 point rule feels more difficult.
I love Pathfinder but power balance definitely can be issue due to the 3.x derived nature. There are definitely some weak options, and you can muck up your character even worse if you don't have any guidance. Beyond that, you don't want a party that's all arcane spellcasters (and maybe one healer), but if you have a "balanced" party you don't want the martial classes to feel worthless after level 10 or so. However, it's much less of an issue once you look past the core classes. You've got a bunch of hybrid classes, for one thing. My personal favorites are Magus, Inquisitor, and Investigator (Warpriest could have been built a bit better but it's also a decent option). Then if you want to play a more advanced non-spellcasting class, there's Path of War (yes it's third party but it's basically Tomb of Battle for PF and Dreamscarred Press rocks).
Anyway perfect balance isn't really a good goal, IMHO. It breeds blandness. Everything is the same, with different flavor text. 4th Edition might be super-balanced but after playing D&D for years it's just so dull and oversimplified. 3.x and Pathfinder have plenty of issues but the shear variety and freedom it provides makes every character I build interesting and unique, and every party is vastly different. I don't think I could play a WotC D&D again. I'm not even convinced I'd switch to PF2 yet.
The only real major downside to a system like Pathfinder is that because every class is so different, it can be overwhelming for novices or players who didn't come from a 3.x background. If you have a good group, it won't matter though because your friends will guide you.
Dude your stuff is so good!!! Always makes me laugh.
I love the uniqueness and personal stories. Well done sir
Thanks!
I'm totally a power-gamer. But personally for me, It's because I want to feel useful, or good at a certain thing. I've built a couple characters that were WAY too powerful for the group I was playing with, so over the course of the game, i slowly toned them down so that the other players didn't feel left out. Power gaming isn't a bad thing, as long as you don't lord it over the other players in the party. Sometimes i'm not even trying to 'power-game' but after years of playing RPG's there are just certain things that you can look at and say, "Man... that's really... really bad..." And also, after playing for a while you pick up on little things that start to break the game... such as:
D&D 5e: Sorcerer 7, Rogue 3
Sneak up on an encampment, cast Scorching Ray as they're 'Surprised.'
You have Assassinate, so any attack that his is an automatic critical hit.
A 4th Level Scorching Ray has Four Attacks that deal 2d6 damage each.
If you hit with all of them, (8d6) and double it. You roll 16d6 Fire Damage.
I wasn't trying to break the game. I just sorta stumbled onto this while I was playing a Rogue/Sorcerer. And, being the Power Gamer I am, I stuck with it for a while. It was fun rolling 16d6 Fire Damage with one spell. I had found a new way to 'break the game' or surprise the DM with a trick. And, it worked very well actually. Quicken Hold Person + Sneak Attack With Green Flame Blade, (Or Booming Blade if you want to be as strong as possible.) With Xanathar's Guide, you have access to Shadow Blade which makes going into Melee to use Sneak Attack actually pretty fun. You've got Mirror Image + Shield (or other defensive spells) to keep yourself alive. I highly recommend it.
And on the topic of Rolling for Stats, I do it usually 50% of the time. If i'm playing sort of a 'crazy' character like a Kenku Bard. I'll typically roll for stats. But If I have a vision for the character while i'm making them, I'll go with the Array or Point-Buy. You can't get the same vision if you roll for stats... BUT, rolling for Stats can help you fill in some of the missing personality if you don't have the perfect vision for a character. Infact, I typically don't write down more than 15% of a character's backstory until i've played them for a session or two. Because then I know how they handle, and how the character actually turns out. I've played one too many 'gruff' characters who end up being a fuzzy teddybear after being introduced to the party... I'm too much of a Dad, damnit.
But when I DM. I let the player know in advance. 'You may not Re-Roll those dice.' If they roll for stats. Most of my players go for Point-Buy or the Array, but some of them Roll for stats. And it's worked both ways. But every time somebody rolls for stats, I've not had a problem of somebody complaining about how powerful they were, or how weak they were. They made that choice. The only time that I sort of got close, was somebody in my game had a 20 Dex Ranger at level 1. (They rolled an 18 and went Elf.) He was always super accurate, but it came at a serious cost. He didn't have many hit-points. He intentinoally didn't put his other higher numbers into combat stats, he didn't want to be a walking god of archery and swashbuckling.
