Chad Perrin: SOB

This is part of my RPG series of entries here at SOB. See the inaugural entry in the series for more details.

In running high level ROLEplaying games, I said:

Optimization isn't necessarily bad in a roleplaying oriented campaign, as long as it isn't metagaming optimization. Make sure that any optimization going on in your campaign is oriented toward character development rather than merely character invincibility development.

There's nothing to be ashamed of in a little reasonable character optimization. Optimization is natural. Players try to optimize their characters, to some extent at least, and you shouldn't discourage that. What you should discourage in a roleplaying oriented campaign, though, is pure combat power optimization with little or no acknowledgement of the importance of in-character justification for the kind of optimization that's going on. If you're starting a new campaign at first level and one of the players comes to you with a character concept that includes the motivation "become as powerful as possible", you might want to consider asking for more depth to the concept.

What does power really mean to the character? It's not going to be the same thing that it means to the player, who can sit outside the game flipping through splatbooks and adding up damage totals that occur as a result of combining corner-case quirks in the game mechanics. Whatever kind of "power" (if any) the character chooses to pursue, the PC should not only have a reason for pursuing that power that is grounded in a richly imagined background, but should also be something that makes sense in-game and perhaps provides a monomaniacal focus on a particular type of power that could leave the character vulnerable to other types of power. If the character must be obsessed, remember that obsession lacks strength outside of a very narrow range.

Motivations need not be to gain power, of course, but be wary of the character whose motivation is "to be as effective at defending the innocent as possible", or some other variation on the "my motivation is just an excuse to min-max". Where's the depth in a concept like that? Motivations should give characters reasons to do things that other characters wouldn't do, or even want to do; they should not give characters excuses to abuse the game mechanics.

In short, if character optimization means "maxing out combat effectiveness by playing stats against each other to best mathematical effect", you don't belong in a roleplaying oriented campaign. Instead, you belong in a tactical wargame, World of Warcraft, or a straight-up dungeon crawl campaign. Maybe the megadungeon is for you — which is fine, as long as you don't bring that style of gaming to a more roleplaying oriented campaign where it can become disruptive.

That doesn't mean you can't do some limited amount of combat optimization, of course. It's entirely possible that a character may be obsessed with achieving perfect skill with a longsword (for instance), but that obsession had to come from somewhere, some preëxisting motivation that drove him to such an obsession (maybe he got beat up a lot in school?), and that prior motivation should serve to monkeywrench the monomaniacal obsession with improving skill with the longsword from time to time (such as by causing him to take risks to protect someone from bullies — risks that might endanger his ability to continue improving his skill with the blade later, such as pitting him against his mentor). More iconveniently for the would-be min-maxer, a monomaniacal obsession with improving skill with a longword won't help much against rust monsters, or in situations where the character doesn't have a weapon at hand.

The very obvious key is that optimizations should be pursued for roleplaying reasons in a roleplaying oriented campaign. Campaign-breaking metagaming optimizations just don't fit into a roleplaying oriented campaign at all, and if you think a player is straying too far in that direction, you should consider whether he or she is really cut out for this campaign in the first place.

That's not to say that a player has to have a concept 100% fleshed out from day one, though. Sometimes, some nuances of character concept don't become apparent even to the character's player until after it has been played for a while. Maybe when a character reaches third level its player comes to you, as the GM, with the idea that maybe the character's underlying motivation for everything is really a sociopathic need for power over others. Fine. Just remember to ask what kind of power it is, and how that sociopathic need for power over others fits into the concept, and so on. There needs to be a believable characterization beneath that statement, or you'll end up with just another excuse for min-maxing, which won't fit into a roleplaying oriented campaign at all.

