Need help fighting the dreaded MinMaxer.

[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.