[RPG] GMing for a hyper optimized character

dnd-3.5egm-techniquespathfinder-1epowergaming

One of my players loves building characters that are, for lack of a better term, broken. I don't mean he min/maxes them, I mean he builds characters that are way more powerful than they should be without compromising other stats too much. Think along the lines of a less extreme Pun-Pun.

I am having trouble GMing for the group with his characters. In order for it to be a challenge for him, I generally need to make things well into the "deadly" range of CR for the group. However, this means that everyone else is more or less ineffective against the challenge and is in danger of getting one-shotted.

The things I have tried are as follows:

  1. Keep the encounters lower level: This results in very fast combat as he annihilates everything and I have trouble producing enough content to fill a session.
    • Problem: Players mostly have fun but feel under challenged. I as GM do not have fun as I watch everything I labored over get shredded in seconds and then panic when we run out of content for the session.
  2. Use enemies with a ton of damage reduction but low attacks: This makes the combat take longer, but the other players get frustrated by feeling useless. Also the whole session just feels like a grind and no one has fun.
    • Problem: Absolutely no one has fun.
  3. Have high CR fights: This doesn't feel like DnD anymore because I end up having to intentionally flub a bunch of rolls so I don't one-shot everyone but him.
    • Problem: I don't like having to lie to keep the party alive. If I do it too often, the players get upset because they know they aren't earning the win.

To be clear, this issue is entirely a problem for me as a GM, not for the other players. The player in question is a great guy who never tries to soak up the spotlight. He always steps back and lets the other characters have a chance to shine at the things they were built for, even if he can do them better. He honestly just likes optimizing builds and basically play testing them for a few months each with our group. He is a great player and a great person, but I can't figure out how to give him the challenge he wants without killing my other players.

Note: I don't want to have the "solution" involve optimizing enemies against him. 1) He builds characters well enough and cycles them often enough it would take too much of my time to do that and more importantly 2) Building these really awesome characters is how he enjoys the game and I don't want to take that away from him by nerfing all his hard work.

Best Answer

In particular for your first bullet

This was originally the last section of my answer. I actually like it more than everything else I've suggested so now it's the first thing.

This is sometimes a hard solution for 3.5e, but honestly not as hard as it is for 4e for what I'm aware, so... You mention

Problem: Players mostly have fun but feel under challenged. I as GM do not have fun as I watch everything I labored over get shredded in seconds and then panic when we run out of content for the session.

This one has a way easier solution than changing your players mindset and designing complex encounters.

Challenge them in other ways than combat. I'm assuming your powergamer is optimized for combat, otherwise... Challenge them in other ways than the one the powergamer is making easy.

There are numerous other ways of challenging the players other than combat. Social interactions are an obvious one - make "encounters" that are unwinnable if they choose to strike instead of talk. Puzzles with complex traps are another - we have a tag. You can either challenge the players with puzzles or the characters, your choice. If you decide to challenge the players, you won't ever have a problem with powergaming that aspect of the play.

This also means you won't run out of content so easily. Essentially, make a different kind of content, one that doesn't get drained easily by optimized characters. If that is not your style, keep reading.


I will revive my experience from 3.5e for that question, adding some insight from 5e (because that's what I have been playing for the last ~4 years).

First things first:

Your players seem to want to play different games

While one player wants to powergame and optimize his character, the others want to... I don't know because you didn't specify, but it seems they either don't want to optimize or don't know how to.

Being the DM for two different groups that want to play two different styles of game is usually hard and, as the link suggests, not usually recommended. It is not impossible though. But yeah, for 3.5e (and I assume PF) it is harder than usual, since there is a lot of unbalancing there. If you are willing enough to a point of changing the system, 5e suffers considerably less than 3.5e and PF from this problem - and I would recommend the linked answer even if you don't plan into changing the system.

In particular, if your other players simply don't know how to optimize, the powergamer can help them with that. Then you can proceed to make encounters that are challenging for everyone because now everyone has an almost broken character.

If they don't want to, that's a bigger problem. Here are some things that you can ask the player to do and do yourself. The first two are for changing the characters he plays, which might not help you.

Ask him to play Enabler/Control characters rather than huge DPS

Treantmonk's guide to God Wizard explains the concept better than I can think. I've linked the 5e guide, but the important thing there is the introduction, where he states his reasons for creating his 3.5e guide. The TL;DR of the guide is: He was asked to play a optimized character, but the other PCs weren't optimized. After trying out a character that overshadowed their party, he decided to make a God Wizard.

I had an idea how I could help the group without dominating the action, and I came back with a Wizard character. In the first combat, I was encouraged to use my fireball, and the group was quite confused when I told them that I didn’t have Fireball, lightning bolt or even magic missile. I still remember the DM asking me, “So what DO you do then?” When I explained I would be putting up walls, fogs, buffing, debuffing, etc. My character was declared “useless”

This means he won't be able to solo encounters on his own. Everyone in the party will still feel useful, your encounters can be "normal" and he will be challenged by having to support his teammates that aren't optimized. As someone who mainly played Wizard in 3.5e and 5e, this guide (and the whole mindset) is awesome for playing an optimized character while making everyone else - especially new players - feel useful by themselves.

Handicap him

This answer for another thread frames it too well. Instead of optimizing the most and being the most ahead, he can instead optimize from a lower starting point - playing either underpowered classes or starting with lower stats or any other kind of handicap you want to give him. He will then have to optimize a handicaped character to get to "as good as" the other characters. There are ways to impose these handicaps on him yourself, like giving him less magic items (which 3.5e depends heavily mainly for martial fighters from what I remember) and other things. Make sure he agrees with that, though. Punishing players for whatever reason is at least a reason to discuss it, as can be seen here and here.

Different fights

This one may seem awkward, but it has worked for me. It won't work for every encounter, but for some of them, instead of putting the party against 4 Goblins, you can put them against 1 Goblin Leader and 3 Goblins. Then, since you are the DM, you can proceed to split the party and make the optimized character focus their time and effort in the goblin leader while the others are focused in the 3 usual goblins.

Essentially, rather than having one ancient dragon or 10 goblins fight the party, try to diversify the enemies in a way that the optimized character gets a larger share of the CR for him. Obviously this needs a) the optimized character being able to "solo" fights b) the other party members being able to handle their mini-fight on their own as well.

The split can be done either forcefully by you - traps, walls and whatever else you can think - or as a "suggested tactics" for the party.

This can also be done in a less impactful manner by making the guy with huge attack focus only on him, while the other creatures/NPCs/enemies focus the others. Yeah, you'll have to find some excuse for the optimized character being targeted by the more powerful attacks, and that will depend on the characters, their backgrounds and their way of behaviour, which are informations we don't have. But it is certainly possible to do while making it immersive.

As I said, I've done it before, but I don't recommend it unless everyone can agree to it. It leads to the game being way less cooperative than most are used to.