So I'm DMing a homebrew sandbox world and I have this player is also the host for our sessions. His wife plays with us along with 2 other players. So a total of 4 players and me as the DM. Now our group tends to start over a lot due to us just getting derailed and mostly by this player getting tired of playing one game and want's to change systems and so we play multiple systems. Remember he is hosting since none of us can really host due to circumstances. Anyway, he wanted to try playing 10th level characters because "It's boring starting at 1st level" and we all agreed to build 10th level characters because hey we haven't ever gotten passed level 7 so why not?
Now he wanted to play a Bard but he wanted certain artificer specialties that can only be obtained up to 10th level. So I give him the okay on making a "Collage of Artificing" giving him the certain abilities he desired as he sacrificed certain bardic ablities. Nothing wrong as far as I can tell, he and I went over the ability trade offs and all is well. I know that he is a power gamer so I tried to put some restrictions on him. He asked how many magic Items was he allowed to have. So I look at the DMG and tell him we are doing the standard magic campaign so he gets the 500 gp + 1D10 times 25 gp along with standard gear. I also allowed all players to roll the starting gold as well for "pocket change."
So the players spend the first night building characters and we disperse until the next week. We start the session and I find out that his character has a charisma of 28. I asked him how and why does he have such a game breaking character stat. His explanation is that he has the craft magic item ability as one of his artificer powers as agreed upon by him and I. He makes a 'robe of useful items" and has all 4 of the patches be a bag of 100 gold pieces. He then takes the gold from said patches and adds them to his starting gold and does it again. He does this over and over until he has like a ton of gold then purchases multiple copies of "tome of leadership and Influence." a very rare item by the way that raises your charisma stat and stat maximum by 2. He thought it was a legendary item so he "Held back" on his crafting of the robe(s) of useful items. Now he argues that since he is crafting the item(s) he gets to choose the patches and the total amount of patches. Again he does all of this without consulting me and assuming I'm okay with it.
He then used these tomes to increase his charisma stat to that number. And all of this was before game play starts. He then gets upset when me and another player are both frustrated and claim that we are fighting him on how his character was built. He also claimed that we "Won't let (him) to play the character the way (he) wants to play it." Now the idea and background of the character is not the issue. But when you have a +14 as your default stat modifier bonus while every other player has a max of 5 or an average of 2 or 3...
Also he proposed 2 items that were originally found in 1st edition that I felt were just world breaking. The first being a corset (he was playing a female character) that allows the user to make an arcana knowledge roll with a weird DC formula, I can't remember how the formula went, that if successful the player can then use a spell slot and cast a spell that they don't know from any class that is of that spell slot's level. The player had a 20 intelligence so a +5 modifier already from when we did dice rolls and ability score increases. It did have a limitation like at dawn or something you need to make a check to see if it gets destroyed or something, but I forgot. The other item was a pouch that had 25 denomination of all coins from copper to platinum. And every dawn it will replenish the amount of that each coin denomination back up to 25. So if you had 1 coin of each denomination in the pouch at dawn you gain 24 of each of those coins. I reluctantly allow him to have the items with some modifications and this is another thing he gets upset at me about.
I want him to enjoy the characters he builds, because he has amazing ideas for characters. But when I try to make sure he builds a character that doesn't outshine the rest of the party because he is smart enough on how to use his over powered stats and skills to thwart everything I came up with for the campaign... Most of the time the other players stay out of it because well they are not the DM, they don't have to deal with the issues of balancing the combat or modifying events in the narrative or trying to meet the expectation of the power gamer's on what his character should know or learn or persuade an NPC based on the rolls. The guy gets an average of 18 or better on the net results. His wife has DM'ed for us as well and she understands my frustration but when she DM'ed she gave him a lot of leeway because well she's married to him and lives with him while we only see him for a few hours a week. His work stresses him out a lot, he feels like his co-workers and supervisors treat him like a stupid redneck because he is a big guy with a beard and looks like a redneck, and he feels like he has no control over his life and theses sessions of D&D are a form of escapism for him where if he can have fun feeling powerful and go on an adventure with friends he at least de-stresses a bit and he can make it another work week. I just don't know how to reign him in and still make it fun for him and the rest of the party. He isn't being toxic with the group either. If he builds a character that doesn't seem over powered or doesn't seem to take over the campaign, we have a great time. I'm just struggling with when he gets really excited to play a character idea he has and making it work in the world I have made.
