[MUD-Dev] Maintaining fiction.

[Travis Casey]

shren wrote:
> On Sat, 2 Jun 2001, Michael Tresca wrote:

>> Speaking of which, look closely at what's happened the Third
>> Edition Dungeons & Dragons.  There are now articles in Dragon
>> magazine that tell players how to "maximize their characters."
>> That is, abuse the hell out of the system to be killing machines,
>> be the most powerful in a fight, and generally, be what Dungeon
>> Masters DON'T want.
 
>> In the new supplement, "Sword and Fist", the book goes into detail
>> about combat tactics.  Not, "A fighter should keep his weak hand
>> away from his opponent," but details on how much damage each attack
>> does, which weapons should be used to inflict the most damage, etc.

> You're missing part of the story here.  In second edition, really
> the only way you could tweak your character was in the core stats.
> By adjusting the character's level of str,dex,con,int,wis,com, and
> cha, you could make your character more powerful.  Because this was
> just a little numerical shifting, it was named min/maxing.

Huh?  Min/maxing was given that name before D&D even existed... the
term comes from game theory, where min/maxing is attempting to create
a strategy that minimizes your possible losses, while maximizing your
possible gains.

There were a lot of things that you could do to make a character more
powerful besides choosing how to allocate ability scores, in both
first and second edition AD&D.  Here's a sampling. off the top of my
head:

  - Choose a race which got bonuses that applied to the area you
  wanted your character to be good in, but whose penalties didn't
  concern you. (E.g., halfling or elf for a thief character, orc or
  dwarf for a fighter, etc.)

  - Make choices based on your meta-knowledge about the game.  E.g.,
  if you know that the campaign isn't going to last to high levels,
  you're generally better off playing a demi-human than a human, since
  the main drawback to a demi-human is level limits, which aren't
  going to impact you.

  - Multiclass in an effective combination.  E.g., fighter/cleric of a
  war god is a very good combination, since you'll effectively be only
  about one level behind a "straight" fighter or cleric (at least,
  unless the game goes to high levels -- but see the previous item),
  you'll get good hit points, you can wear any armor, and with the
  right choice of god, you'll be able to use the weapons you would
  have picked as a fighter anyways.  Thief/mage is another good
  combination, since thieves can't wear very heavy armor anyways.  You
  avoid the low-level "one-shot-wonder" problem that mages have, and
  at higher levels, a few well-selected spells can augment your
  thieving abilities greatly.

  - If the GM isn't using a dual-classing retraining rule and you have
  the stats for it, do an early dual-class switch.  That is, you pick
  an initial class which is very survivable at low levels (e.g.,
  fighter), advance to second level, then switch into a class which is
  very powerful at high levels (e.g., mage).  This particular
  combination is a very popular one, since it gives you a slew of
  extra hit points in your early mage levels (especially if the GM
  uses the "max hit points at first level" rule), and lets you pick up
  a weapon specialization (choose staff or dagger, so you can keep
  using them while you're a first-level mage).

  - In first edition, cajole your DM into letting you choose your
  character's starting age instead of rolling it -- and then choose an
  age in the "mature" range, and give yourself the net +1 to
  Constitution for being in that age level.  (This is shading more
  into cheating than min-maxing...)

  - In second edition, if the GM is using the "Complete" books, pick
  one of the more unbalanced kits, like bladesinger or swashbuckler.

  - In second edition, choose weapon and non-weapon proficiency
  combinations that add up well.  For example, under the Complete
  Fighter's Handbook rules, specialization in the cestus and
  specialization in punching add up well.  If you're building a
  martial artist character, pick Tumbling proficiency to get a +2 on
  all your attack rolls.  And so on.

Well, this is getting long, but I could easily come up with a lot
more. A lot of these things are so common (e.g., picking a race that
works well with the class you've chosen) that most people wouldn't
consider them min-maxing... but they are, really.


This leads to another point -- namely, that min-maxing is not a bad
thing, so long as it's not taken to excess.  People really do these
things in real life: they choose careers that line up with their
natural abilities, they choose what skills to learn based on what they
see others around them succeeding with, and so on.  Warriors
throughout history have chosen their weapons based on what was most
effective in battle.  And so on.

When min-maxing really becomes a problem is when min-maxed characters
are considerably more powerful than non-min-maxed ones.  When that
happens, there are two basic choices:

  - Eliminate some of the opportunities for min-maxing.

  - Publicize info on how to min-max characters, so that people are on
  a "more level playing field" when it comes to min-maxing.

Personally, I tend to prefer the first.  However, that usually
requires giving players fewer choices, which some game designers don't
like to do.  Thus, some prefer the latter option.

> In third edition, making a character involves a thousand different
> choices.  Sometimes it isn't clear which of these choices should be
> made to get a certain type of character.  There's about 20 pages of
> feats in the core rulebook alone.  Some of them arn't worth taking,
> while some of them are necessary.  Sometimes there are ones that are
> necessary to make a really good fighter at higher levels, so you
> need to be able to have the stat requirements for them by the time
> you reach the level.

> The one time I played third edition, after flipping through the
> feats endlessly, I was ripping out my hair and mumbling over and
> over "I just want to make a good archer *whimper*" while rocking
> back and forth.  I eventually ended up making something more of a
> non-combatant, a brilliant diplomat who knew a little bit of
> everything - and let everyone else rip thier hair out over the
> combat system.

> In second edition, min/maxing was number shuffling to abuse stat
> cutoffs.  In third edition, it can be quite necessary to wade
> through the complexity of the system and actually make the character
> you want to make.

The same was true of second edition, and first edition as well -- ever
seen a group of hard-core D&Ders advising a newbie on how to make a
character?  "You want to be a fighter?  Ok, then you'll want to put
that 18 in Strength.  Go ahead and roll your percentile strength, so
we can see if you'll lose anything if you choose to be a dwarf instead
of a human.  Ok, you rolled a 48 for your percentile... you should
choose to be a dwarf so you can get the +1 to Constitution.  Now let's
go over the good kits..."

The biggest difference is that right now, the 3rd edition rules are
new to almost everyone -- so instead of people learning the effective
combinations through "apprenticeship", as most people learned them
before, people are learning them from magazine articles and such.

Right now, third edition seems more complicated than second.  It's
definitely more complicated than "plain vanilla" second, but I don't
think it's as complicated as second edition with all the bells and
whistles of the optional rulebooks.  (Especially considering that many
of the second edition rulebooks were mutually contradictory -- thus,
being able to build an effective character could hinge on knowledge of
just which set of rulebooks your DM was using...)

--
       |\      _,,,---,,_     Travis S. Casey  <efindel at earthlink.net>
 ZZzz  /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_   No one agrees with me.  Not even me.
      |,4-  ) )-,_..;\ (  `'-' 
     '---''(_/--'  `-'\_)
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