u/Semicolonsemi

so this came about in the span of a single night in drunken sleep deprived insanity. we'll call the problem player "Jack" after jack horner in puss in boots, mostly for the amount of unnecessary items (a lot of them magic items) he had on both of his characters.

Jack is in two games, one monk (importantly, jacks fiancé) dm's. and another game i dm. in monk's game, jack plays a weird artificer/illrigger multiclass with no subclass as a level 5 character. with that, he uses the crooked moon's dark bargain feature that none of us in both games know about and knew we could do (this is in both of his characters. i called it out in my game, but let it go as it interrupted the flow of combat.) he rolled his stats on both characters, they came out around the ballpark of 3-4 16s, one 18, and at least one 14 as the lowest stat. though stats like these on both characters are possible, they're very improbable.

like i mentioned in the beginning, jack had too many items for anyone to actually need. his rogue/sorcerer in my game had upwards of 320lbs of items. oh but he should realize that he'd be encumbered right? well he turned off encumbrance for that. his artificer had magic items that most of all, nullified the purpose of our cleric who was built as a tank (funny story, cleric was the only one drinking that night and was so upset, he was going to bring in a hobo wild magic sorcerer because "this shit is wild.") the magic items overshadowed my purpose as a debuff support as well.
he homebrewed magic items (which we found out were generated by chatgpt) for each of us in monk's game as monk was a new dm and jack offered to help write some things out. our magic items had some caveat that made us change something about our character, or straight up ask jack to change it. me and rogue got the shit ends of these. rogue's required him to take a level in fighter as his shapeshifting weapon required proficiency. mine took spell slots from people, but if the creature didnt have spellcasting (which most if not all enemies did not have) i would explode, dealing upward to my total hit die to myself. meaning i either barely survive, or go unconscious. i obviously made him change this and made him add things i could do. he did, but kept the self-inflicted-kamikaze. and then there's his weapons and items. first, his weapon did upwards of 2d8+whatever modifier on a regular ranged attack or near 60 per turn. and then theres his armor class. he had a 24 with medium armor (that doesnt give d-adv on stealth somehow) with a shield that gave +4 to ac, and a frying pan that also increased ac. two problems with this. Jack physically cannot use the shield with the frying pan as the pan requires your off hand. but his offhand is taken twice by both his musket and also his homebrew solar beam emitter. both of which are two handed.

there are two possible explanations, and one worst case. either he didn't know about all these contradictions and bs stuff as he is relatively new. which, okay, if youre at least willing to make up and fix this stuff and follow our agreed upon things, we can call this an inexperience bump. or, he's used to powergaming and tried to do it in a roleplay heavy game, which, also, okay, maybe this game isnt a game for you, there are many powergamer tables out there. but third and what i hope is not the case: he knows hes doing all this and wants to be the main character with the rest of us as minions or fodder. which i would mention his roleplaying. he's done less than all of us rp wise. we have a player who is brand brand new (call him fighter), fighter is an edgy cool guy built on aura farming, and he plays it really well. and he is present in the roleplaying. but thats besides the point.

so... im not sure. me, rogue and cleric are currently talking to jack and monk about this and its still in progress. we don't want to stop being friends with them as we've all been really close with me being the newest addition to the group (having come in like 7 or 8 months ago). we just don't want to play with jack if his character overshadows our purpose as players and characters. so what do you guys think? personally, i feel like this is a learning bump. ive had issues of adding items that are outsidee of the rules in my early days. hopefully this will end well enough and we can move on from this. i just figured i share this to get some outside opinions as our opinions when we found this out last night were... skewed (as mentioned, one of us were hammered and i was sleep deprived).

TL;DR: player suspected of skewing stats, gives himself multiple powerful magic items that trumps our roles in combat. homebrews items that nerf us or make us change things in our character to even use. has an illegitimate AC due to item contradictions.

Update: we made a little bit of progress with jack. He acknowledged his wrongdoings and was willing to fix things. I didn’t want to do anything about monks campaign without rogue and cleric as they’re at work rn. I did make him fix his character in my game and I told him I will be watching his character sheet in the case of this happening again. Fixing, including using point buy like everyone else did, removing his items, and I blocked third party sources unless I approve of them. It’s a step, but the rest is still up in the air.