How to ease down the munchkin factor?

Question

I've been playing RPGs since the early eighties and have come to terms with the fact that not everyone enjoys this hobby for the same reasons as myself. I'm into it for the sake of the adventure, the story and the discovery. Other reasons, not so important to me, but important to others, include: Solving mysteries, playing tactical combats on a battlemap, re-enacting a theme/story, never-mind-I'm-just-hanging-out-with-friends, optimizing a character, etc.

It so happens that my regular gaming group consists of 70% munchkins, meaning all effort goes into optimizing their characters, very little effort into background and playability of the characters.

I have issues with this, because it tends to shift attention from the story to the technicalities. I also feel that the minmaxer-heavy playstyle results in very long combat encounters, which in turn reduces the time we have to play the rest of what the game has to offer. We get less laughs and memorable moments, and more marathon, fatigue-inducing combats. I strongly believe this tendency is slowly killing off our fun at the gaming table.

Right now I'm putting a lid on my Pathfinder campaign, and have begun prepping for a D&D 5e campaign. I want to discourage the maximizing of characters, and instead encourage a more easy going attitude around being optimized and "winning" encounters.

Has anyone else had this problem? How can I set about achieving this? I'm considering pregenerated characters and restrictions on how to advance these characters, but I'd prefer more subtle options, optimally as part of the campaign/story instead of the rules. What are the tools at my disposal?

(Please don't answer that I'm wrong in attempting to change my group. I might be, but either we change or there is no game at all. Also, please don't suggest I solve this by reconsidering who I play RPGs with. I may or may not be doing that in a parallel process.)

Regarding what brand of munchkins my players are, they're not kids wanting to cheat. Rather they see the rules given as a personal challenge to make a totally optimized character who is "best". Creating powerful characters makes them feel very clever.

The fact that the players spend so much time tweaking and focusing on bonuses and feat-combos is not in itself a bad thing. The problem is that the time we spend together at the gaming table is finite and thus priorities as to what we spend that time on, must be made. I feel that the minmaxing takes up an unnecessary amount of time in several ways:

• An unholy amount of time is spent talking about how this and that spell or power can be used in conjunction with blah in order to deal even more damage.

• All the spells, powers and options available gives a lot of options in combat. This can be good, but not when the average time it takes to play thru an encounter is 2.5 hours because every round must be considered carefully.

• A lot of rules discussions in general. When your character build requires circumstances so and so, say sneak attack, it becomes very important how light, darkness, stealth and perception works. Demanding that this be played by the book and discussing what the book actually says swallows time too.

It is my conviction that toning down the munchkin factor will leave us with plenty more time to enjoy the game. How do I get them to do so?

Answer 1

This might not be as much of a problem as you think. Why? Because munchkining, minmaxing, optimising, whatever you want to call it - is severely limited in 5e. The main techniques for it in previous editions of D&D involved things which are significantly less effective in 5e.

Multiclassing has been crippled by the all-important ability score increases/feats being a feature of class advancement instead of character advancement. There is currently a limited selection of classes and feats, so taking advantage of obscure classes, prestige classes, variants, and feats is no longer an option.

D&D 5e also introduces the concept of 'bounded accuracy'; see here for a good explanation of this idea. There is only so much it's possible to do to optimise a character in 5e, and the gap between an optimised character and an unoptimised one will be fairly small.

Your players will still spend time optimising their characters, of course, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. If a player hasn't spent any time on their character, that's a sign that they may not be particularly invested in them.

As far as creating playable characters with reasonable backstories goes, this is a great opportunity to use their munchkin-ness against them. They're going to want to choose a certain background for the proficiencies it offers - make them justify it. You want to be a Sailor who became an adventuring Wizard with a single level in Cleric? That's fine, but you'd better have a damn good explanation for it.

And using their munchkin-ness against them is a great technique to make them roleplay, too. When they create their characters, they'll choose a bond, a flaw, an ideal, and a trait. Let them know that you're happy to hand out inspiration (which is incredibly powerful - advantage to a roll of your choice? Sweet damn, who wouldn't want that?) if they play their character. Positive incentives have been used to motivate people to do what the motivator wants for years, because it works.

Quick bit of backup for all this - I'm DM-ing 5e for a group consisting of 3 munchkins and 2 roleplayers. One of the munchkins is so bad he walked into a core-only 3.5 game and insisted on creating an Artificer. And you know what? He's playing a single-classed Fighter, roleplaying as much or more than the roleplayers, and (as far as I can tell) having a great time doing it. (Oh, and he also has by far the most extensive backstory, he really got into it when he was choosing his background options.)

Answer 2

As a roleplayer who dislikes playing for stats, I loved it when the GM introduced an eggtimer. Players only got a limited time for rules discussions, swapping spells & checking/discussing rules and had to just plough in there and get stuff done.