This player sounds like he is trying to be a problem player. I've played with people like this before. Here are a few points:
Never, ever, ever, ever, let your players make their own homebrew classes, subclasses, races, or monsters. It is good for your players to be creative, and want to create their own new option only they play as but, I've learned through experience, the player will not be able to help but make it a "tad" more powerful than all the other options in the books. For me, if a player wants to play as a certain option that isn't possible in the current ruleset, and they can't just reflavor a different option, I have them come to me with the idea, and if I like it and would allow the idea, I homebrew it, as the DM. I know how powerful subclasses should be. I know how powerful races should be. The players don't. Players, especially power gamers, only think in numbers. "What kind of ability can I make that will let me add yada-yada-yada damage per round to my already broken character?" They will only make broken abilities, even if they aren't trying to. I know how things are balanced in the game. I know how to make homebrew that doesn't break the game. If there is homebrew in my games, I have to approve it or have made it. They never homebrew. If they want to homebrew, I sit down with them, they propose an ability to me, and I fix it.
Power gamers can be a problem. I mainly DM, but when I play, I am a power gamer. I like numbers, and I like making those numbers higher, and finding ways to significantly increase my damage. I do have to keep in mind not to overshadow the other players.
Don't let players pick their own magic items out of the DMG. Give them options of the rarity of magic items that you want them to have, and let them choose from a list of 10 or less. Don't let them choose one of the manuals or tomes that increase a score by 2. Award these for quests if you must, and only rarely. Don't let them choose it.
I'm sorry to say this, but being a DM has a lot more to do with babysitting than most people typically like to think. I always keep track of everything each player is doing to make sure it won't break the game. I don't run super rail-roady campaigns, but I have to make sure they aren't all turned into babies or scattered across the multiverse. Any decision a player makes, especially before the campaign starts, monitor closely.
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Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Tell him that in this world, there was only ever one tome, so he can’t use it more than once, unless he’s going to wait around for 100 years.
Or say, they were to start with x number of magic items, and each tome would be one, so how did he get that many.
There was no such thing as an arcana knowledge roll in 1e (there were no out of combat skills at all, in fact). And it should be obvious you can’t use items from previous editions. Kind of Like Levi said homebrew + power gamer= bad.
It seems like he’s going through some stuff at work and life, but you are his DM, not his therapist. He doesn’t get to make Ridiculous characters to work through his issues.
I get that it’s tough when he’s the host for you to just say no, but it seems that he’s going beyond power gaming and into a bit of bullying (particularly considering the detail you give about his physical size, it seems you might feel a bit intimidated) and a bit of just cheating. It’s up to you to not let him roll you over like that. At some point, it falls to you to just say “No. You can’t do that.” If he starts to argue, pull out Rule 0: The DM is always right (that actually was in 1e). And then escalate: one of the gods reaches down and lowers his CHA to 20, disintegrates the robe and everything else he’s got down to his small clothes, because they fear his growing power. They’ll be keeping an eye out and might just need to smite him.
Or maybe find another group. This dude is a serious pain, and DMs can pretty much always find players.
IMO it sounds like he's going crazy and then expecting you to accept some of it. I mean, if he got away with you giving him a nerfed infinite-money bag he might have a point. Make him start his magical item selection again with clear limitations and if he's going to abuse his homebrew subclass than remove it or edit it until its not a problem.