I approved of this player. 10/10 Would DM for him Again.
There's a difference between breaking a given encounter (which is fine) and breaking the game (which isn't). Having a character dominate a single encounter is actually good for the game. It gives that PC a memorable moment of victory and tends to make them like their character. The problem with powergaming arises when some PCs dominate every single encounter and the other PCs never get their moment in the spotlight.
I completely agree. I've been in the shoes of the person dominating every encounter. And, It's not fun for me. I could see why certain people enjoy it. I'm a very competitive person by nature, and my Tabletop RPG's help steer me away from that, but I still strive to have a 'strong' character.
I've also been on the other end of it too. Where one person made The Best Archer Alive. And he... was. He dominated every fight without so much as breaking a sweat, and everybody else never really had a chance to do anything. And I can say without a doubt... that that isn't fun. Having been on both sides of it, if I find my character to be too dominant, I usually end up changing some things around, with DM permission.
DaWasabiHD very late to the party, but I too dislike when my PC becomes too powerful. I once rolled high stats, so I decided to lower some of them to flavour my character and avoiding game breaking. Playing a strong melee dwarf, high hp but useless at range and not too high AC (17), allowed me to shine as a fronliner, but also made it so other ranged, high dps or support characters weren't outclassed. I get bored when I even so much feel I have a strong character, and try to work with starting weak equipment of character flaws (reckless, frail, coward and so on)
Yeah, I role for stats 100% of the time as I like having some stats super low, like a 6 constitution wizard with 4 strength and intelligence 17!
That last bit of getting 3/18s almost happened to me before once. except I got 2 18s one 17 and the rest were 15s.
And I had already decided ahead of time that I was going to be a wizard.
So I had a wizard with 18 strength (and the additional strength modifier was also a perfect) 18 went to wisdom 17 went to Dex 15 to everything else.
I think the funny part was that I had more strength then our paladin.
And no I didn't dual-class.
The appearance I basically gave for my character was was just look at The Rock that's what he looks like.
Part of my back story was while I was trying to be a wizard during my free time I just exercised........a lot.
My first character was a mary sue monk with 3 18 rolls...
Long gone now xD
OP Clerics aren't annoying because of powerful healing. Clerics were only OP in 3rd edition, which is when healing was, as a whole, a subpar strategy. The power of the cleric came from a decent BAB combined with powerful buffs, allowing any cleric to turn himself into a "super-fighter"
Well, the problem still stands. A few days agomy party had a big fight in a 5th edition game. I used up all my 3 spell slot in healing, because my teammates were hit hard.
Problem was every turn I spent healing people would be negated by the enemy hitting them again the very next turn (I have high AC, my teammates don't except one, maybe). Had I spent that turn casting an offensive spell I would have probably avoided much more damage to my team.
I can heal 1d4+3 as a bonus action or 1d8+3 as a whole action if I touch the target. Compare that to the damage I can do, which is 4d6 with one spell (+ advantage on next attack) or 3d10 on touch.
In 5th Edition cleric are more armored casters (they are still very very strong though), but healing is still something that should be done out of combat.
Most people would suggest the most optimal strategy for healing is to just wait until a character gets dropped to 0, and then bring them back up with a healing spell. Does it make a lot of sense in the narrative? Not really. But it is the most optimal strategy.
I think the main problem with this is a lot of newer D&D players have this Action RPG mind-set, where healing is sustainable. But it hardly is. Healing costs spell slots, and spell slots are one of the most valuable resources for a character, especially at low levels. That spell slot you used to cast cure wounds, could've been used to cast Guiding Bolt, which does a crap-load of damage for being a first level spell, and gives advantage on attack rolls made against that target (not sure for how long though).
Servaes Guiding Bolt gives advantage for the next attack on the target, no matter where it comes from. I think a good idea would be to apply guiding bolt on a target and then use the advantage to have a higher chance to hit inflict wounds.
It requires a lot of spell slots, but if you need something nuked at low levels you don't get much better than that.
For a narrative point of view, before you get to 0 hp you haven't been hurt by anything serious, so a healer might not consider it urgent.
Also, in the case of a Forge cleric he should know that breaking things is faster than repairing them. Trying to heal up someone while someone else is trying to kill them is less efficient than killing/defeating the one that is trying to kill them.