Oddly, the more munchkin-esque members of the party seemed to consider this a part of the crunchy numbers challenge and didn't object at all.

I guess our characters ended up with worse stats, but on the other hand I'm pretty sure this innovation has prevented me from feeling the need to murder the offending players by building a giant bonfire of all their rulebooks and roasting them on the top of it, so on the whole, it's been a win.

Answer 3

Here are the things I'm planning to do in my upcoming campaign to get the characters involved in the story.

• Emphasize BIFT (Bonds, Ideals, Flaws and Traits) and hook it right into your plot. This is 5e's gift to your style of play. It's not as emphatic about it as other systems, but it's really given mechanical weight to backgrounds. Backgrounds are important not just because they provide proficiencies, but because through the Bonds, Ideals, Flaws and Traits, they provide opportunities to gain inspiration which is an in game currency that can be used to gain advantage on a roll.

• Hand out inspiration like candy. If you want to incentivize getting into the story and interacting with it rather than long drawn out combats, award inspiration for things that further that aim.

• Don't plan long combats. 5e's combat is set up to be fairly quick (most combats resolve in much less than an hour, and really more often than not it's a turn or two through the initiative order).

The good news for you is that this edition supports the style of play you're after fairly well (probably not as well as other games but better than other D&D editions). The character creation minigame that your PCs enjoy playing is all but gone. There is a limited number of selections, and common optimization techniques are relegated to optional rules and are sometimes now suboptimal choices (multiclassing and feats require substantial tradeoffs to make work).

Rather than handing your players Pre-gens, perhaps discuss generating custom backgrounds that fit your setting, and talk about how they can have their BIFT (usually the Bond, but it could be other things) tie directly to the adventure or campaign that you are running. There shouldn't be a lot of other things you need to worry about with this system at this time. There's so few options right now that there shouldn't be much of an opportunity for your players to get too munchkiny about it.

As far as how to tamp down rules discussion and just focus on the story, I'd recommend the following as a part of your social contract (either implicitly or explicitly).

• If rules discussions do not resolve quickly, I'll make a ruling. My default ruling will be to grant advantage or disadvantage towards the party that is most directly affected by the instance, I will also assign a player to bring the correct ruling to the next session. this will help all of us quickly move on from a particular rule discussion and get back to the story at hand.

• Make sure to think about your next move before it's your turn. If you want to involve someone else in it, you have a few moments at the start of your turn to discuss with your fellow player (or you can pass them a note). Please be respectful of everyone's time by not taking too much time on your turn. This is supposed to be a fast paced game (especially the combat), lets not bog it down by over thinking it.

Answer 4

The problem as I understand it isn't so much that they optimize characters as trying to optimize how they play while they are supposed to roleplay an encounter.

One tactic I've often seen used when "table talk" gets in the way of the game is:

The GM can announce "You're in the middle of battle and your lives are in peril -- I expect you to stay in character and roleplay this scene. If you say something, you're saying it in character and it will chew up time - and you'll lose even more time if it wouldn't make sense to the other characters. If you're looking up books at the table, you're pausing in character while you try to remember some arcane lore."

If you're talking, looking up books, etc, you lose any initiative or going first advantage - everything you do will delay your attacks. And if you're much too slow, ... you don't just go last, you might have to wait a round. At the start of each round, players are supposed to announce their actions. One GM I have played with a lot simply shortcuts the talk by saying "It's next round" and going from player to player one by one, and points to them "What are you doing?". They either announce their intended actions clearly right then and there or he moves on to the next guy (he waits at most about two seconds) -- and if they're busy reading books, they might be effectively stunned that round. [It might even be useful, if you're still alive. If he's feeling generous they might go first next round.]

It can even be quite effective to simply shift people down the action order each time they do any discussion or reading by ruling that carefully choosing actions (and communicating about them) takes time in character.

Answer 5

I'm having a similar problem in that I don't much care for that type of bookkeeping even as a player, and can only imagine it being much harder as a DM. I've gotten some great suggestions for less rules-intense systems if you want to take a look at some (DND 5.e has been suggested, so you might already be halfway there), but here's a few bits of advice I can give you from good DMing that I've seen.

It Doesn't Have To Be About Combat

Role-playing games tend to focus on combat quite frequently, but they don't have to focus on combat. Plenty of good games I've played in had combat very rarely, with players only checking on rules when needed and an emphasis on finishing combat quickly. The rest of the campaign was investigating and exploring cities, and interacting with characters and, quite often, each other.

This works especially well if you allow players plenty of time to interact without using the dice at all. Not every action requires a roll to succeed. Provide them with some downtime to just talk to each other in-character and build relations with each other. That alone can be deeply rewarding.

