Anti-Optimization

[Darkly]

So I was discussing with a friend of mine what the weakest level 20 3.5 characters would be, and we threw around some ideas on how to screw up a character. I looked online for some suggestions (since nearly everything about this edition has been written up) but all I could really find were optimization handbooks highlighting what not to pick. Helpful, but not really the same. So I thought I'd reach out and ask for some suggestions!

A few ground rules for anybody who wants to give it a shot:

-36 point buy. We want this character to have every advantage in the world to waste. Alternatively, for a bit of a challenge, scores of 18's across the board.

-Similarly, hit points are either average or maxed. When this character sucks, it won't be from DM limits or bad luck.

-Every handbook allowed, but no homebrew.

-The character will not throw away money (unless forced to). They'll waste it, sure, but they get the normal amount of gold per their level. They will not buy anything that can not be carried or ridden.

-My friend and I both agree that the Vows are an easy out for this challenge, but I won't forbid them. Same goes for NPC classes. If you want to make a commoner with Vow of Poverty and Vow of Nonviolence, go for it.

-The idea is to primarily gauge combat ability, but if the character sucks out of combat as well then that's a neat bonus.

Hopefully this get's a bit of attention, because I'd love to see how people approach this! After so much time trying to get the most effectiveness out of mundane feats or breaking the system in half, I figured this would be a new spin on things. And who knows, maybe we can get an Anti-Optimized Party out of this idea!

[Asmotherion]

How much worse than commoner 20 with vow of poverty and vow of non-violance can you really get? I guess you could invest all your points into some very specific skill-set that's highly improbably to ever be relevant enough to put him in the spotlight. Prefferably exclusivelly skills that are cross class to the commoner, so he never really excells at anything.

That's it. Commoner, LV 20, Vow of Poverty and Vow of Non-Violance.

Cannot be of any use in combat, cannot be improved via magic items, and is mediocre at best in all cross-class skills.

I'm pretty sure that's the limit, without deliberatelly trying to get him disseasses, curses and/or loosing limbs/rendering him comatose.

[Darkly]

Since the Commoner and Vows are the easier outs, the hope was for a build that didn't use those that is still on a comparable level. If that's unobtainable, then that's sad but understandable. In that sense, I suppose I might be looking for the second most worthless build.

[GrayDeath]

Commoner 20 (edit: works just as well as Fighter 20 taking all Flaws that apply combat maluses and the same feats as the commoner, ergo SKill Focus Profession times 20)., all feats spent on Skill Focus for specific kinds of Profession into which they only ever put 1 rank, and never use it again.
Because they put all their skillpts into the cross class skills Ride and every single type of Perform.

Even if they have all 18s and non terrible Magic Items, they will be useless in and out of combat.

(assuming they spend their money just as stupidly, spend it all for armor they dont ahve proficiency with, at elast 10 different sets should be enough to swallow level 20 wealth^^).

[One Step Two]

I propose a Buomman Trunamer, with an Int of 3, thus no skills per level, 0 ranks and a -4 Penalty to Truespeak checks.

[NigelWalmsley]

Do you have to be a 20th level character to count, or is it acceptable to start out as a 20th level character and then lose a bunch of levels to e.g. spending XP on crafting or getting rez'd by Raise Dead? The latter could reduce your power level dramatically, potentially leaving you as a 1st level character with 1 Constitution and all your wealth tied up in scrolls of Rouse or something.

[Twurps]

If we stick to 'non npc classes' and leave out the vows. I'm pretty sure we can still get very terrible. If we're not doing fractional BAB's, the build might even include wizard.

I know, I know, wizard is powerfull and all. But 1 level won't help that much by the time lvl 20 comes calling. So something like: wizard 1, sorcerer 1, beguiler 1, Wu-Jen 1, etc etc.
You'll have more lvl1 spells than you'll know what to do with, and the will save is going to be pretty decent. Other than that though the build wouldn't achieve much. After a couple of levels, take a PRC that advances stuff we don't have (obviously not casting!). I don't have any inspiration at the moment as to what PRC that would be though.

