Reading some of my old game books I was struck by something. I can pick out the gear I would pick, were I creating a character today. Often at the drop of a hat.  In short, I could pick out the gear almost every character anyone ever made would be using in short order.

Naturally I exaggerate a little bit, but generally there is always an 'optimum' speicimen that every serious player (Real Men...) uses. Lets leave off the silly uber-munchkins with their arsenal of nuclear bomb bullets or what have you.

This is not a universal problem, but it is one to keep in mind when talking about games in general.  It's a many headed hydra, not just restricted to 'the best gun' or what have you. Not at all. Cyberpunk 2020 and Shadowrun both posit worlds where the optimum thing to do is to cram as much cyberware into your body as possible, and even gives you a few examples of 'Must Have' gear that you can't seriously play without.  It is not  excessive to suggest that many players, particularly the combat minded, will spend most of their money buying the cyberware they couldn't start with, once they've gotten the guns and armor they couldn't start with.

We can always suggest that the GM has the option of simply not making such things available, but that is a hollow solution at best.  Players will rightly point out that the stuff is out there, and consistently frustrating your players may lead them to thinking you don't want them to 'progress'... they get unhappy and leave.

Fine, fuck 'em with a fork, don't need those crap players anyway, right?

Too drastic a measure, and it doesn't address the issue at all, merely reduces the number of people willing to play with you.

From a design perspective it is important to make sure you don't have any 'must have' gear.  Comparison: Cyberpunk 2020 reflex boosters and Shadowrun reflex boosters. In Cyberpunk, you can be a top notch 'Solo' without reflex boosters, or in fact a decent combatant period. They give you a slight edge in initiative rolls, sure, but not even half of the variable in the roll.  

Shadowrun: without the extra actions granted by 'reflex boosting' cyberware or magic you simply can not compete with the bad guys. Someone with Wired Reflexes is worth three or four times what someone without them is. Roughly. Obviously, for a combat oriented character in a presumably violent game, Wired reflexes (or somethign equivilent) is a must have. Thus, every character will have it.  Thus a problem.

In Guns and other gear I've found the best solution is the simplest. Generic guns or a holy huge plethora of guns to chose from with minimal to non-existant differences other than name brand recognition.  Fading Suns, Feng Shui and a host of other games seem to have it right (SLA industries is on my list, barely, but I'd like to keep my explaination a bit more mainstream).  

Armor, however, rarely seems to work with the same concept. Of course, you could say that to a lesser extent with guns. Mostly, people get the strongest, toughest armor they can.  Realistically, if you expect danger is imminant, this isn't a bad thing. However, from a gaming standpoint it tends to suck. Character concept goes out the window if everyone has the same concept of 'Power Armored Goon' or what have you.  Ironically, Shadowrun does okay, the main body armor is the Armor Jacket. It's not the very strongest, but it is the strongest 'street armor'... and everyone is pretty much expected to have it. Of course, there is no good rule based reason why players won't start strapping on the mil-spec security armors and what have you as soon as they can.  But we're getting to that. Fading Suns, now, seems to have it right... but how?


The real issues start when players routinely carry massive cannons around, walk about with tank armor strapped to their chests and otherwise run rampant with their gear.

Whatever happened to style?


Rules, it seems are a piss poor way to control what players do. First of all, if they don't like it, then they'll ignore it. Simply not putting it in there can occasionally lead to even worse 'fan ideas' floating around the net that if made canon would completely invalidate anything in the main book.  I've seen a few.

The Key, I suspect, is in the GM. As always.  Let the players go hog wild with gear, cyberware, guns, armor. Run it as a one shot... sky's the limit... sort of game. In that game you introduce the concept of 'social pressures'.  Full borg killing machines have no social life at all, even the human looking ones.  Ditto for the guy who never takes off his armor. Let the player unload with that seven foot long, 50 lb uber-rifle... then make them suffer for carrying it around after (rather than going 'And where the fuck were you hiding that?') until they are sick of it and ditch it... or get smart about when they pull the big guns.  If there is one peice of key gear that is a 'must have', try making the character the only one in the world with it (as far as they can tell from encounters), and setting up situations where it is less than useful.  Wean them from the concept of need for that one game.

