Need help fighting the dreaded MinMaxer.

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by Jasonft

To start, I think it is broken as heck... but it looks legal.

...

Would I ever allow it in my game if I was GM? Heck no. But I need solid rules to stand on when arguing with this person as a fellow player.

Help?

Cosmic is a modifier that's very much only with the permission of the GM. That's a LOT of cosmic flying around there. Has the GM seen this? Have they approved it? Are they OK with it?

If they have, and they did, and they are... I'm not sure you should bother arguing with the player. You'd be fighting both of them.


EDIT: If this isn't a character for an actual game, but just something he's screwing around with for his own entertainment, don't stress yourself over it. If he's passed it to you for a review for rules legality, OK, that's a useful commentary... But.

When I'm making my own characters for no game in particular just to entertain myself, I'm my own GM and I get the last call on how I can jamn things together, how many points I get to do that with, any restrictions on character creation, etc etc. It doesn't matter how many Cosmics I put on a power, or frankly how many incredibly antisocial disadvantages end up on my character, otherwise making them totally disfunctional in any group play setting. They're not a "real" character that actually has to see play, work in a group, and not **** off my GM. It's like writing fanfic for myself, only myself, never to be shared - my plot lines might be utter crap and the protagonist might be a total author-insertion character, but I'm the only audience so if I like it, I've achieved 100% market success.

So he might be doing something totally cheesy, but I wouldn't stress over it because it's very "not real". Offer friendly critique, but don't obsess over whether he's going to try this in a "real" game. This isn't real.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Donny Brook

How does he get his ****** characters into a game in the first place? Sounds like the GMs are not doing their due diligence.

There seem to be two polarities in character creation. In one, it's a collaborative process: The player comes up with a concept, talks it over with the GM (and sometimes the other players, which in my experience is ideal), does a rough draft, and submits it to the GM, who checks it for correct arithmetic and rules legality and acceptability for the campaign and suggests appropriate other skills and possible design tweaks. In the other, it's a more adversarial process: The player goes away and does everything on their own and shows up with character sheet in hand, expecting to play.

I've had a couple of players who expected the latter and had difficulty adapting to my campaigns—occasionally to the point of dropping out because they couldn't get through character creation. But they were used to the less collaborative style from their long-running Champions campaign; that approach seems to be endemic in Champions. There's an entire gaming culture that does things that way, I think.

[Langy]

Originally Posted by Jasonft

As to the other things: He claims that since he officially works as bodyguard for the party Gadgeteer (who can build the stuff for him) the 15 point 'Gadgeteer Friend' means he doesn't have to pay for his hideously expensive TL11 powered battlesuit. With supporting sensory gear of course.

The battlesuit still needs to be paid for. Gadgeteer Friend only gives him the option to do so, not give him any high-tech item for free.

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by Langy

The battlesuit still needs to be paid for. Gadgeteer Friend only gives him the option to do so, not give him any high-tech item for free.

Alternately, the Gadgeteer PC pays for it out of his own Wealth. Which, if he hasn't, well, tough. You can't write down equipment on other peoples character sheets and deduct from their available funds.

[ericthered]

So what do you need?

tips on how to make characters that are useful in a party with him?
A character that can go toe to toe with him in a Player vs Player conflict?
Arguments on why your GM should restrict this?
An even more broken build you can use to make a point?

Really, we don't know what your goal is. If we know what needs to happen, we can help a lot more.

[Nereidalbel]

If he's using sloppy handwriting to fudge his character, make him stat his characters up with GCA. Nips that problem in the bud, as well as automating the math part.

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by whswhs

There seem to be two polarities in character creation. In one, it's a collaborative process: The player comes up with a concept, talks it over with the GM (and sometimes the other players, which in my experience is ideal), does a rough draft, and submits it to the GM, who checks it for correct arithmetic and rules legality and acceptability for the campaign and suggests appropriate other skills and possible design tweaks. In the other, it's a more adversarial process: The player goes away and does everything on their own and shows up with character sheet in hand, expecting to play.

The latter is very much a D&D-ism. Since D&D, especially in later iterations, is such a closed and well-defined system, the assumption is that any book-legal character should work. In fact, there was even a drive by either TSR or WotC at one point (perhaps at several points) that people should be able to pick up from one campaign and drop into another, no problem. It was meant to be standardized.

