So, I potentially have a couple of big problems I need to ask for help with. First, my group is made up of players of varying experience. We have two very veteran players that have been playing since second edition, one player that has played since late third edition and really played more on fourth edition, and one player that is brand new to the game. The problem is that the two veteran players are significantly better at designing their characters and usually wind up with very well built, powerful characters. The less veteran player usually builds decent characters and the newbie usually has help still from the rest of the group and sometimes struggles playing his character. The first question here is how do I adequately dm for a group like this?
The second question is in regards to a more specific problem for the game we are just starting. Now, we all hate the point buy system for generating stats, so we roll for stats. No fancy systems, just 4d6 and drop the lowest. One of the veteran players showed with stats he rolled of: 13, 13, 15, 16, 18, 18. Now, I don't think the player cheated, but the stats raised an eyebrow or two so I had him retool his stats in front of us using my dice. He rolled 16, 16, 16, 17, 18, 18. This character is obviously miles beyond the rest of the party, and because he is arguably the best player in the group at character building I have some concerns at how much better he will be than the rest of the group. Mercifully, I know that neither of the veteran players are power games and they hate multiclassing with a passion. They lock in to the flavor of their character and just make good choices when leveling. Still, the obvious power of the character is concerning. What should I do here?
For the first question, I would suggest: try to make them collaborate with teamwork in order to fill the gap of experience. Also, since I believe the mechanics of the characters is not the central part of the game, reward the new players when they show out-of-the-box thinking.
For the second question: well that player is kind of lucky :) I would suggest to try the point buy system, since is the fairest method for stats. But if roll stats if your only way to go, I would let that player keep those stats. As I suggested before, the mechanics is not the central part, try to "test" him/her with clever use of NPCs.
Mercifully, the group is usually pretty in sync with one another. They do already collaborate pretty constantly, and realistically they do talk to each other when building the party to make sure that they compliment each other and fill most roles. Usually we seem to struggle on anyone making a healer since nobody likes the cleric. In fact, the lucky player was actually making a healer this time since we saw the new Favored Soul sorcerer and Celestial Pact Warlock from last months Unearthed Arcana. The lucky player made an Aasimar Celestial Warlock with the Acolyte background.
Where running encounters gets rough with the group is typically the veteran players wait until after one of the other players makes a mistake in an encounter to explain what they did wrong or could have done better. I've asked them why before, and it's because they don't want to come across as trying to run somebody else's character for them, and I actually kind of agree. It's very respectful. It's just sometimes the mistakes are big enough that it gets the party largely killed.
On the second piece, we have tried using the point but system before, and all but one party member hates it because it feels like you miss a riveting piece if character creation. Interestingly, the fourth edition player absolutely loves it because it is completely fair, albeit sometimes underwhelming. The rest of us, myself included, feel like it makes the characters kind of like "cookie cutter" characters. Usually there isn't a huge variance in the party's stats, so it's not a problem. This was just one of the bizarre outlier scenarios on a character that realistically has a lot of utility and potential power to begin with. The Aasimar player is actually one of the best role players, and maneuvers social encounters better than he handles combat, which he is also very good at. I think challenging the character without potentially screwing the rest of the group is actually my real problem here. And I did let him keep the stats after putting him on the spot like that, and then having the dice basically light on fire for him. Never in my career as a D&D player have I seen something like that happen, and I would feel a bit like a dick to take away such blatantly fair good fortune.
Yeah, in my opinion I don't think you can take away his rolls, that's the point of rolling. Sometimes you will get the crappiest of crap player, other times you get a god-like being, this is why it's intriguing to so many. I always make everyone roll with me present though -- I don't take any scores that were premade, if you made him reroll because his scores "looked" suspicious, you better be having everyone re-roll in front of you, even those with average or terrible scores, otherwise you're basically calling him out for cheating, which he may or may not have done, while someone else may have cheated, but didn't blatantly put the highest scores but went a little above average with everything but one dump stat to "balance" it that might not catch your eye.
