So, you’ve read all about how to how to make a character with a compelling story and how to play D&D tactically. You love your character, and you don’t want them to die. It’s only natural to start thinking about making your character as powerful as possible so they aren’t casually slain by a lucky kobold. Whether you’re a roleplaying maven who wants to give your character a beautiful arc or a combat fanatic who wants to slay everything that stands against you, it only makes sense for your thoughts to turn to powergaming.
In this installment of the New Player’s Guide, we take a look at a controversial topic that has driven many D&D groups apart: will optimizing your character improve your D&D game, or tear your group apart? The answer is more nuanced than you might think.
What is Powergaming?
Powergaming is a term that describes the act of optimizing your D&D character and acting in a way that maximizes reward while minimizing risk. “Powergamer” is roughly synonymous with terms like “min-maxer,” and “munchkin,” and all of these terms carry a degree of derision. That might be because this efficient way of playing largely ignores the “roleplaying” aspect of roleplaying games, and focuses almost exclusively on winning the “game” aspect.
Some powergamers think deeply about the systems of D&D to find broken combos and exploits in the rules, whereas others simply look at character optimization (“char-op”) boards to find powerful combos that other players have theorized about online.
Why Some Folks Optimize, and Why Others Don’t
Everyone who optimizes does it for different reasons, but one common through line is that being strong is fun. If you make a character and envision them as a mighty demon slayer, you want the game to support your story with the mechanics. You want your character to be cool, right? D&D rewards a clever understanding of its mechanics with greater power—essentially, the ability for your character to do cool things more consistently.
In a more extreme case, you might want to create an all-powerful character because the relationship between you and your Dungeon Master is antagonistic. If your DM tries to screw your character over at every opportunity, like you’re playing the Tomb of Horrors in every session, it makes sense to create a character that can’t be defeated.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with optimizing your character; it just means that you’ve put in work to allow your character to do the cool things that you want them to be able to do. On the other hand, there is a dark side to powergaming. If your DM just wants to play a collaborative game where the DM sets interesting challenges in front of the players, but isn’t going out of their way to annihilate your characters, optimizing your character into an all-powerful death machine could leave other players in the dust.
If everyone in your group is optimizing their characters to the best of their ability, this isn’t a problem; everyone’s playing Gandalf or Galadriel or Elrond, the campaign becomes a super-powered thrillfest where powerful wizards and warriors battle evil liches and their undead servants.
On the other hand, there are lots of players who don’t like to optimize. Some do so because they don’t have the time to dedicate to fussing over every minute detail of their character sheet because of their job, home life, or because of any number of real-world concerns. Life is hard, and the people who are working hard to make their real life work deserve to have fun just like the folks who are able to dedicate hours to learning how to optimizing their D&D character. If everyone in your game is “optimization neutral” in this way, you might have a party made up of Aragorn, Legolas, Boromir, and Gimli. All powerful warriors in their own rights, but with a few flaws that force them to rely on one another to survive.
There’s another type of players, too: the kind that actively choose not to optimize their character because they like their characters to have character flaws that are represented in their game stats. These players might optimize their characters in some ways, and lean hard into their weaknesses. Or, they might be happy to be defined by their flaws more than they are by their strengths. A group of players that would rather play Frodo, Sam, and Gollum desperately surviving in a world too powerful for them might play characters like this.
It’s easy to have fun in any group filled with players that all have the same philosophy towards character optimization—even if they don’t have the words to articulate what that philosophy is. However, things become messy when characters of wildly different levels of optimization are in a party together. Gandalf fights the Balrog alone at the Bridge of Khazad-Dum in The Fellowship of the Ring because, as he tells the Fellowship, “This foe is beyond any of you.” This is an awesome moment in the Lord of the Rings films and novels, because we’re an audience that gets to watch one character have the spotlight in a scene that is at once both tragic and epic.
