Dealing with Min Maxed charaters as a DM

[sasigns]

I have a really solid group however I have one player who Min / Maxed his character and seems to be only combat orientated. I am having issues dealing with this as a new DM as his charater is a power house and seems to run combat. He is playing a human barb with a Glaive he is using pole arm mastery and reckless attack so he gets advantage on all attack rolls and two attacks a round using his pole arm mastery feat. Not to mention opportunity attacks for anyone coming in his reach. The issue is he does so much damage that I have to really up the enemy power and it seems to be getting everyone else killed but him. Any ideas on how to deal with this would be great.

We are about to start Out of the abyss and we ended Harried in Hillsfar last night with the characters being level 2. I had a drow slaver raiding party capture them. I am thinking that being human may be somewhat of an issue in the underdark but they do have a cleric with a light cantrip so that makes the darkness pretty easy to deal with. Also was going to remove the Glaive as they are captured and let him find one at a later time and perhaps only have them find basic and common weapons So he would have to down grade to a quarter staff for a while that would at least take his damage down from a d10 to a d6 ..

Any thoughts or help would be appreciated.

[darrenan]

Is this guy ruining everyone's fun, or only yours? Sometimes it can be easy to take an adversarial approach to GMing and get upset or annoyed when players crush your encounters. However, I try to keep my focus on the players. He designed his character in a totally legal way, so he should be allowed to enjoy that play style at least part of the time.

That said, there are various ways to craft encounters that will challenge his character:
- Enemies with ranged attacks and the ability to move/disengage as bonus actions. Stay out of his reach and pepper him from distance.
- Large numbers of weaker enemies swarming him. I'm pretty sure that he still only gets his attack of opportunity once per round.
- Don't forget that reckless attack is also giving enemies advantage against him, it's a double-edged sword. In combination with the previous point, it can actually make him quite vulnerable.
- Enemies that apply disadvantage debuff conditions. These will counteract reckless attack.

And when doing this you have to remember to not leave the other players out in the cold. Everyone should be having fun and feeling useful most of the time (it's ok for one player to be occasionally shut down by a specific encounter, forcing them to act differently). At the end of the day it is expected that a party will get through most encounters relatively unscathed, expending a certain percentage of their limited resources. The problem with this barbarian is that other than limited uses of rage, he doesn't really have limited resources.

FYI - I'm also running Out of the Abyss, and coincidentally there's a fighter in the group with reach and polearm mastery, and a barbarian with reckless attack, so I feel your pain ;-)

[Zacchaeus]

Looks to me like the player has got his character just right and is using everything at his disposal appropriately. Such a character isn't invincible though and there will come a time when he'll get into trouble. There's no need to increase the difficulty of opponents; he can only deal with so many of them. And also everything derrenan said above.

[LordEntrails]

darrenan gives some excellent advice.

One other note, we have a house rule that the off-hand attack granted by polearm mastery does not have reach. This came from the players because they felt it was too powerful and from a practical point, using the butt of the weapon should be a close-in thing.

Also note, though powerful at first level, later on it's not really a big deal because you only get one bonus attack per round, and around level 4 most of the combat oriented characters can all make an attack using their bonus action.

[HoratioDrank]

I second LordEntrails' sentiment. Barbarians are very front loaded as a class (arguably too front loaded, but that's beyond the scope of this thread). He's shining right now, but as the party goes up in level the power distribution will definitely normalize.

[Nickademus]

I've seen this will two-weapon fighting as well. I'm nowhere near an authority on D&D, but I've seen the same 2WF character at 1st and at 5th level. He's a beast at 1st, but by 5th level, he's about average (maybe a little below the dpr of others). It'll work out in the wash, and the others have given you plenty of ways to tweek things until then.

[Seya]

Use caster and ranged NPC against him. That way you yet him a bit and not kill he group. Then he will also have more fun taking out harder to kill enemies

[epithet]

Use lots of goblins. They can disengage to avoid attacks of opportunity, and pepper a target with arrows. Having advantage with a double handful of goblin archers (spread out, so your bard doesn't just take them all out with shatter... no, I'm not bitter) could lead to a re-evaluation of your barbarian's tactics.