Clerics were very strong.... but a Cleric-buffed fighter/paladin/Barbarian was always stronger than a battle-cleric. Battle-clerics just make people jelly, because "You're not the Tank! You're the Healer!!!1!"
The problem comes from efficiency. Namely that if the party didn't have the fighter/paladin/barbarian/whatever, the money spent on that character would instead be split amongst the remaining characters, and a battle cleric with 1.25x as much gold to spend on magic items and stuff is stronger than a fighter/paladin/barbarian/whatever
I had a character who I was unhappy with because he didn’t get a single magic item and almost everyone did, but I didn’t say anything about it because I was a half-orc fighter and didn’t use magic. After a while, the GM realized and felt sorry, and when I finally got an ivory greataxe with additional damage, I felt so amazing. I really didn’t want to sound needy when I didn’t get a special item, and that’s the only thing that kept me from sounding like one of those guys.
"You're the DM. You're so powerful, if you don't like something, just change it. You shouldn't complain about balance issues."
Okay.
*INHALES*
SO HERE'S THE THING:
What this REALLY translates to is this:
Imagine you're playing Borderlands.
"Dude if you think that area is too hard just mod the game to give yourself guns that do a billion damage."
See yes, we CAN technically just "make the game harder" if we want to but it's easy for players to see through those things. And it's not fun to do, either. It feels sleazy and cheap. Putting a fair obstacle in front of the players that provides a well-rounded challenge for all involved and promotes teamwork is INFINITELY more rewarding. Having a solid encounter predetermined is better than just "Well that was too easy to a bunch more enemies spawn- I mean climb out of the cave and run toward you."
So yeah don't tell your DM to not bitch about balance issues just because we already hold a significant amount of power. The struggle is making an encounter fun and just the right amount of challenging.
Yeah, I feel like people who say things like Puffin's quote there fundamentally misunderstand how games (not just tabletop RPGs, games in general) are supposed to work, and what a DM's role actually is. I think the issue with understanding what DMs actually are and are supposed to do is very much a D&D culture thing; you'll run into tons of shitty people on that side of the screen in every game, but D&D is the one where a ton of little holdovers from when this was basically just a multiplayer Wargame remain in both the system and the culture.
The thing is though if your players are more powerful, and you increase the power of what you throw at them, you aren't making it harder, you're just keeping up. If your players all have really strong characters then throwing something stronger at them should be just as challenging as if they have weak characters and you throw something weaker. He isn't saying just make the game hard, he's saying that as the DM you literally get to control the balance.
@@WolfbloodJakeWilliams But there comes a point where you're just "throwing more stuff" at them. That's not fun. It's just mindless and grindy.
With DnD characters in editions that aren't 4th, some characters, and thus their players, are more powerful than others. Taking a wizard out of a tier 2 or higher party has way more of an effect on what they can deal with, then say removing the fighter or the ranger. Players in a party typically aren't all close to the same effectiveness in combat, or even out of combat.
Also, difficulty isn't even consistent between players/characters in the same group, against the same enemies. A monk with proficiency in all saving throws isn't going to have as a hard a time against monster's special abilities and spells as the character with their default 2 saves, and 4 non proficient saves.
And a character with a mid 20s armor class is going to be basically on easy mode against opponents with normal attacks, that literally need nat 20s to hit them, whereas a player with a character with a mid to low teens AC will experience a lot more difficulty from the same attacks, which have a chance of hitting them around 50% or greater, so they will get hit all the time when exposed to multiple enemies.
And, since I've broken into pointing out DnD's game balance issues, a wizard with divination spells will be able to dominate gameplay when there is information to gain, with enchantment spells they can dominate gameplay when there's NPCs to charm or control. Abjuration lets them be the MVP when there's damage to avoid or deflect, and there always is. Evocation and Conjuration allow them to dominate combat by dishing out the most damage as long as they take some of the more powerful spells, and since some are focused and others are area of effect, they can be the most powerful at hitting a single enemy really hard, and the best character for dealing with a group of enemies with the area of effect spells. The variety of types of spells wizards in particular get, and more importantly, that they get to choose from all of the schools of magic, insures they can dominate gameplay most of the time, because they don't have to sacrifice access to even one school of magic's speciality, and the 8 schools of magic cover a wide range of utility in the game, so wizards can be MVP in most situations in the game, if they have a good portfolio of spells.
