Need help fighting the dreaded MinMaxer.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

I worded my phrasing as politely as I would put it in real life: If they clearly aren't a good match for the session, then I will tell them so to prevent both of us from wasting our time. If they don't understand, then I will more clearly iterate that they are not invited to the game. I don't subscribe to the geek fallacy that exclusion is a dreadful sin. If someone won't fit, someone won't fit.

Okay, yes, we're in agreement. And there are intermediate cases where you have to be firm, but if you are, they'll be okay.

[Terwin]

Originally Posted by Kalzazz

Or if the players are okay with it, there's nothing wrong with a character who spends 95% of their time as at best ambulatory set dressing but is useful the 5% of time they are relevant

I've played characters before who were due to hyper specialization utterly useless the majority of the time, but due to forewarning by the DM was not a problem

The key is for the DM and player to be mutually in tune with what is going on

For some reason that reminds me of my Kender-wizard(spell-jammer-like game). He would spend the first 2/3 of every combat attempting to make friends with the bad guys(Xenophile and curious), but once he became aware that these 'potential friends' had drawn blood on his existing friends, he would pull out his high-powered area of effect innate attack(Spells as powers) and make sure they saw the error of their ways.

(most of the other players were fairly new to GURPS and I wanted to make sure it did not become a game of Warrior: 'What happened?' Wizard: 'There were bad guys, I killed them' Warrior: 'Why do I even carry a sword?')

[mehrkat]

Don't forget he was almost impossible to hit. As the gm in that game I had subsets of enemies loosely set up to attack specific groups of PCs. His was a few random extra enemies that looked "bad" that he could throw a spell at.

Unless the PCs "got the attention of" the wrong enemy for the most part they had there own enemies in every battle. The combat capacity varied widely in that game.