But in a game, the wild power disparity between the hyper-competent Gandalf, the strong-but-flawed warriors like Aragorn and Boromir, and the kind-hearted but physically weak hobbits would be incredibly frustrating. Unless you know that your group is actively excited for that kind of power disparity, you need to figure out a solution.
Side Note: The Stormwind Fallacy
Worth noting is that these broad categories aren’t the be all and end all of powergaming. A classic RPG fallacy is the “Stormwind Fallacy,” which states that character optimization is antithetical to roleplaying. This statement is fallacious because it’s absolutely possible to have a flawed, three-dimensional character and still optimize their build so that they can reliably do cool things, too. Aragorn and Boromir are great examples from the Lord of the Rings characters mentioned above; they’re powerful combatants, but have intense roleplaying flaws. In the films, Aragorn is reluctant and fearful to lead, so he chooses not to claim his birthright and lead the mighty armies of Gondor. Boromir is a talented warrior with many advantages, but he is vulnerable to the corrupting influence of power and the will of the One Ring—a temptation that leads to his downfall.
Some of the best story-focused roleplayers are willing to put their powerful, optimized characters into compromised, suboptimal situations because it creates a dramatic and exciting story. You can see this in Critical Role, Tales from the Mists, and any number of other beloved D&D streams. It can take a lot of trust in the DM to present you with situations that let you kick ass and situations that prey upon your characters’ weaknesses. Nevertheless, playing this way is incredibly rewarding.
What Kind of Gamer are You?
There are too many positions on powergaming and character optimization to count; the spectrum of opinion between “it’s the only true way to play” and “it ruins D&D” contains infinities. Likewise, there’s a continuum of how intensely players will optimize their characters. Some players have an innate knack for finding powerful combos and gravitate to optimizing automatically. Some read char-op threads on D&D forums to learn the best strategies. Some are just happy to play. Some still actively give their characters debilitating flaws because it helps them create a more dramatic and nuanced character.
All of these playstyles are valid. Even so, just because they’re all fine ways to play D&D doesn’t mean that people with different playstyles won’t come into conflict. Some of these playstyles are so disparate that it’s almost inevitable that someone will get annoyed with someone else for playing the game “wrong.” But don’t despair. This doesn’t mean that your group is doomed if some people want to optimize and others don’t.
Communicate Early and Often
If you’re playing with veteran D&D players, they probably know whether or not they like to optimize their characters. In that case, just ask them straight away as part of your Session Zero. As usual, clear and open communication with your fellow players is the solution to 90% of all problems at the game table. Try to align everyone’s goals by finding out if some people don’t like the power imbalance that powergaming can create between player characters, or if they don’t mind.
If your players are new to D&D, they probably don’t know for sure if they’re going to min-max or not, so asking directly won’t be as useful as it would with a veteran player. You might be able to guess how they’ll approach the game based on their personalities or taste in other media. D&D players who play collectible card games or MMORPGs may be more inclined to optimize their characters in D&D because the types of games they play heavily encourage optimization, whereas players who were more into fantasy novels or films may be less inclined to min-max. This is just a rule of thumb; it’s not true for all people. The only way to know how new players will approach the game is to play with them for a few sessions.
Once you know roughly where on the powergaming continuum your players fall, you can host a Session Zero and lay out some expectations for your campaign. Remember, you can have a Session Zero at any time during your campaign, not just before the first session. This works even better if everyone can talk about their own expectations too; this will make your Session Zero less of a lecture from the DM and more of a conversation between friends.
Here are some questions to ask new players that haven’t thought about powergaming before:
- If one of the characters is stronger than all the others, would that make the game less fun for you?
- On the other hand, would you have less fun if your character is weaker than all the others?
- If one character hogs the spotlight and consistently spends more time doing cool things than you, would you be annoyed?
- Do you want this game to be the sort of game where we all work together to tell a story, or do you see it as a competition between the players and the DM?
