Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 56 - Character Optimization and Saying No as a DM

Episode Date: January 17, 2021

There's been a lot of character optimization discussion online the past couple of months.  What is it?  Should players always optimize their characters?  On the flip side, DMs need to say yes to player choices, right?  Not always.  Jeremy discusses the situations when optimization may be necessary, encouragement for DMs to say yes to their choices when possible, and the powerful ability to say No when necessary.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Taking20 Podcast, Episode 56, all about character optimization and DM choice. This week's sponsor is the Kansas Whale Conservatory. Sure, we're landlocked and we don't have any whales within a thousand miles of the state, but donating to the KWC is money whales spent. I think I'm ready to announce this. We're on YouTube. Episodes 30 and later have been uploaded. Don't worry, you won't have to see my ugly face there, but the audio is there in convenient waveform so that you can watch while

you listen to my melefluous voice. I have no intention of leaving the podcasting platform for YouTube permanently. This format is my first love and I'm not leaving it. I have every intention of continuing to podcast about one topic or another long after you listeners tell me to stop talking about RPGs. One of the regular discussion points I see come up online is the concept of RPG character optimization. But what is it? Should you optimize your character?

In the interest of full disclosure, I talked about min-maxing, which is another way of thinking about optimization, in episode 8 of this podcast, released in March 2020. That was a year ago, not that detailed, and recorded while I had a sinus infection with worse equipment than I have now, so I want to re-sew this field. Also, given the dust-up late last year about Cody from the similarly named Taking20 YouTube channel and Pathfinder2e requiring optimized characters, making any suboptimal choice non-viable, I think that necessitated a longer response on this topic. But with character optimization, let's start with the basics. Character optimization is selecting a party role or gaming mechanic,

and then selecting the character traits, feats, spells, technologies to absolutely maximize your ability to perform in that role to the detriment or even exclusion of everything else. The barbarian who drops their mental stats like intelligence, wisdom, and charisma to ridiculously low levels to boost their physical stats like strength, dexterity, and constitution. The frail weak wizard who's smarter than Einstein with his intelligence of 20, but he can't lift anything heavier than a pool cue. As I said in episode 8, optimizing your character isn't necessarily a bad thing. In the traditional four-person party that harkens all the way back to the days of first edition,

it was the fighter, rogue, cleric, and wizard with each person having their role. The fighter was the tank, the frontline combatant, maybe intimidator during social encounters. The rogue was the trap finder, the scout, the flanking combatant, skill jockey, and maybe did a little bit of range damage. The cleric was the healer, possible frontline fighter, did a lot of diplomacy, and buffed the party. The wizard finally was the

range damage dealer, battlefield controller, debuffer, and then responsible for knowledge about nearly everything. Each player likely makes character design trade-offs so their character can be good at their job. I mean, that makes sense. We would expect network administrators to understand a lot about switches and routers. I hope civil and structural engineers know more about building bridges and tunnels than I do. Doctors should have more education about the human body than we have, so they can tell you what that rash is that's growing just above your left kidney, and it's growing by the day, and it's starting to whisper sweet nothings into my, I mean, your ear. As I was thinking about this,

the traditional four-person party I talked about really is kind of an antiquated design. These days, with so many game systems having hybrid classes like Pathfinder or subclasses in D&D 5e and a myriad of options available to them, party members aren't shoehorned into only filling these roles like they used to be. A 5th edition or Pathfinder Druid is extremely flexible and can be almost like a Swiss Army knife for the party, filling whatever role is needed. A Pathfinder Swashbuckler can be a charismatic fighter or a rogue to fill the role of face of the party, if you will.

Regardless of what role your character plays in the party, she does have a role and it's important that she's the best that she can be at that role, right? I mean, I'm the damage dealer, I need to be able to deal the most damage. I'm the tank, so I need to have the best armor class and most hit points. Right up front, and by right up front I mean a few minutes in, I'll say that I'm not going to fault any player for making decisions that optimize their character's ability to perform his or her role. Some people live looking for that perfect feat or trait to take at every level. They go to message boards or social media sites like Reddit to debate which ancestry selection is the best for each character class. Hey, if that's what you consider fun, then I'm not going to yuck your yum. Hell, the ranger in my

