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What are the average stats for an acolyte supposed to be? I was under the impression the everything should be somewhere around 30 at character creation(besides obvious differences like feral worlders that have higher str/to but lower int/wp), however it seems my players tend to have closer to 40 in most of their stats when they make characters for my campaign.I even had an instance of a psyker with 70 willpower at 3rd rank...
I have dabbled with a point buy system in my head a bit to keep things balanced, but I have not been able to come up with anything of substance.

any thoughts?

The average should be around 30. 20 + 2d10 is going to average out to 31. With the one free reroll they're also likely to end up slightly above average. Are they rolling in front of you? Of course, after spending XP on advances they're going to have slightly higher than average stats Some of the careers also have starting bonuses or penalties.

There's a pointsbuy system in Rogue Trader. It's nice and simple. You get 100 points to spend, no more than 20 in any given stat. Should produce slightly above average characters, either well rounded or some very obvious weaknesses that can be exploited.

If you allow players to min-max, then things can get stupid fast. Standard stats are around 30, with specialty stats normally in the 40's for the respective class. They tend to grow from there.

Min-Max is a cruel term when you’re trying to build a character to a specific idea.

I made a Feral World Guardsman yesterday for our upcoming game, and I’m using the Gunnery Sergeant Harker model, so I wanted him to be a huge mammoth of a man wielding a Heavy Bolter.

I went out of my way to boost his Strength to 50, his Toughness to 60 and purchased enough Sound Constitutions to get his wounds to 20, plus Bulging Biceps, Hardy, Iron Jaw and Dodge +20. The guy is probably the toughest non-Marine character I’ve ever made, and I wouldn’t call him “min-maxed” (he still has various Intelligence-based skills like Survival and Tracking, Lore skills – even Carouse, because it made sense for his background, and I spent a lot of XP getting his Willpower to above 30 so he wouldn’t break and run at the first lesser Daemon to cross his path).

Yeah, you could just spend XP on things that make you better in combat, but I’ve found that characters who can’t do other things are often left behind and find themselves doing very little during a game.

There is a difference between roleplay min-max, and straight powergaming min maxing.

Elaborate.

I would have thought all min/maxing was power-gaming.

I have no problem with character optimization, that's not what I am trying to get at here. What I am irked by is when my low level pc's who are supposed to be just above average and fairly squishy eat daemons for breakfast.

Ok, I'll do what I can to explain it.

Let us use dark heresy as an the example game.

Assume for the following example that the techpriest upgrades the exact same stats, the exact same way.

Say we have tom the techpriest. Say he builds up his backstory as a noble and a duelist. He has good WS, BS and asks to be a fellowship techpriest, a diplomat of sorts. He gets special advances and the ability to upgrade his fellowship. This makes for a good, unique character. Now if this same character doesn't adhear to his backstory, picks up a multi-laser and only uses his fellowship to lower prices on items... we have power-gaming. (actual player character btw...)

However, let us say tom the techpriest keeps on his path of sword and pistol. He speaks for the party a good deal, and tries to challenge foe's to one on one combat. He may, through roleplay, be able to get certain talents that match being a two weapon duelist, that his class wouldn't allow him to get normally. He becomes a beast in melee, and uses his noble influence to get some of the best swords and pistols around. We have a good roleplayer that is maxing himself out.


That in a nutshell is the overall difference. If you roleplay it right, but still keep your characters strength maxed, you have roleplay min-max. However, if you just take the best crap and say screw your characters background, making no effort to explain why you needed to buy that missile launcher as an adept or why that cleric needs a rad-clenser, you have a powergamer who is min-maxing.

Basically, both players are still min-maxing, but for different purposes. You wouldn't want to play a character that was completely ineffective, and the roleplay min-maxer finds a way around that. For example I played way back in 2nd edition dnd a character that was exceptionally dumb, but found throwing bucklers to be effective. My GM allowed me to focus on that, so I was a shield chucker for a good long time, taking penalties to some things to gain bonuses to what I wanted to do.


For a final example, upgrading toughness in dark heresy is something of a standard, but if you have a low strength, shooting only techpriest with very high intellegence who takes a mining augment for it's bonuses to toughness and makes no use of it otherwise, besides the off chance you need to drill something, your powegaming unless you have a valid, roleplay reason for the change.

Captain Idaeus wrote:I have no problem with character optimization, that's not what I am trying to get at here. What I am irked by is when my low level pc's who are supposed to be just above average and fairly squishy eat daemons for breakfast.

If that is the case, then do what I have implemented. I state you cannot purchase anything beyond the first two stat upgrades without a valid roleplay reason. You cannot, say, have an adept who spends the whole game reading and researching and then uses his experience to purchase the 3rd toughness upgrade. You may want to go as far as to state that you cannot advance your still that quickly, or just limit when stat upgrades can happen.

My gaming group doesn't have formal terms for 'min maxing' but we do try to set expectations when making characters for a campaign. If the GM wants ultra-optimized death machines with no social skills beyond "fire gun" that's fine,a s long as everyone is on the same page. More amusingly, we've also taken to doing fun things like (in a D&D 3.0 game) rolling stats and taking what we got, like old-school D&D, just to make it interesting.

Balance wrote:My gaming group doesn't have formal terms for 'min maxing' but we do try to set expectations when making characters for a campaign. If the GM wants ultra-optimized death machines with no social skills beyond "fire gun" that's fine,a s long as everyone is on the same page. More amusingly, we've also taken to doing fun things like (in a D&D 3.0 game) rolling stats and taking what we got, like old-school D&D, just to make it interesting.

This is why I like 32 point buy, or building by an array. I can build for the class I want but I cannot make a character that is both good with a weapon and knows which way the pointy part faces.