I'm 6'2" and my players consistently make 6'3" characters

Allow me to save you from your revelation about Legolas and Gimli: LOTR is a campaign that started with four players, the hobbits. Gandalf is an NPC guide to help new players get through the first adventures. Arriving at the inn where they meet Strider is when they pick up a new player who's playing baby's first edgy PC. When they get to the formation of the Fellowship, two of the previous players had to drop out, but two new players (Legolas and Gimli) join the group. These two are old hands, and probably friends of the GM. They know that the newbies have had a great time and built a solid rapport between their characters, so instead of trying to worm their way into the core of the Fellowship storyline, they deliberately pick characters who do the same thing (kill baddies) but from two competing races, and decide collectively that their characters are going to have a rivalry arc which will eventually end in them being friends, as a symbolic statement at the end of the story. That's why Legolas does all his trick shooting and sliding down stairs on a shield- he's really rules-smart and has built his character to be able do do cool shit like that, while Gimli's player optimised for raw numerical offence and defence. TL;DR: yes they were both powergamers, but they were also the *best* roleplayers in the campaign, as they made sure their rivalry added to the campaign without taking away the focus of the original story.

I ran a game once where everyone tried to be the most useless member of the party. It was..odd.

Someone I GMed for specically asked to roll stats with 1d20, and ended up with 21 strength, 2 intelligence and the rest mediocre. The Roleplay from this character was legendary

Oh my god the TALL party! I'm playing in that one (well the same idea): I'm playing as a Tiefling who looks terrifying but just wants people to like him (he talks with the Big Scary Voice and everything) so the DM said I could be extra tall (6'6") just to sell it. The Paladin found out and changed his race a couple hours before we started to dragonborn just so he could be 6'8". THEN our wizard died when we were level 4 (in an obvious suicidal character way), and became a dragonborn Sorcerer, and was 6'11". Lastly, our monk later changed their character (because they were bored of being a weird social outcast orphan), and became a 7'4" Goliath Warlock. My 'ultra intimidating but nice' Tiefling became the shortest party member in 4 sessions.

I've had characters that did tons of damage and just wanted to the the higher damage dealer. They didn't argue but kept one upping one another. That all ended when our Dragonborn fighter (who wasn't one of the two) suplexed a fire giant off a bridge......

"Even in single player video games, you still have to balance the game" I think Just Cause would disagree

I'm sensing a lot of hostility towards a certain person...

I've had games where a character felt really underpowered compared to the rest of the group. Yeah, it's co-op, so your party mates' strengths are your strengths, and taking joy in them pulling off cool stuff is important. But feeling like dead weight with nothing to contribute does suck, and I don't think that you have to be an unpleasant player to not like being in that position. Oh, and height story. The campaign our group is currently running we're all 11 (or our race's equivalent of 11), and we have a dragonborn the size of a 14-15 year old, a furbolg the size of an adult, and then a 2.5ft kobold and a 2ft gnome. A lot of carrying happens...

One of our players (who has now left both of our campaigns he was in) was really a master at putting together maxed out character builds. And rules haggling his way into getting his way when he misinterpreted rules, but that's another issue. It really started to not be fun as other players when you can only do 1/4 the damage on your 30-second turn as the rogue can on his 5-minute turn. Still, it was clear that the guy was crucial to the party winning in the DM's difficult encounters. When my wizard hit 5th level, I made a decision. The game was unfriendly to all my offensive magic, so I decided I'd instead Haste our rogue and take him from the stratosphere into the mesosphere in every encounter. And it worked. I became pure support for one guy. Doing what I could for the good of the party. Then I got 4th level spells and could be a little more independent. (4th level is the golden zone of D&D spells if you ask me.) I started Polymorphing and Banishing enemies myself (Divination wizard with low portent roles is awesome). The rogue was not so happy I wasn't hasting him anymore. In a recent encounter (now we're in double-digit levels), I decided that Hasting the rogue was the best option again...until the enemy tried to escape, and I needed to trap it in a Wall of Force. I knew this would be bad, and it was. Because I dropped concentration, the rogue lost Haste which meant he also lost a turn from temporary exhaustion. I never heard the end of it. It was like I'd committed a personal sin against him. I took Haste out of my prepared spells after that. This was one of the last straws before we were tired of playing with him. I also learned after he left that the DM had been scaling our encounters into the realm of superdeath to try to compensate for the absurdly powerful rogue. I guess the lesson here is don't buff the alpha gamer, because you can't take it back. Whether it's with spells like Haste or giving them too many magical items or giving them rules exceptions, they only want to go higher and higher, and the ENTIRE TABLE will suffer for them being nerfed or passed over for some boon.

i once played played a Wizard who forwent all other spells in order to focus entirely on maximizing the power of his magic missile. good times.

"I also have the power to look into the future only better than Kyle." Eric Cartman

I had a bad power gamer in one of my campaigns and because I was the only one who had a Neutral Evil character, at one point I had literally every other player begging me to kill him but he was much stronger than me so everyone just kept helping me up my stats by buying me weapons and stuff just so I could kill him and this made him really mad so at one point he tried to kill me and for some reason he decided to do this near a cliff side so I just pushed him off and once he died everyone cheered and shouted "DOWN WITH THE TYRANT" and I'm like "oh my gog guys, he's right here, that's super rude"

4:00 My friend was a Paladin and a whiner...and our GM gave him a magic hammer to get him to shut up about not having a magic item (joke is: the hammer actually did nothing but glowed slightly and we never found out til game ended)

Here's a story for you guys from me as a newb (Still am) I was joining a campaign halfway through, level 1 and no magic items. I asked, "Hey, can I get at least one so it can be somewhat fair?" The gm gave me a flexible metal staff that can talk. It was also indestructible (This comes in later) Later in the game, we were fighting a lich in a flat plain. It casts antigravity for 50 ft in the air, and our party goes STRAIGHT UP. After the spell wears off, I roll to use my staff to help break my fall. I roll a nat 20. I use the STAFF AS A CATAPULT AND LAUNCH MYSELF AT THE LICH'S FACE. Me using myself as a projectile was the most damaging attack against the lich and I took no damage.

When I started dming I had a good chunk of player experience under my belt. To avoid the dreaded powerplay scenario I told all of my players that their characters should at least have one flaw and that a fun character is better then a good character. So now I have a cleric who has a massive sweet tooth and a monk that is almost brain dead (he rolled a 3 during stats rolling).

