Need help fighting the dreaded MinMaxer.

[Bruno]

While we had some very "wild and wooly" anything goes kitchen-sink 3.x D&D games around here, entire publishers were banned, along with some official supplements, as sort of an agreed "this is junk writing and produces junk results" armstice. There was also an assumption that you'd be using your pile of random supplements to make something interesting, not something powerful. The idea of deliberately designed cheese builds (the infamous Pun-Pun the kobold, as a classic example) horrified everyone once we heard about it.

Which is a long way of saying that we had campaign rules and guidelines, if loose ones based largely on mutually-assured good faith. That last part (good faith) is required for a really successful game, in my experience. Everyone on the table needs to be trying to make the game fun for everyone, including players making the game fun for the GM as well as vice-versa. Self-centered rules exploitation or abuse isn't fun for others.