These questions will help identify your players’ feelings towards intra-party balance (how powerful the characters are in relation to one another), without once mentioning the jargony words of “powergaming” or “optimization.” If the players tell you that these things don’t bother them, great! Just let them know that they can always tell you if something feels bad about your campaign, then go play some D&D!
If a player answers “I don’t know,” then take their answer at face value. Don’t assume they’re hiding something from you. Optimization is probably just a topic they haven’t thought about before, or one that doesn’t impact their enjoyment of the game. Don’t interrogate them, just move on. Trust that if someone’s optimization (or lack thereof) bothers them during the campaign, they’ll let you know.
If the players tell you that yes, some of these things would bother them, you can facilitate a conversation in which the players can agree to not do things that will upset the other players. You’re all here to have fun together, after all. If someone feels like their fun is being trampled on because they feel forced to consider what’s fun for other people, that’s not the kind of person you want in your weekly gaming group. You can ask questions like these to work out a compromise:
- It sounds like most people want the group to not be too overpowered. Would you feel okay not reading any character optimization guides or choosing overpowered combos?
- It sounds like most people want the group to be relatively powerful. Would you feel okay reading a bit about your character’s class before playing? (The Class 101 series is a great place to start to get an overview of your character.)
Balance between player characters can be one of the most important topics a D&D group can discuss. Or, it could be completely unimportant! Figuring out what works for your group must be your number one priority as a Dungeon Master. If you and your players can communicate clearly and effectively with one another, you’ll all come back to the game week after week, excited to play again.
Are you a powergamer, or does someone in your gaming group love to optimize their characters? Have you ever talked with your group to work out how to deal with power imbalances in the party? Let us know in the comments?
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James Haeck is the lead writer for D&D Beyond, the co-author of Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus, and the Critical Role Explorer's Guide to Wildemount, a member of the Guild Adepts, and a freelance writer for Wizards of the Coast, the D&D Adventurers League, and other RPG companies. He lives in Seattle, Washington with his fiancée Hannah and their animal companions Mei and Marzipan. You can find him wasting time on Twitter at @jamesjhaeck.
You don't have to be rude, you know.
Agreed, I follow the Joe Manganeillo school of thought in that people can be bad at the game, and people that love to play all around weak characters are the worst kind of toxic to any group that is looking to do anything other than collectively writing a book
I get the feeling it's about party composition. An otherwise all strength-heavy melee party is going to rely heavily on their druid to heal them and help them stealth around with pass without trace. On top of that, clerics and druids are a solid base class with a reliable and flexible spell selection. In past editions, they were very broken, contested only by wizards at very high levels.
What does your party look like?
I have a fighter 3 level, two wizards 4 level, and a 3 level bard. I use point buy
Well of course they need you. You're one of the healers, along with the bard. And you can also hold your own in melee, both on the basis of being a goliath and having wildshape. There's nothing wrong with the party depending on you. You, I'm sure, depend on the other party members. The wizards and bard for support, the bard for social interactions and the fighter to help hold the line in combat. The nature of the game is for the party to depend on each other, and that includes your 4th level goliath druid.
See, that's funny to me because balancing encounters is one of my weaknesses as a DM because my first DM-ing experience was with powergamers. I won't go into details, but watching one PC obliterate everything I threw at the party, while anything that might have been a challenge for him would run the serious risk or wiping out the rest of the party with little to no effort, really skewed my ideas of what an encounter should look like. Nowadays, I personally have nothing against optimization, and I would never force a player to do something other than what they'd planned with their build (unless they're using homebrew or UA stuff without discussing it with me first), but focusing purely on it for character-building is definitely either something either the whole party should be doing or none of the party should be doing.
I know this may surprise you, but some people like to play, you know, characters instead of walking piles of stats. If everyone optimized their characters all the time the way that you're describing, then there would be entire races, classes, and subclasses that would never get touched, which is so obviously not how the game is supposed to be played that it's laughable. Players should be able to play a Four Elements monk because they want to punch stuff and throw fireballs just as much as they should be able to play an Open Hand monk because it's going to generally be better at doing monk things (deliberately making your character bad at things their class should be good at is another story and definitely something that would merit a talking-to at my table).