And apparently I turned this into another rant of mine about how magic in DnD is the main source of game imbalance and inconsistency in the game. It is the main thing that makes the CR system or systems obsolete by about tier 2 or so, because there are more than a few spells that swing combat, and sometimes even non combat gameplay so wildly. And that's not even factoring in the fact that most non caster classes have few to no abilities that compare to the more powerful level 3 and higher spells.
@@Inevitibility23 Or, you could, I don't know, actually keep up with numbers and abilities of the players to challenge them in *other* ways or play into whatever glaring weaknesses they've got?
It's hard to get started on doing that because it takes a bit more effort than just arbitrarily following CR listings and throwing monsters at the party.
.
The easiest ways to do stuff is to encourage the strong dudes with big numbers handle to be bad(and possibly some underlings to) while having the rest of the party deals with other things going on or other foes, ones better suited for them. Both contribute to the encounter in their own way, while getting challenged.
The problem with power imbalance is that it does affect the roleplaying as well. Even with no combat, if one person has a bunch of amazing abilities and another person doesn't, one person is controlling and participating with the story more. The Rogue can try to sneak over to a secret meeting and see if he can overhear a conversation, oh cool, except the wizard can turn invisible, fly, be completely undetectable, steal some documents virtually without any risk of notice, go up to a 200 foot window and go in and see what's going on, shapeshift, etc.
I once played as a gm and one of the players was a wizard that was super powerful like all they need is some healing and the rest is their job so I decided to slowly ramp up the difficulty in some parts so the wizard would have to protect his team and share the loot because he was very selfish
having a spearhead character doesn't seem to be a bad solution to these specific balance issues.
a spearhead only works when it feels natural, or is agreed upon by the party at the start. i had a game where it was 100% artificial by the GM, and it made the campaign miserable, because he also then was the spotlight hog. nobody else could try anything because he always was immediately asking the dm to do 10 different things, and because the GM had tapped him as the spearhead, he got his 10 things before anyone else could do anything. this eventually resolved when his character was killed(took 4 times to kill him, first was i shot him and he was replaced by a doppleganger when the DM put the two behind an illusion veil, then made me guess which one was the real person. i guessed wrong, and thus allowed an evil character to supplant him. 2nd was my next character shot him in the face, killing him. third time was he dive-bombed into a chasm to kill a demon, and died himself in the process. 4th time was the entire party against an alternate reality version of him. THAT time he stayed down. and because the party had killed my deity(lolth) the one week i missed, i then cast meteor swarm on the party from 150 feet in the air, and had the help of one other party member(who most of the group had been dicks to in character). the DM tried to pull intervention crap, but i called him on his favoritism and he backed off.
Haven't seen the "I've ascended into godhood at level 4" character yet. I should send my AD&D 2e ogre I made with the official book of humanoids.
Granted this is an old video, i was really expecting to hear about Clerics and Wizards. But good content, good points.
I love all of these advice videos. It's awesome. Note to self: be ok with being mediocre. I was never going to be an alpha player anyways.
I usually don’t base characters on how powerful they are, but on how fun they are to play as. I mean what good about having a character that can blow a hole on this earth if they aren’t fun to play as?
I prefer to come up with an Idea for a fun character and then build around that concept, it makes the game more fun when you have a character that is also a real person
Same, I like to build fun characters that are also capable. For example, right now I'm playing this 12 year old girl who is a Yuan-Ti Pureblood Soul Knife mystic. It's has some fun Roleplay moments because she doesn't care about anyone else and only talks using telepathy, but she is kind of friends with this silver Dragonborn who is also in the party (mostly because he won't ever leave her alone so they have grown close).
How can you not have fun having a character than can blow a hole in this earth? =D
Made a sylph sword saint in pathfinder, collects blood from fallen enemies to use as paint, fun times. Easily one of the funnest characters I've ever played, and easily one of the WORST characters I've ever rolled up.
I once rolled 6 18s for stats. DM took my dice and tested them.
Alexn Andum that’s what i would do mate. You have good rolls,just gotta check
Alexn Andum were they loaded
Well... WERE they?