Dealing with a character who is super strong, let him have his moments where he is clearly top dog, but also perhaps try to build encounters that play to his weaknesses, perhaps in his characters morals/rp style since fighting his stats would greatly endanger the rest of the party as well. Your baddies might not be able to be a super threat to him, but they can have captured someone he loves/cares for and be in a position to harm/kill them in front of him or possess an item that he desires (be it a major part of the story or some "artifact" that might grant greater power) and attempt to destroy it/curse it.
Also, the baddies (if smart creatures) could have "heard stories" of the super strong leader of the group, and thus want to focus on him, rather than the others.
One other thing I like to point out -- dice don't have memory, people do. It doesn't become "less likely" that he will roll high again on his second time rolling, the odds of him rolling that high are exactly the same as the first time. while it isn't likely that someone will roll scores that high consecutively, it is possible.
It's often easier for people to think in terms of a coin flip, there is a 50/50 chance of getting heads/tails. You can flip a coin 50 times and get heads 37 times. It doesn't mean that next time you flip you are more likely to get tails because it is "due" -- it's still a 50/50 shot on each and every flip. The coin doesn't "remember" that last time was heads so next time should be tails, that's how most of our minds reason, but that isn't how it works.
Actually, playing with his back story is a good idea. I do appreciate that my two veteran players *always* give me a back story, and it usually has a series of open ended story hooks built in that I can elaborate on or ignore at me leisure. And we do usually roll dice as group, we just missed a couple of weeks and wanted to play rather than have a character building week, so I let the group make their characters beforehand. Suffice to say, I won't be doing that again! Thankfully, I do have a pretty easygoing group. But I want to challenge them and make sure it's fun for everyone. I've seen way too many games where one "god" character makes the rest of the group feel useless...
But I will try some more obscure threats to the Aasimar and see how that goes. Additional thoughts are still welcome though!
One of the veteran players showed with stats he rolled of: 13, 13, 15, 16, 18, 18. Now, I don't think the player cheated, but the stats raised an eyebrow or two so I had him retool his stats in front of us using my dice. He rolled 16, 16, 16, 17, 18, 18. Still, the obvious power of the character is concerning. What should I do here?
I would give the best rolls to the worst player and the worst rolls to the best player if I were worried enough.
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"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both" -- allegedly Benjamin Franklin
If the player with the awesome stats starts dominating combat, I'd suggest doing what I did when I had a similar situation years ago with an old Dark Sun game I ran. One character had a 1/2 giant character and he became quite the combat monster because like your player, he rolled extremely well right in front of us the night people rolled up characters. He didn't break out right away at lower levels, but over time it became obvious he was basically Conan and the rest of the party were his henchmen to some extent. So I came up with a number of options to help curtail this without ruining his overall fun.
1) I let him shine a good bit. Some combats it just made sense to let him do his thing and mow through NPCs. He designed his guy to be able to plow through waves of "fodder" type monsters/NPCs, and I gave the party a good number of those fights for them to deal with to let him shine.
2) Sometimes I'd soften him up before a fight broke out. Now, this might not work for you depending on the party's make-up, but in this instance, the group didn't really have a dedicated rogue type, so most of the time this player would just trigger traps and deal with the effects because he had A) great or at least decent saving throws depending on the type and B) a TON of hit points. However, not all of my traps of course would do straight hit point damage. Sometimes they'd freeze him, paralyze him, etc. So there were times where he'd trigger one of those kinds of traps, fail his save and "BOOM" he's a statue (essentially) for a large chunk of combat depending on what the other PCs did. Also, sometimes the traps would just debuff him or poison him. He'd get awfully nervous when getting into a big fight while also having ongoing poison based damage hitting him every few rounds...
3) You mention that your veteran players are good at role playing their PCs. You can use that to your advantage if so depending on what they do. In my instance, the guy played his 1/2 giant as headstrong and impulsive. He LOVED to just charge right into combat. I used this against him on occasion. One time for instance I had him fall into a pit trap when he charged without looking. It was DEEP. Took him pretty much the whole combat to get back up out of it. Another time he triggered a teleport trap which shunted him back to near the beginning of the temple complex they were in. Took him about 10 rounds to run back to the action. :) And remember, not every trap has to allow a save. ;) Though I wouldn't do that too much if I was DM. But every once in a while... ;)
4) I was also big on making certain NPCs/critters seek him out in combat as he looked like the most challenging threat. This especially kicked in later in the campaign after he'd taken to having his character bragging about his exploits to NPCs when trying to intimidate them. Word of his prowess spread...