Talk With Your Players

You've made it clear to us that you want a much less crunch-y campaign, but have you made that fully clear to all of your players? They may be focused on the crunch, but this may just be from past experience and instinct.

Sit them down, let them know you'd like to ratchet that back a bit. You don't necessarily have to change players to get a different type of campaign. They may surprise you with how well they can role-play once you make it clear it's going to be the main focus of your campaign.

Introduce More Role-Playing Interaction

And now that you've got that down, try to introduce a lot of good situations where role-playing is rewarded over roll-playing.

Introduce diplomacy and negotiations, reward players for coming up with non-violent solutions and acting in realistic manners, and present them with characters that aren't just out to slip a dagger into their back, but instead characters who want to get to know them, work for them, sell them things, seduce them, or even a combination of those things. The richer and more interesting your characters are, the more likely your players will want to talk to them, and the slower they'll be to pull out the sword.

You can have some combat along the way, but you can also make combat much more important, and not just pull it out every time they wander down the street. Enrich your world.

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Most of this is advice on how to decrease the amount of combat in your world, but honestly it helps. Munchkins will be munchkins, and they will do their best to make the most powerful of characters. What this does is reduce the impact it has on you and the players enjoying the game. Encourage them to interact in non-combative ways, with characters who want more out of life than a quick dagger to the coin-purse, and you'll be rewarded with much more engaging gameplay.

Answer 6

You've been playing RPGs in the same style for many years. Consider breaking out with a sledge hammer.

Run a couple of one to three session "quickie" games that are in unfamiliar and rules-lighter systems. Give out pre-made characters, or use a system that includes a quick character-gen method where optimization is difficult or pointless. Tell your players that you want to experiment and play around a little, and that you want to worry less about careful use of system optimization.

This will let everyone loosen up, without feeling like they're going to "fail" while playing a character they are invested in. Players take crazier risks and do weirder things when their character will be gone after that night no matter what.

The unfamiliar system limits their use of the system to whatever's already baked onto the character sheet. There is nothing to worry about in picking the stats. This frees people up to focus more on story and roleplaying.

Hopefully, everyone will enjoy the expirience. You can talk with your group afterwards about what people did and did not like. Carry through the fun things you discovered into your next regular campaign.

My favourite game for zany one-shots that encourage risk-taking is Fiasco (http://www.bullypulpitgames.com/games/fiasco/). The system exists only as a catalyst for developing a narrative, not for resolving tasks or combat. There are many other wonderful games too choose from, too.

Answer 7

My suggestion is to play softball. Let them know the encounters won't be very hard beforehand, that they don't need to worry about maximum effectiveness and then follow up on that promise. A lot of min-maxing players have grown into that habit because of GMs who run very difficult encounters or saw the need to match a player character's competence with tougher adversaries.

So buck that trend, if winning encounters stops being hard, they will naturally stop focusing on winning encounters. Of course, you must make sure there's plenty other things to keep them engaged since combat likely won't enough on its own.

These can be the things you prefer, and especially discovery should be easy to put into any dungeoncrawling. Remind them to search for secret doors from time to time (be sure to also put some in) and put good stuff in there. Maybe add in an NPC in the middle of the dungeon, captured by the monsters, and use him for exposition.

Finally, it's hard to work out a playstyle that works for everyone. If this doesn't work it may be worth considering letting someone else GM while you play, at least for a while.

Answer 8

I had a similar situation with my group (I think 3.5/PF brings the optimization out in folks). First off, talk about the type of game you WANT to have, and stress that combat optimization isn't necessary. Then get their buy-in to prioritize, or at least give equal weight, to non-combat activities. Then have each player give you a stat-free character concept, both at first level and at a hypothetical 5-6th or whatever level. Focus on abilities or capabilities that aren't tied to a stat (i.e, "I want to be the master of the rapier, challenging all others to duels, I'm scornful of ranged weapons and magic"; instead of "I'm taking this feat and that score increase to maximize my attack roll and damge with the rapier, that is the most damage producing light finesse weapon....") and then reverse engineer that into a class that matches the concept as closely as possible (battle master or champion fighter, perhaps, in my example.

A few hard decisions on your part, like using the point pool for ability scores and banning multiclassing can also limit the min/maxing. There is an archtype or feat in 5e that allows almost any type of class sorta mimic a traditional multi-class (fight with magic, thief with fighting, super access to all magic, etc) so just banning multi-classing will probably fix the issue.

Then you have to stick to it. Make non-combat encounters fun and rewarding. Let characters talk their way out of fights. Get away from the tactical grid battles and let characters improvise. Make advantage/disadvantage hinge on their descriptions of how they are fighting and how they are using their environment and less about how they exploit a stat to mechanically gain it. Give out inspiration for actions that are counter to optimal play but are in character.