In a worst-case scenario, you should be able to determine what kind of player you're dealing with after half a dozen game sessions or so; best-case, the player will be perfectly honest both with you and with himself or herself before character creation even begins. If it takes you six game sessions to figure out that a particular player is a min-maxing combat optimizer who tries to make campaign-breaking characters, there are ways to deal with it. Many apparent blessings turn out to be curses; sometimes a reputation for prowess turns out to be notoriety as people spread rumors about your temper; if you're too good, brand spanking new adventurer NPCs may seek you out to duel and, when they die in droves, you may find yourself unwelcome in basically every pocket of civilization, and perhaps even sought by the law as a murderer.

In my experience, the best way to deal with disruptive munchkin players in a roleplaying oriented campaign is often to cultivate a GMing style where achieving too much combat power too quickly, without attendant weaknesses, and out of pace with the rest of the group, ends up having increasingly intolerable roleplaying consequences. You don't have to cater to everyone. Don't try to please the players who don't please you.

If you spend all your time bending over backward for disruptive munchkins as well as players who actually engage themselves in the spirit of a good roleplaying oriented campaign, you'll probably eventually find yourself wearying of GMing that campaign pretty quickly. Would you rather burn out on GMing because of a disruptive munchkin, or just leave the munchkin thinking you're not a very good GM so that he or she will avoid your games to play with some other GM?

. . . and if you're very, very lucky, the experience might actually teach the munchkin something, and make a great roleplayer out of a formerly disruptive, min-maxing player. I've seen it happen.

Mostly, though, on the rare occasion I've ended up with a munchkin in the group, he (I've never had a female munchkin) would get sick of a campaign in which dump-statting and powergaming backfire a lot. The player would eventually get his character killed, or develop other interests, or otherwise get out of the campaign and leave us to enjoy the roleplaying experience that was left behind.

It should go without saying that the next time I started a roleplaying campaign he just wouldn't be invited.

This is part of my RPG series of entries here at SOB. See the inaugural entry in the series for more details.

In running high level ROLEplaying games, I said:

The biggest problem of bookkeeping in a roleplaying oriented campaign isn't on the player's part, by any stretch of the imagination. The GM has a tremendous burden, dealing with high level NPCs and trying to manage the game in light of what the entire group of PCs can do at high levels, and this is only made worse in cases where the campaign is focused on roleplaying because of the greater numbers of NPCs required as well as the greater depth of NPC development that is needed. The only fix for this sort of thing seems to be inspiration plus elbow grease.

Bookkeeping isn't really as big a problem for PCs as one might think, at least in games where characters aren't already too complex at starting power levels, and at least in cases where the PCs developed naturally over the course of many sessions of play. When playing a character for a long time, starting out at simple, low-power status and developing from there, a player develops a relationship of sorts with his or her character, and the player's understanding of the character and its abilities grows with the character. It is typically only when starting characters at high levels that players really have a huge problem, in a roleplaying sense at least, with bookkeeping — because the player isn't used to the plethora of capabilities available to the character at those higher power levels, and will often forget about various abilities during play that should come as second nature to the character itself.

This is, in fact, the exact same problem GMs have with high level NPCs all the time, regardless of the style of play. If you, as a GM, intend to keep NPCs true to the rules, you have a tremendous bookkeeping burden. This makes it quite difficult at times to not only play the character appropriately with dozens of feats and class features and spells and so on listed on the NPC's character sheet, but also to create NPCs quickly enough to keep up with the pace of play. While this problem has always existed in D&D to some extent, it became especially problematic with D&D 3E, and hasn't really been relieved by 4E.

Bookkeeping may not be much of a problem for players most of the time, but it really is the bane of the GM in high level campaigns because of the complexity of high level NPCs and the sheer number of NPCs that show up in any game that isn't a pretty strict dungeon crawl campaign oriented toward generic monster enounters. RPG campaigns that focus on playing roles (rather than resolving rolls) are hit especially hard, in part because of the greater depth of characterization needed for NPCs, and in part because of the greater quantity of NPCs required to keep the game moving along. Aside from random NPC generators (and I'm working on writing one myself a little at a time, to suit how I run games), I don't know of many reasonable fixes for this problem besides hard work and a nimble mind.