There is a Druid In my party with a magical scroll that can ascend anybody who reads it to godliness, but it is a dead language that requires a lot of knowledge to learn. What the dm forgot, was that my character could learn comprehend languages, a level 1 spell

I wish I had a group that all wanted to be "the tall one" your description had me in tears and the fun I could have with that party in game.

As far as power balance, I think D&D has two problems: everyone wants to be effective in combat, and it used to be far less balanced than it is now (prior to 4e and 5e). 5e has a specific problem: dealing damage is king. - Save or suck spells are very unlikely to land compared to previous editions (even a creature with no bonus to that saving throw has about a 35% chance to break Hold Person each round), and powerful creatures can break them for free with legendary resistance. - Healing spells are far less effective than damaging ones by design (unless bonus cast on an incapacitated ally). - Buffs are fine, but are seldom as useful as dropping a fireball or similar. - Most powerful non-damage spells, such as Fly or Invisibility, have severe limitations in how creatively they can be used. A lot of that comes from the Concentration mechanic - no more flying through the dungeon as an invisible gas cloud unless you have multiple casters cooperating. As I said, damage is king. Beating the enemy to death with a magical hammer always works. So the question becomes: who deals damage the most effectively? Every player wants to be that guy. And, if one of your players brought something really good, like a Hexblade with devil's sight and agonizing blast, you can't reasonably stop him from doing damage without knocking him out of the fight. Some classes just have better tools for dealing and avoiding damage than others. This is why barbarians are often regarded as a stronger class than fighters in 5e - better damage and damage resistance. The boring but effective dragon sorcerer is more useful than the fun but unpredictable wild magic sorcerer. And so on. The DM can do something about this. Problems that have more than one solution are a good start, especially if some of those solutions don't involve combat. Enemies with very high resistances but specific weaknesses are great to showcase a particular character or force players to fight creatively. But players themselves can't fix the problem, and DMs often don't know the problem even exists.

The mechanics in a cooperative board game differ from RPGs in one important point: Board games are stacked against the players so hard every player is important to winning. Even if you never get to use your character's special abilities, you have contributed to the solution and probably have done a few awesome things. This is different in RPGs where it is possible your character ends up basically useless, because the other characters are better at your field of expertise. Nothing kills investment in a game faster than the game telling you that you do not need to be there.

I only had one game with a complainer... 6 hour games were 3 hours of him complaining... UGH... it wasn't even valid complaints... he was a Human/wizard [trying to soul bind demons], I was a halfling/sorceress, and when I used "charm person" to get information from a captured bandit he accused ME of "slavery" which was illegal in town... and he was "Soul Binding" demons perminently

Never had a tallboye complex but I often have players who, obnoxiously, desperately want to be "the cool one." So they build their character thinking they'll play a Jack Sparrow or Tyrion Lannister character, never stopping to think that the reason they like those characters so much is that the script is WRITTEN to make them look cool, not improvized with a table of people who would probably also like their character to be the clever, or cool, or special one. Nobody else really cares about your desire to always have a witty one-liner or to perpetually win in a battle of wits and isn't planning their actions around setting you up to deliver them: that's what you don't have in common with your favorite characters. As a general rule, if you build your characrters based around how others will perceive you instead of how you're gonna play them, you are cheating yourself out of a good time.

The GM is so powerful, he even works under water!

It actually happened to me, where I felt like someone else did everything my character did but better. I played an early UA Artificer Gunsmith and a friend played an Arcane Archer. Since I had a gun, the GM said there was an ancient civilization my character researched so I had magitech stuff others didn't, and his character was an ancestor of that civilization, so he had a gun as well. Since Gunsmiths basically only had class features that make them shoot the gun good, the arcane archer basically did that plus all other kinds of things I could not content with. Only leg up I had as an artificer was having magic items. As our GM thought about it, he realized how my character totally feels redundant and underpowered next to this arcane archer dude. I don't know, it sure felt like I couldn't really do much with my cool gun when all my options were basically "You shoot but it does more damage" while he can shoot his gun better, has special shots that do all sorts of things, can shoot faster/more often and on top of this is decent with most weapons, can tank and has more hit points. This basically killed the campaign because the GM did not know what to do with my character.

The worst ones are the ones that make the super-powerful characters, *and then chew out the rest of the party* because some of us like roleplaying more than pouring over stat blocks :/ I mean, if that's your thing, enjoy your thing. But don't shit all over everyone else's thing, especially if the person in question genuinely doesn't mind being weaker.

Whiners are really bad, but not the worst. And most alpha gamers are tolerable. But the worst person I’ve ever encountered (we’ll call him Jim). Jim used every single book published in 5e to his advantage. When we had to create characters he’d go over each and every book, class, and race to create the most optimized build, to the point of where he was taking advantage of loopholes he created himself, just because nobody would do that kind of thing. After he created his character (it took about three hours on average) he’d have the most optimized spells for the game. And he would make the best move he potentially could. ‘But Kieth’ I hear you say, ‘Wouldn’t it be good to have a person who’d spend hours (though a little annoying) on a character that’d help your team the most in any situation?’ You’d think so, but no. He’d always get about a 30 on his initiative because of his loopholes, so he’d go first in the battle every time. Him doing the optimized turn takes him about 10 minutes to half an hour (not joking). One of the worst parts? The fact that he would do the best move possible every time. What? Your character is grappling the boss? Too bad, I really wanna do an empowered meteor swarm. Sorry you’ll die, but I’ll do like 200 damage so it’s worth it. This would happen all the damn time. He would kill the rest of the team if he had to, just to make a cool move. I’m sure I don’t have to explain why we kicked him out of the group after the fourth campaign in a row that ended in him getting all of us killed doing his ‘cool’ attacks, then dying later because he had no backup.

I just wanna say I appreciate the detail you put into the anvil I absolutely love it

DM: "I made a maze for my PCs!" Wizard: "I cast Etherealness" *Curb your Enthusiasm starts playing*

ur videos make me appreciate just how reasonable and well-adjusted my gaming group is

I once had a player whine about being hit by monsters after deliberately putting himself in harms way in order to give another PC flanking bonuses.

