by Motormouth Jamie
For the past three years, I have had the utmost pleasure of playing in a Pathfinder (1st edition) campaign ran by our good editor-in-chief alongside a good many known Legionnaires. We were playing Way of the Wicked, a phenomenal 3rd party campaign where the party serves the dark lord Asmodeus in the corruption of a goodly kingdom, advised to build evil characters that would take control of the domain.
I will not pretend to be the best Pathfinder player – I did little consulting on how to beat the echoes of Monte Cooke’s Ivory Tower game design that haunted PF1e’s game design – but there was one player who knocked their build out of the park. The Legion’s own Digs With Hands constructed an anti-paladin of such extreme combat prowess, capable of instilling fear into the fearless, that every encounter we had I always felt assured we were safe behind his blade.
He was a juggernaut, terrifying in his optimisation, and he knew his abilities well. His character also showed the most development in roleplay, going from Chains, the prisoner doomed to execution, to Sir Tristan, the undead avatar of destruction. Watching him play, it almost made me feel bad for not being as effective in combat as him, almost envious of his ability to meld his powerful character build with great roleplay. Why did I feel like that?
In this hobby, there is a well-known archetype of player: the “Min-Maxer.” A term taken from chess, it is a form of powergamer where the player fixates on choosing only the most optimal choices in character building, behaviour that most forums and groups I have encountered to be looked down upon. Such players, as it seems the common understanding goes, are less focused on roleplaying and more interested in rollplaying, treating our collaborative storytelling more like a Munchkinesque board game of kicking down doors and picking up loot. They break combat balance, make other players feel useless in comparison, and are a pain for the games masters to handle.
While there are those that act like this, I have noticed members of our greater hobby have taken to looking down on creating builds or trying to optimise characters wholesale. An overreaction, I say, one coinciding with an unfortunate development in the TTRPG community of players who no longer Read The RulebookTM. Surely, we should all be seeking to optimise our characters? Not just for combat – though there is no shame in a group that wants to play a combat focused campaign – but to make the mechanics of our characters more in line with the narratives we wish to create.
Digs With Hands used the tools of the system to create a character that worked perfectly for the narrative he wished to portray. He was a great and terrible force of Evil, spreading fear with his mere presence, a true icon of sin. My character, an oracle of intrigue, could not live up to his combat prowess, but we had simply optimised for different modes of play. I may have felt less useful when it came to slinger spells and smashing skulls, but my efforts in the corruption of the kingdom and its people help make the corruption of the land come about fully. In focusing our individual areas of system mastery, we had made our party stronger as a whole.
As an amateur TTRPG designer, and as a GM, I love min-maxers. I love watching players take what I have made and construct wicked and wild abilities, throwing them at the narratives I present, and reveling in their enjoyment of their power. As a community, I think we should all foster each other’s love for our games, in all areas. We should show each other how to master the system’s mechanics, inspire one another to participate in the roleplay, to create beautiful stories with beautiful characters. The next time you find yourself cringing at a fellow player as they explain their “meta” build, take a moment to stop, laugh, and work with them to build them up further. After all, power can be compelling in of itself.
A vile creature from the dark and dank lands of the old world — England — Motormouth is one of the BPLs foremost consumers of table top systems, voracious in appetite for overpriced paper and ink.