Another nice trick might be to take a race with a hefty level adjustment, and trade all/most boni away by becoming dragon-born or something similar.

So: book diving for terrible level adjustments and PRC's it is...

[Glimbur]

Mutliclassing to get 0 bab and minimal HD could work. Would need to minimize a casting stat so you can't actually cast spells, probably. Does put you at risk of competence if you get stat boosters. And you would have pretty good saves.

[Venger]

It's fairly difficult to build a character more useless than Zaq's li'l brudder (https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=19553609&postcount=256) back for the order of the bow initiate iron chef.

[Anthrowhale]

There are many curses: Arboreal Transformation, Baleful Polymorph, Greater Bestow Curse, Blindness/Deafness, etc... which are available for purchase.

[Doctor Despair]

You know, it just occured to me... Just keep taking levels of bloodline. Your ECL never goes up, so you never see the benefits of them beyond level 1. You never gain new HD, skill points, saves, BAB, etc... Bloodlines, friends. Friend to the highest and lowest levels of optimization, and presumably nowhere else, haha

[zlefin]

Isn't there some PrC which irrevocably kills your character as the capstone? I think it's vaguely related to sainthood or revenants or something.

[Doctor Despair]

Isn't there some PrC which irrevocably kills your character as the capstone? I think it's vaguely related to sainthood or revenants or something.

Technically, Dread Necromancer's capstone ends the character's life...

[AvatarVecna]

A while back, there was a thread asking after the worst possible artificer. I submitted this:


Player>Build>Class. The easiest way to suck as an artificer is to, as the player, refuse to build items or use infusions. Refusing to use your class features, incidentally, is a fine tactic for making the worst possible iteration of any class.

If the goal, instead, is to build an artificer in such a way that you could hand the build to a player who knows how to optimize and have them have a bad time, you've got a few things you can do:

1) Race: Vril (DotU 126). +2 Con/-2 Int/-2 Cha. Small size. Light blindness. Vulnerability to poison. Common as neither a base language nor a racial bonus language.

2) 32 point-buy should go into 18/18/8/8/8/8. Become Venerable for 12/12/4/9/11/9 after racial adjustment. Never let Int be higher than 10, so infusions are never an option.

3) No more than UMD -1 ever. This prevents them from crafting items requiring spellcasting as part of their creation (also known as "all magic items"). No ranks in craft skills prevents them from crafting any non-magic items too.

4) Take the flaws "Weak Will" and "Pathetic Wisdom". Take the "Brawler" and "Illiterate" traits; blow your free +1 on some obscure profession.

5) Spend all the feats you can on "Skill Focus: [some obscure profession]".

6) All skill points get invested one rank per obscure profession; ideally, these shouldn't overlap with the Skill Focus feats.

7) Artificer bonus feats should be spent on lame and/or circumstantial metamagic feats. You can use them with wands by burning through charges, and you can use them with scrolls if you make a hard UMD check (only possible if you get a boost from somewhere). Enlarge Spell, Rapid Spell, Ghost Touch Spell, Earthbound Spell, and Fell Frighten are all pretty good for this goal.

This character can't speak Common, and can't read at all. He can't make items that replicate spells or involves spells in the creation thereof, and can't make mundane items, but if he's got the base item already crafted by somebody else. He's got 1d6-3 (min 1) HP per HD, crap armor class (no dex, but no heavy armor proficiency), only simple weapon proficiency (and limited to small weapons), has no better than a +1 in any useful skill, and no better than +5 in any skill. Even if he's handed wands/scrolls/etc by somebody else, it's likely he either can't use his metamagic feats with them, or can but they're garbage not worth the resources...just like him! He takes a penalty on any attack that isn't unarmed or grappling...as a small character who isn't a monk. At lvl 20, he'd have +3/+7/+9 saves before items.

And even at the end of all of this...he's still probably got a few things on commoners. Medium BAB, a decent Will save past the mid-levels, and hell maybe he can buy a wand for a spell that's actually worth using with some of his metamagics. But he'll never be even remotely good at anything.