"You gave me *loaded* dice?" *bumps into guard* "He gave me *loaded dice!"*
One time I roled a charter with 3 18s and 3 1s well the charter was a bit to stupid for the campain with 1 int and 1 wis and asking for help was out of the question with 1 charisma but it was a very strong barbarian with lots hp and Ac and damage
Rewatching this and I think you articulated a conversation I've had with some of my friends pretty well. Many of them like Pathfinder over 5e. I like them for different things. Pathfinder has some way overpowered options and if a group is building characters together, can imbalance the game by level 1. I like 5e since the balance is close enough and allows leeway. I like building characters in Pathfinder though, since I see it kinda like a mental challenge.
On the ending note, I frequently reroll for stats when making a new character. It literally is just not fun to play a character that has no stats below ten, your character has to have some weaknesses to have depth. I have had times where I've rolled multiple eighteens and just threw the whole set away because that shit is garbage, I'd rather play my 5 Charisma Monk
Personally I think spotlight balance is way more important than power balance. I don't care if main character is the weakest person in the party, I just want a fair amount of spotlight ^.^
I prefer building, maintaining, and growing interpersonal relationships between PCs or NPCs... and stats really can't ( or shouldn't) give you that
Yeah what I noticed is that the more powerful you are, the more spotlight you get. Even other players gravitate towards the strongest one.
Fortunately that hasn't been my experience ^.^ I'm currently playing the a game where I am by far the weakest possible character and the last session was 60% about my subplot :)
I am jealous. In one game I was in the DM kept giving one of my characters boosts and buffs non-stop because the other two characters in the game were power gamers. It ended up with my character's nickname being "The President" because I had soo many connections that I was able to solve entire situations just by calling a buddy, which was great.
Alexandra Elizabeth True, spotlight is also a problem. Power usually does two things: giving spotlight and comforting the ego. Every player should have ample spotlight, but it doesn’t have to be equal. Btw weakness is also a strategy to get spotlight and gets exploited sometimes. Searching spotlight is ok, but try to let others also have some spotlight. Everybody should have fun, so extrovert players like myself sometimes have to be reminded to leave space for others.
David Gantenbein See, I think a good GM should try to give everyone a chance to play, and sometimes that means shushing the over eager player so everyone else gets to play too ^.^
Oh yeah, weakness as a moment to "shine" is something I usually go for over spotlight for being good at something ^.^ It's hillarious to socially fumble, commit faux pas, and be entertained as the fallout hits ^.^ It's less fun to be kidnapped the 17th time in a campaign, but yeah, it can be just as good as victory
Not everyone finds the same kinds of spotlight entertaining either (I don't usually get excited for combat, tossing the spotlight to me is just gonna result in me trying to point it towards one of the other players lol)
i'm not an alpha gamer, as i usually don't care if someone does more work than me, but i do still powergame, and will sometimes spend long periods of time looking at stuff for it(usually between classes at school). now, i won't do extensive research in the game to see what everyone else finds to be the strongest, as that to me is where you cross the line - someone else is doing your work for you, and really, if you apply it, it is no longer YOUR character, it is a copy/paste from an internet template. if i happen to get really close to a template, i don't have an issue with it, as long as the idea was self-generated, and someone else happened to beat me to it.
i don't ALWAYS optimize, but usually my characters are specialists, where they have a few things they do really well(my favorite example is my amazon ghost, which specialized in heavy damage attacks, stealth, deception, and arcana). but i have a reason for any given character to be optimized towards a given thing. the amazon ghost is a high damage assassin who also specializes in disarming magical traps(we didn't have a caster, and our group uses arcana for that type of roll). my Drow Vanguard is a front line brawler who can sustain herself as long as she is landing hits, but is also reasonably good in dexterity and charisma skills(finesse weapons). My Combat Medic specialized in keeping players alive(seriously, i healed the group for upwards of 1000 damage in a boss fight at level 10, and we still almost lost half the group because i was out of tricks).
