The...problems...with optimization/specialization? (3.5)

[TheDMofDMs]

Hey, everyone. I got a lot of interesting (and amusing responses) to my last (and first) thread, and I wanted to follow up on it with the following.

I've always encouraged my players to build characters that are versatile. I've watched no few people make their Spiked Chain/Whirlwind fighter with Weapon Focus and Weapon Specialization, and the idea, from a logical standpoint, seems off to me.
Would anyone really devout that much time toward this single goal? In the dark and forbidding places, deep in the Wilderlands, what happens if you lose your +3 spiked chain?

In my games, I like to introduce the myriad threats of the world. Mainly, environmental things like cold, lack of food or sleep, avalanches and cave-ins. Things that casting fireball at won't fix. And then there's the monsters with Improved Grab, or that are actually capable of tactics.

So here's my question: do you guys think that a character who has not specialized in any one thing, such as a fighter who took Blind Fight, Combat Expertise, and Power Attack, or a wizard with Grease, Scorching Ray, and Arcane Eye are as capable as "optimized" characters?
I know that the super-charged characters do more damage or whatever, but my point is something like, "character A does 20 damage/round, or 10 damage/round if in situation 1, 2, or 3. Character B does 50 damage/round, or 1 damage/round if in situation 1, 2, or 3". (I'm not actually concerned with damage/round, since there's a lot of ways to win a fight).
Oh, and I'm not talking about those characters with infinite-combos. I'm going to consider those mathematical errors, rather than actual, legitimate methods for role-playing.

So, what say you?

[Kansaschaser]

So here's my question: do you guys think that a character who has not specialized in any one thing, such as a fighter who took Blind Fight, Combat Expertise, and Power Attack, or a wizard with Grease, Scorching Ray, and Arcane Eye are as capable as "optimized" characters?

So, what say you?

Answer: Bard. The bard class is not specialized is any one thing and it's a super useful class for a variety of situations.

[Combat Reflexes]

I would say it's entirely up to the DM. If he can keep the encounter level a bit lower than normal and doesn't make optimized NPCs or monsters, the power levels would still be the same but the PCs a lot more real.

[potatocubed]

I think there's a notable difference between characters which are 'built' to, say, level 10, and characters which start at level 1 and are played to level 10.

By playing a character, they adapt to the GM's campaign style - if you're playing with a GM who throws a lot of equipment-destroying enemies at you, then characters evolve who can function with a minimum of equipment, or who can adapt at speed. They tend to be more well-rounded, as a result of facing a wide variety of challenges and levelling up to deal with them, and things like spell lists are dictated as much by the sort of things the GM likes to use as enemies/obstacles as they are by what spells win at everything (shivering touch, I'm looking at you ).

A built character, on the other hand, will completely overpower an evolved character in their area of specialisation and be considerably less useful the rest of the time.

This all has very little to do with optimisation, mind you - a character can be an optimised generalist (Batman wizard, for example) or can be optimised to function in a specific campaign - but I think it's an artefact of the usual character-building assumptions.

[Douglas]

In my opinion, characters with a single thing they are super-powerful with but that's it are not truly well built optimized characters. They are "optimized" in the sense that their one trick is ridiculously powerful, but they are not optimized in the sense that usually matters - being able to consistently contribute a lot in the majority of situations throughout a campaign.

The best optimizers, when they choose to powergame without handicaps, will create characters who can face nearly any situation, any opponent, any environmental hazard, and easily beat the challenge regardless of what it is.

For the most extreme example I have readily on hand, see the Team Solars link in my sig. I created that party for a game that was advertised as (paraphrasing) "Extraordinarily deadly dungeon crawl, BRING YOUR POWERGAMING". The DM was fond of such situations as going through a portal to find yourself A) underwater, B) ink-filled water so not even Darkvision or True Seeing tell you anything, C) boiling water (constant fire damage), D) pressure equivalent to miles of depth (worked out to repeating save-or-die with escalating DC, as I recall), E) a Blade Barrier below you, and F) a squid/kraken-like monster above you with around 10 very high damage tentacle attacks that can see through the ink and is immune to the water hazards. Oh, and if you got past the Blade Barrier watch out for the Sphere of Annihilation at the bottom, and if you worked your way out of the water chamber you find a supernaturally hot desert with a supernaturally fine-grained damaging sandstorm going on. The party I built had measures that negated the threat of every last one of these hazards, with the possible exception of the Sphere of Annihilation if I was insufficiently cautious - and that was without building with those specific threats in mind, I just covered them as part of a general "handle anything" plan.