EDIT: "Why not VoP?" Because if you handed a VoP artificer to somebody, step one is breaking their vow. What do they care? And if the goal of the thread is finding somebody who is going to intentionally play the character badly, you don't need to hamstring the build for the character to suck in-game, the player will take care of that by playing badly, even if they've got a perfect build and straight 18s pre-race. Better to build a character who couldn't build items even if they wanted to.

There was also this bit later, where an obvious way to significantly upgrade Bob was realized:


Honestly...not really. Templates, particularly acquired ones, are generally of the "improves you" type. Nobody puts effort into becoming worse. One of the classic exceptions is actually undead templates in general - most undead are categorically weaker post-template, but the template was applied so that a necromancer could control and buff them without having to deal with whiny party members. But a necromancer in a party of PCs usually doesn't need to rely on "murder and animate everybody" tactics because PCs you can trust are just objectively better than zombies/skeletons you directly control, just because even if you're a fighter, PC levels are awesome...of course, the key word there is "usually", and that's mostly what I'm making this post for. If you turned a noncaster type - rogue, barbarian, fighter, even a monk - into a skeleton or zombie, they're far less competent than they were before. But for this guy...

Bob The Worst Artificer goes from 1d6-3 to 1d12 HP per HD. Bob gains +1 Natural Armor, a natural attack he's automatically proficient with, and Damage Reduction. Bob also has lost his Light Blindness, and it no longer matters that bob can't speak or write because Bob receives commands mentally. Being unintelligent removes Bob's feats and flaws; between losing Weak Will flaw, his base saves remaining the same, and his lack of a Con penalty, Bob's Fort and Will saves have skyrocketed - to say nothing of undead immunities protecting him from all kinds of nasty things! In fact, if you made Bob into a skeleton, he'd get Improved Initiative as a bonus feat, one of the best Core feats that isn't inherently magical. The only way that Bob is directly worse is BAB, but he only gets one attack anyway, and if he was made a Zombie, he had double HD for massive BAB/Save gains (and an unfortunate hit in the action economy). And both templates get a slight boost to Str/Dex, Bob's best stats!

This is the sad fact of Bob's existence: even without suffering from a pile of cursed items or diseases, even with a theoretical +5 to some obscure profession, he's still got such garbage HP and such a garbage attack routine that a party member could seriously look at him and think "he'd objectively be more useful dead". Bob is so terrible that even the Skeleton and Zombie templates are direct and obvious upgrades in almost every conceivable way.

[Duff]

I forget...
How useless would a truenamer with no ranks in the naming skill be?

[NigelWalmsley]

You know, it just occured to me... Just keep taking levels of bloodline. Your ECL never goes up, so you never see the benefits of them beyond level 1. You never gain new HD, skill points, saves, BAB, etc... Bloodlines, friends. Friend to the highest and lowest levels of optimization, and presumably nowhere else, haha

It depends on what it means by "20th level". If you have to have twenty actual character levels, bloodlines don't help. If you just have to present a build where you've gained 20 levels worth of XP and treasure, bloodlines are a less efficient way to burn resources than crafting useless magic items, because at the end you still have a pile of gold, and a feat to spend on something that might actually be useful.

[Kelb_Panthera]

Isn't there some PrC which irrevocably kills your character as the capstone? I think it's vaguely related to sainthood or revenants or something.

That's BoED's Risen Martyr. Given the class' requirements, no character participating in this exercise would qualify.

[Biffoniacus_Furiou]

Start as a Truenamer with no ranks in Truespeech, the skill is trained only. Wear a name tag with your own truename on it so you won't forget it.

Only invest skill ranks in cross-class skills. All of your 1st-6th level feats are from the Aberration Blood chain in LoM.

Take the Quick trait (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/buildingCharacters/characterTraits.htm#quick), the Frail flaw (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/buildingCharacters/characterFlaws.htm#frail), and the Slow Healing flaw in Dragon 328 p42 (requires Con 13 or lower).