There are ways to "cheat", of course. As Joseph pointed out in a comment responding to running high level ROLEplaying games:

In regards to the amount and depth of NPCs, I find it helpful to keep vital statistics on all past NPCs so that they can be resurrected in a new incarnation. It literally halves the prep time in that regard.

It's a good technique for lightening the burden, and often with just a few tweaks here and there — tweaks that can be made on the fly — NPC stats can be modified strategically to mask the fact they're retreads. That, of course, tends to be useful mostly for NPCs that fit within certain common molds and don't get too tightly integrated with the ongoing game, since it leads to a certain amount of generic feel for the NPCs. For more richly realized NPCs with greater depth, they need to be truly unique, at least within that game world. Changing the names and a couple of minor details (swap out the longsword for a bastard sword, trade numbers on thieving skills with those on social skills, and change colors in the description) only goes so far.

You can also go outside the current campaign for help, though. This works to some extent with borrowing stats from previously used NPCs, like above, of course, but only within certain limits. Sometimes, a set of stats may not translate very well because of setting quirks that may invalidate the basis of an entire character sheet. Using only examples from real homebrew settings in my own life: maybe a set of Wizard stats is inappropriate to a Midian campaign, where a set of variant arcane spellcasters replaces the Wizard; a priest of Oroboros in the Serpent's Spine may be fundamentally incompatible with the Velesh setting, which doesn't even have a typical D&D pantheon; an Orcish psionic Wilder in Neiäth would surely be incompatible with almost any other campaign setting. Even when character stats do translate well across settings, though, if you run games in multiple settings, or if you start borrowing from your PCs in other GMs' campaigns in their own settings, you run the risk of being thought too attached to certain "types" of characters, if you do this more than occasionally.

All of the above suffers the problem that changing some details about character stats, slapping on a new name and basic description, and making up mundane background details as needed, can lead to your NPCs all having a very generic feel, though. Rules help to flesh out and support concepts, after all, and lend a stronger flavor and sense of uniqueness to a character built on a strong conceptualization. As stats get shared around more, they become less uniquely suited to supporting any particular concept, which means that the concepts for the NPCs start looking less unique. With luck, that'll be the worst of your problems, because there's always the possibility you'll try to make the character "unique" with lame, Mary Sue style gimmicks, and superficial alterations. We really don't need any more red-headed lesbian Elves, who are long-lost heirs to the noble Armand family, with wings and a tragic past in which they were sexually abused. Trust me — it has been done to death, and it wasn't even good the first time.

There's an easy way to get roughly instant NPCs with real depth, of course. I've been known to actually crib not only NPCs in other games I'm running (particularly when two campaigns are taking place in the same campaign setting), but also my PCs in other GMs' campaigns, too. This results in NPCs with deep, rich backstories, and it's trivial to make minor changes — often on the fly — to fit them better into the current campaign if need be. I've had both NPCs inspired by PCs of mine and PCs inspired by NPCs of mine. Once they're introduced to a game world, they begin to diverge from their counterparts in other game worlds, and the players seem to find these among the most interesting NPCs, for obvious reasons. This is definitely something to do only rarely, though.

In cases where the players aren't already familiar with the character, it can work brilliantly for obvious reasons, and doesn't run the risk of sapping the concept of all sense of uniqueness when adapted to a new campaign setting. Where the players are familiar with the translated character, you must be more discerning in how you handle things; make sure you don't have the appearance of creating a "GM's pet" NPC, you don't do it so often that the players get tired of never meeting anyone new, and you don't suck all the fun out of meeting new NPCs by introducing characters the players already know everything about in circumstances where someone mysterious and new would be a better fit. Done well, though, you can definitely enhance the quality of play, not only with an already richly developed character being ready (for the most part) to just drop right into the game, but also with the added excitement amongst your players of being able to interact with a character they've grown to know and love under other circumstances.