5) Of course, you don't want the rest of the group feeling neglected and missing out on fighting the "big bad" types. No one wants to play mop up all the time in fights. So in some instances I'd have the "support" NPCs/critters mobbing the big guy and getting in his way while the "boss" types (especially if they were caster types) did their best to avoid him. This usually left the boss types open to the rest of the party engaging them and being the ones to beat them down.
6) I let the combat monster PC get ahold of a cursed item one time. Part of his being impulsive and all. He just grabbed this one big axe that I planted in a treasure horde because I knew his character would be drawn to it. That sucker was cursed out the wazoo and ****** him for a good long while because in my game "remove curse" wasn't an insta-fix. I had it work more like dispel magic in that it had to overcome a threshold number to break the curse and this was a heck of a curse.
7) Throw "mission based limitations" at him if possible. For example, in that Dark Sun game, the group eventually began working for a noble house and I sometimes had the head of the house impose "restrictions" on some of their missions. Like having to take people alive in combat, thus forcing the combat monster to pull his punches to keep from accidentally killing targets. Another thing I had them do sometimes was go "undercover" as servants in other houses or kingdoms wherein they didn't get to always have their normal armor/weapons available. Now, the combat monster was still pretty tough, but much less so at times when without his optimized armor/weapon set-up he liked.
Those are some wonderful suggestions! I will definitely make use of these! I appreciate all of this feedback greatly, and it does help. I've been dming since third edition, and it wasn't too bad because I had a large group. While it was a challenge running a game for 12-15 players, sometimes more, it was actually pretty straightforward. Switching to a group with 4 players has been a challenge since I have had to scale everything back from what I was used to. It's been weird tackling separate groups of orcs instead of just attacking the whole camp :) but I think I enjoy this group a bit better because they actually role play and treat it as primarily a role playing game, not a tactical battle simulator. It's been a lot more fun. I feel like you guys have helped me grow a bit as a dm here though, and I appreciate it. This was definitely new territory for me! Thank you!
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So, I potentially have a couple of big problems I need to ask for help with. First, my group is made up of players of varying experience. We have two very veteran players that have been playing since second edition, one player that has played since late third edition and really played more on fourth edition, and one player that is brand new to the game. The problem is that the two veteran players are significantly better at designing their characters and usually wind up with very well built, powerful characters. The less veteran player usually builds decent characters and the newbie usually has help still from the rest of the group and sometimes struggles playing his character. The first question here is how do I adequately dm for a group like this?
The second question is in regards to a more specific problem for the game we are just starting. Now, we all hate the point buy system for generating stats, so we roll for stats. No fancy systems, just 4d6 and drop the lowest. One of the veteran players showed with stats he rolled of: 13, 13, 15, 16, 18, 18. Now, I don't think the player cheated, but the stats raised an eyebrow or two so I had him retool his stats in front of us using my dice. He rolled 16, 16, 16, 17, 18, 18. This character is obviously miles beyond the rest of the party, and because he is arguably the best player in the group at character building I have some concerns at how much better he will be than the rest of the group. Mercifully, I know that neither of the veteran players are power games and they hate multiclassing with a passion. They lock in to the flavor of their character and just make good choices when leveling. Still, the obvious power of the character is concerning. What should I do here?
For the first question, I would suggest: try to make them collaborate with teamwork in order to fill the gap of experience. Also, since I believe the mechanics of the characters is not the central part of the game, reward the new players when they show out-of-the-box thinking.
For the second question: well that player is kind of lucky :) I would suggest to try the point buy system, since is the fairest method for stats. But if roll stats if your only way to go, I would let that player keep those stats. As I suggested before, the mechanics is not the central part, try to "test" him/her with clever use of NPCs.
What about using the stats 15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8 (the elite stats) as base stats and add racial stats?