[Sucrose]

The DM is ultimately responsible for the challenge associated with basically any character archetype, so who would be more capable depends on how much the DM wishes to cater to them.

A min-maxed (that's the term that you're going for, btw, someone who accepts weaknesses in several areas to specialize in one specific area- whether it's optimized or not depends on how well the specialization was chosen, and one can optimize without min-maxing very much) character can sometimes handle challenges considerably more difficult than a generalist when it plays into his specialty. A generalist will be marginally more effective against a variety of situations.

Thus, if the DM specifically wants to nerf the min-maxed character, said character will tend to find himself in areas where his specialization does not apply. Thus, in such a case, it would be optimal to play a generalist, since you never get to play to your strengths anyway.

If the DM wishes to play to his players' strengths, then min-maxing will be more effective.

If the DM doesn't take sides, then it depends on how difficult it is to solve problems with your character class when generalizing. If min-maxing gives only marginal rewards (as in the case of wizards, in which generalists tend to be able to still solve a fight with one spell), then one would seek to be a generalist. If the solution method is less effective (it would take several rounds to kill a dragon with default weapon damage, for example, in which time it would have a very reasonable chance of killing you) then you would want to find ways to boost your solution method until it's effective, at which point you can begin to look into finding other ways to solve problems.

Thus, how min-maxed one should be depends on how much is needed to be able to solve problems effectively. Once one is at the point of efficacy, then of course one should generalize rather than aiming for overkill.

An additional factor is just how much general ability investing in generalization gets you. A Fighter with Power Attack, Improved Bull Rush, and Shock Trooper gets a dramatically improved damage potential when it works, and still is at least decent with a bow when he doesn't get the option.

Taking Brutal Throw, to improve thrown weapon efficacy, doesn't improve ranged ability as much as Shock Trooper improves melee ability. Taking Point Blank Shot is nearly negligible.

Likewise, taking Blind-Fight, as in your example, requires that one invest in Wisdom, and only improves your chances of striking an invisible foe by 25%.

And Combat Expertise just means that your enemy moves on to fighting someone who's a bit easier to crack, typically. You're also expanding their life expectancy by using the Combat Expertise, rather than killing them more quickly by Power Attacking for an equal amount, even if you're fighting alone, so unless you're expecting reinforcements, you aren't really in a good situation. There's a reason that defense is not considered as important as offense in the vast majority of situations.

[LordBlades]

I've always encouraged my players to build characters that are versatile. I've watched no few people make their Spiked Chain/Whirlwind fighter with Weapon Focus and Weapon Specialization, and the idea, from a logical standpoint, seems off to me.
Would anyone really devout that much time toward this single goal? In the dark and forbidding places, deep in the Wilderlands, what happens if you lose your +3 spiked chain?

Welcome to the way 3.5 functions. Some lower tier classes (like a fighter in your example) need to specialize in order to contribute often to the point they are good(and by good one often means barely decent) at that thing and that thing only.

Other classes, especially Tier 1 don't give a rat's ass about specialization. They are brutally effective in the area they specialize in , but their range of options is so vast that they still have answers to almost every situation out there (at least on par with the answers of most 'experts' in that field).

[Beheld]

Optimization takes two directions:

1) Making the things you do better.

2) Making it so you have something good to do in more situations.

For example, uberchargers. You have one really good thing to do, and that thing is "Kill anything that I can make a charge attack against and hit the AC of that is subject to HP damage."

Now, there are different ways to optimize on the basic design. First, let's be honest, you are a fighter, you can't do anything outside of combat, so just leave that to good characters.

In combat, you can do three things:

1) Try to make yourself better at dealing with things you cannot charge attack.

2) Increase your charge damage from 500 to 2000.

3) Increase your ability to charge attack against more foes.

