Mmm, psionics, Shadow Weave Magic, Initiate of Mystra.
A min-maxed character is one with dumpstates and weaknesses. A powergamed character is one with fewer weaknesses than a ‘normal’ character. Anything that can challange an OP build will wipe the floor with a party of ‘standard’ characters.
If they’re actually powergaming, the likely answer is: “No, I’m immune.” Or: “okay, with my buffs, I get to add +200 to this.”
It really depends.
I’m thinking about 3.5 in particular, where an optimized wizard will be able to do the job of the rest of the party (assuming they’re built to be fine, but not power-gaming), better than them.
There’s no real in-world way to balance that. Either the DM Fiats the power-gamer weaker, the DM tells the power gamer “no”, or the rest of the party power games to. Its just too unbalanced.
If we’re talking 5e, that’s all out the window then. If 3.5’s power runs from 0-10, the strongest 5e build is like a 6, and the weakest is like a 3. Its still extra work for the DM to balance, but can be done all in-world without needing to rely on metagame fiat.
And, of course, there’s lots of other systems out there, where the above can be more true or less true depending on what kind of game it is, though 3.5’s power ceiling is probably higher than 95% of the systems out there.
Eh, disagree. Unless everyone is power gaming to the same degree (which can be fun!), an OP character being adequately challenged will probably result in all the other players feeling irrelevant.
Short answer: read Jack Vance’s ‘tales of a dying earth’. It’s the reason dnd magic is called ‘vancian’.
Longer answer: in that series, magic works by just remembering words, and then saying them. But these magic words are powerful things, weighty in the mind, hard to carry. And, when said, they tear themselves out of your mind, causing you to forget them.
So, not ‘spell slots’ per se, but the idea is you’re prepping spells almost as a ‘potion’, something you carry in your mind, and consume to cast out a spell.