Take Sacred Vow and Vow of Poverty at 9th and 12th, get rid of all your wealth due to VoP, then promptly commit an evil act to lose its benefits but continue trying to maintain it by donating everything.

Spend your last 8 levels to gain the Vampire template (http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/sp/20030824a). This makes you undead so you lose the benefit of all your Aberration Blood feats.

You'll have 12d12-24 hp, you can't heal hp or ability damage naturally (which should include fast healing), you have no wealth, and literally none of your feats do anything at all.

[daremetoidareyo]

Base class 1
Base class 1
Base class 1
Base class 1
...etc.
Then

Base class +2

Every xp you get makes you lose experience.

[Maat Mons]

Hairy Spider is (probably by editing error) +0 LA. It has Intelligence as a nonability, making it more-or-less the worst possible race choice for a Wizard.

An April fools article from Dragon magazine had a flaw that forced you to spend all your time "farming for your liege."

Between point-buying an 8, the -6 penalty for Venerable age, and races with a -2 penalty, it's pretty easy to start with 0 in a physical ability.

You can cast Greater Construct Essence (from an item) on an intelligent magic item, and then manifest True Mind Switch (also from an item) to become that item.

[dspeyer]

If you take 1 level each in Archivist, Artificer, Bard, Beguiler, Death Master, Dread Necromancer, Hexblade, Jester, Magewright, Nightstalker, Sha'ir, Shugenja, Sorcerer, Spellthief, Wizard, Warmage, Wu Jen, Psion, and Wilder while keeping your int and cha both below 10 (easy on 36 point buy) then you'll be pretty useless. No BAB. No magic. Not much for class features. Barely any skills. And what skills you do have can be things like perform(bagpipes) and perform(mime).

Spend your money on metamagic rods. They're expensive.

[noob]

Become a truenamer then turn a weapon in a thiaunium weapon temporarily and kill yourself with it then it stops being a thiaunium weapon and your soul is forever out of reach.

[Max Caysey]

How much worse than commoner 20 with vow of poverty and vow of non-violance can you really get? I guess you could invest all your points into some very specific skill-set that's highly improbably to ever be relevant enough to put him in the spotlight. Prefferably exclusivelly skills that are cross class to the commoner, so he never really excells at anything.

That's it. Commoner, LV 20, Vow of Poverty and Vow of Non-Violance.

Cannot be of any use in combat, cannot be improved via magic items, and is mediocre at best in all cross-class skills.

I'm pretty sure that's the limit, without deliberatelly trying to get him disseasses, curses and/or loosing limbs/rendering him comatose.

Its worse to not take VoP - and then just choosing to use no items...

[noob]

Commoner 20 with the quick trait and frail flaws and 4 constitution.
You have 0 hp constantly.
Now get to graft to yourself an device that replicates an item that inflicts upon you a negative level(ex: due to alignment difference) and you are permanently at -5 hp or lower.
You can also do commoner 20 with a con of 12 and get exactly 86hp(just need the good rolls) then you get 19 negative levels with your grafted devices and you are permanently at -9 hp and with the penalties of 19 negative levels.

[King of Nowhere]

I don't see anything against multiclassing, so...
your starting stats are 18 18 8 8 8 8.
And you are taking exactly 1 level in all spellcasting classes available. this way, you get 0 BAB, 0 to most saving throws (your will save is gonna rock, though), and you get a giant bunch of spells you can't use. and nothing else.
now, i'm not sure exactly how many caster classes are there. you may have to take two levels in the same class, getting a little bit of BAB, but you should still be able to fall short of even getting the first iterative attack.
spend all your feats in metamagic that you can't use. spend your gold to pump your casting, as long as you do not increase your mental stats.