Here are some general counters to an Ubercharger that a DM might use:

1) Ironguard
2) Grease
3) Hiding behind cover/corners
4) Being in the air too high to hit with a charge
5) Elusive Target

Faced with these situations, the charger can either 1) try to make himself better against these people without using his main stick or
2) expand his main stick to apply to these people too.

For example:

1) Use a club
2) Fly
3) Fly and/or redirect charge feats/skill tricks/class abilities
4) Fly
5) Do so much damage that you kill things with Elusive Target too (Valoruos weapon + Orc racial ability of double charge damage + Pounce = lots of nono power attack damage too.)

So with Wizards, it's not always a choice between "Should I be versatile, by taking Spell Focus in two things, or should I specialize by taking Spell focus and Greater Spell Focus in one thing."

The eventual ideal goal is to have a trick to beat every encounter. You can go for that like a versatile Wizard, who gets all his DCs high enough that by picking the right spell (AoE, no save, target weak save, ect) you can beat every enemy, or you can go for it by attempting to get one super trick to work on every single enemy.

In 3.5, strategy 2 is usually better, because the design goal is to not allow one person to be able to beat everything in the game, so there's not enough stuff out there to allow you to really get "too" strong in every way.

But since single super power tricks that can then be applied to every enemy are based entirely only playing on small oversights in design, they are abundant. Everyone knows the uber charger, the Tainted Scholar, the Cleric shooting 40 arrows a round all for 50+ damage, the Incantatrix with a single Orb spell doing 500 damage, and casting three of them a round.

And sure, you may end up with merely the ability to beat 70-90% of all enemies with that one trick, but as long as one of the other four guys in your part can beat that 10-30, you still win D&D.

[FMArthur]

The answer for the Fighter and most of the nonmagical classes is a resounding "no". The Fighter built to trip everyone, all the time forever is not going to be able to grapple, disarm, intimidate, or generally perform any other regular combat tactic very competently. The same is mostly true of one built to murder any foe with a charge, or ones dedicated to grappling, or Rogues dedicated to always getting their Sneak Attack. But generalizing with these classes just isn't very good, and your rate of success with them will drop below 50% very quickly against level-appropriate encounters if you don't focus on making one or two things very effective with the character.

Imagine a Wizard having to spend feats for every spell he could cast, and he could only get higher level ones by spending his feats on similar spells from lower levels first. That's what melee was reduced to for the majority of 3.5's lifespan.

The solution to this was the Tome of Battle. Almost every single maneuver in the book is designed to replicate the unnecessarily intricate feat chains and combinations that Fighters, Barbarians, Rogues, and any other kind of warriors were having to jump through so many arbitrary hoops for. A warrior built with ToB can be good at something and still have a bag of versatile tricks at his disposal, because they don't require a bajillion feats to do.

[navar100]

The player has three responsibilities when creating a character:
1) The character cannot try to Win D&D.
2) The character has to be able to function as an adventurer. He does not have to be Mary Poppins, able to do everything by himself all the time, but neither is he an earthworm with legs.
3) The personality must fit the campaign. If the campaign is about the Holy Order Of Saintly Philanthropists, the player does not play a pirate ninja Evil McNasty Puppykicker Babyeater.

The DM controls the NPCs, the gods, the nations, the culture, source books used, rules interpretations, campaign plots, adventure hooks, pace of leveling, pace of treasure, pace of magic items, and the ability to have things happen by fiat. The only thing the player gets to control is his character.

As DM, it is not your job to force players to create characters as you demand. If a player wants to specialize, he should be allowed to regardless of how much you prefer generality. It is fine for there to be some encounters where the specialist is in a sub-optimal position. That comes with the territory of being specialized and can be a fun challenge to overcome. You should also have encounters where the specialization is very optimal to allow the player to enjoy the thrill of being in his character's element. It is not fine to purposely have numerous if not every single encounter be such a sub-optimal position for the character as "punishment" for the audacity of specializing when you prefer generality.

If the entire campaign theme would harm a particular specialization, it is the DM's job to warn the player. For example, if the campaign will be an undead heavy campaign, then rogues won't get to sneak attack a lot, if at all, and mind-affecting illusion and enchantment spells aren't a good idea to stock up on. However, it is a smart idea for a cleric player to pay more attention to his undead baneness specialization.