current campaign is choosing a build based on killing things from a really, really long way away. I think I found the webpage he's using as the basis for his build, so I'm pretty sure I know what feat he's taking when he hits 15th level in a few weeks. But do you have to make the exact, perfect decision for how to build your character to the exclusion of everything else? In roleplay light campaigns that are almost closer to video games, there's no issue at all. Sure, it's fun being the most lethal bastard on the planet focusing on being the best damage with a bow or laser rifle, greatsword, dorn dergar, bite attack with ability drain,

or whatever your character has. Or being a top-tier decker and deftly avoiding online protection mechanisms to hack databases and getting that one piece of information that would allow your party to bypass three-quarters of the security mechanisms at Favreau Fabrications. If all your players go for optimized builds, it really limits your character variety. Every Cleric takes the extra channel feat. Every Barbarian wields a greataxe. Every Sorcerer focuses on Fireball. Every Starfinder Mystic is from a race called the Shirin. The result of character optimization is unrelenting homogeneity, meaning there's little to no variety in the characters.

No one plays against type. No one tries anything new. No one takes a feat because of some interesting event from their backstory because that would be suboptimal. In that respect, in his video, Cody was right. If all players choose to only make optimal choices, that means your characters will start all looking the same. To only make optimal choices, that means your characters will start all looking the same. If you as a DM run your game that forces your players to use optimized characters, then you'll have the same problem. They'll make the same design choices for their characters. Their backstories will become slight variants on a similar theme, so they gain access to a particular feat or trait that would otherwise be unavailable to their character.

Combat will look the same because every fighter is a half-orc that's a walking bucket of hit points and heavy metal armor. Every sorcerer is a high elf, weak and squishy, but free teleport if they find themselves in melee combat. Every cleric is a human heal bot who must maximize her ability to remove debilitating conditions like blindness and disease, but doesn't know which end of the sword goes into the bad guy. Optimal characters make for a rather boring game regardless of the game system. D&D, Pathfinder, Starfinder, Shadowrun, Call of Cthulhu, Blades in the Dark, Cyberpunk Red all suffer from this problem. Players, I would encourage you to design a character that you would want to play even if the writers at RPGBot.net say that's a bad choice.

Just because a particular ancestry or race has a bonus to an ability, that doesn't mean that every member of that ancestry follows that same path. I mean, if you want to run a gnome barbarian or a karasha leshunta mystic, a troll combat decker or a half-orc wizard, all sound fun to play. You, a wizard with your green skin, don't make me laugh. Ignis, boom. So you're gonna stop the racist bullshit or does Thorak have to burn a bitch? DMs, you have a choice on how to run your campaign.

You can run your game as a slave to the numbers given, the encounter as presented in the module. The role you made on the encounter table featuring the bad guys as written with no regard to party makeup, player experience, or difficulty the characters may be having. You can run every encounter with extremely high difficulty where every creature always goes for the killing blow and follows a narrow set of actions in combat. But if you do, you don't get to whine about how there's no variety with the characters or actions because you are the one driving the players to this narrow range of choices for their characters. If you run every combat as lethal, PC-killing grindhouses, then every player with a modicum of sense is going to try to keep their character alive, i.e. optimize them for combat. You know what that means? Your social interaction encounters are going to suck.

The exploration and foraging parts of the game will likely consist of a lot of failures. Similarly, if you have an adventure and warn the PCs it's going to largely be a series of social encounters with an extremely high price for failure, then don't be surprised when the characters that the players bring to the game can't fight their way out of a warm wet paper sack. I mean, it's an intriguing idea, though. The party has to investigate the dangerous world of high society to uncover who would have the motivation for supplying the fringe terrorist group of humans who are seeking to destroy elven society.

The characters have to collect information, interview people, examine evidence. Maybe there's an attack or an assassination attempt if the players are getting too close to the truth. There's a showdown in front of the queen where the party confronts the big bad evil guy who also happens to be the queen's courtesan. And I've added that to my google doc of campaign ideas I hope to flesh out one day. DMs. You can certainly run games at an extreme or adventures exactly the way they are written but remember you are the DM or GM and you have the power to change anything in the world and anything in the adventure that you would like to. Creature statistics like hit points, armor class feats, and weapons they wield, change them at will. Treasure and loot earned by the party, change it