Nice of you to accuse people of being petty in such a petty comment.
That is a rather bold statement. As a DM I can 'rise to the challenge' and make anything a near death experience or otherwise difficult. It's not hard to 'rise to the challenge'. What is hard is managing a player that does not care if anyone else at the table has fun. I have no issue with powerful characters. I have an issue with rude people making the game less fun for others.
I feel like the culmination of this discussion and something that everyone can agree on is that players who make powerful characters and show off or are just general jerks are toxic players that everyone hates, and that can make some people dislike powerful characters in general because they have had a bad experience with “power gamers”. I think the nugget of truth that we’re trying to find in this argument is that 1) This is a roleplaying game, and roleplay is usually the point of the game, not just combat and character optimization. 2) “Power gamers” need to be fair, thoughtful of other players, ACTUALLY ROLEPLAY, and let other people have the spotlight, just like everyone else. And 3) Power gamers and non-power gamers need to respect each other’s differences and have fun playing the game. Just trying to take what I’ve learned out of the discussion and try to find a compromise so everyone can find ways to courteous to their fellow players and DM.
That’s an issue I feel like everyone has.
Powergaming focuses on maximization problems and mathematical arguments, so I'm going to compare learning D&D to learning math:
If a person new to mathematics wants to start with the basics, then they don't want their friends, tutors, or teachers to start throwing calculus and topological arguments at them because it's overwhelming. Say you, a new student, wanted to start learning math with your friends at a reasonable pace, and you all decided to begin with basic algebra. Then, suddenly, one of your friends who took to the subject faster extrapolated all of the basics and started basing their explanations in deep theories of polynomials and finite-dimensional vector spaces during your group study sessions. When you try to tell your friend that their complicated ideas are making the group's learning difficult and un-fun, you are then told you have "self-esteem issues".
Do you think you'd feel good about that? Would you be excited to delve deeper and discover the cool numbers and patterns hidden behind all of the axioms and theorems? Do you ever appreciate it when a teacher in class gives a terse, technically correct explanation, and then makes you feel less than because you don't currently understand and you don't have the time to spend hours upon hours studying esoteric books?
This is an article for new players. If you are new at any subject, should you be chastised or made to feel stupid or unworthy because you don't operate perfectly? Do people appreciate know-it-all Hermione Grangers who wield their knowledge over others because of their own internal self-esteem issues and superiority complexes?
Your argument is elitist and is intent on excluding new players from the game.
I like to build semi-optomized characters with a focus on larger toolkits. It seems like I'm the only one, at least the only one my IRL groups have encountered. Anyone else like to play strange multi-class builds for interesting (if a little suboptimal) play styles?
That sort of sweeping generalization is not helpful at all. To be honest, you are highlighting the difference in perspective that makes powergaming an issue at many tables by saying that "everyone that does X is a toxic player that everyone else hates". You cannot expect to make social changes by reviling a position, that just adds fuel to the fire. DND is not just combat, but it is also not just roleplay. Both are integral parts of the experience and, in my opinion, a session needs both portions to be played at a decent level for the game to be considered excellent.
A player that is actually toxic does not have to be a powergamer... though it does happen that someone who is predisposed to thinking other players are inferior is also more likely to seek ways to make their character seem superior.
One could easily make an argument that the roleplay centered face of the party is hogging the spotlight, since they get the majority of story beats routed through their character. Is it not ok for a combat focused character to shine in combat? If not, why is it ok for a roleplay centered character to shine in social interactions? Is one character at fault for trivializing combat because of their mechanics? Is the other at fault because they are actually good at speaking or can bust out a 30 on demand for a key persuasion check? Not all characters are equal, and neither are players equal. There are people who cant figure out puzzles. There are people who can't convince the local lord with a persuasive argument... should these players not get to fantasize about being able to do these things? That sort of gatekeeping is toxic in a different way. That in no way is defending the toxic actions of people who choose to degrade the experience of others, but rather it is a defense for the larger number of players that want to play the game to fulfill a specific fantasy.
