My DM has asked me to tone down some builds for the party's sake and focus on character development and being interesting instead of overpowered. In exchange, whenever someone important can't make it to a session we have one-shots where I help the rest of the party go crazy-op and we face correspondingly dangerous enemies. Everybody wins.
As a DM, I've helped build most of my players' characters and encourage high OP. In exchange, they face lots of skill challenges, situations requiring creative thinking, and high level combat with interesting and complicated terrain. Again, everybody wins.
I think something we're all touching on here is that if you've got a problem, talk about it, and it shouldn't be a problem.
My DM has asked me to tone down some builds for the party's sake and focus on character development and being interesting instead of overpowered. In exchange, whenever someone important can't make it to a session we have one-shots where I help the rest of the party go crazy-op and we face correspondingly dangerous enemies. Everybody wins.
As a DM, I've helped build most of my players' characters and encourage high OP. In exchange, they face lots of skill challenges, situations requiring creative thinking, and high level combat with interesting and complicated terrain. Again, everybody wins.
I think something we're all touching on here is that if you've got a problem, talk about it, and it shouldn't be a problem.
And I do enjoy the list :D
For the most part here, I am in the same boat. I'm running a hig-op epic game for what ammounts to four fairly twinked strikers, a controller leader, a buff-bot/heal-bot/attack spam Artificer/Warlord DMPC. I threw a revised Ashardalon at the party at level 23. Level 30 Post MM3 Solo. I realized that if it weren't for the fact that he had a hoard of level 26 elites with him, there was a decent chance they would have beat him. It would have been ugly, but it would have been close either way. When they next fought Ashardalon it was at level 25, after a marathon battle against waves of oncoming epic foes. They went through two level 25 standards, four level 26 standards worth of minions, and at that point somewhere in the neighborhood of 6 level 26 Homebrew elites. Then Ashardalon shows up, missing some HP due to an event ealier in the adventure. They had had enough of him, so, despite having eaten a level 33~ encounter's worth of enemies at that point, and being pushed to the brink of their healing powers, they turned around and ended him. They then mauled the Balor when it popped out, and then nearly wiped out the remaining elites before the timer ended. By the end of the whole encounter they had murdered enough things to equal a level 35 encounter for a party of their size. It was obscene, intense, and nuts. The artifcer was tapped on all of his healing powers. Most of the party was out of dailies and encounters, which considering how front loaded their encounter setup usually is, is obscene. This was also not the only fight they had this day. Its so far outside the assumed power curve of the rules, its not even funny... and you know what? It was awesome. I pushed them right up to their limits, and they came out badass as all hell for it. The next major fight they had was against a level 28 Solo, a Balor, four custom 26 elites, a level 26 standard, and a level 26 standards worth of minions. Half of the fight took place in freefall. I nearly killed two of the players, one coming down an immediate reaction which ended the Solo's attack routine mid-multiattack and kept him from being rended into mist. The other used barbarian stay-awake hax and warforged resolve to tank two elite brute to two points away from negative bloodied and then back up again. The secret of dealing with OP characters is that PvE balance is entirely in the hands of the DM. As long as the party is all along the same level of power, which is really easy to achieve in 4E, roll with whatever they throw at you. Overpowered players only mean that they can take more abuse before breaking, so take advantage of that fact to make them feel like heroes.
I'm in the camp of, "if you're having a problem with OP characters, talk to the player". Especially in the case where all the players aren't on the same page, OP wise.
I think it's ok to occasionally use the tools here in order to challenge the player from time to time, but if the OP player knows that you are ALWAYS going to make their character inoperable, then what's the point of pthem laying?
Any issue a DM has with CharOP can be solved by having a discussion with the player. No need to be all passive-agressive.
I've seen a lot of cases where you've got players who are better at OPing than the DM is, but the DM is the DM due to storytelling ability or other considerations. Playing at the DM's level just isn't fun in a lot of those cases. It's like when you play a console game with a much younger sibling/cousin and you end up giving yourself limitations like "I'm going to pick the worst character and I'm only going to use the A button". Fun for them, not a whole lot for you.
And so, while the players do have a responsibility to tone it down a bit in those cases, the fact is that tabletop gaming is a cooperative venture, and so the DM has an accompanying responsibility to step his game up a bit.
That aside, the first few bits of advice are perfectly legit regardless of op-level. Know your player's characters. Know what they do. Keep track of when they've used their immediates and when their temporary buffs have worn off. If you play on maptools or something, this is especially important to remember, since it's easy to leave the modifer in and have it go unnoticed.
And after that come a few more OP specific things that basically boil down to "Don't just haul things out of the book by rote, tailor the fights to the PCs." It's perfectly reasonable that the enemies realize that clumping up is a bad idea cause that one guy is packing a radiant grenade launcher, or that resistance items/defenses might be a good idea because one of their guys is a human Tesla coil.
You don't want to tailor every encounter towards dicking over your players; conversely, you don't want to make the encounters too easy, or it becomes nothing but another irritating speedbump on the road to the next level.
If they're running a high-op build that has weaknesses, hit their weaknesses every now and then, to encourage them to spend some feats/powers shoring up those weak spots rather than pouring it into more DPR(where DPR is shorthand for 'whatever they're OPing that I'm trying to counter). That, imo, is what a good DM does.
Original post edited to reflect some of the feedback to date. Interesting discussion so far. Always fun to see the different approaches that different people take to the job.
..."window.parent.tinyMCE.get('post_content').onLoad.dispatch();" contenteditable="true">You don't want to tailor every encounter towards dicking over your players; conversely, you don't want to make the encounters too easy, or it becomes nothing but another irritating speedbump on the road to the next level.