And that's it. your 18 str and dex still make you somewhat more useful than a level 1 martial. you are still going to have many more hp, though you'll still be very low for your level. you have nothing else. nothing you can use, at least

[noob]

I don't see anything against multiclassing, so...
your starting stats are 18 18 8 8 8 8.
And you are taking exactly 1 level in all spellcasting classes available. this way, you get 0 BAB, 0 to most saving throws (your will save is gonna rock, though), and you get a giant bunch of spells you can't use. and nothing else.
now, i'm not sure exactly how many caster classes are there. you may have to take two levels in the same class, getting a little bit of BAB, but you should still be able to fall short of even getting the first iterative attack.
spend all your feats in metamagic that you can't use. spend your gold to pump your casting, as long as you do not increase your mental stats.

And that's it. your 18 str and dex still make you somewhat more useful than a level 1 martial. you are still going to have many more hp, though you'll still be very low for your level. you have nothing else. nothing you can use, at least

It contains way less theorical optimisation than my commoner build.
The main problem is that a high will save is a situationally strong thing: I have seen one gm which had adventures where half of the rolls were basically will saves.
Other than that you avoided competency in terms of attacking power and with the right spell picks all your spells can be useless things(it can be hard to find spells that are always useless but you can find a lot of spells that are very rarely useful and pick the same spell as many times as possible to reduce polyvalence).

[Goaty14]

with the right spell picks

It won't matter which spells he picks, if he can't cast any of them!
(unless somebody has the genius to hand him a potion of stat +4, though)

[Endless Rain]

That's BoED's Risen Martyr. Given the class' requirements, no character participating in this exercise would qualify.

Actually... by the RAW, all that happens is that your character's "perfected, spiritual body is taken whole into the upper planes." i.e. you get plane shifted to an upper plane. If someone in the party has a means of planar travel, it's relatively easy to bring you back. But even going by the "Final Ascension kills you" interpretation, there's nothing in the rules saying you can't be Resurrected normally.

Under either interpretation, you're still prohibited from taking any levels in a class other than Risen Martyr... which you can't take because you've already maxed out Risen Martyr. No matter how many experience points you get, you'll never be able to level up and make choices that counteract your previous bad decisions.

[Troacctid]

So here's what you do. You put together a list of attributes and stipulations like "Lizardfolk," "Sorcerer," "Whirlwind Attack," or "Spend at least 50% of WBL on poisons." Then get a few optimizers together and draft them. After the draft, everyone passes all the garbage they drafted to the person on their left, who then has to cobble together the best character they can out of the mess. Then you all play a one-shot and see how hilariously you fail!

[icefractal]

Going with all 18s, PC classes only -

Be a Wizard 20, spend all your feats and money on casting-related stuff (have a really huge spellbook), then spam Disjunction on artifacts until you fail the save and permanently lose all casting ability. Spread out your ability increases so you have 18/19/19/19/19/19.

Problem - you're still pretty good at some skills. With a 19 Int, that's 6 skills to make useless. Concentration is an obvious pick, and then I'd probably go with five different Perform skills, because the money you earn from them is pretty mediocre at 20th level, having multiple is usually going to be redundant, and because they're cross-class you're not even that good at them (+15's not bad, but not world-class either).

To be more extreme, take Sudden Still / Silent, pull off the psionic sandwich trick (either by being a Cerebromancer or hiring a Psion), and then lose all casting and manifesting ability while in the form of a sandwich, so you're not even able to move or talk.

[ExLibrisMortis]

If you take 1 level each in Archivist, Artificer, Bard, Beguiler, Death Master, Dread Necromancer, Hexblade, Jester, Magewright, Nightstalker, Sha'ir, Shugenja, Sorcerer, Spellthief, Wizard, Warmage, Wu Jen, Psion, and Wilder while keeping your int and cha both below 10 (easy on 36 point buy) then you'll be pretty useless. No BAB. No magic. Not much for class features. Barely any skills. And what skills you do have can be things like perform(bagpipes) and perform(mime).

Spend your money on metamagic rods. They're expensive.
Take the Spellgifted trait to drop your caster level to 0 for most spells, just in case someone hits you with a stat boost. Make sure your spells known are not from your Spellgifted school.