The thing is, what is being discussed in this comment thread isnt even powergaming. Everyone is actually talking about problematic players. If people could actually accept that, then maybe we could make some progress in fixing the problem.
There is so much about this post that is just toxic and incorrect. There are incorrect ways to play D&D according to the table that the game is playing at. The DM determines the correct way to play at the group. I am certain that Joe Manganeillo doesn't hate people who don't optimize their characters.
Understand that what happens at your table when you're a player is not up to you to determine what is toxic or bad playing. What happens at other tables is 100% not something that effects you. I understand liking powergaming, I like powergaming, but advocating for "character eugenics" is not okay, because your comments can hurt other people's feelings.
I agree with pretty much everything that you’re saying. I was trying to point out that we were talking about problematic players, and that trying to respect other people’s playstyles is important to having a cohesive group. I think that you need to balance roleplay and combat in your game and character, and leaning too hard on one side or the other can be toxic or just plain rude. People who overvalue roleplay AND people who overvalue combat can both be toxic, problematic, and just not fun to play with. In all things, moderation is key. Balance and moderation seems to be the best solution to this problem
What you are talking about is an area I have seen in D&D 5th as an issue, IMHO the rogues sneak attack is very powerful and is something I would change in a home game. I myself have not spent a lot of time with the rules but I would not allow a sneak attack to stack with other attack options, it should take the whole action of the player, I would also limit when it would apply in combat situations and instead apply a precision damage mod to other attack/s based on a roll and/or position of friendly's on the battlefield and severely limit the ability on thrown/missile/spell attacks to the point some would think it worthless. Then rigorously test it and change things as needed to realign class's as needed.
MDC
Unfortunately most of the time I have seen exactly what you are saying above happen or at least been described to me. But I have also seen quite a few power gamers enhance a game experience for newer players in one shot games and games they do not know well. But after a time they again express what most people would call game disruptive behavior. I have also seen quite a few of these type of issues cause the player to become a GM and carry over into their GMing experiences.
MDC
I think that is a good quote "Don't be a jerk" and then if we can get everyone to agree what jerk like behavior is we will be on our way to a good place. Or you can just like jerk like behavior in your player handout for the game and hopefully not experience it at all.
MDC
I'm not a big fan of nerfing core capabilities of classes. Since rogues do not get multiattack, the only way that their attacks scale as the party levels is with sneak attack. I'm running a level 19 table, and the rogues need sneek to keep up with the spellcasters and fighters.
Yes, I think there's a lot of room for a semi-optimal build that's a little broader than a really optimized in a particular role character would be.
This particularly works if core roles are covered well. Even for fairly optimized characters, I think it's often a good idea to have some secondary ability that fills out the character and also broadens the party's capabilities so that core abilities don't fall to just one PC. For example, I play in a game where my character is a Paladin/Bard and has a lot of skills. I'd be a better Paladin without the Bard levels of course, and for damage dealing Sorcerer multiclass is much better. As a Bard, Paladin isn't an optimal MC either. But it fits the character's story and makes sure that the party's skills are covered reasonably well. One other character in that game is a Champion Fighter. Sure he'd be "better" as a different archetype, but the player doesn't like resource management and prefers the "I'm just good" of the Champion. He's got a few interesting skills, too, like Persuade and Insight, and Resilient(Wisdom). Again, he passed up some DPR optimization for RP ability and part of the general "you won't fool me" story.
This article doesn't account for support classes, and how you can powergame with the aim of making all your teammates look cooler. Look up Treantmonk's "god wizard" guide