so that it's better for them. Motivations and actions taken by adversaries both within and outside of combat, you can change it. Modify it to make it better for the players. When the players complain, you can't just hold up your hands and say, well, that's what's in the module or monster description or DM guide. Frankly, you're taking the coward's way out doing that. So in summary for character optimization, players, before jumping to the most optimized D&D wizard, vampire the masquerade clan, or Cthulhu occupation, talk to your DM about two things. One, whether the character must be optimized to succeed in the planned adventure and world. And two, your vision for your character and whether that's a good fit in the universe. DMs, I would encourage you to be flexible in your combat and in your world where you can give the players the opportunity to play the character they would like. That being said,

it brings us to our second topic, saying no as a DM. Matt Colville, a DM I greatly admire and respect, released a video in December about saying no. Matt did not allow a player to play an elf to gain access to a particular feat. The player admitted that was the only reason he wanted to play an elf was access to that feat. So Matt said no, that's not what elves are like in his world. And he has every right to do so. I want to talk about DMs saying no to four very specific things. One, character creation choices that break the game world. Two, character creation choices that are being done to exploit a rule but doesn't fit the world's narrative. Three, character actions that would not be possible.

And four, character actions that would hurt the other players or characters. You may have heard me say in other videos that GMs should find a way to say yes. I talked about improvisation and saying yes to support players' choices. My advice hasn't changed. You should say yes to your players whenever possible. The players are responsible for their characters, however you as the DM are responsible for what's going on in the rest of the world. The DM designs the campaign and is responsible for maintaining the tone of the game, the world's history, and informing the players when something is impossible or would have a potential detrimental effect on their fun. Years ago I was a player in a game and one of the other players wanted to play a hobgoblin character. He was, for lack of a better term, desperate to do so, and kept insisting that the DM should allow him to play a Hobgoblin because that's what he wanted.

However, the DM kept explaining that the campaign takes place in a small xenophobic village that's regularly plagued by Hobgoblin and Goblin raids. He said that the Hobgoblin character would likely be persecuted, maybe even accosted and attacked by going to this town, which would serve as an early quest hub. There were cries from the player that it wasn't fair, that he couldn't play exactly the character that he wanted. The DM had spelled all this out in the player handout before session zero and even multiple times on the campaign discord channel. The DM even offered alternatives to playing a hobgoblin. The player said he was leaving the campaign because of it, and it really bothered the DM. He and I hopped on Discord the next day and had a good 30-minute conversation about it after that happened. I asked him a few basic questions. How deep does this hatred of

hobgoblins run? Would it be possible in this world to have an exception that demonstrates the racism in this town? This one hobgoblin that somehow grew up in the town and the people in the town say things like, oh all hobgoblins are murdering bastards except for Lauren, he's okay. He said no, that the hatred of hobgoblins was a central pillar of the campaign. So the other question I asked was, could the situation change at some point in the future where hobgoblins might be tolerated in town? And he said, for the campaign that he wanted to run, he didn't see how that would happen. So I said, you were right to say no to the player. In this case, the player was wanting to make a character choice that would break the tone of the game and potentially the campaign narrative.

No is the right answer here. Suppose the answer to the last question had been that the situation would change at some point in the future and hobgoblins were at least tolerated. Then, I would say to the player, hey, you can play something besides a Hobgoblin at first, and then the situation changes, we'll write your existing character out and bring in the Hobgoblin you want to play. Some DMs run the different races or ancestries in whatever RPG you want to name

that just give numerical differences to the PCs and NPCs. Higher strength, more intelligence, better cunning. There's really no personality differences to the races. If you run your game that way, more power to you. I do this sometimes for campaigns where players aren't interested in role-playing. Orcs tend to be stronger, makes sense you're a barbarian. But in some campaigns, the role-play aspect comes out and the different ancestries and races have vastly different belief systems, different ways of behaving, and different interactions both within their own ancestry and with outsiders. In your world, elves may be warm and loving to other elves,

petty half-elves, and immediately dismissive to and distrustful of non-elves. Elves in your world may absolutely refuse to use metal weapons, and instead, all of their weapons are made out of obsidian, animal parts, and wood. They believe that any elf who willingly touches metal loses the connection to their deity. It is now considered an Edlon, or an outsider. They are outside the laws of the deity, outside the ability to call the fair wood home, and outside the protection of elven laws. If so, should you allow an elf to play as a character who uses an adamantine greatsword and wears full plate? That would go directly against the way the elven ancestry lives in your world,

so you as a DM would have every right to say, no, elves don't believe in using metal. Could this elf, however, be an outsider, banished from his homeland for daring to use metal weapons? Absolutely. That's one way you could allow the player to play the greatsword character while still being an elf. But as a DM, I would come up with some sort of repercussions to take effect later. Maybe other elves won't associate with the party at all. They won't sell to them, won't give them quests or something similar. The elf himself may be persecuted for wearing metal armor. There could even be numerical penalties for losing connection to your deity, or even assassination attempts as the elves put a bounty on his head. If a player choice would break the way a race or ancestry operates in your world, then you have every right to say no as a DM.