while i am not expressly opposed to playing characters that are not optimized for something, i do have an issue with feeling like what i do doesn't matter. for instance, i created a drow sorcerer who couldn't keep up with the offensive capabilities of the wizard or fighter, didn't have the defensive capabilities of the fighter, paladin or rogue, and didn't have the utility to match the wizard or rogue, because i only get a few spells that i can know, and can't extend my list. combine that with, because i was a draconic sorcerer(which admittedly did help my defense situation some, but i was still really easy to incap), i was hunted by the overarching empire because i was an easy to identify magic user in a world where magic was supposed to be banned(we were helping the last hold of wizards etc). so not only did i feel like i was pretty much useless, being overshadowed in every skill, encounter, etc(and i was pretty shunned by npcs because i was a drow), i was actively drawing negative attention to the group because of what i built - when a player was killed because an encounter with guards sparked up, i felt responsible for it. eventually i stopped showing up, because i a) wasn't having fun with the character, and B) thought my character would do less damage to the group being an NPC in charge of flying the air ship. ok, and the DMs girlfriend was hoarding the groups gold and making life miserable for the rest of us - IE i couldn't afford to get basic equipment because i never could keep gold, and usually had to plead with her character for enough gold to get food(we had a different economy, so everything cost gold because we wanted to keep it simple, and not deal with copper, silver, platinum etc). i might show back up at some point, but only if i was allowed to make a different character, one that could do something that would benefit the group beyond just adding a few d6-d8 damage to an enemy on my turn.
personally, i LOVE a challenging fight.(probably why when i picked up Dark Souls 3 earlier this year, i started loving the game). the feeling of knowing that this epic challenge that was set before you was overcome by you and your party by your ability is amazing(especially if you can say you are the main reason the group survived, like i can with the combat medic listed above). now, i don't have an issue with easier campaigns, but if i have to choose, i will lean towards the harder. for instance, my group was asked to vote between 4 difficulties of campaign. normal, heroic, legendary, and DM's Wrath. i immediately voted for DM's wrath. and enough of the rest of the group was willing to give it a shot that we got to play it. and it was a BLAST to play! that said, everyone needs to be on the same page for something like that. if we had been loaded into that campaign and half the group had built characters that were more gimicky and were not optimized, we would never have finished a fight, and it wouldn't have been fun, because the DM would have had to either A) kill everyone, and reload the last "checkpoint" he had elected, or b) clearly spare everyone in the party to let us progress
Hey puff? Thanks for making this video. I didn't realise it, but I was taking my pathfinder groups homebrew too seriously. I had complained several times to our gm about my character. I need to relax and slow down and enjoy the time more.
There is a little power imbalance in the main campaign I play (3.5), I have a fighter, and the thing is sometimes players can’t show up, and then there’s players who *rarely* miss a session, this results in level differences. If you don’t show up, you don’t get any exp for what happened, and then when a character dies, the player makes a new 1st level character.
I was one who almost never couldn’t show up, and my character never died, so right now I think I’m 5th level. My character is quite overpowered, being one of the more high level characters. I don’t know how she got so good. But I still remember this one time: (she was 4th lvl when this happened) my fighter was unconscious and bleeding out, she had -8 hp, if she got to -10, she would die. Which was *bad* because if she died we would probably all die. You see, she’s the only fighter, the other died to a 20ft crocodile near the start of the campaign. Everyone, I mean *E-V-E-R-Y-O-N-E* was panicking and screaming, “someone save Yin!” “She can’t die!” “NOOOOO!” Panic, lots of panic. Why? You might ask?
There is a couple barbarians, but they are more low level. So, she was the tank, and I mean, *tank* , she high hp, ac, she had a plus- uh, something to her initiative roll, I think it’s a +5? She has a high strength score, she had a really cool magic-longsword-that-was-good-against-dragons (which she doesn’t use half the time ‘cause she uses her normal longsword),she has a plus... 8?, to her main longsword in addition to her +4 to her damage roll (1d8).
I call it, “The Day of Most Fear” (she survived, by the way), and it still lives up to it’s name.
I've played with an alpha gamer who was dating the DM. Yeeeeeeeeah.
She got away with a LOT and her character was ridiculously overpowered. She breezed through battles while my (also pretty overpowered) character died. Three times.
It was also a bit difficult because my CHARACTER was obsessed with being the best, while her character was chill but the PLAYER was obsessed with being the best. And you could tell she was mad after a battle where I did more damage than her (but died again) and she would struggle to not throw a fit about it in-game.
