[RPG] One player has made combat trivial for self

combatdnd-5eproblem-players

I have a player who has pretty much minmaxed his character to simply deal the most damage possible, and have a great amount of health. The other characters are more quality-built, with evened out stat-blocks.

In short, I let this player play a homebrewed 5th edition version of the 3.5e knight (except without the weapon binding). This Player now has the most health, most AC, and can do almost as much damage as the rogue. This problem is going to get worse quickly, as they're only at level 3 now. Naturally, this makes combat very uneven towards my other players. In long this PC is foremost in health, at 24 . He is tied with another paladin for the most AC (18), and does more damage than the rogue (though the rogue is much more efficient in not taking damage). This character has a +6 to attack rolls (I may have to audit that), so they hit quite often. This character is geared towards pure combat and so everything else this character is either really good at or somewhat mundane.

I've somewhat evened this out by making combat encounters less of a main feature.

I do want to fix this, however. I have came up with an experimental fix, but I don't want to employ it quite yet. (Using [plot], during one battle, all DEX mods swap with STR, and all WIS mods swap with INT, and finally, all CON and CHR mods swap. This would put my quality-built players at a much better playing field, but will also punish the problem player, not exactly my intentions, but a slap on the wrist is appropriate.)

What other ways can I even out PvE combat such that this player doesn't simply kill everything while the other players get points for participation?

Best Answer

“Sorry, that homebrew was a bad idea. I messed up. Please help me fix this by making a new character.”

Some recognition of responsibility here is in order. The player certainly has some responsibility for powering up the character, of course. It's arguable whether that's a bad thing by itself or not — but it's irrelevant, because the DM has much, much more responsibility for this situation.

You approved a homebrewed class, and that turned out to be a bad DM decision. So the player is not really at fault at all — they just used what you gave them.

The traditional way to deal with this is to acknowledge that the original DM decision to allow this piece of homebrew was a bad call, and to work with the player to remove the homebrew from the game. Being a traditional fix, experienced DMs will give a warning by saying something like this at the very beginning, when approving the homebrew: “Okay, we can try that, but I reserve the right to remove the homebrew class if it turns out to be a problem.”

Naturally, it's more difficult now on a social level to revoke the homebrew, since that warning was (likely) not given originally. However, that doesn't change the fact that it's the fix for the situation that is cleanest, least complicated, least likely to break other parts of the game, and most likely to actually fix the problem.

Apologise to your player, say that the homebrew class is really, really not working out, and work with them to build a new character that doesn't use a broken homebrew class.