Another example when it's good to say no is when players try to use their player knowledge instead of character knowledge. An example would be if a character fails his lore or knowledge check about trolls, but the player still says, hey everyone, use fire or acid to stop their regeneration. The character wouldn't know that. He failed the roll. The player does because she's played D&D before and knows the monster. Another example

would be if a player has played the adventure before and uses their prior experience to influence what their character does. Careful everyone, this door's trapped. There's no way a fighter with a 7 intelligence and a minus 3 perception standing 40 feet away from the door could possibly see a DC-25 trap. In both of these cases, and any other time a player tries to use their knowledge that the character doesn't have, you have every right to say

no as a DM to maintain fairness at the table. The fourth and strongest reason to say no is when players attempt to take actions that would ruin someone else's fun. The classic example I've seen multiple times at the table. Oh, my rogue is going to try to steal loot from the rest of the party. Maybe they're in camp and she tries to rob the party while they're all sleeping and she's on watch. Could be that the rogue attempts to palm a valuable gem when she's the first one to open a chest. Either way, they are trying to have fun at the other player's expense. Another example of this is when a player tries to use his character to make unwanted sexual advances to another character. As I mentioned in another episode, that is absolutely forbidden at my table. Period. Hard

stop. But I cast charm person on them so they should do what I want. Yeah, Captain Horny, that spell isn't mind control. Keep that stuff in your fanfiction, yeah? Remember, the PCs are working together as a team, and as such should rarely, if ever, take actions that would be detrimental to the team. However, I have DM'd roleplay-heavy campaigns where betraying the party was part of a character arc and character growth, but these were all veteran players who had played together a long time and wouldn't take it personally. A variant I would use rather than saying no is to ask the player if the character

really would take a certain action with the reminder to that character he or she is a flesh and blood creature that feels remorse, pain, sadness, loss, and responsibility. Would that father of three really drop a fireball at his own feet to kill five kobolds with the expectation of getting resurrected later? Would you willingly go through that much pain and the potential to never see your family again? Maybe the circumstances dictate that you would, but make sure the player is able to justify the action to herself

and potentially to you. Why would Pirate Captain Enormous Knob Johnson scuttle his ship when he could just escape and potentially to you? Why would pirate captain enormous Knob Johnson scuttle his ship when he could just escape and live to fight another day? Why would your big bad evil guy fight to the absolute death when she has a portal waiting and could step through and attack the players again later? Why would your character who believes in doing good things and being a good person save the amulet of cromulent hacking when he could save the dozen kids trapped in the orphanage. Okay, um, how in the hell would a character have that choice? The fire burns hotter and you hear a groan as part of the roof collapses.

You stand at the intersection and on your left, inside a room 20 feet away, the amulet glows green with circuit board patterns displaying in the emerald and fading away just as quickly. On your right are twelve doe-eyed, undernourished waifs huddled together in the room, calling out to you, Please, sir, help me! What do you do? What sick, twisted DM would possibly do something like that? I mean, that would-

Hang on. Hang on. On the left, magic item. And on the right, twelve ragamuffins got it sorry i was making notes for my next gaming session dms yes you should try to say yes to your players about their creation choices and actions whenever you can but no is a powerful tool in your toolbox that can be used to great effect when it's needed if a player's design decision for their character would break the tone of the game or the campaign world, or if a player's choice for their character's action would break the fun for the other players or tone of the world, then no is the better answer there.

Do you agree with me? Disagree? Do you have a show idea? You want to tell me to go pound sand? I'd love for you to leave me some feedback on this episode or provide me some feedback to feedback at taking20podcast.com. I get a few messages per week and I'm diligent in responding, so please keep the feedback coming. Thank you all so much for listening. Once again, I want to thank our sponsor, the Kansas Whale Conservatory. Be sure to check out our new orca triplets.

They'll have you saying, whale, whale, whale, what do we have here? This has been episode 56, character optimization and DM choice. My name is Jeremy Shelley, and I hope that your next game is your best game.