This is one of the most tenuous balances a DM needs to strike. You want to slow your players down, and challenge them, but you don't want to be a dbag about it.
Case in Point: The DM that put us in a magic city that caused every non-human to take penalties to speed/attacks/defenses whenever they moved a square away from a human. It was a pretty terrible session and I left the group shortly thereafter.
I do think the OP's list is a good way to give a DM some tips and tricks in how to balance this.
I have to agree with Nyronus here. I don't want to tone down my build because someone wants to take 4 mc feats, 2 skill focus, and a polyglot feat. I want to be badass in MY OWN WAY, which at this moment, is, on my warden, being as close to unkillable as possible. I grab a brute, maybe a few soldiers, and I go toe to toe with them for as long as it takes my party to get to them. When I see the brief flash of nerdrage in my DM's eyes as I 2nd wind and go from near death to very healthy and nearly unhittable, it makes it fun for me. He know's it's only 1 turn, then he gets to have fun making me sweat.
The wizard has fun dropping very inconvenient zones, some as bad for us as team monster, and throwing extra monsters at me to tank. "Hey you missed one!" or "Hey I think you let that one get away". The wizard isn't opped at all really, but she has a lot of fun with her build's concept as an animee-sque gnome illusionist. She has fun.
Our hexblade is the highest DPR in the party, and has opped the hell out of teleporting. He pops behind the perfect front line and unloads on the nastiest looking controller or artillery he can find, then ports back out. He usually ends up playing a defender, so the chance to develop a striker in a long term game is awesome. He has fun.
The shifter avenger is a crazy hodgepodge of carnage falchions, avenging resolutions, skill focus diplomacy, no defensive feats, with no power of skill (WHAT?!). She came up with the idea of a character based on her FF11 main of several years. It isn't particularly optimized, but she loves being able to fly once a day (wings of light), and almost always hitting. She has fun.
We all decided on characters independent of each other (other than role), and we all have fun doing our own thing. Our DM does a pretty good job giving us a fight we talk about for a long time about once a level.
How a player has built their character is how they want that character to be heroic. To spend all your time as a DM trying to get around that defeats the purpose of the game, which is to have fun. Let them be implacable rocks of defenders, become death incarnate strikers, crush an enemy's mind as a controller, snatch a friend from the gates of hell with a massive heal, etc. The trick is to have in mind which encounters you want to be truly memorable, and toss a monkey wrench into those.
No, his very first point concerns players of opped defenders who forget that there's only one immediate action per round. Which is ... uh ... nobody I've ever heard of on CO.
There's a few people on other boards who forget there being only 1 immediate/round, but they're the type of people who have no optimization bone in their bodies. His first point was really preaching to the choir, as was the premise of this thread, really, come to think of it.
D&DN Paladin: Half-Fighter, half-Cleric, all useless. D&DN Ranger: Third-Fighter, third-Rogue, third-Druid, all useless. With one interesting concept that has its execution botched.
We all decided on characters independent of each other (other than role), and we all have fun doing our own thing. Our DM does a pretty good job giving us a fight we talk about for a long time about once a level.
How a player has built their character is how they want that character to be heroic. To spend all your time as a DM trying to get around that defeats the purpose of the game, which is to have fun. Let them be implacable rocks of defenders, become death incarnate strikers, crush an enemy's mind as a controller, snatch a friend from the gates of hell with a massive heal, etc. The trick is to have in mind which encounters you want to be truly memorable, and toss a monkey wrench into those.
In my experience playing in LFR and playing with literally 100s of different people. Opped defenders and opped defenses don't tend to dimish a party's fun. The DM knows they're hard to kill and/or get away from, but the rest of the party is still vulnerable, so no one's fun is ruined. DMs can get frustrated, but the players tend not to care or notice this sort of optimization. Dms can typically counter this sort of optimization simply through using monsters with close burst powers or teleporters.
Opped leaders also tend not to ruin a party's fun. I've played with tons of optimized healbot passifist clerics (some of which are oblivious to the healing errata) and offensive warlords and artificers. Again, the players like buffs, free attacks, being healed, so again, these tend to not be a problem for the players. DMs can get frustrated however.
Opped strikers are the typical culprit on the players side. For example, I've seen a striker do more damage in a normal turn than all the rest of the party (including a couple of other strikers) does in one round, which isn't fun for the rest of the party. I've seen a lot of different people reacting negatively to these sorts of broken strikers.
Opped controllers can destroy the fun of encounters as well, typically through stacking penalties to saving throws. However, I've not seen many of these in play for whatever reason. In my experience, people tend to self-limit the penalties they give on their save-ends effects or optimize other aspects of their characters, such as burst size or damage. Optimized controllers can make for nearly inescapable effects, and having a single character put a good section of an encounter completely out of the fight for most of the fight each fight isn't fun for the other players/dm. Dm tend to counter by giving creatures immunities (which isn't fun for the player), abilities to shrug off effects (e.g., remove stunned at start of turn), or escalating encounters, which tends to create extremely swingy encounters.
I think the reason Strikers and Controllers stand out so much is because their effect on a fight is much more quantifiable. When a Striker drops 2-3x as much damage as everyone else in the group, people notice. It's the same when a Controller hits with massive action denial through whatever form they choose.
A good DM should have some tactical understanding of how best to respond to this. Not to void their builds entirely, but to challenge them. Hitting the squishier Striker/Controller gives the Defender and Leaders more opportunity to shine when they mark or heal respectively.