And this is why I don't like starting campaigns anywhere but level 1.
Your problem here is the combo of starting at a high level, plus someone being a known powergamer, plus letting the known powergamer pick his level 10 magic items. At 1st level the powergamer couldn't have done this... and at 10th level a powergamer couldn't have done this if the DM had maintained more control over what is allowed.
If you're going to start at 10th level, which is not unreasonable given your group's tendency to start over regularly and the desire to see the higher level game, then as DM you need to make a list of very specific house rules on just exactly what they are allowed and not allowed to do. You definitely shouldn't be doing things like saying "You can pick any magic item in the DMG that sells for X price."
If I were doing this I'd figure out the total value of magic items by some formula like the OP did... and then I would, as suggested above, produce a list of items for that price or less that are available, and tell people to pick from that list. And there is only one of each thing (except if you're talking about healing potions or ammunition), so if Jack gets the Gauntlets of Ogre Strength then Mary doesn't also get them. The idea would be, "This is all the treasure your characters found up to this level - you decide how you divvied it up when finding it."
The reason you don't want the players just picking stuff from the DMG is that you, as DM, are the only one who knows what kind of challenges you plan to put before them. For some campaigns, a Staff of the Magi would utterly break the campaign. For others, it would be shrugged off and hardly ever used. So -- you, the DM, have to know what you plan to do and control the magic items so game-breaking ones to your campaign, do not end up in your game.
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WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
I'm in the "don't start above level 1 camp. That said I can't remember the time we haven't had a campaign without backup characters, who generally are created at first level, and then "fast leveled" to get near the party average. (Some DM's don't do blanket XP, but it turns out the party rarely has more than a three level spread.) During the "speed leveling" process the DM simply decides on what magic items a character has. I say "decides", but it is more consults and then offers up a modified Starting Equipment list which includes some Magic Items on it.
Regardless of any of that though, the rules you stated were: 500 gp + 1D10 times 25 gp worth of Magic Items in addition to standard equipment. It doesn't matter if he can craft magic items or not. Thus the sum of all magic items on his character sheet (and the Tome's use would have to be listed in the modifiers for the ability) can go over that 525-750 gp limit. So his "trick" works exactly ONCE. Cause 400 gp worth of patches, is 400 gp worth of magic items, consumed or not. (once again, would have to list how the gold was accounted). I'll come back to the robe in a second. Now, IF your campaign allows the buying of non-consumable magic items, there is usually a common sense limit, and very rare items would not be on it, especially ones which are imbued with magic every century or so.
Back to the Robe, DMG is very clear on what items are on it:
The robe has two of each of the following patches:
Thanks for your insights. Normally the magic items are not an issue since most of the time we are able to get magic Items out of the way early in the beginning of character building before starting session. The problem happens when he takes forever trying to come up with how to get his character from the way he envisions it in his head to paper. That is when we start having problems. Especially when we are starting at higher levels. Everyone else finishes and he is still trying to figure out what class best fits his character (Normally ends up being a Bard) but he doesn't like the lack of damaging cantrips in the Bard class. And he is never satisfied with how the bard plays and with the artificer class he likes the ideas but not satisfied with that either. So this time around he wanted to try merging the two classes to match what he envisioned for his character.
When he doesn't care as much about the character he builds we have a good 4 to 7 sessions and make a lot of progress before the session falls apart based on situations such as the DM is getting burn out so we switch DM's or a new book came out in Shadow Run or L5R systems and we all would like to switch to play those systems. Then when we want to go back to the previous game some players lost their character sheets so we end up building new characters. And when that happens we get the issue of when he gets invested into a character at character creation, that is when he struggles. He knows he's a power gamer. He tries to not power game too much but he gets frustrated being limited to set character classes because he thinks that the established classes don't allow him to do what he envisions the character to be within that class. If he just min maxed a character through point buy, I wouldn't mind so much. If he stayed with a set class or multiclassed as the PHB instructs I wouldn't have a problem. And like I said he has great ideas for fun characters... but they work in 3.5 with all the options available to them where as in 5E there really isn't much options as far as the classes go and the tools for modifying classes in the DMG still feel limiting to him. But when I DM I'm more familiar with 5E and so I have an easier time DMing it rather than 3.5.