I think that really if you communicate with your players on their characters, then you can make it so they are all “the wheel” in a way by making them all amazing at something, showing them that they all are great. Then from their you can show them how to mix and be more versatile instead of just being the most damaging

Someone in my group edited their pdf to be 200 feet tall and as thin as a pencil

In our party we had a little powergaming competition that ended spectacularly in a fight against a Mindflayer. The Cleric casts blade barrier at the 'flayer's location and the 'flayer counters by levitating above it and also putting itself out of reach of melee attacks. Next action the Cleric responds by summoning a Greater Earth Elemental from the roof of the cavern above the 'flayer and commanding it to "jump" (ie fall) at the 'flayer and have it make a grapple check on the way down. After adding the cumulative damage the 'flayer took from falling, being pushed through a blade barrier and having a Greater Earth Elememtal land on it, we declared the Cleric the winner and got on with the game.

In my first DM experience with my friends, I had one player who knew 5e DND so well that he created a monster at level 1. His character was so powerful my enemies I made couldn’t touch him. The rest of the party was mediocre at best. But he was huge. So I was faced with this half orc barbarian who was overpowered in combat... but also narratively driven. The player really wanted the character to be properly role played. And he wrote an extensive amount of lore for the guy. One of the points is that he rebels against his orcish half, trying to care for as many creatures and allies as possible. It was one single line in the lore he wrote, but I exploited the hell out of it. I crafted an elaborate boss fight in the middle of their campaign. An armor piercing, heavily armored spearman enchanted to get rid of all of his disadvantages and deal three dice worth of damage each strike. His hp was whatever I felt, and I finally called the fight at 150 hp on the boss. A single strike from the boss would take one of the players to under half. And the npc bard had to focus hard on healing to keep them alive. I tested them. They hit it as hard as possible and barely survived. Finally, I looked at the barbarian and said “this will be every fight from now on, you realized. The challenges will only grow from here. The bard’s face pales, and your party is in disarray. Only you stand strong after this fight. And you wonder to yourself... if this really is worth the potential cost.” After that, there was a shift in his character and how he fought. He focused on defending the party rather than hitting 30 damage strikes. He planned out a fight to keep the spellcasters alive and helped coordinate the first time players he was with. He knew I was scaling encounters to him, and his character was protective. So it was the only thing he could do. It was a wonderful, narrative centered decision. It also made the story better, and the encounters more entertaining. Now that I new what they could handle, I could go all out. The session was great after that bit of improv. That’s the moral of the story. xD

"5e is mostly balanced" *Laughs in Stunning Strike*

The GM has infinite powers in the same way Jafar does when he wishes to be a genie. A GM without players has no powers and is thus beholden to the wish (although they can warp the wish to their own entertainment and usually also the players)

Never understood people who want OP character stats at LV 1. Having a really crappy stat or two makes the RP aspect so much more fun and challenging. My monk has 4 charisma because he took an oath of silence as a child and is just now breaking it. I never would have thought of that character quirk without that god awful roll, and watching him learn social conventions, and even words, is so much fun!

The biggest reason why balance is important is obviously for play experience. If your character is consistently underpowerforming versus every other character in the group, even though you optimized it and played it as good as could be done, then the class is obviously too weak. Everyone wants to be able to contribute to the group. It's the same reason why unemployment has so many negative psychological effects, lol. People who feel they can't contribute to society in a meaningful way tend to feel less valued. Same with groups. People love to be valued for something, whether it being healing, damage dealing, utility.

0:22 Other Joe: hey Ben you wanna play a Zombie game?

my group also had a situation where everyone wanted to be the tallest, except for one guy. We didn't get too absurd with it and none of us changed the heights we'd chosen initially on our own. The result was that there were 4 characters who were nearly 7 feet tall and the one average height guy looked like a dwarf beside them.

I think it's very important to learn the difference between "power gaming" and "optimization", as sometimes it can be very, very hard to tell the difference between the two. I myself have been bowled over by groups of players that just had more experience, knew the game better than me and destroyed everything in their path with little to no effort. It was horrible, and they all walked away with smiles and enormous cocks waving about--- while I practically cried at all of my hard work having gone to waste. Excellent video! :D

In my campaign, we have a fighter... that doesn't fight. He'll be in the fight for a couple of rounds, but as soon as his life is in danger or the fight isn't going his way, he will literally walk away from the fight. There was one time we were fighting a rocktopus (that's it's actual in-game name) and he goes first in combat. He decides, "I want to tame the rocktopus!" and fails. So the rocktopus attacks and we all start to gang up on it and our fighter literally turns around and starts to walk away and not fight it. Or when we had to bring back one of our dead party members (it was his fourth character) back to town to revive him because there was a cleric in town that would revive one of us for free, he was actually going to leave the group, as in the actual group, until we convinced him not to, because he didn't want the character revived and the complicated process it took to bring the character back to life involved putting a dead body in our bag of holding. He also doesn't participate in fights and then proceeds to grab the twenty 50gp gems in the monster's horde and doesn't share nor tell the other characters about them.

Lot of good points, though I think you left out one. NPC parties with PC classes. If a class is horribly unbalanced and powerful it also works against the party if there is ever an enemy of that class. If for instance high level magic is broken it means you can basically never fight an enemy wizard, lich or monster with high spell casting levels. Other wise the entire party be wiped out with a single spell. Wish for instance is insanely strong but has draw backs that might stop a PC party from using it. However NPc's rarely live beyond an encounter and have no qualms about using their best magical items, spells etc to get rid of a party.

There's a manga called Quick Start!! where one of the girls makes her character taller when she finds out another player's was just a few centimeters taller than hers. Her whole thing is that she keeps developing crushes on NPCs and setting canon characters.

Yeah... I actually agree with Puffin here. Power Gamers aren't the problem; Alpha Gamers are the problem. I honestly don't have problems with someone that wants an optimal and powerful character in an RPG, but it becomes a problem when it's done to the extent of trying to one-up the rest of the group or one-up the GM. Heck, I admit that I like looking up homebrew and third-party and splatbook stuff to make awesome characters that feel cool, but I never want to end up doing it to the point of being untouchably powerful outside of a Deus Ex Machina. It's a detriment to the rest of the party when there's an Alpha Gamer trying to be a one-player-party, but rarely will it be bad if a Power Gamer has an optimally specialized character that does some thing really well and most other things not well.