[noob]

I now imagine the kinds of villains the antiparty faces.
A stranger in a dark cloak tells you "I will force you to wear an headband of wisdom even if it causes my death"
Or the Graft thief called The surgeon that tries to steal or sunder all the grafted device holy swords you use to get negative levels while saying "It is for for your own health".
Or yet a villain that casts polymorph any object, cure diseases, cure poisons and remove curse on people to fix their problems.

When they meet you their menaces are stuff like "If you die despite my best efforts then I will turn you into an high grade deathless so that you lose your uselessness"

In the world in which the antiparty wanders the bandits are so bad at their job they usually kill themselves by holding backwards their crossbows or by tripping and falling on their own swords.

I imagine the worst villain would be the ones that would guilt trip you into wearing items that makes you useful with tricks like giving them to you as presents then telling you when they see you are not wearing them things like "why are you not wearing the awesome hat of disguise, mass resurrection, teleportation and immortality while it matches perfectly your Robe of Vermin?".

By the way a robe of vermin is a great magical item for any that likes making their character weaker.

[Unavenger]

Anti-optimisation doesn't get as much coverage as optimisation because a) it's pointless and b) it's sorta too easy. Like, we've already had "Wizard who can't cast spells", "Truenamer who can't speak utterances", and similar, which even without allowing NPC classes means you can have some pretty crappy characters.

Also c) because "Acquire a Shape of Fire by some means, such as Gate, and get it to reduce your hit point maximum to a negative number so that you can never again be conscious" is the clear winner.

[Kazyan]

According to BoVD, page 10, self-mutilators can permanently lower their HP by 10 to gain a +1 natural armor bonus. Do that repeatedly, dropping your health all the way to at most 0 HP, even with the "all 18s" stipulation. Don't worry: armor bonuses of the same type don't stack, so it's not like you'll have decent AC at the end of this or anything. Apply this method, or the Shape of Fire strategy, to any build with a positive maximum hit point total.

You could also use the self-mutilation method (or Shape of Fire) on a build that sacrifices everything for high CON, giving it at least 7 hit points per level--or 13, if we're going with the max HP rule. Once you've destroyed all that HP you've built up, take the Vampire template, like Biff alluded to. This triggers all that fun stuff about a functionally-destroyed vampire returning to their coffin to heal and being helpless, but the rules are weird: Can you actually get back out of your coffin? You can't reach positive hit points, after all. This renders the character permanently helpless, while still technically existing.

Temporary hit points could get you out of the coffin for as long as they last, but not any buffs to CON--you're undead, after all.

Remember to use your WBL to buy the worst coffin ever. Ideally, you want one made of opaque black paper, such that it blocks out the sun, but has zero hardness and 1 HP.

[noob]

Some people declared roleplaying as anti optimisation so the whole point might be to prove that anti optimisation is the same kind of theoretical optimisation hell-scape as what optimisers makes and that roleplaying is not a matter of direction for optimisation?

[Bohandas]

They should be of an underpowered species such as a goblin or a kobold. Some humanoid that has a a CR below 1/2 for their monster manual entry

Failing that, they should be something on the other end whose level adjustment exceeds the actual value of their abilities

[ben-zayb]

It seems to me that looking for a way to be the most useless character is still a practice in optimization, just on the opposite end. I imagine true anti-optimization to be more in the veins of all decisions on building and playing the character to be completely random.

If you're just looking for an ECL 20 useless character, I'd do it by taking a crapton of useless to barely useful templates, like Hooded Pupil or Axiomatic, capping it off with something that removes pretty much all your special abilities; these are most seen in templates that turn you into a Construct, such as Dustform. You also get the added bonus of negating your 18 CON score.

[Bohandas]

Technically, Dread Necromancer's capstone ends the character's life...

Oh, that gives me an idea. How about someone who takes levels in dread necromancer after already being a lich

[Particle_Man]

Am I really the first to suggest taking 10 levels of green star adept? :smallbiggrin:

For flavour then (I cannot beat the other anti-optimized builds but who cares as I have the failure flavour!)

https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?581768-Kermit-the-Garden-Gnome-A-truly-awful-build