Everybody has the same base start and can put the numbers where they wan't them
Mercifully, the group is usually pretty in sync with one another. They do already collaborate pretty constantly, and realistically they do talk to each other when building the party to make sure that they compliment each other and fill most roles. Usually we seem to struggle on anyone making a healer since nobody likes the cleric. In fact, the lucky player was actually making a healer this time since we saw the new Favored Soul sorcerer and Celestial Pact Warlock from last months Unearthed Arcana. The lucky player made an Aasimar Celestial Warlock with the Acolyte background.
Where running encounters gets rough with the group is typically the veteran players wait until after one of the other players makes a mistake in an encounter to explain what they did wrong or could have done better. I've asked them why before, and it's because they don't want to come across as trying to run somebody else's character for them, and I actually kind of agree. It's very respectful. It's just sometimes the mistakes are big enough that it gets the party largely killed.
On the second piece, we have tried using the point but system before, and all but one party member hates it because it feels like you miss a riveting piece if character creation. Interestingly, the fourth edition player absolutely loves it because it is completely fair, albeit sometimes underwhelming. The rest of us, myself included, feel like it makes the characters kind of like "cookie cutter" characters. Usually there isn't a huge variance in the party's stats, so it's not a problem. This was just one of the bizarre outlier scenarios on a character that realistically has a lot of utility and potential power to begin with. The Aasimar player is actually one of the best role players, and maneuvers social encounters better than he handles combat, which he is also very good at. I think challenging the character without potentially screwing the rest of the group is actually my real problem here. And I did let him keep the stats after putting him on the spot like that, and then having the dice basically light on fire for him. Never in my career as a D&D player have I seen something like that happen, and I would feel a bit like a dick to take away such blatantly fair good fortune.
Yeah, in my opinion I don't think you can take away his rolls, that's the point of rolling. Sometimes you will get the crappiest of crap player, other times you get a god-like being, this is why it's intriguing to so many. I always make everyone roll with me present though -- I don't take any scores that were premade, if you made him reroll because his scores "looked" suspicious, you better be having everyone re-roll in front of you, even those with average or terrible scores, otherwise you're basically calling him out for cheating, which he may or may not have done, while someone else may have cheated, but didn't blatantly put the highest scores but went a little above average with everything but one dump stat to "balance" it that might not catch your eye.
Dealing with a character who is super strong, let him have his moments where he is clearly top dog, but also perhaps try to build encounters that play to his weaknesses, perhaps in his characters morals/rp style since fighting his stats would greatly endanger the rest of the party as well. Your baddies might not be able to be a super threat to him, but they can have captured someone he loves/cares for and be in a position to harm/kill them in front of him or possess an item that he desires (be it a major part of the story or some "artifact" that might grant greater power) and attempt to destroy it/curse it.
Also, the baddies (if smart creatures) could have "heard stories" of the super strong leader of the group, and thus want to focus on him, rather than the others.
How do you get a one-armed goblin out of a tree?
Wave!
One other thing I like to point out -- dice don't have memory, people do. It doesn't become "less likely" that he will roll high again on his second time rolling, the odds of him rolling that high are exactly the same as the first time. while it isn't likely that someone will roll scores that high consecutively, it is possible.
It's often easier for people to think in terms of a coin flip, there is a 50/50 chance of getting heads/tails. You can flip a coin 50 times and get heads 37 times. It doesn't mean that next time you flip you are more likely to get tails because it is "due" -- it's still a 50/50 shot on each and every flip. The coin doesn't "remember" that last time was heads so next time should be tails, that's how most of our minds reason, but that isn't how it works.
How do you get a one-armed goblin out of a tree?
Wave!
Actually, playing with his back story is a good idea. I do appreciate that my two veteran players *always* give me a back story, and it usually has a series of open ended story hooks built in that I can elaborate on or ignore at me leisure. And we do usually roll dice as group, we just missed a couple of weeks and wanted to play rather than have a character building week, so I let the group make their characters beforehand. Suffice to say, I won't be doing that again! Thankfully, I do have a pretty easygoing group. But I want to challenge them and make sure it's fun for everyone. I've seen way too many games where one "god" character makes the rest of the group feel useless...
But I will try some more obscure threats to the Aasimar and see how that goes. Additional thoughts are still welcome though!