I like to use stat rolls because when I get a bunch of high stats I feel like a natural born hero and that's fun, but when I get a bunch of low stats, I become that person who decides to be a hero despite sucking, and that's also fun. I actually really like when I play as a bad character and have to challenge myself to make it through a campaign. The threat of dying or failing important tasks is suspenseful and interesting. Plus, if I die I can always make a new character. The problem is that most players are stupid and think that being the sucky person in the group is bad and means you're a bad player and that in turn the game is going to suck, when in reality it adds depth to the campaign, and it actually makes you a better player to succeed, despite character flaws. This causes most players to cheat at stat rolls and that's why I use point buy when I DM.

Players who want to be the best are not the worst, believe me. The first time I tried gm-ing my group did not care about the game, period. I was using the “Lost Mine of Phandelver” adventure from the starter pack because it was my first time, and in the first session we got through ONE BATTLE, and that’s it. If you’ve ever played that adventure, you know that the first battle is with a small gang of goblins, and once there is only one goblin left he tries to escape. One of the players(who had never played before, this was their first time) asked if he could “seduce the goblin.” At this point, I was internally screaming “help” as the player rolled for how much the goblin loved him and asked what modifier to use. So honestly, a whiny player isn’t that bad. 😂

I make a game where players start out with no classes and do stuff to get their class by buying stuff and fighting, so my game usually balances itself out, and they have a shared inventory so usually no one complains. Also I make it so the players who do easy or hard can be in the same game by making easy gamers have a slight advantage by most enemies targeting tougher characters.

I've honestly never understood going into an rpg to feel powerful or have perfect characters. Honestly my favorite part of roleplaying is to be able to connect with the characters. An important part of a good story is the characters and if all the characters are perfect people it'll just be boring,

I had a player that was jealous of a Fighter/Cleric who rolled quite high stats (though not high enough to be a Paladin in the edition I was DM'ing). I watched the guy roll it. The jealous player refused to roll stats in person and since he did settle on stats that were fair, I didn't press the issue. Realistically, though, if he had taken the opportunity to roll while I observed, he probably would've done better. Over the course of the game, he complained about his class limitation/features, didn't understand the edition we were playing (which was old-school D&D and over-complicated in places), complained that the potions he had weren't specifically put there to overcome a specific obstacle (because I love it when players use magic creatively; like your frog story), complained that he couldn't play his character as intelligent as himself because INT was his dump stat (for a Barbarian). He asked for a bunch of items and class abilities that, on the surface, were fairly benign, but I had to spend a bunch of time considering them to decide if they were OP. Then complained that the compromise I ended up reaching had too many drawbacks. (I just wanted something resembling neutral power-buoyancy) On the other hand, he was a damn good DM, could act and do voices, carry on entire conversations seamlessly between several different characters. He only suffered from creating several DMPCs that were OP.

I find playing FATE (yes, there's an RPG system called FATE; not talking about the video game [and Jim Butcher helped write it!]) alleviates these problems a bit, because one of the core tenants is that all the players are competent. No rolling for picking up a fork or checking to see if the ground still exists. Makes it easier to focus on story, and gives way to cool and epic moments. (and the FATE coins/compulsions are hilarious too!)

Just found your video's a couple days ago. These are funny as hell, yet so true. Seen the same things over the years. Been watching off your video's every day so far at work. Cant stop laughing

I've actually encountered a rather creative response to alpha gaming before. The sort of game I was playing had a pretty DM vs the Players dynamic, and it was expressed in the story as a literal god of evil stalking our party to try to screw us over however it could. It's a setup that I'm confident only worked because our DM had such a fun and creative sense of humor that everyone went along with it. Anyway, the twist on this setting is that there's something like a "karma" system where our party was also protected by a benevolent god...embodying failure. So whenever any single character did a little too well compared to the rest of the group-from rolls or otherwise, it's treated as a dip in our patron god's protection and the evil god jumps in accordingly. Sometimes it's just a mundane thing like one guy who rolled 2 natural 20s in a combat situation when (everyone else rolled below 3 at least once) had to take a triple-roll disadvantage check when he used intimidation during negotiations the next day (justified in-story as the evil god hitting him with a minor disease that caused sneezing fits while he talked). Sometimes, it's more scary such as our rogue suddenly becoming drunk right in the middle of sneaking through enemy camp. It created this weird atmosphere where rolling really good was just as dangerous as rolling really bad. When my half-elf died from a potion of Enlarge Person being mislabeled as a potion of Invisibility, I ended up deciding to start creating the most bizarre of characters just to see what kind of shenanigans my DM could throw at me through the evil god given the right context.

First character I ever played was given to me as a parody character, A homosexual dwarf who was an Ex exotic dancer... I got to roll for stats I had 3 17s and the rest were above 13...

I'm kinda new to d&d like I just joined last year , so far I'm love d&d because it makes me think a lot more than actually school , so when I found your channel, i enjoy your videos like how much you say is what I see in my group and it makes me smile so thank you for Making awesome videos

There is a little power imbalance in the main campaign I play (3.5), I have a fighter, and the thing is sometimes players can’t show up, and then there’s players who *rarely* miss a session, this results in level differences. If you don’t show up, you don’t get any exp for what happened, and then when a character dies, the player makes a new 1st level character. I was one who almost never couldn’t show up, and my character never died, so right now I think I’m 5th level. My character is quite overpowered, being one of the more high level characters. I don’t know how she got so good. But I still remember this one time: (she was 4th lvl when this happened) my fighter was unconscious and bleeding out, she had -8 hp, if she got to -10, she would die. Which was *bad* because if she died we would probably all die. You see, she’s the only fighter, the other died to a 20ft crocodile near the start of the campaign. Everyone, I mean *E-V-E-R-Y-O-N-E* was panicking and screaming, “someone save Yin!” “She can’t die!” “NOOOOO!” Panic, lots of panic. Why? You might ask? There is a couple barbarians, but they are more low level. So, she was the tank, and I mean, *tank* , she high hp, ac, she had a plus- uh, something to her initiative roll, I think it’s a +5? She has a high strength score, she had a really cool magic-longsword-that-was-good-against-dragons (which she doesn’t use half the time ‘cause she uses her normal longsword),she has a plus... 8?, to her main longsword in addition to her +4 to her damage roll (1d8). I call it, “The Day of Most Fear” (she survived, by the way), and it still lives up to it’s name.

