How to limit min-maxxing in your game system.
Posted: Mon Nov 23, 2009 1:48 am
This particular guide does not apply to limiting min-maxxing once people are actually playing the game--there's actually no need to do it once you're at that stage, because the DM/GM/ST/whatever can just say 'No'. This is at the design level.
Let me just come out and say right now that min-maxxing isn't necessarily a bad thing. It can actually be very good; all things being equal someone who min-maxes probably has a greater interest in the game you're running then someone who just picks something that 'sounds good'. The problem comes when someone who min-maxxes ends up with substantially more screentime or awesomeness than someone who didn't. And while we expect a certain degree of payoff for people who work harder or know the rules better, it can quickly get out of hand.
Thus, most of the work done to limit the bad effects of min-maxxing must be done in the bulk of the rules. This means writing balanced rules and doing thorough playtesting. However, it would be insanely arrogant and almost certainly wrong for anyone to claim that they can write a perfectly balanced rules-set with no problems in it. There are also certain ways to write rules that tend to create more min-maxxed results than others. This isn't always true, however; most of the vertical advancement options (see below) in 3rd Edition D&D suck hardcore and yet these rules are notorious for being unbalanced.
Limit players' abilities to select vertical advancement options.
I'm not saying take vertical advancement out of the game entirely since it's no guarantee it'll make the game better; M&M d20 and 3E D&D are prime examples of systems where min-maxxers tend to focus on horizontal advancement. I'm just saying severely limit the amount of vertical advancement players can take.
Feats like Weapon Focus and Weapon Expertise and Two-Weapon Fighting are bad. Feats like Whirlwind and Polearm Gamble are better. The reason why you want to do this is because vertical advancement tends to lead to people having a 'Five Moves of Doom' chart. Seriously, look at 4th Edition D&D if you don't believe me. Every Rageblood Barbarian selects their feats in roughly this order:
1) Hide Armor Expertise
2) Weapon Proficiency: Execution Axe
4) Weapon Focus: Axes
6) Weapon Expertise: Axe
8) Deadly Rage
That stinks. It's also incredibly boring; all of the barbarian feats do nothing except modify rolls.
Limit prerequisites for later-era expansion options.
Feat chains suck. We hate them. Not just because they suck up all of your feats now for a later payoff, but also because they're impossible to get without planning your character. In this thread, I talk about the horrible realization I had when I found out that I wouldn't be able to get everything I wanted. I originally just wanted to select what sounded cool but that just wasn't possible; I had to think about what I wanted my character to do way ahead of time. And while it is cool to fantasize about the awesome things your character will get to do (and is one of the prime rewards of grindings) it's not cool to realize that you need to do things in a certain way or you'll suck.
Going back to 3rd Edition again, one of the worst things about that edition were prestige class requirements. Not prestige classes themselves; those things were fucking awesome. No, what sucked about them was that they required obscure feats in things like Destructive Rage and Skill Focus: Scry and putting your ranks into shit you would never think about.
So if you imagined your character entering a prestige class but also wanted them to complete a feat chain, you were double-fucked unless you planned out your character ahead of time. And I don't know about you, but when I was a beginner plotting things out more than a couple of levels in advance was just irritating. Unfortunately, that's what happens. You're pretty much forced to min-max now.
4th Edition D&D by and large got rid of prestige class paragon path prerequisites. That's very good. Unfortunately, they also started worshiping on the altar of vertical advancement, which wiped out any benefit of this system. That's bad.
Give players plenty of chances to overcome 'bad' decisions.
3rd Edition's rebuild option in the PHBII was a great idea. 4th Edition's retraining option was even better even though they completely wrecked the idea by not letting people retrain class features and letting people trade in lower-level options for higher-level ones.
Now you might be thinking to yourself 'wait, won't letting people switch around their options much actually lead to increased min-maxxing'? The answer to that, surprisingly, is no. People who are actually good at min-maxxing plan their builds so meticulously that there is actually not a need for them to replace 'bad' options unless they're using a stupid system like 4E's retraining rules.
If you have a system where you can correct earlier mistakes, people have less motivation to build their character perfectly ahead of time on the assumption that they're stuck with one bad choice for the rest of their life if they mess up.
Do not have people pay for non-combat resources out of their swords fund.
The final nail in the coffin for 4th Edition rituals, aside from being too unwieldy to cast and having bupkis effects, was that they cost money. Money that you needed for swords.
This means that anyone who cares about the Swording part of the game will elect to avoid using rituals whenever possible. And that might have actually been a goal of the 4E's design team; if so, it was a retarded one, because some people actually feel it's important that their druid gets to control weather in a 3-mile radius for 24 hours or that their wizard gets to lock a door really hardcore. So it ends up hurting beginners or 'Real Roleplayers', which is the same as benefiting min-maxxers.