So I can see where people used to D&D (and many D&Ders seem to assume that all RPGs are really just shadows of D&D and have a very hard time grasping that things can be different, in my experience), but, in my opinion, this cannot work in GURPS.

Each campaign, each game, each setting has different assumptions. You need to know those assumptions, and you need to know how the GM intends to run things. There are so many optional rules and switches that a truly great build might be useless in a setting. For example, the OP's character would truly suck in a super-level psi-campaign that focused a great deal on astral travel, battles of the mind, and dueling clairvoyants trying to rewrite the future. He's got ~200 points of "I blast people" while everyone else has ~200 points of things that actually matter for the campaign.

Plus the character builds can be so diverse that a GM will be unable to balance for everything. If he knows you're building a combat god for his psi-wars campaign, then he'll be sure to include plenty of combat. If lots of people build combat gods, then perhaps his subtle, conspiratorial psi-wars is a bad fit for the group. Can you imagine the disaster of a group of combat demons showing up for a conspiratorial game?

So both sides need to be talking to each other. The only exception I can think of would be a well-defined campaign framework, and of those, I think only DF is a good fit, since it actually has the rigorous, tight rules necessary to make that work... but even it is a bit more like D&D 3.5 than it is like 4 or Living Greyhawk, because there are lots of supplements and pyramid articles that may or may not apply.

[weby]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

The latter is very much a D&D-ism. Since D&D, especially in later iterations, is such a closed and well-defined system, the assumption is that any book-legal character should work. In fact, there was even a drive by either TSR or WotC at one point (perhaps at several points) that people should be able to pick up from one campaign and drop into another, no problem. It was meant to be standardized.

Even in D&D you can build totally silly characters by combining things, so the DM just has to say no in such...

I have played D&D with a bunch a true min-maxers/power gamers and when your party at level 5 consists of characters like the one with AC 35, the one with about 200 hit points and such.. it is really not balanced, that is because the DM said we could pick any combinations of legal abilities.

[Phantasm]

Originally Posted by Langy

The battlesuit still needs to be paid for. Gadgeteer Friend only gives him the option to do so, not give him any high-tech item for free.

I've encountered something similar: a character in a TL8 superhero game without High TL as a trait and with only Average Wealth, but with a Secret Patron who provided TL10-11 gear at no monetary cost to the PC. In the player's mind, this gave him carte blanche to basically take everything he could in Ultra-Tech from those TLs that would assist him in being a Batman expy at the start of the game. Made it tough for my gadgeteer/super-archer who had to pay cash when making things (that were not trick arrowheads provided by Consumable Signature Gear) to keep up.

[trooper6]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

The latter is very much a D&D-ism. Since D&D, especially in later iterations, is such a closed and well-defined system, the assumption is that any book-legal character should work. In fact, there was even a drive by either TSR or WotC at one point (perhaps at several points) that people should be able to pick up from one campaign and drop into another, no problem. It was meant to be standardized.

So I can see where people used to D&D (and many D&Ders seem to assume that all RPGs are really just shadows of D&D and have a very hard time grasping that things can be different, in my experience), but, in my opinion, this cannot work in GURPS.

It is indeed very much a D&D-ism. But I think it is rooted in more than just standardization. I think it is rooted in D&D's marketing strategy. D&D produces a lot of splat books aimed at the player. A lot. So many books aimed at the player. All these books are canon. The player buys all these books and there is this assumption (encouraged by Wizards) that they should be allowed to use them in character creation. There is a way in which the very market model disempowers DMs from saying no to "legal" characters crafted by players made using their expensive splat books.

In all my time playing D&D, it never occurred to the DMs or they didn't feel like they were able to make any character creation restrictions other than: starting level and some alignment restrictions. The only splatbooks I recall not being allowed was The Book of Vile Darkness when evil characters were restricted, and there was one combat splatbook that was widely understood to be overpowered and imbalanced. Oh and I want to say that even alignment restrictions were not standard. Way too often there would be parties with Good Paladins and Evil Assassins that were supposed to work together somehow. But I saw players get really angry and resentful if the DM tried to assert any authority over their character creation process...I mean, they spend hundreds of dollars on splatbooks, they deserved to be able to use them.

GURPS, on the other hand, seems to sell more to GMs than it does to players. So the sense of entitlement that comes from being marketed directly to doesn't seem to permeate GURPS players.