Quote from: sureshot;1135434I prefer min-maxers over players who insist on making useless characters for reasons and feels.

I have never encountered people making deliberately useless characters.

I however have experienced powergamers making their fellow players feel short in the pants with their competently made characters and callously ignoring it... only to then get upset when allowances are made for the other players to catch up.

My sentiments nowadays are powergamers need to read the room and do some self-policing rather than engage in getting one over the table.

Quote from: ZetaRidley;1135443Funny thing is I've been working on a rewrite of the system, basically taking the core ideas like Strike, Parry and Dodge and Percentile skills. Basically codifying stuff and making it flow more. So far, its working.

I was always a fan of Microlite Platinum.

Quote from: Darrin Kelley;1135385But that is never their goal. Their goal is invariably to bully the rest of the group into doing exactly as they do. And in doing so, they subvert the entire group activity to their will.

This is why I will never believe in an "honest min-maxer". Because their actions show anything but honesty.

Tautological arguments are tautological.

This is why I will never believe in a "tautological argument". Because the argument reasserts itself and fails to show anything but tautologies.

Quote from: Razor 007;1135430Surely, there are systems that don't offer as many bells and whistles to min-maxers.  Run one of those systems.  It will be less likely to attract the min-maxer crowd.

Pretty much. The problem with "min/maxers" is systems that lack proper constraints and allow wide power disparities. If the system limits what characters can do or what sort of benefits they can have it will reduce the impact of "min/maxing". Though, even then you could have "min/maxers", depending on what people even mean by that term.

Quote from: sureshot;1135434I prefer min-maxers over players who insist on making useless characters for reasons and feels.

The first as others have pointed out can actively contribute at the table. The second not only complains about being useless they expect the other players to help them overcome their characters being useless. For example taking a low Str character and then complaining that they cannot hit or damage a creature than whine and complain that the min-maxer can. While also expecting the other players to be their pack mules.

Word. Though, low Strength characters aren't necessarily bad, and you could build some proper "min/maxed" characters with low STR (and probably maxed DEX) depending on the system and options available. The issue is ineffective characters who can't pull their own weight figuratively speaking, cuz they don't have anything (or enough) to complement their role or abilities and allow them to perform at least SOME useful adventuring function as part of the group. So they become dead weight the party has to carry around and not contribute anything.

Quote from: sureshot;1135434The sad part is some here don't understand what a min-maer is. I can build a D&D Fighter with average to above average stats and take the bread and butter feats and still be told I'm min*maxing. As everyone else was told by the DM it would be a combat oriented campaign and they decided to build pure rileplaying character who cannot hit or damage anything.

A "min/maxer" is anyone who doesn't build their character like a complete mongoloid, with spread out skills and stats that are all mediocre or low, at least a couple of knowledge based and/or social skills that are rarely, if ever, going to come up in actual play, and not a single thing they're genuinely good at.

I burned out on Kickstarter projects that look awesome and fail to deliver. Time after time. Especially Swedish games, they look pretty, but either try too hard with some neat ideas or are really just art books.
Also tired of hype games like DCC. I used to really enjoy DCC at first, then I realized it is great art, great ideas and very awkward rules. Very few adventures go beyond 5th level because there is little challenge in very little time. The funnels are fun, but it gets old after a while, which is a shame. The gonzo should have been turned down a few notches so that at least 10th level was possible.

Quote from: DeadUematsu;1135446I have never encountered people making deliberately useless characters.

I have consider yourself fortunate imo.

Were a not just talking about a Fighter who says takes a 10 Str and can perhaps make up for it with decent Dex. The best way to describe it was their desire to give min-maxers and their builds a big middle finger. Which I have no problem with. It's when the same players complain about feeling useless. What do they expect when their personal choices lead to their character feeling useless.

Quote from: DeadUematsu;1135446I however have experienced powergamers making their fellow players feel short in the pants with their competently made characters and callously ignoring it... only to then get upset when allowances are made for the other players to catch up.

I have also seen the opposite of min-maxers complain they cannot do anything at the table while refusing to accept the consequences of their choices made for the character. It's one thing if poor dice rolls give a player low attributes especially an important attribute for Rogue. It's another to build them in such a way as to make them if not useless than average on anything. Then expect the DM to toss the bone when it gets too rough at the table. I have a run into such a thing thankfully very few times and each I give the player an opportunity to change their mind because I know they will suck at the table and roleplaying can only get one so far. Almost each time the players and myself are told to mind our own business and not tell player XYZ how to build their character. Which again I am fine with it yet at the same time I also give the player fair warning I am not going to go easy on them because of the type of character they made.

If player ABC makes low Str and Con Fighter and wants to be more skilled based yet throws himself into combat and expects to be as good as the player who min maxes the Fighter then he is out of luck. Players at least at my table are responsible for their character choices and I am not going to screw everyone else over because the player was warned ahead of time of the kind of campaign it was going to be and was too stupid and pigheaded to listen to any advice.