"I've never run into balance problems." - Someone has obviously never played 3.5.

Yeah, your "tall people" issue is a little weird, but I've encountered something like it. I had a play group at one point (I was the DM) who were /obsessed/ with knowing the most languages. I kid you not, the barbarian had 16 intelligence so they could start with 5 languages off the bat, and then put a skill point into linguistics at every level. And I do every one of my games using point buy, so they sacrificed actual important "barbarian" stats to do this. It's actually beyond me why they thought it was so damn important lol. And speaking of point buy, I realized after my first game that rolling for stats was something I would never do. In fact, the DM of my first game told us to roll for stats, but I actually just used point buy for my character and told him I'd rolled the stats. He was pretty trusting, but there was one person at our table who had two 18s and their lowest stat was a 13, BEFORE racial bonuses and penalties. And he definitely did it so he could be the biggest, baddest dude in the party. Fortunately the DM seemed to realize this, and so took many opportunities to try and intentionally humble the character, and nobody minded much at that point because when you play bullshit like that 24 strength, 20 constitution, level 6 bloodrager, the bullshit comes back around when you get taken out in one shot by a magical trap because you charged ahead of everyone else for first dibs on loot. :P

"You're the DM. You're so powerful, if you don't like something, just change it. You shouldn't complain about balance issues." Okay. *INHALES* SO HERE'S THE THING: What this REALLY translates to is this: Imagine you're playing Borderlands. "Dude if you think that area is too hard just mod the game to give yourself guns that do a billion damage." See yes, we CAN technically just "make the game harder" if we want to but it's easy for players to see through those things. And it's not fun to do, either. It feels sleazy and cheap. Putting a fair obstacle in front of the players that provides a well-rounded challenge for all involved and promotes teamwork is INFINITELY more rewarding. Having a solid encounter predetermined is better than just "Well that was too easy to a bunch more enemies spawn- I mean climb out of the cave and run toward you." So yeah don't tell your DM to not bitch about balance issues just because we already hold a significant amount of power. The struggle is making an encounter fun and just the right amount of challenging.

That last bit of getting 3/18s almost happened to me before once. except I got 2 18s one 17 and the rest were 15s. And I had already decided ahead of time that I was going to be a wizard. So I had a wizard with 18 strength (and the additional strength modifier was also a perfect) 18 went to wisdom 17 went to Dex 15 to everything else. I think the funny part was that I had more strength then our paladin. And no I didn't dual-class. The appearance I basically gave for my character was was just look at The Rock that's what he looks like. Part of my back story was while I was trying to be a wizard during my free time I just exercised........a lot.

I GM a group of six people. One guy, his character's name is Milton, constantly rolls high. Like, we're talking he can't roll anything below a 13 on a bad day. We tried swapping out his dice for ones that we bought ourselves and know are fair, because we thought he was cheating. His characters, as one might expect, are ridiculously overpowered. It's gotten to the point where his character actually 'breaks the game'. Like there was one time where I had an hour and a half of sidequest to get a key to a door, and he rolls a nat 20 with like +7 strength or whatever it was. So, I let him have it and they skipped a big chunk of that story arc, skipping almost to the final boss. I've had to improvise hours worth of gameplay due to things like this that he does. He's become a legend among our D&D friends, because some of the stuff he's done is just unreal. He's summoned spaghetti out of thin air, he's persuaded goblins to be his pets, he's punched enemies out of this dimension, he's stolen thousands of gold worth of items. This man can't be stopped. He's told me before that Milton will soon ascend to godhood, and then he'll challenge me, the GM, for ultimate power. I've tried ramping up the game difficulty, cultivating boss fights to be extra hard, random encounters happen more often when he's on low HP, but no attacks seem to hit him. Outside of fudging the dice (which I really don't like doing) What the fuck do I do?

I will say that during some games I've been a bit of a power gamer but there is one thing that really really pisses me off. I go out of my way to make this really cool idea for let's say an Ice Wizard. I really think it's a cool idea any super powerful then the DM decides okay because you did this I'm going to throw every creature that is immune or resistant to ice against you and only that.......... it's not so much whining about the encounters not being tailor-made for me and more about the fact that they are tailor-made to go against me 100%. For whatever reason you're not fighting Bandits you're fighting ice Bandits was one of the dumb ones I have seen

I will confess to puzzlement at anyone allowing someone to roll for stats without seeing the roll, let alone accept a bit of paper they brought into the session as their 'roll'

I stuck with the 27 points and the 15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8 rules. Though the 27 point rule feels more difficult.

I've TOTALLY had a whiner in my party before. A player wanted to make a special snowflake OC so I suggested that he make a human Sorceror instead. It was my first game so I said NO YOU CANNOT PLAY AS A GOLEM. I am too inexperienced to handle that at the table. Exactly as you said: I made him the younger brother of the Count of a port town (WHO GAVE HIM STARTING WEALTH BY THE WAY) gave him knowledge of any water-based spells, gave him Longsword proficiency, I EVEN gave him an excuse to command the town's guardsmen during an attack! He quit on his own funnily enough - I never kicked him from the game. One time he had requested extra quest reward. I gave him a Superior Potion of Healing on top of the extra money and he asked for TWO. He then went on to publicly assault someone only for the guards to arrest him. "WOW THAT'S BULLSHIT! IF I FAIL MY PERSUASION CHECK TO LOWER MY BAILOUT FEE, THEN I'M LEAVING!" He rolled a 4 (mod of +4 CHA) and we never saw him again. He instantly quit the game.

Dude your stuff is so good!!! Always makes me laugh. I love the uniqueness and personal stories. Well done sir

Don't stop your a great story teller! (0:58 sound changed to lower level ;) just had to mess with you as well :D ) I can't begin to tell you how many times your stories made me laugh !!

