Re: Makes me want to play Savage Worlds
I'd like to take this opportunity to request the opening of a new OOC chat thread, as this one's getting close to capacity and I don't like the idea of the conversation coming to a halt. :P
On topic, I've been reading a /lot/ of threads for SW lately, and I gotta say...you can easily min/max, but it's only in one area. Derfinsterlin's Strength/Fighting d12 melee monster? Shoot him in the face with an arrow. Or throw a rock at him. And the best part is, you can also just throw a bunch of melee mooks at him and let the guy go to town doing exactly what he told the GM he wanted to be doing. Those high skill levels are a flag to the GM "I want the character to shine here", and that's perfectly alright. Yeah, you can throw his weakness at him, and boy howdy will he have a few of 'em, but only do that when it adds to the fun, which isn't always.
If he starts to outshine somebody else, then they shine elsewhere and you should highlight that as well. But one of my basic principles as GM is to always look for ways to make the players' characters look like badasses. Even when they're having the tables turned on them. /Especially/ then. (The more awesome their opponents, the more awesome the players will feel when they come out on top.)
But yeah, min/maxing with SW is really easy and in fact expected explicitly. Put a bunch of points in one or two areas you're really good, dump a lot of other areas, and don't dump any of those precious Attributes. Then it just becomes a matter of knowing that there are some things you can't do, and that just takes player buy-in to the system. Pathfinder, /any/ edition of D&D, they all offer so many options to nickel and dime all opposition, I've seen several builds that really do allow a single PC to do anything anyone else can do, and better. But it's all very obscure stuff that those GMs probably shouldn't have allowed in the first place, and definitely a case of the GM not looking over everyone's sheets and approving them before play. Granted, there's usually things you can do about any one of them, but it tends to involve killing the character in ways they didn't see coming, rather than shaping the game so it's still fun for everyone.