His wife and I have both had to deal with this as the group's DM. We have both looked at him and pretty much said "Do you want to DM this?" and his responses of course no because he has tried DMing our group twice and both times he just didn't enjoy it. Both times he felt like he wasn't having fun because he couldn't understand why we can't figure out how his intricate magical tower's rules worked to progress the story. It took us, the players, 3 sessions just to figure out how to get our characters into the tower and then 2 more sessions being stuck in the tower before we were able to ask the right questions and learn how the tower's door system operated in order to progress, then we went up against a creature that would have normally been a hard for us ended up killing us because we were low on health because of falling into the magical traps of the tower prior to fighting the creature. The other time we were using FATE system and... it fell apart on the first session. After that he just threw in the towel on DMing.
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This player sounds like he is trying to be a problem player. I've played with people like this before. Here are a few points:
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Spells, Monsters, Subclasses, Races, Arcknight Class, Occultist Class, World, Enigmatic Esoterica forms
Tell him that in this world, there was only ever one tome, so he can’t use it more than once, unless he’s going to wait around for 100 years.
Or say, they were to start with x number of magic items, and each tome would be one, so how did he get that many.
There was no such thing as an arcana knowledge roll in 1e (there were no out of combat skills at all, in fact). And it should be obvious you can’t use items from previous editions. Kind of Like Levi said homebrew + power gamer= bad.
It seems like he’s going through some stuff at work and life, but you are his DM, not his therapist. He doesn’t get to make Ridiculous characters to work through his issues.
I get that it’s tough when he’s the host for you to just say no, but it seems that he’s going beyond power gaming and into a bit of bullying (particularly considering the detail you give about his physical size, it seems you might feel a bit intimidated) and a bit of just cheating. It’s up to you to not let him roll you over like that. At some point, it falls to you to just say “No. You can’t do that.” If he starts to argue, pull out Rule 0: The DM is always right (that actually was in 1e). And then escalate: one of the gods reaches down and lowers his CHA to 20, disintegrates the robe and everything else he’s got down to his small clothes, because they fear his growing power. They’ll be keeping an eye out and might just need to smite him.
Or maybe find another group. This dude is a serious pain, and DMs can pretty much always find players.
IMO it sounds like he's going crazy and then expecting you to accept some of it. I mean, if he got away with you giving him a nerfed infinite-money bag he might have a point. Make him start his magical item selection again with clear limitations and if he's going to abuse his homebrew subclass than remove it or edit it until its not a problem.
And this is why I don't like starting campaigns anywhere but level 1.
Your problem here is the combo of starting at a high level, plus someone being a known powergamer, plus letting the known powergamer pick his level 10 magic items. At 1st level the powergamer couldn't have done this... and at 10th level a powergamer couldn't have done this if the DM had maintained more control over what is allowed.
If you're going to start at 10th level, which is not unreasonable given your group's tendency to start over regularly and the desire to see the higher level game, then as DM you need to make a list of very specific house rules on just exactly what they are allowed and not allowed to do. You definitely shouldn't be doing things like saying "You can pick any magic item in the DMG that sells for X price."
If I were doing this I'd figure out the total value of magic items by some formula like the OP did... and then I would, as suggested above, produce a list of items for that price or less that are available, and tell people to pick from that list. And there is only one of each thing (except if you're talking about healing potions or ammunition), so if Jack gets the Gauntlets of Ogre Strength then Mary doesn't also get them. The idea would be, "This is all the treasure your characters found up to this level - you decide how you divvied it up when finding it."