Riversidewren anything else happen tell me more
Riversidewren I hope you and the other players left and started playing a new game with a different DM, because that is the only real solution I can see for a situation like that. She clearly isn’t a good teammate if party members keep dying and all she cares about is doing more damage than them. The alpha gamer is a problem, but DM favoritism makes it an even bigger problem.
Rotate who acts as the DM for your parties. Should help remind the crooked DM just how unfair it is when the DM favours one player over another.
in the game i am playing now we were walking around and found a bridge leading to a old ruin, and in the middle of the bridge was a giant stone statue. we waked across but my hill dwarf sensed something was off about the statue. I yelled "its a golem!' right before it came to life. we all go ready to fight it, then the monk used fist of unbroken air and knocked the golem off the side of the bridge instakilling it. one of the best moments in the game so far, but also kind of disappointing because i was hoping to get to use my knowledge of stone and rocks to find a way to kill it.
My teammate has a power called divine law which basically means he has more control over what happens and how stuff works than the GM/DM does. It’s so broken.
I love DnD. But watching this. I have to say that SOMEHOW. I got 2 18s a 17, a 16, and 2 15s for my rogue... and he got OP REALLY fast. In fact. He progressed so fast I had to ask the DM if I can use a second character just so people can catch up.
In my opinion the GM isn't all powerful. They're bound by logic, fairness and player expectations. If you're a GM who designs unfair and illogical encounters or kills characters without a means of resistance the players will and should quit. 'Rocks fall and everybody dies' is not the players losing, it's the GM losing. It means they have failed as a storyteller and game designer so fundamentally that they have to scrap the game and probably lose their group. The GM is only as powerful as the players let them be.
This is why players with OP characters annoy the hell out of GMs. Not only are they hogging all the screen time and glory from other players they are also making it impossible for the GM to design level appropriate encounters or craft a believable world. If at any moment ten flying Terrasques can appear over the horizon how are human beings not extinct? If that can't happen then how is there going to be a combat scene with dramatic tension for a level 20 party that includes a bearbarian, a mystic, a sharpshooter crossbow expert, a Shadow Sorcerer and Xanthir Darkblade the Multiclass Homebrew Edgelord dual wielding Vorpal Blades.
...okay
eh, the DM is all powerful in the sense that an absolute monarch is all powerful. Legally and systemically they can decree anything they want, but if they decide to bankrupt the country by funding a bunch of uppity tea-haters because they're butthurt about something, they might find their head on the chopping block. The DM has the power to do, allow, disallow literally anything he wants, but his power is constrained by the support of his players because without players his power exists only within his head.
tbf if he's dual-wielding vorpal blades the DM has to have allowed those to begin with.
Also, how are Shadow Sorcerers on the same level as any of those other things?
First solution I thought of for the OP character/DM balance problem: other planes. If you can't challenge your players on the Material Plane, throw 'em on a separate plane where packs of flying Tarrasques could exist without driving the material plane races into extinction. That, or creatures that do tend to keep to themselves, but still are absurdly powerful anyways; extra powerful liches or properly-played Beholders come to mind.
@@celestialtree8602 That's a good way to solve the power level problem for the story but balence is still an issue in a mixed party composition. Let's say you have 4 players and 2 of them are overpowered while the other 2 are vanilla. If the pack of flying terrasques (or equivilent) attack the vanilla players they get melted while the OP characters survive. This means the DM has to either A: Deliberately not attack them which ruins immersion once the players notice or B: The players have to base their strategies around the 2 OP characters because everybody else sucks.
For some groups option B is fine, for example I don't mind being carried since I'm more into the dynamic storytelling aspect of the game however for people who like the combat but don't know the system well enough to powergame it can be frustrating being dead weight.
To the point about collaborative board games: I expect that there are people who would feel frustrated by certain kinds of balance issues there that are frustrated by the same issues in rpgs. For example if One two otherwise stats comparable characters in a collaborative game one had the ability to heal one health for two talismans and one had the ability to heal one health for three talismans with no clear trade off there would be that kind of frustration of 'why can't I do that' even being on the same team.D&D is pretty complicated and well balanced, but in some homebrew games, or systems where a lot of time hasn't been put in that can get upsetting, especially because unlike a board game you don't usually just swap characters next game if it's getting frustrating. Hope that helps with that aspect of understanding!