Then, of course, there's always the expedient of "borrowing" NPCs from other sources, such as published campaign settings and adventure modules, online accounts of other people's ongoing games, and so on, with changes made where you feel they're necessary to add your own flavor to them or eliminate some details you find "dumb" or otherwise unsuitable to your campaign. I think it was Albert Einstein who said that the secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. This can help immensely with the mad scramble to come up with a developed character concept when you need one right now, but it doesn't really solve the problem of being familiar and comfortable with playing the stats on the sheet. You may end up smacking yourself in the forehead when you realize you've been forgetting about the character's always-on ability to detect psionics.

Ultimately, though, the dedicated GM of a roleplaying oriented campaign is sure to want to actually create NPCs (mostly) from whole cloth a lot of the time. I definitely do. The less your campaigns rely on characters that also appear in other contexts, explicitly or beneath a thin veil of midsirection, the more the NPCs will acquire their own unique flavors. That requires a lot of time and effort for high level campaigns, though. For some GMs that time and effort requirement can be reduced by using some largely random system to come up with the skeleton of a character concept, then flesh out the NPC with off-the-cuff decisions made during play. In the end, though, it comes down to a balance of hard work and a nimble mind.

This is part of my RPG series of entries here at SOB. See the inaugural entry in the series for more details.

In running high level ROLEplaying games, I said:

Lengthy combat seems largely inevitable, except in cases of combats that look like "failures" (either because of TPK or a too-easy vanquishment of what was supposed to be a dangerous foe), in high level campaigns. Lengthy combats don't have to be boring, or common, though. Mix in combats with lower level peons, along with other types of challenges, and the occasional lengthy combat will feel epic instead of merely long. It's the boring sameness of lengthy combat after lengthy combat that really makes combat in high level campaigns dull, and that's easily avoided by making sure that the game's about a lot more than "challenging" combat.

As I hinted, high level combats can surely get tedious and dull if they turn into blow-by-blow slugfests where both sides are trading damage and soaking it up by virtue of high hit point totals. This is one of the biggest problems with stat inflation as a means of keeping game play "balanced" at higher levels.

Of course, at higher levels both characters with classes and creatures with Monster Manual stat blocks also develop strange and wondrous abilities, including "save or die" spells, frightening supernatural abilities that (temporarily?) cripple opponents, and other capabilities that basically break the rules of normal hit-and-damage combat resolution. Just a few days ago, a tenth level character of mine came within a hair's breadth of having his memory erased and getting dumped on the street or worse (thank goodness for the save bonus granted by Conceal Thoughts).

Scary insta-kill abilities can sometimes be more trouble than they're worth, however, as combat resolution becomes anything but predictable for the GM, whose aim should generally be to challenge the PCs without accidentally achieving TPK. Sometimes, PC death is appropriate, but one hopes it's because of a dramatic turn of events that adds to the power of the storyline, rather than because of an unexpected series of save failures that ends the storyline prematurely with the universal deaths of the entire group of PCs.

The only way I've really discovered to deal with this other than to just completely screw around with the basic rules of the game system (which I have been known to do from time to time) is to combine conflict resolution options that avoid the standard toe-to-toe confrontation with the occasional, truly epic battle at a climactic moment that is rare enough to make it fresh and interesting rather than just yet another hit point grind. Lengthy battles of attrition of massive HP totals can be interesting, as long as they're not commonplace. Break things up with noncombat events that draw the players into the game at least as well as combat encounters, and the variety will help even the most grinding combats become more interesting as well.

In short, there's a lot more to keeping combat interesting at high levels than merely keeping it challenging.

I guess there's always the option of just picking monsters that have a lot of insta-kill capabilities and pit them against your PCs, then do all your rolls behind a GM's screen and fudge the results to keep things fun for the players. I find that saps a lot of the fun from the game for me as a GM, though, and pretty well fails to engage the players in actual roleplaying nearly as much as the kind of approaches I discussed above. Your mileage may vary.