The reason you don't want the players just picking stuff from the DMG is that you, as DM, are the only one who knows what kind of challenges you plan to put before them. For some campaigns, a Staff of the Magi would utterly break the campaign. For others, it would be shrugged off and hardly ever used. So -- you, the DM, have to know what you plan to do and control the magic items so game-breaking ones to your campaign, do not end up in your game.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
I'm in the "don't start above level 1 camp. That said I can't remember the time we haven't had a campaign without backup characters, who generally are created at first level, and then "fast leveled" to get near the party average. (Some DM's don't do blanket XP, but it turns out the party rarely has more than a three level spread.) During the "speed leveling" process the DM simply decides on what magic items a character has. I say "decides", but it is more consults and then offers up a modified Starting Equipment list which includes some Magic Items on it.
Regardless of any of that though, the rules you stated were: 500 gp + 1D10 times 25 gp worth of Magic Items in addition to standard equipment. It doesn't matter if he can craft magic items or not. Thus the sum of all magic items on his character sheet (and the Tome's use would have to be listed in the modifiers for the ability) can go over that 525-750 gp limit. So his "trick" works exactly ONCE. Cause 400 gp worth of patches, is 400 gp worth of magic items, consumed or not. (once again, would have to list how the gold was accounted). I'll come back to the robe in a second. Now, IF your campaign allows the buying of non-consumable magic items, there is usually a common sense limit, and very rare items would not be on it, especially ones which are imbued with magic every century or so.
Back to the Robe, DMG is very clear on what items are on it:
Thanks for your insights. Normally the magic items are not an issue since most of the time we are able to get magic Items out of the way early in the beginning of character building before starting session. The problem happens when he takes forever trying to come up with how to get his character from the way he envisions it in his head to paper. That is when we start having problems. Especially when we are starting at higher levels. Everyone else finishes and he is still trying to figure out what class best fits his character (Normally ends up being a Bard) but he doesn't like the lack of damaging cantrips in the Bard class. And he is never satisfied with how the bard plays and with the artificer class he likes the ideas but not satisfied with that either. So this time around he wanted to try merging the two classes to match what he envisioned for his character.
When he doesn't care as much about the character he builds we have a good 4 to 7 sessions and make a lot of progress before the session falls apart based on situations such as the DM is getting burn out so we switch DM's or a new book came out in Shadow Run or L5R systems and we all would like to switch to play those systems. Then when we want to go back to the previous game some players lost their character sheets so we end up building new characters. And when that happens we get the issue of when he gets invested into a character at character creation, that is when he struggles. He knows he's a power gamer. He tries to not power game too much but he gets frustrated being limited to set character classes because he thinks that the established classes don't allow him to do what he envisions the character to be within that class. If he just min maxed a character through point buy, I wouldn't mind so much. If he stayed with a set class or multiclassed as the PHB instructs I wouldn't have a problem. And like I said he has great ideas for fun characters... but they work in 3.5 with all the options available to them where as in 5E there really isn't much options as far as the classes go and the tools for modifying classes in the DMG still feel limiting to him. But when I DM I'm more familiar with 5E and so I have an easier time DMing it rather than 3.5.
His wife and I have both had to deal with this as the group's DM. We have both looked at him and pretty much said "Do you want to DM this?" and his responses of course no because he has tried DMing our group twice and both times he just didn't enjoy it. Both times he felt like he wasn't having fun because he couldn't understand why we can't figure out how his intricate magical tower's rules worked to progress the story. It took us, the players, 3 sessions just to figure out how to get our characters into the tower and then 2 more sessions being stuck in the tower before we were able to ask the right questions and learn how the tower's door system operated in order to progress, then we went up against a creature that would have normally been a hard for us ended up killing us because we were low on health because of falling into the magical traps of the tower prior to fighting the creature. The other time we were using FATE system and... it fell apart on the first session. After that he just threw in the towel on DMing.