4E could have gone a long way towards mitigating this effect if they had implemented a sane Wealth-By-Level system like 3E did. In 3E, even if you blow all of your money on scrolls of Rabbit Fucking down to melting down your armor for money then at least by next level you would get reimbursed. 4E only exacerbates the effect. Every time you use a ritual you are going to be paying for it for the rest of your life. That is really bad if you want to avoid min-maxxing.
Be careful about balancing limited-use items versus permanent items.
Here's a question for you. Why does a wand of Mage Armor (750 gp) cost less than +3 bracers of armor (9000 gp) despite costing a 1/12th of what they do? Well, the layman might answer that you are eventually going to run out of Mage Armor wand charges while the Bracers of Armor last forever.
But that's crap. People are going to immediately ditch their +3 Bracers of armor once they find +5 Bracers of Armor. Similarly, the person with a wand once they find these bracers (and can't trade them in for anything) is never going to use another charge from the wand again because it's a waste of time. The game also tells us that there are a finite number of encounters a player with the +3 bracers of armor will face before +5 BoA will drop in their lap, completely eliminating the need to use the latter.
So we can see right away that if the wand has 50 charges in it but there are only 30 encounters to get from +3 BoA to +5 BoA, the person who chose the permanent cost item is getting ripped off.
3E failed because of this system, but it wasn't really noticable for two reasons:
1) Spells (which were free) did a better job than the limited-use items with of course the notable exceptions of wands of cure light wounds and the light.
2) Limited-use items had a limited overall effect anyway. Wands topped out at level 4, potions couldn't have personal effects and topped out at level 3, etc.
4E failed even more hilariously; if you ever use a reagent or those potions which let you burn a healing surge for some effect you'll get the stink eye at your table like you're a fucking munchkin. And you probably are, too. You cannot use these things unless your DM is completely clueless. Those things are overpowered because the game designers just weren't thinking of the paradigm that 'permanent' use items are in fact not.
If your price sheets for permanent and limited-use items don't match up then expect any min-maxxer to calculate how many times a 'permanent' item will actually be used and making decisions based on that basis. If you can't make them match up then you can make them come out of two different resource pools (tokens that can only be traded for limited-use and a different set of tokens that can only be traded for permanent-use) and don't make them intersect--for example, you can have wands of temporary armor bonuses and bracers of always-on fireball (or vice-versa), but you can't have wands of temporary armor bonuses and bracers of permanent armor bonuses in the system.
And if you can't do either then for Koresh's sake implement a wealth-by-level system; at least that way the person with the +3 bracers of armor can fix their mistake after they realize it.
Let me just come out and say right now that min-maxxing isn't necessarily a bad thing. It can actually be very good; all things being equal someone who min-maxes probably has a greater interest in the game you're running then someone who just picks something that 'sounds good'. The problem comes when someone who min-maxxes ends up with substantially more screentime or awesomeness than someone who didn't. And while we expect a certain degree of payoff for people who work harder or know the rules better, it can quickly get out of hand.
Thus, most of the work done to limit the bad effects of min-maxxing must be done in the bulk of the rules. This means writing balanced rules and doing thorough playtesting. However, it would be insanely arrogant and almost certainly wrong for anyone to claim that they can write a perfectly balanced rules-set with no problems in it. There are also certain ways to write rules that tend to create more min-maxxed results than others. This isn't always true, however; most of the vertical advancement options (see below) in 3rd Edition D&D suck hardcore and yet these rules are notorious for being unbalanced.
Limit players' abilities to select vertical advancement options.
I'm not saying take vertical advancement out of the game entirely since it's no guarantee it'll make the game better; M&M d20 and 3E D&D are prime examples of systems where min-maxxers tend to focus on horizontal advancement. I'm just saying severely limit the amount of vertical advancement players can take.
Feats like Weapon Focus and Weapon Expertise and Two-Weapon Fighting are bad. Feats like Whirlwind and Polearm Gamble are better. The reason why you want to do this is because vertical advancement tends to lead to people having a 'Five Moves of Doom' chart. Seriously, look at 4th Edition D&D if you don't believe me. Every Rageblood Barbarian selects their feats in roughly this order:
1) Hide Armor Expertise
2) Weapon Proficiency: Execution Axe
4) Weapon Focus: Axes
6) Weapon Expertise: Axe
8) Deadly Rage
That stinks. It's also incredibly boring; all of the barbarian feats do nothing except modify rolls.
Limit prerequisites for later-era expansion options.
Feat chains suck. We hate them. Not just because they suck up all of your feats now for a later payoff, but also because they're impossible to get without planning your character. In this thread, I talk about the horrible realization I had when I found out that I wouldn't be able to get everything I wanted. I originally just wanted to select what sounded cool but that just wasn't possible; I had to think about what I wanted my character to do way ahead of time. And while it is cool to fantasize about the awesome things your character will get to do (and is one of the prime rewards of grindings) it's not cool to realize that you need to do things in a certain way or you'll suck.