I love Pathfinder but power balance definitely can be issue due to the 3.x derived nature. There are definitely some weak options, and you can muck up your character even worse if you don't have any guidance. Beyond that, you don't want a party that's all arcane spellcasters (and maybe one healer), but if you have a "balanced" party you don't want the martial classes to feel worthless after level 10 or so. However, it's much less of an issue once you look past the core classes. You've got a bunch of hybrid classes, for one thing. My personal favorites are Magus, Inquisitor, and Investigator (Warpriest could have been built a bit better but it's also a decent option). Then if you want to play a more advanced non-spellcasting class, there's Path of War (yes it's third party but it's basically Tomb of Battle for PF and Dreamscarred Press rocks). Anyway perfect balance isn't really a good goal, IMHO. It breeds blandness. Everything is the same, with different flavor text. 4th Edition might be super-balanced but after playing D&D for years it's just so dull and oversimplified. 3.x and Pathfinder have plenty of issues but the shear variety and freedom it provides makes every character I build interesting and unique, and every party is vastly different. I don't think I could play a WotC D&D again. I'm not even convinced I'd switch to PF2 yet. The only real major downside to a system like Pathfinder is that because every class is so different, it can be overwhelming for novices or players who didn't come from a 3.x background. If you have a good group, it won't matter though because your friends will guide you.

One thing I do different than most DMs is I work with my players to optimize their character based on what they want to become. It's a long process because I stay extremely vague and try to bait their thoughts and move in the direction they want to head. I play Pathfinder mostly, it's my favorite system but I wouldn't wish the years of research I had to do on anyone. I just want them to feel connected to their character, so getting it as close to what they envision despite their lack of player experience is ideal.

I usually don’t base characters on how powerful they are, but on how fun they are to play as. I mean what good about having a character that can blow a hole on this earth if they aren’t fun to play as?

I've been watching your videos a lot the past few days. They're making me remember the one time I tried to play D&D. It was a really cool idea, but I couldn't stand the personalities of any of the other people in the group. I keep running into that problem when I want to indulge my geekier interests. :sigh:

I love all of these advice videos. It's awesome. Note to self: be ok with being mediocre. I was never going to be an alpha player anyways.

I'm totally a power-gamer. But personally for me, It's because I want to feel useful, or good at a certain thing. I've built a couple characters that were WAY too powerful for the group I was playing with, so over the course of the game, i slowly toned them down so that the other players didn't feel left out. Power gaming isn't a bad thing, as long as you don't lord it over the other players in the party. Sometimes i'm not even trying to 'power-game' but after years of playing RPG's there are just certain things that you can look at and say, "Man... that's really... really bad..." And also, after playing for a while you pick up on little things that start to break the game... such as: D&D 5e: Sorcerer 7, Rogue 3 Sneak up on an encampment, cast Scorching Ray as they're 'Surprised.' You have Assassinate, so any attack that his is an automatic critical hit. A 4th Level Scorching Ray has Four Attacks that deal 2d6 damage each. If you hit with all of them, (8d6) and double it. You roll 16d6 Fire Damage. I wasn't trying to break the game. I just sorta stumbled onto this while I was playing a Rogue/Sorcerer. And, being the Power Gamer I am, I stuck with it for a while. It was fun rolling 16d6 Fire Damage with one spell. I had found a new way to 'break the game' or surprise the DM with a trick. And, it worked very well actually. Quicken Hold Person + Sneak Attack With Green Flame Blade, (Or Booming Blade if you want to be as strong as possible.) With Xanathar's Guide, you have access to Shadow Blade which makes going into Melee to use Sneak Attack actually pretty fun. You've got Mirror Image + Shield (or other defensive spells) to keep yourself alive. I highly recommend it. And on the topic of Rolling for Stats, I do it usually 50% of the time. If i'm playing sort of a 'crazy' character like a Kenku Bard. I'll typically roll for stats. But If I have a vision for the character while i'm making them, I'll go with the Array or Point-Buy. You can't get the same vision if you roll for stats... BUT, rolling for Stats can help you fill in some of the missing personality if you don't have the perfect vision for a character. Infact, I typically don't write down more than 15% of a character's backstory until i've played them for a session or two. Because then I know how they handle, and how the character actually turns out. I've played one too many 'gruff' characters who end up being a fuzzy teddybear after being introduced to the party... I'm too much of a Dad, damnit. But when I DM. I let the player know in advance. 'You may not Re-Roll those dice.' If they roll for stats. Most of my players go for Point-Buy or the Array, but some of them Roll for stats. And it's worked both ways. But every time somebody rolls for stats, I've not had a problem of somebody complaining about how powerful they were, or how weak they were. They made that choice. The only time that I sort of got close, was somebody in my game had a 20 Dex Ranger at level 1. (They rolled an 18 and went Elf.) He was always super accurate, but it came at a serious cost. He didn't have many hit-points. He intentinoally didn't put his other higher numbers into combat stats, he didn't want to be a walking god of archery and swashbuckling. I approved of this player. 10/10 Would DM for him Again.

OP Clerics aren't annoying because of powerful healing. Clerics were only OP in 3rd edition, which is when healing was, as a whole, a subpar strategy. The power of the cleric came from a decent BAB combined with powerful buffs, allowing any cleric to turn himself into a "super-fighter"

5:20 favorite scene by far lol I love your goofy animations it's my sense of humor.

My first character was a mary sue monk with 3 18 rolls... Long gone now xD

I had a character who I was unhappy with because he didn’t get a single magic item and almost everyone did, but I didn’t say anything about it because I was a half-orc fighter and didn’t use magic. After a while, the GM realized and felt sorry, and when I finally got an ivory greataxe with additional damage, I felt so amazing. I really didn’t want to sound needy when I didn’t get a special item, and that’s the only thing that kept me from sounding like one of those guys.

I once rolled 6 18s for stats. DM took my dice and tested them.

I usually have a character creation session before the campaign and adopt an almost sort of Monster of the Week crew set up. I.e. one class role per crew unless there is a group of more than four. In other words, 1 Tank, 1 Damage, 1 Healer, and 1 Support. (I divide the healer and support because support can focus on buffs and debuffs while the healer can worry more about making sure the party stays alive). Anyway I have the players basically tell me what role they are gonna cover, that way I can help guide their character creation. I.e. Dude wants to be a tank, then I can recommend a Fighter, Barbarian, or Paladin unless they have a tank build for a class that I never considered before. This ensures that everyone has something that they are good at have their own moments to shine. For example, the tank can go into a battle of endurance cause they can take blows and stay standing. The less durable players can have tests of reflexes or reasoning. Everyone gets a chance to shine and succeed, or fail spectacularly.