Then bring in the regular game with all the regular rules and regular gear.  As long as you don't start forcing them to go crazy, they might just stick to ordinary stuff for a while.  They may even trust you enough to leave the wired reflexes off?

Or am I completely off base with this one?  I dunno, myself, I've run the anything goes games as primary, and Doug Knows that D&D, the granddaddy, doesn't seem to be as bad about it as many games... if you could say it is at all (other than the 'Must have +5 weapons and armor by level X... mentality)

You can't combat optimization with a game system.  Ever.  

If your players are munchkins, they will munchkin whatever system you throw at them, no matter what it is.

You can either deal with the munchkin player as a person, trying to get him to curb his behavior, or just letting him be, or you can just not play with that person.

It's worth pointing out that many DMs fear optimisation because they suck at it themselves. Also because they want to pop the very gear they banned PCs from having into their badasses to give them an edge over the PCs.

But yes, some optimisation is done simply because the options are badly designed. D&D manages to avoid the worst of this by expanding the possible niches characters can fill such that what is required to be the greatest divine caster is not what one needs to become the greatest arcane caster is not what one needs to become the greatest monk or arrow shooter or whatever.

You also shouldn't put characters in situations they can't handle with their current gear if you don't want them to upgrade their shit constantly. If you want to run a low-magic D&D game, you're an absolute fucking asshole if you then proceed to toss a bunch of enemies with DR and spell-likes at the party. Don't ban anti-tank guns if you plan to exploit that by making fight their way through a complex filled with heavily armoured cyber-soldiers with pistols. Fights shouldn't be rigged in the DM's favour (they also shouldn't be rigged in the PCs' favour, but that's another rant).

In my current StarCluster IRC game - the Beginner's Luck series, now in it's fourth year - one of the characters has as his most trusted weapon a .45 caliber hogleg revolver made on a world in the Steam age. He picked it up as a fourteen year old from the corpse of a man the party accidentally killed. He's now 18, and head of Security for a planetary government. He has access to any armor or weapon he wants, but his weapon of choice is still that hogleg revolver.

-clash

I love optimization.  I just want to make sure that optimal paths lead to the type of game I want to play.

If I want to play a game where everyone's nerves are jangling with upgrades, and the common folks are helpless against the mighty blurring cyber-speed of my sleek killers then Shadowrun is my game, right?  If that's my goal then I don't object to it being the one optimal strategy.  It's what I wanted to do anyway.

It's only when I want to play a down-on-his-luck Street Shaman who gets by using his wits and a pocket derringer that Shadowrun really lets me down.  It's not serving what I want from the game, because what I want is so clearly sub-optimal to the game system.

Quote from: TonyLBI love optimization.  I just want to make sure that optimal paths lead to the type of game I want to play.

Looks like I'm riding on the TonyLBus today! :cool:

Quote from: TonyLBIf I want to play a game where everyone's nerves are jangling with upgrades, and the common folks are helpless against the mighty blurring cyber-speed of my sleek killers then Shadowrun is my game, right?  If that's my goal then I don't object to it being the one optimal strategy.  It's what I wanted to do anyway.

This is what bugs some oldtimers a bit about SR4. The optimal mix of implants tipped to the bioware side of halfway. Cyberware is still an important part of implants, but it isn't king anymore. Which I think underlines what you are saying, what the optimal is is important in defining the tone of the game.

Ironically with SR4 it is now much more viable to play without implants or magic. Overall even the bast without implants is only near-optimal, but doable. And fun to play. Which I think is the important part of "combating" optimal, making sure that there is some variety in the optimals. Different paths to take and lots of near-enough-to-optimal-to-work that you don't get a herding of people to a single point.