I was always a power gamer as i liked to do my research and D&D 3.5 offered so many options. At the same time i was depending on lot of utility like creating sphere of darkness while having perks that would help me fight in it, well at least better then enemy could. When it came to leveling up, since i had lot of knowledge on classes, feats etc, other players would just come to me to pick best class/feat for things they wanted to do. We ended up doing quite well and all had their fun, even if sometimes we just had to run for it. I was also pretty good with telling if we can handle the engagement and to secure escape when we clearly couldn't. Remember, to get XP you don't have to kill the enemy, just overcome the obstacle/ resolve the encounter.
5:50 is the big challenge one of my groups ran into. It was a get-together where we only had the one weekend to play so not part of any ongoing campaign. We were intended to, and even set up, a more light-hearted game. We were starting at level 5, and the notion was silly character themes. Example, we had a half giant rogue with 17 strength and 6 dex. And only 1 rank in stealth, but max Intimidate. His style was when he was (inevitably) caught sneaking, he would yell "YOU CAN'T SEE ME I AM SNEAKING" and Intimidate the person into agreeing that yes, he was too stealthy to be seen.. Four of our five players were like that and as a result... well, it was fun but not optimal.
The fifth player had spent TWO WEEKS pouring over supplements before this one off weekend in order to min-max his character for maximum bonuses at most common D&D tasks. The problem was: yeah, he was "on our side", but because we hadn't bothered to optimize at all, and he had optimized out the wazoo, /he did every single task and left nothing for any other player to do/. The entire game devolved rapidly into people just passing so we could get to his turn quicker, so we could resolve the situation quicker. The combat had been set easy since the DM knew we were going to be playing un-optimized; so he one-round killed every single encounter. While we all had strategies (like the above rogue) our characters COULD pull off - they were usually less direct and more time consuming than his character resolving the problem in a more straightforward manner - which he always did.
It was super frustrating because it broke the expectations everyone had going into the game (that he had agreed to as well) and just made everyone feel pointless for being there. Nobody, even in a silly game, wants to feel like their characters' existence is pointless and they cannot make a contribution - and bad power disparities, be it from poor balance or poor stat-outs or differences in optimization can lead to that. I think this doubles over a bit with your alpha-gamer one. Someone self-aware of the lime-light problem can handle it by simply deciding NOT to hog the lime-light (a spellcaster who is over-optimized for the experience with a self-aware player can always excuse not using their best spells as "holding onto them just in case" after all), but when you combine large power gaps with the powerful character being played by the "It's all about me, me me!" type... yeah it goes poorly all around.
If I remember back to my first dnd game... I had a bard and he was made as a pure support and reporter type
Knowledgable ... I came back the next week and the GM and the alpha gamer (who complained at how bad my bard was in combat (albeit on purpose) had remade my bard into a badass bard who (in my eyes) lost all his character.... Idk but it wasn't a great intro... Imo
a GM completely taking control of a charecter and changing it? nope bye. thats out of the realm of the GM's control right there.
I combatted the problem of our characters all trying to be really tall in our game by admitting that my character's 5/11 but lies that she's 6 feet tall. So my character's the shortest lol
I know I'm a bit late to the party, but I want to mention something incredibly important regarding coop board games vs d&d: the length of a game! although i can confirm what Ben says in this video, i think that there is a huge difference if you are confronted with an unbalanced situation for 1-2 hours or for days and/or weeks. At least I've never seen someone complain about this power balance problem occur in a one shot (except for the characters not knowing each other very well, which is also a non-issue in board games), so this would make sense according to my hypothesis. but that are just my 2 cents.
edit: ok actually I remembered 1 one shot, where there was a massive balancing issue, that was mentioned and meant to be nerfed if there would've been a second session. one char was strong enough that he basically solved every encounter by himself and if he had enough healing items he could have played alone and still would have been fine....so that happened.
6:30 I ran an Exalted campaign where the PCs were trying to resurrect themselves (very long story). They ended up taking part in the siege of one of the Underworld's necropolis cities that had a large flat topped tower in the center. After a several session siege through the city they finally assaulted the tower and used magical jetpacks to get to the top quickly to engage the boss before he got away. Cue what should have been an awesome fight with the full party plus a dps npc vs a very highly stacked boss.
First full round in, the tank rushes him, grapples, pulls the jetpack from the boss, and throws him off the tower. Encounter ends.