Answer 9

The best thing you can do is talk to your players and try to understand why they are doing this instead of focusing on RP. What do they like to do (besides stat max)? Are they stat maxing because they are afraid you are going to kill them (or because that happened to them before with another GM)? Are others trying to compete with the "Alpha Stat Maxer?" These are all things to observe to get a better handle on addressing the issue with your players.

Here are some basic suggestions that I've used in the past that have worked for me.

I'm Gonna throw something crazy out there: make the majority of combat too easy.

Once players realize that they can handle almost every encounter easily, they will probably stop worrying about min/maxing their toons. Furthermore since the majority of the encounters will be over quickly, you'll have more time to focus on the story. Of course putting some challenging fights in for key story points is needed - make those difficult - but not every session needs to have a life-or-death fight.

Also if your players are simply too OP for the enemies, abstract combat completely. Just roleplay it without dice and let them invincibly splatter the enemies against the background. Players like that.

Another idea is to create scenarios where the combat is secondary. For example, a paper map is on the top floor of a burning house. There are bandits, etc. trying to recover the map before your players. The players are actually fighting against time and the environment, and not the bandits - it is highly unlikely you have a character stat maxed for this type of scenario. Similar scenarios where combat is secondary include powering down an artifact before it reaches full power, hostage situations, heist missions (think Payday), "point-a-to-b" timed missions, etc.

Answer 10

So this borders on being a rude answer, but if you/your players actually know the rules, rules discussions/disputes/shenanigans shouldn't dominate the time.

Discussing obscure rule interactions/exceptions can be a lot of fun, but is very different from optimizing characters or disputing/explaining rules in play, and it's also different than actually playing D&D. It wouldn't be rude at all for you to ask that players keep this sort of shop talk to a minimum, and focus on playing the game in front of them. Allow them to discuss these things when they're about to (or in the process of a) level up, but in general play, they've already made their build choices, and should focus on using them. If some trick of the rules they're abusing requires an explanation, this is also the proper time for them to explain it to you and get your approval/denial. Once you've accepted it, you can veto it at a later date if it's breaking your game, but don't spend valuable game time discussing it beyond, "sure" or "don't do that."

Also, I find it really weird that your combats take longer with an optimized party. Maybe 3.5/pathfinder makes all the difference here (I play 4e these days), but an optimized party should be done with all but the most intentionally drawn-out combats by the end of round 3, while an unoptimized party might take 8-10 rounds to complete the same combat. The only thing I can think of is that you're severely over-inflating combats in an attempt to challenge the party, which counter-productively both negates the advantage they had by optimizing AND makes such optimization mandatory to not die. Some players also enjoy the tactical combat board game more than they enjoy roleplay, in which case, 4e is absolutely the system of their dreams.

If you give them standard combat encounters that they absolutely destroy, that's kinda cool every now and then, but it gets old real fast, at which point that gamebreaking combo they used to treasure becomes a lot less appealing than something cinematic and theme-appropriate that also manages to get the job done.

tl;dr: the trick to fighting optimized characters is not to challenge them. that only reinforces their decision to optimize. the trick is to leave the difficulty level precisely the same, until they rein themselves back in because they're bored of it being too easy.

Answer 11

Your Problem isn't optimized characters, it's Armchair Strategists.

Often a leftover from GMs who like to spring 'surprises' on players through overlooked technicalities like 'you didn't say you were wearing a glove when you touched the door handle! 450 electrical damage!', the Armchair Strategist is a player who likes to ask about 500 questions before doing anything at all, and will happily debate any suggested course of action for up to an hour before committing to something as potentially deadly as buying a packet of crisps.

To paraphrase a cartoon character, they feel the world they are playing in is very dangerous, so they have to be 'vewwy vewwy careful'. By trying to out-think every possible loophole in their actions and get consensus of the group they are trying to stop anything bad happening to their character - and missing the point entirely, which is that bad things happening and the awesome stuff the character has to do to get out of it is what drives stories forward.

To deal with it, move stuff along. Ask them what they are doing, and don't let them sit there looking up things in books - if they don't know what they are doing, they do nothing, and you ask the next person. Explicitly allow actions that are not bounded by the rules, that are thematic without being broken. A good example of this is swinging on the chandelier as a charge to reach a foe in a high place, a bad example is 'I aim at his head and if I hit, he dies instantly'. Encouraging creative, non-by-the-book strategies and ideas, and not sticking to the letter of the rules on whether you can sneak if a lantern is placed partially around the corner in a dim corridor or whatever and just using a practical, common sense, objective reading of the situation to deliver a fair reading of what is and isn't possible and how hard it is for the character, will quickly lead the armchair strategists to stop obsessing quite so much over every tiny detail for endless amounts of time.

Requires you to be able to assign DCs on the fly and be fair and balanced about what is possible, but those are good skills to have in any case.