"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both" -- allegedly Benjamin Franklin
Tooltips (Help/aid)
If the player with the awesome stats starts dominating combat, I'd suggest doing what I did when I had a similar situation years ago with an old Dark Sun game I ran. One character had a 1/2 giant character and he became quite the combat monster because like your player, he rolled extremely well right in front of us the night people rolled up characters. He didn't break out right away at lower levels, but over time it became obvious he was basically Conan and the rest of the party were his henchmen to some extent. So I came up with a number of options to help curtail this without ruining his overall fun.
1) I let him shine a good bit. Some combats it just made sense to let him do his thing and mow through NPCs. He designed his guy to be able to plow through waves of "fodder" type monsters/NPCs, and I gave the party a good number of those fights for them to deal with to let him shine.
2) Sometimes I'd soften him up before a fight broke out. Now, this might not work for you depending on the party's make-up, but in this instance, the group didn't really have a dedicated rogue type, so most of the time this player would just trigger traps and deal with the effects because he had A) great or at least decent saving throws depending on the type and B) a TON of hit points. However, not all of my traps of course would do straight hit point damage. Sometimes they'd freeze him, paralyze him, etc. So there were times where he'd trigger one of those kinds of traps, fail his save and "BOOM" he's a statue (essentially) for a large chunk of combat depending on what the other PCs did. Also, sometimes the traps would just debuff him or poison him. He'd get awfully nervous when getting into a big fight while also having ongoing poison based damage hitting him every few rounds...
3) You mention that your veteran players are good at role playing their PCs. You can use that to your advantage if so depending on what they do. In my instance, the guy played his 1/2 giant as headstrong and impulsive. He LOVED to just charge right into combat. I used this against him on occasion. One time for instance I had him fall into a pit trap when he charged without looking. It was DEEP. Took him pretty much the whole combat to get back up out of it. Another time he triggered a teleport trap which shunted him back to near the beginning of the temple complex they were in. Took him about 10 rounds to run back to the action. :) And remember, not every trap has to allow a save. ;) Though I wouldn't do that too much if I was DM. But every once in a while... ;)
4) I was also big on making certain NPCs/critters seek him out in combat as he looked like the most challenging threat. This especially kicked in later in the campaign after he'd taken to having his character bragging about his exploits to NPCs when trying to intimidate them. Word of his prowess spread...
5) Of course, you don't want the rest of the group feeling neglected and missing out on fighting the "big bad" types. No one wants to play mop up all the time in fights. So in some instances I'd have the "support" NPCs/critters mobbing the big guy and getting in his way while the "boss" types (especially if they were caster types) did their best to avoid him. This usually left the boss types open to the rest of the party engaging them and being the ones to beat them down.
6) I let the combat monster PC get ahold of a cursed item one time. Part of his being impulsive and all. He just grabbed this one big axe that I planted in a treasure horde because I knew his character would be drawn to it. That sucker was cursed out the wazoo and ****** him for a good long while because in my game "remove curse" wasn't an insta-fix. I had it work more like dispel magic in that it had to overcome a threshold number to break the curse and this was a heck of a curse.
7) Throw "mission based limitations" at him if possible. For example, in that Dark Sun game, the group eventually began working for a noble house and I sometimes had the head of the house impose "restrictions" on some of their missions. Like having to take people alive in combat, thus forcing the combat monster to pull his punches to keep from accidentally killing targets. Another thing I had them do sometimes was go "undercover" as servants in other houses or kingdoms wherein they didn't get to always have their normal armor/weapons available. Now, the combat monster was still pretty tough, but much less so at times when without his optimized armor/weapon set-up he liked.
Hope those suggestions help. :)
Those are some wonderful suggestions! I will definitely make use of these! I appreciate all of this feedback greatly, and it does help. I've been dming since third edition, and it wasn't too bad because I had a large group. While it was a challenge running a game for 12-15 players, sometimes more, it was actually pretty straightforward. Switching to a group with 4 players has been a challenge since I have had to scale everything back from what I was used to. It's been weird tackling separate groups of orcs instead of just attacking the whole camp :) but I think I enjoy this group a bit better because they actually role play and treat it as primarily a role playing game, not a tactical battle simulator. It's been a lot more fun. I feel like you guys have helped me grow a bit as a dm here though, and I appreciate it. This was definitely new territory for me! Thank you!