The Character Optimization Arms Race

When creating a character for a game you need to be sure your optimization doesn't lead to an arms race between you and the storyteller. Allow me to explain what I mean when I say arms race.

Let's say you are an experienced player and you know the character creation rules. You know the combination of abilities that will give you the highest possible damage yield for X type of character. If you know how to be the best rogue possible, why shouldn't you be? Because in doing so you may do significant harm to the campaign and reduce the enjoyment that the party gets out of the campaign.

What happens when one PC is far and away more powerful than the rest of the party? Usually as a storyteller in order to keep the game challenging for that character I have to increase the difficulty of encounters. In doing this I end up going beyond what would be a challenge for the rest of the party and just like that the rest of the party is playing second fiddle to one character. If you are that PC then you get to be the star but the rest of the party probably will not enjoy themselves as much as you do. They will miss more than you and they will get hurt more than you. By doing this you have challenged the storyteller to an arms race which leave him in a hard situation, if he doesn't up the difficulty to meet the highest player he risks not challenging the party but if he does the rest of the party is left in the dust. Remember that no one likes to feel useless in real life or in a game. Your objective should not be to outdo the rest of the party but to work with them to overcome challenges. Furthermore you are punishing yourself because as the most optimized character, the storyteller will likely give you less gear rewards in order to keep you from pulling farther ahead from the rest of the party.

But what if the whole party is optimized? Well if thats the case the whole party may have fun and revel in their damage potential. However they should be aware of the by products of having the perfect combat party.

The challenge is what makes combat encounters entertaining. Without risk of failure there is no tension or excitement and while most times a party is not in extreme peril there is always a risk, a challenge involved. If the entire party is optimized for combat effectiveness a storyteller must rely on the most dangerous and challenging encounters the players can possibly handle. From my experience that means that when the bad guys hit they hit hard, actually increasing the chances that a PC will be killed. Also encounters take longer to finish due to the sheer number of bad guys or because of the huge pools of hitpoints the bad guys have. Both of these reinforce negative player behaviors by making them even more obsessed with doing damage and increasing their optimization to keep up with what they perceive to be an upped ante from the storyteller. In essence it creates a damage arms race that often leads to a completely combat oriented campaign and/or frustrated players/storyteller.