Quote from: DeadUematsu;1135446My sentiments nowadays are powergamers need to read the room and do some self-policing rather than engage in getting one over the table.

Yeah...no players and DMs in general should learn to read the room not just powergamers.

If a player who suffers from a fears of Spiders insists on joining a camapaign where Spider and Drow will be common enemies they will fight at the table they should look elsewhere. If a player is told the campaign is going to be more about combat and less roleplaying and insists on making a skill based character who cannot hit the broadside of a barn it's on the player not the power gamer to fix the problem.

Same thing if players does not like Slavery and tells the DM about it yet decides to have players captured by slavers in the first thing is being a dick.

Quote from: VisionStorm;1135449Word. Though, low Strength characters aren't necessarily bad, and you could build some proper "min/maxed" characters with low STR (and probably maxed DEX) depending on the system and options available. The issue is ineffective characters who can't pull their own weight figuratively speaking, cuz they don't have anything (or enough) to complement their role or abilities and allow them to perform at least SOME useful adventuring function as part of the group. So they become dead weight the party has to carry around and not contribute anything.

Again I have no real problems with either or as long as both types of players accept the shortcomings of the characters. It's usually in my experience the player who is the opposite of min-maxer refusing to take responsibilities for their character creation choices and lashing out at the party. The min maxers seem to know that they are good at one or two things and don't blame the other players for not being as good during social situations in a campaign

Quote from: VisionStorm;1135449A "min/maxer" is anyone who doesn't build their character like a complete mongoloid, with spread out skills and stats that are all mediocre or low, at least a couple of knowledge based and/or social skills that are rarely, if ever, going to come up in actual play, and not a single thing they're genuinely good at.

Most of the ones I encountered all seemed to take at least using Pathfinder a few skill ranks in Perception and maybe one rank or two in a Knowledge skill. The opposite of the min-maxer builds a Wizard specializing in Enchantment yet takes a low stats as for Intelligence like  a 10 or 12 then wondering why more often than not the target shrugs it off while blaming the other Wizard who usually has a 16-18 Int at first level that their spells work and calling them a min-maxer.

Quote from: DeadUematsu;1135446I have never encountered people making deliberately useless characters.

I've encountered them all the time. They just don't know that they're making their characters deliberately useless, but their choices are deliberate and ultimately lead to useless characters nonetheless. They're the people who, for example, want their characters to be good at everything or have extremely complicated builds that would NEVER pay off unless you're playing a point-buy system and the characters are already extremely experienced, so they insist on spreading out ALL their selections (even against the explicit recommendations of people who actually know how to build their characters) and have tiny levels in every single skill they have and not a single truly high attribute, so their character ultimately becomes good at nothing. And even simplistically built non-min/maxed characters that at least focus on one thing to be good at  (even if some of their selections are dubious) significantly outshine them.

Quote from: DeadUematsu;1135446I however have experienced powergamers making their fellow players feel short in the pants with their competently made characters and callously ignoring it... only to then get upset when allowances are made for the other players to catch up.

My sentiments nowadays are powergamers need to read the room and do some self-policing rather than engage in getting one over the table.

"Powergaming" and "min/maxing" are two different things, but people like to lump them together or use the terms interchangeably, which complicates this type of discussion. One refers to a certain gameplay attitude that is not limited to character building, but extends to the acquisition of treasure, having powerful magical items or even cheating, while the other one refers more specifically to optimizing character builds within a given framework. Powergamers don't necessarily even have to be good at building, they just want the coolest powers and magic items, and if they can get them without meeting any normal ability requirements or such they'll do it. I've played in "powergaming" groups where every long-standing character had some sort of video game inspired cool magic item that was way out of whack with normal power levels in the game.

And "self-policing" only works if we all agree what exactly is "good" or "bad", or what precisely is the breaking point at which other players that don't know how to build their characters effectively start to feel inadequate. And it assumes that this is some sort of objective criteria that is plain for all to see, as opposed to subjective notions that vary widely by individual and only exists in people's heads.

Ah, you play PF! Now I know you're pulling my chain.

Edit: To be clear, I am not calling you liars BUT your experiences are very hard to believe.

For all that, there's always that guy who can have straight 18s and still manage to build a useless character that contributes nothing to the party.  Usually in the name of "roleplaying not rollplaying" boy there's a trope I've had enough of.

Quote from: DeadUematsu;1135446I have never encountered people making deliberately useless characters.

I have. I've even played a couple myself. It's all dependent on the game and the group goals.

One was a retired shadowrunner who went back to the streets after some shit happened to his life. He was now 58, his body old, skills rusted, but he had to do it regardless. Lots of fun ensued.

Useless characters can produce good stories.

