By Jason Campbell

I’ve been running a weekly 5e campaign in Monte Cook’s Ptolus setting since January 2022, the player characters are currently 18th level. It can be difficult to run a 5e game with higher level characters while keeping the game challenging and the players engaged. This campaign diary series features notes from my players and I about the challenges of playing high level 5e.

Players Who Min-Min?

People in the TTRPG community talk a lot about “Min-Maxers” – players who use the rules to build the most powerful combat characters they can. Some players love this, it’s the most exciting challenge they see in the game. Others disparage this in favor of roleplaying. Either of these ideologies is fine as long as the players are having fun.

In my current game the characters are powerful but I’ve noticed that some of my players have developed characters that don’t do the tactically optimal thing in every combat. The bard in the party is not a musician, but a historian who has taken on the task of documenting the story of one of the other characters as an epic hero. He has many powerful abilities and will use them in combat to aid his allies, but his character is one who avoids the spotlight, preferring that his friends are the heroes. He rarely uses bardic inspiration, even when he has no other bonus action. I see this as an outgrowth of the character not wanting to be the leader, so they avoid giving advice.

The characters have found some very powerful items in the campaign, each obtaining one “artifact” level item. Another character at times avoids using their artifact as it taps into undead powers that sometimes conflicts with other player and non-player characters beliefs.

Conclusion

I enjoy these sorts of characters. Again, the characters are very powerful, and the players aren’t choosing to fail, they usually end up succeeding at heroic tasks. But they have developed characters deep enough that they abide their own ethics over the tactically optimal choices at times. As a GM I enjoy watching this story evolve with the characters.

What do you think? Do the players at your table construct characters with well developed ethics, or a powerful build, or maybe both? Let us know in the comments.