If had to say there was a problem player it would the "flavor" player. There is absolutely zero need for a flavorful character to be mechanically poorly built. There are flavorful good options as well as flavorful bad options. Just because you aren't taking the mechanically best options doesn't mean you have to tank your character.
Stop scaling encounters up to challenge the strongest of them, and the others will do fine. In fact, if he isn't challenged, he'll probably feel more comfortable spending his resources on non-combat options.
this approach combined with the utilitarian use of evolution points sound good.
the other two aren't power gamers. one is a beginner and the other enjoys flavor characters more than number output. i try to cater to all three of them accordingly.
being a GM requires a lot of juggling, and i've never run into this much of a problem before on this level. we'll see how this next game goes and i'll post the results.
This.
And if the one player favours flavourful characters more than number output, why would he care that the one PC has bigger number output? And if he doesn't care there is no problem.Help the new player improve his pc and everyone should be happy.
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I've been in this situation. It's not that this is broken per se to deal 90+ damage in a round at that level, it's that the other players are simply on another power level.
There's no "great" solution in game, save to just accept it, keep the encounters at the level of the rest of the party, and focus the game more on the role playing and world instead of the game. But I would just talk to the player. Tell them that their dynamic is making it difficult to work with the other players since their power level is so drastically higher than the rest of the party. Say that you don't mind power in characters, but when the rest of the players are so far back it's taking the fun out. Encourage them to change out for a powerful strictly support character; they can min-max buffs to make the rest into fighting machines.
If they are stubborn you may have no choice to dismiss them. It's sad, but games are fun with all power players or no power players. They can even be fun as a mix if the power players are front-line and non are support (or vice-versa). But this does not sound like the case here :(.
Good luck to you, it's never pleasant having this conversation, but most people are more open and understanding than you might think.
Contributor
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If the power guy is a summoner (synthesist notwithstanding), he should have access to some pretty sweet buffs already. Couple ideas:
1) Encourage him to rebuild as a standard summoner, so that he can buff while the eidolon kills folk. He probably won't be super thrilled about this.
2) Through an artifact-type item or some sort of divine boon, give him a sort of "reverse-Fervor" ability. What I mean is, something that lets him cast buffs as a swift action, but only to affect others. He gets to charge in claws-blazing, the rest of the group gets some hastes and such. It might need a little refining, and still relies a little on the player's cooperation, but it's worth investigating. :)
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we have sat down and the power player has helped the beginner and the flavor player optimize a little, while the scaling back a little of his character has balanced the party so CR14 encounters are more their speed around level 12, loot and buffs all accounted for. maybe it was the luck of the dice, but the last game went very well. skill challenges that roped in the other two let them shine while the summoner still tore up the battle field, but not so much as to dwarf everybody else. we're still a little lopsided if you ask me, but the optimization helped. i'm glad we were able to talk it out outside game and i didn't have to do something drastic in-game. he got a little butt-hurt at first, but he was glad to be of help in the end.
to stop this from happening in the future, i was thinking of printing off a sheet of guidelines for players to keep in mind when building characters...nothing too restricting, but a reminder that maximum damage isn't the goal here
Agreed, sounds like a good sign, especially with him helping out the other two. As was stated, it seemed like the bigger problem was that the others were not particularly well designed for combat. Which, unfortunately, is pretty easy to do, especially when you have a beginner and a "flavor" guy.
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I would recommend you update your summoner character to unchained summoner, paizo is aware of esummoner power and has given us a fix which solves many problems, specially the ahem spells, and has also reworked evolutions points. Let him keep the characters, using unchained will help you tremendously
I had this problem too in multiple campaigns.
I usually responded by upping the difficulty level. it became the classical problem of "rocket tag". The monsters can murder the players instantly, so the players have to adpt to murder the monsters first.
In this kind of power amplifying game it will end up being just the boken character(s) who are still able to keep up with the monsters and the rest will fall behind and not be able to do anything.
First, the solution is NOT to throw heavier stuff at the players. in fact you can throw reduced challenge enemies at them routinely and the broken-ness wont matter anymore. In this case it is important to note HOW the character deals damage, is he single damage focused or can he AoE? If he cant Aoe, spread the HP bars around the battlefiled to make it hard for hi mto pick up too many kills in a battle. if he can pounce ten clutter his movement with walls and terrain.
For example (This example assuems every character is a damage dealer):
Broken character A deals 90 damage per round.
Regular character B deals 60 damage per round.
Weak character C deals 40 damage per round.
The enemy in thsi scenario is a 50hp meat minion.
Character A kills the minion straight out in one round.
Character B does the same.
Character C may not be able to do it in in just one round.
In this scenario it does not matter at all that character A does more damage then B, because both damage levels are high enough to deal with the current threat, character A literally performed overkill.
Character C in this instance is in need of your Gm advice for building his character, because he cant beat up meat minions when he should be killing them easy peasy.
Broken characters shine when killing dangerous foes, so if you give them a constant flood of dangerous foes they will just shine all the better, at the cost of non Broken characters.
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I have a problem. One of my players has created a "broken" character, that is to say that she is ridiculously powerful.
There are no overpowered characters -- only insufficiently creative GMs.
(Annoying weasel noises and tittering, smarmy laughter)
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Already noted earlier, that the PC in question, is not particularly powerful, just more so than the other players, who built very PCs very weak PCs.
Also, I would like to note, to the comment above, that though the PC may have no particular advantage in roleplaying situations, he also has no particular disadvantages either.
I was about to recommend that the player with higher system mastery help the others to optimize a little more, since they seem to need it, but then I saw that this has already happened. Glad it worked out.