New Player’s Guide: Powergaming

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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.

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