Going back to 3rd Edition again, one of the worst things about that edition were prestige class requirements. Not prestige classes themselves; those things were fucking awesome. No, what sucked about them was that they required obscure feats in things like Destructive Rage and Skill Focus: Scry and putting your ranks into shit you would never think about.
So if you imagined your character entering a prestige class but also wanted them to complete a feat chain, you were double-fucked unless you planned out your character ahead of time. And I don't know about you, but when I was a beginner plotting things out more than a couple of levels in advance was just irritating. Unfortunately, that's what happens. You're pretty much forced to min-max now.
4th Edition D&D by and large got rid of prestige class paragon path prerequisites. That's very good. Unfortunately, they also started worshiping on the altar of vertical advancement, which wiped out any benefit of this system. That's bad.
Give players plenty of chances to overcome 'bad' decisions.
3rd Edition's rebuild option in the PHBII was a great idea. 4th Edition's retraining option was even better even though they completely wrecked the idea by not letting people retrain class features and letting people trade in lower-level options for higher-level ones.
Now you might be thinking to yourself 'wait, won't letting people switch around their options much actually lead to increased min-maxxing'? The answer to that, surprisingly, is no. People who are actually good at min-maxxing plan their builds so meticulously that there is actually not a need for them to replace 'bad' options unless they're using a stupid system like 4E's retraining rules.
If you have a system where you can correct earlier mistakes, people have less motivation to build their character perfectly ahead of time on the assumption that they're stuck with one bad choice for the rest of their life if they mess up.
Do not have people pay for non-combat resources out of their swords fund.
The final nail in the coffin for 4th Edition rituals, aside from being too unwieldy to cast and having bupkis effects, was that they cost money. Money that you needed for swords.
This means that anyone who cares about the Swording part of the game will elect to avoid using rituals whenever possible. And that might have actually been a goal of the 4E's design team; if so, it was a retarded one, because some people actually feel it's important that their druid gets to control weather in a 3-mile radius for 24 hours or that their wizard gets to lock a door really hardcore. So it ends up hurting beginners or 'Real Roleplayers', which is the same as benefiting min-maxxers.
4E could have gone a long way towards mitigating this effect if they had implemented a sane Wealth-By-Level system like 3E did. In 3E, even if you blow all of your money on scrolls of Rabbit Fucking down to melting down your armor for money then at least by next level you would get reimbursed. 4E only exacerbates the effect. Every time you use a ritual you are going to be paying for it for the rest of your life. That is really bad if you want to avoid min-maxxing.
Be careful about balancing limited-use items versus permanent items.
Here's a question for you. Why does a wand of Mage Armor (750 gp) cost less than +3 bracers of armor (9000 gp) despite costing a 1/12th of what they do? Well, the layman might answer that you are eventually going to run out of Mage Armor wand charges while the Bracers of Armor last forever.
But that's crap. People are going to immediately ditch their +3 Bracers of armor once they find +5 Bracers of Armor. Similarly, the person with a wand once they find these bracers (and can't trade them in for anything) is never going to use another charge from the wand again because it's a waste of time. The game also tells us that there are a finite number of encounters a player with the +3 bracers of armor will face before +5 BoA will drop in their lap, completely eliminating the need to use the latter.
So we can see right away that if the wand has 50 charges in it but there are only 30 encounters to get from +3 BoA to +5 BoA, the person who chose the permanent cost item is getting ripped off.
3E failed because of this system, but it wasn't really noticable for two reasons:
1) Spells (which were free) did a better job than the limited-use items with of course the notable exceptions of wands of cure light wounds and the light.
2) Limited-use items had a limited overall effect anyway. Wands topped out at level 4, potions couldn't have personal effects and topped out at level 3, etc.
4E failed even more hilariously; if you ever use a reagent or those potions which let you burn a healing surge for some effect you'll get the stink eye at your table like you're a fucking munchkin. And you probably are, too. You cannot use these things unless your DM is completely clueless. Those things are overpowered because the game designers just weren't thinking of the paradigm that 'permanent' use items are in fact not.
If your price sheets for permanent and limited-use items don't match up then expect any min-maxxer to calculate how many times a 'permanent' item will actually be used and making decisions based on that basis. If you can't make them match up then you can make them come out of two different resource pools (tokens that can only be traded for limited-use and a different set of tokens that can only be traded for permanent-use) and don't make them intersect--for example, you can have wands of temporary armor bonuses and bracers of always-on fireball (or vice-versa), but you can't have wands of temporary armor bonuses and bracers of permanent armor bonuses in the system.
And if you can't do either then for Koresh's sake implement a wealth-by-level system; at least that way the person with the +3 bracers of armor can fix their mistake after they realize it.