Quote from: Itachi;1135462I have. I've even played a couple myself. It's all dependent on the game and the group goals.

One was a retired shadowrunner who went back to the streets after some shit happened to his life. He was now 58, his body old, skills rusted, but he had to do it regardless. Lots of fun ensued.

Useless characters can produce good stories.

In the context of the campaign, it wasn't useless. Let me be clear, you guys are trying to convince me that there are people who go in full-tilt deliberately and non-cooperatively throwing in knowingly useless characters against the known parameters of the campaign as some sort of stance and I simply don't buy it. I think there's a lot of revisionist history going on and that's okay if you want to prove a point to someone on the fence but goddamn is that not going to convince me to ignore my own experiences over the last twenty odd years. Powergamers, min-maxers, munchkins, doesn't matter, have, for me, proven themselves to be socially retarded, if not malicious, when not monitored and the proposed anti-thesis of them from a couple of dudes on the internet doesn't change that.

Quote from: Itachi;1135462I have. I've even played a couple myself. It's all dependent on the game and the group goals.

One was a retired shadowrunner who went back to the streets after some shit happened to his life. He was now 58, his body old, skills rusted, but he had to do it regardless. Lots of fun ensued.

Useless characters can produce good stories.

Yeah, it depends a lot on what type of game you're running, how important character abilities are in your game and how deep into the story your group is (either by design or by accident). There can be flawed characters that still make themselves likable enough or contribute in their own way, even if they don't have extraordinary abilities. They may stumble into things that stronger characters miss while acting heroic, or perform the most memorable antics in the session that leaves the rest of the group laughing or make things interesting in play. Though, that depends on the player and how the group approaches play, as well as what the campaign is about and how the GM handles things.

In one game I was running one of the weakest characters in the group (a 3e Fighter 1/Mage 2 dark elf, who was level 3 in a level 5 group, and wasn't very good at fighting OR magic) suddenly walked up to an ogre camp while the rest of the group was arguing about strategy when they had already been setup for like half an hour or more of real time, waved at a couple of ogres that saw him, then dropped Darkness on the middle of the camp, and ran like hell. Everyone laughed their ass off. Some in the group thought it was only a joke, but I as the DM ruled that it really happened and the player agreed that's what he wanted to do for sure. The rest of the party had been too busy arguing--both IRL and in character as well (shifting between IC and OOC talk)--to notice. So now the ogre camp was alerted and chaos ensued.

Most of the party was already in position so it didn't mess up their strategy much, but it did force their hand and they lost the element of surprise. Since their original plan was to lure the ogres down a funnel to pick them off more easily it still worked in their favor, but they didn't get the chance to let off a few surprise range attacks first. And the area of Darkness was a double edged sword, cuz it worked against both, the PCs and the enemies, once they moved into the camp. But they ultimately managed to pull through and win out after a tough battle that would've happened an hour later if that character hadn't intervened.

Quote from: DeadUematsu;1135471I think there's a lot of revisionist history going on and that's okay if you want to prove a point to someone on the fence but goddamn is that not going to convince me to ignore my own experiences over the last twenty odd years. Powergamers, min-maxers, munchkins, doesn't matter, have, for me, proven themselves to be socially retarded, if not malicious, when not monitored and the proposed anti-thesis of them from a couple of dudes on the internet doesn't change that.

Funny how the same thing could be said the other way around. But we're not the ones dismissing what the other side says by making hyperbolic claims about what they're trying to do while failing to address a single point, make a concrete argument or even bothering to draw distinctions. Your argument is simply "This are my ExPeRiEnCeS!" and having unrealistic expectations that the people you lump together simply "police themselves", like saying it should be so gives us concrete guidelines about WTF "self-policing" even entails, and according to who's criteria. Yours? Mine? Some guy on the street? Or the internet?

I generally avoid powergamers and min/maxers by two methods
(a) I often run games with random chargen. Roll the dice and roleplay the results.
(b) I am very specific with my chargen thoughts for point buy games. For instance, Boxing in Palladium gives you extra H2H actions, not more times to shoot guns and I am happy to limit choices of races and classes for the given campaign.

It also helps that I run lots of convention and FLGs game days so all the PCs are my pregens. Over the years, I've also had home groups who gave me their PC concepts and let me handle the chargen.

Quote from: ZetaRidley;1135443Funny thing is I've been working on a rewrite of the system, basically taking the core ideas like Strike, Parry and Dodge and Percentile skills. Basically codifying stuff and making it flow more. So far, its working.

Please start a discussion thread about your Palladium rewrite!

Quote from: DeadUematsu;1135447I was always a fan of Microlite Platinum.

Links? I've never heard of it! Love the Microlite stuff.

I've encountered useless players, but never useless characters.

Hand me the most useless character at the table, and I'll play the PC to the hilt and be useful in the game, even if the mechanics of the character are sub-optimal.