Granted this is an old video, i was really expecting to hear about Clerics and Wizards. But good content, good points.

i'm not an alpha gamer, as i usually don't care if someone does more work than me, but i do still powergame, and will sometimes spend long periods of time looking at stuff for it(usually between classes at school). now, i won't do extensive research in the game to see what everyone else finds to be the strongest, as that to me is where you cross the line - someone else is doing your work for you, and really, if you apply it, it is no longer YOUR character, it is a copy/paste from an internet template. if i happen to get really close to a template, i don't have an issue with it, as long as the idea was self-generated, and someone else happened to beat me to it. i don't ALWAYS optimize, but usually my characters are specialists, where they have a few things they do really well(my favorite example is my amazon ghost, which specialized in heavy damage attacks, stealth, deception, and arcana). but i have a reason for any given character to be optimized towards a given thing. the amazon ghost is a high damage assassin who also specializes in disarming magical traps(we didn't have a caster, and our group uses arcana for that type of roll). my Drow Vanguard is a front line brawler who can sustain herself as long as she is landing hits, but is also reasonably good in dexterity and charisma skills(finesse weapons). My Combat Medic specialized in keeping players alive(seriously, i healed the group for upwards of 1000 damage in a boss fight at level 10, and we still almost lost half the group because i was out of tricks). while i am not expressly opposed to playing characters that are not optimized for something, i do have an issue with feeling like what i do doesn't matter. for instance, i created a drow sorcerer who couldn't keep up with the offensive capabilities of the wizard or fighter, didn't have the defensive capabilities of the fighter, paladin or rogue, and didn't have the utility to match the wizard or rogue, because i only get a few spells that i can know, and can't extend my list. combine that with, because i was a draconic sorcerer(which admittedly did help my defense situation some, but i was still really easy to incap), i was hunted by the overarching empire because i was an easy to identify magic user in a world where magic was supposed to be banned(we were helping the last hold of wizards etc). so not only did i feel like i was pretty much useless, being overshadowed in every skill, encounter, etc(and i was pretty shunned by npcs because i was a drow), i was actively drawing negative attention to the group because of what i built - when a player was killed because an encounter with guards sparked up, i felt responsible for it. eventually i stopped showing up, because i a) wasn't having fun with the character, and B) thought my character would do less damage to the group being an NPC in charge of flying the air ship. ok, and the DMs girlfriend was hoarding the groups gold and making life miserable for the rest of us - IE i couldn't afford to get basic equipment because i never could keep gold, and usually had to plead with her character for enough gold to get food(we had a different economy, so everything cost gold because we wanted to keep it simple, and not deal with copper, silver, platinum etc). i might show back up at some point, but only if i was allowed to make a different character, one that could do something that would benefit the group beyond just adding a few d6-d8 damage to an enemy on my turn. personally, i LOVE a challenging fight.(probably why when i picked up Dark Souls 3 earlier this year, i started loving the game). the feeling of knowing that this epic challenge that was set before you was overcome by you and your party by your ability is amazing(especially if you can say you are the main reason the group survived, like i can with the combat medic listed above). now, i don't have an issue with easier campaigns, but if i have to choose, i will lean towards the harder. for instance, my group was asked to vote between 4 difficulties of campaign. normal, heroic, legendary, and DM's Wrath. i immediately voted for DM's wrath. and enough of the rest of the group was willing to give it a shot that we got to play it. and it was a BLAST to play! that said, everyone needs to be on the same page for something like that. if we had been loaded into that campaign and half the group had built characters that were more gimicky and were not optimized, we would never have finished a fight, and it wouldn't have been fun, because the DM would have had to either A) kill everyone, and reload the last "checkpoint" he had elected, or b) clearly spare everyone in the party to let us progress

Haven't seen the "I've ascended into godhood at level 4" character yet. I should send my AD&D 2e ogre I made with the official book of humanoids.

The problem with power imbalance is that it does affect the roleplaying as well. Even with no combat, if one person has a bunch of amazing abilities and another person doesn't, one person is controlling and participating with the story more. The Rogue can try to sneak over to a secret meeting and see if he can overhear a conversation, oh cool, except the wizard can turn invisible, fly, be completely undetectable, steal some documents virtually without any risk of notice, go up to a 200 foot window and go in and see what's going on, shapeshift, etc.

Party of slender men. 10ft tall & 100 pounds. "I wonder why everyone runs away from us! Is it my three piece suit?"

Personally I think spotlight balance is way more important than power balance. I don't care if main character is the weakest person in the party, I just want a fair amount of spotlight ^.^ I prefer building, maintaining, and growing interpersonal relationships between PCs or NPCs... and stats really can't ( or shouldn't) give you that

In my opinion the GM isn't all powerful. They're bound by logic, fairness and player expectations. If you're a GM who designs unfair and illogical encounters or kills characters without a means of resistance the players will and should quit. 'Rocks fall and everybody dies' is not the players losing, it's the GM losing. It means they have failed as a storyteller and game designer so fundamentally that they have to scrap the game and probably lose their group. The GM is only as powerful as the players let them be. This is why players with OP characters annoy the hell out of GMs. Not only are they hogging all the screen time and glory from other players they are also making it impossible for the GM to design level appropriate encounters or craft a believable world. If at any moment ten flying Terrasques can appear over the horizon how are human beings not extinct? If that can't happen then how is there going to be a combat scene with dramatic tension for a level 20 party that includes a bearbarian, a mystic, a sharpshooter crossbow expert, a Shadow Sorcerer and Xanthir Darkblade the Multiclass Homebrew Edgelord dual wielding Vorpal Blades.

I have to deal with a cleric with a passive Perception of 24. And don't worry, he won't let you forget that.

Hey puff? Thanks for making this video. I didn't realise it, but I was taking my pathfinder groups homebrew too seriously. I had complained several times to our gm about my character. I need to relax and slow down and enjoy the time more.

I think you're convoluting childish players with game balance. Legitimately there are games that are bad at balance. Balance between portrayal of a character and their actual ability. Balance between character capability and setting demands. When you talk about CR that's a very new concept in D&D's history and an idea that a lot of games have no analog for. Characters that are overly powerful tend to make a mess of the story you're telling drag other characters into a depth of the pool they may not be ready for. When you talk about limiting class or more powerful spells in your games you are balancing the game.