The way I combat optimization is to go the other way.  I tell the players they are absolutely free to twink out their PCs.  Then when I go to construct opposition I assume the PCs will be like unto gods among men.

Quote from: jrientsThe way I combat optimization is to go the other way.  I tell the players they are absolutely free to twink out their PCs.  Then when I go to construct opposition I assume the PCs will be like unto gods among men.

Yeah, this is what I do.  Actually, in practice I'd often help them twink out their PCs by giving advice to the people who aren't as up-to-speed on the rules.  

However, if there are bits which are out of genre or dull, then I'll generally put in house rules which fix that aspect of the system.  For example, the Buffy RPG system has no real drawbacks to armor -- but in the series people should really be fighting in fashionable and/or skimpy outfits, not armor.  So I implemented a house rule that armor penalized your DEX to the point that choosing to wear armor was at best a wash.  Not realistic, but it fit the genre.  Along the same lines, I changed it so that weapons were a flat damage bonus rather than a strength multiplier.  Thus, weapons were a big deal to low-strength PCs, but only a minor help to super-strength characters (like Slayers and such).  

It's been a while since I ran a cyberpunk game, but when I did the PCs were armed and armored to the gills.  The armament and cyberwear differed, but armor was just sort of a standard that was common to them all.  That just meant what made them stylish and cool was how they blasted things, not how they protected themselves.

Meh, if they're minmaxing at least it means they're studying the rules and learning. So there's a bright side to it.

You can't fight it.  The best you can do is go along and optimize the NPCs.

There's nothing wrong with optimization per se; it's a natural consequence of simulative mechanics--mechanics that try to model the inner workings of a process. Whenever you do that you're going to have some "builds" or strategies that are suboptimal and some that are optimal. To give this a little more meaning, if you're looking for maximum damage in a single hit, there may be several ways of accomplishing that, but some of them are going to leave you with fewer resources elsewhere, without providing any advantage.

As I said if you have a reasonably complex set of simulative mechanics and a multidimensional set of "stuff" you can do with them, I don't think it's possible to prevent optimization. It's just a way of "learning how to say it properly" in a given mechanical "idiom". "You want to say "human tank" in GURPS? Here's the recipe." Whereas to say the same thing in Basic D&D, you just order: One Fighter, please.

The real problem is when optimization leads to convergent character designs/behaviors, which is just boring from a color standpoint and brain-dead from a game standpoint. (Did I just call Basic brain-dead? No: designing a fighter isn't the challenge, it's what you do with the character.)

The goal then should be to encourage divergent designs with tradeoffs in utility in different situations and even in direct conflict. This is a combination of character-building and situation generation.

Why would a GM want to combat their players having fun?

Quote from: James McMurrayWhy would a GM want to combat their players having fun?

I have a tendency these days to get tetchy about GMs getting aggro about optimization, because it tends to stem from some rather, shall we say, "Swinish" motivations.  

But in fairness, uber-optimizers can indeed be rather disruptive in the sense of one's fellow players.  When a player tends to twink out to the extent of overshadowing all the other players and depriving them of fun when combat comes around, you have a problem.

I've seen it happen countless times in games, so I have no qualms stating that it can be a real problem, and a very frustrating problem for the GM and the other PCs.

Yep, that's definitely a problem. I'd say the problem was possibly a GM either not knowing how to handle optimized characters or not having the balls to say "that character doesn't match the genre we agreed on."

Quote from: James McMurrayWhy would a GM want to combat their players having fun?

When it makes it stupid tough to come up with a challenge for the characters and it stops being fun for the GM.  I've been there far too often. I have a regular player that has a really bad tendancy to do this.  The biggest problem is if the other players aren't on board with it.

EDIT: Yeah, what J Arcane said. When it is disruptive or even worse purposely used to disrupt.