I once played as a gm and one of the players was a wizard that was super powerful like all they need is some healing and the rest is their job so I decided to slowly ramp up the difficulty in some parts so the wizard would have to protect his team and share the loot because he was very selfish

5:50 is the big challenge one of my groups ran into. It was a get-together where we only had the one weekend to play so not part of any ongoing campaign. We were intended to, and even set up, a more light-hearted game. We were starting at level 5, and the notion was silly character themes. Example, we had a half giant rogue with 17 strength and 6 dex. And only 1 rank in stealth, but max Intimidate. His style was when he was (inevitably) caught sneaking, he would yell "YOU CAN'T SEE ME I AM SNEAKING" and Intimidate the person into agreeing that yes, he was too stealthy to be seen.. Four of our five players were like that and as a result... well, it was fun but not optimal. The fifth player had spent TWO WEEKS pouring over supplements before this one off weekend in order to min-max his character for maximum bonuses at most common D&D tasks. The problem was: yeah, he was "on our side", but because we hadn't bothered to optimize at all, and he had optimized out the wazoo, /he did every single task and left nothing for any other player to do/. The entire game devolved rapidly into people just passing so we could get to his turn quicker, so we could resolve the situation quicker. The combat had been set easy since the DM knew we were going to be playing un-optimized; so he one-round killed every single encounter. While we all had strategies (like the above rogue) our characters COULD pull off - they were usually less direct and more time consuming than his character resolving the problem in a more straightforward manner - which he always did. It was super frustrating because it broke the expectations everyone had going into the game (that he had agreed to as well) and just made everyone feel pointless for being there. Nobody, even in a silly game, wants to feel like their characters' existence is pointless and they cannot make a contribution - and bad power disparities, be it from poor balance or poor stat-outs or differences in optimization can lead to that. I think this doubles over a bit with your alpha-gamer one. Someone self-aware of the lime-light problem can handle it by simply deciding NOT to hog the lime-light (a spellcaster who is over-optimized for the experience with a self-aware player can always excuse not using their best spells as "holding onto them just in case" after all), but when you combine large power gaps with the powerful character being played by the "It's all about me, me me!" type... yeah it goes poorly all around.

My teammate has a power called divine law which basically means he has more control over what happens and how stuff works than the GM/DM does. It’s so broken.

I've played with an alpha gamer who was dating the DM. Yeeeeeeeeah. She got away with a LOT and her character was ridiculously overpowered. She breezed through battles while my (also pretty overpowered) character died. Three times. It was also a bit difficult because my CHARACTER was obsessed with being the best, while her character was chill but the PLAYER was obsessed with being the best. And you could tell she was mad after a battle where I did more damage than her (but died again) and she would struggle to not throw a fit about it in-game.

To the point about collaborative board games: I expect that there are people who would feel frustrated by certain kinds of balance issues there that are frustrated by the same issues in rpgs. For example if One two otherwise stats comparable characters in a collaborative game one had the ability to heal one health for two talismans and one had the ability to heal one health for three talismans with no clear trade off there would be that kind of frustration of 'why can't I do that' even being on the same team.D&D is pretty complicated and well balanced, but in some homebrew games, or systems where a lot of time hasn't been put in that can get upsetting, especially because unlike a board game you don't usually just swap characters next game if it's getting frustrating. Hope that helps with that aspect of understanding!

6:30 I ran an Exalted campaign where the PCs were trying to resurrect themselves (very long story). They ended up taking part in the siege of one of the Underworld's necropolis cities that had a large flat topped tower in the center. After a several session siege through the city they finally assaulted the tower and used magical jetpacks to get to the top quickly to engage the boss before he got away. Cue what should have been an awesome fight with the full party plus a dps npc vs a very highly stacked boss. First full round in, the tank rushes him, grapples, pulls the jetpack from the boss, and throws him off the tower. Encounter ends.

Many of the alterations my friends and I implemented in our homebrew are now present in 5e. We used an alternate feature for rolling stats: Roll 4d6 and drop the lowest dice (we usually also had 1s rerolled, as well). This solved the ability score “imbalances” and usually was fair enough that folks wouldn’t whine and whomever was DMing wouldn’t be facing the amazing Stat monger... for the most part, we all kept dice rolling to a minimum because our group was very good at negotiation and problem solving without having to kill everything that moved. Besides, it’s role playing, not roll playing! We eventually gave up on creating dungeons and just described places to players so that they wouldn’t just, somehow, always walk straight through and avoid all the most dangerous parts like they had a map... We almost never ran modules, mostly because they tend to be too simple or overly complicated. Rich developed NPCs and stories with alternate outcomes led by PC decisions leave a fun and memorable impression on the players. Villains don’t usually see themselves as such, nor do their followers or supporters. Almost nobody views their self as evil either. Alignment was our indicator of likely behavior but it wasn’t strict, unless someone did something definitely against their core alignment without any sort of explanation. And in party fighting wasn’t uncommon, but we were sneaky about it at least. My favorite trick was kind of figuring out their was trouble and just having my character walk away without so much as giving a clue to the other PCs... so much fun. I would help them out if trouble, of course, for a price. It was always repaid in one way or another though. Nobody blamed each other because from a character perspective, it always made sense.

I role for decent stats not stats for Omega Mary Sues or Gary Stus. But I reroll if my stats don't fall in average race stats(excluding charisma and intelligent).

in the game i am playing now we were walking around and found a bridge leading to a old ruin, and in the middle of the bridge was a giant stone statue. we waked across but my hill dwarf sensed something was off about the statue. I yelled "its a golem!' right before it came to life. we all go ready to fight it, then the monk used fist of unbroken air and knocked the golem off the side of the bridge instakilling it. one of the best moments in the game so far, but also kind of disappointing because i was hoping to get to use my knowledge of stone and rocks to find a way to kill it.

THE ALMIGHTY TALLEST! OBEY THE FIST!

Rewatching this and I think you articulated a conversation I've had with some of my friends pretty well. Many of them like Pathfinder over 5e. I like them for different things. Pathfinder has some way overpowered options and if a group is building characters together, can imbalance the game by level 1. I like 5e since the balance is close enough and allows leeway. I like building characters in Pathfinder though, since I see it kinda like a mental challenge.