Troperville
Editing Help
Tools
Toys
|
alt title(s): Min Max 
Obi-Wan: Is this really a first-level character? How did you get such a high Repair rank?
R2-D2: I took Short. And Mute. 8 extra skill points.
GM: Speaking of which, you should really only be beeping and whistling right now.
R2-D2: Don't be stupid; it only applies when I'm talking in character.
GM: But you guys never talk in character!
{beat}
GM: Oh.
R2-D2: You are enlightened.
I don't make the crazy rules, I just twist them to my purposes.
I will stop referring to the Power Gamer as MinMaximus.
The art, much beloved of munchkins, of optimizing a character's abilities during creation by maximizing the most important skills and attributes, while minimizing the cost. This is done by strategic decrease of stats believed to be less important in game (called " Dump Stats"), exploiting hideously overpowered but legal combinations of the Game System, obtaining the best toys and magic weapons accessible to a character, or by stacking flaws and handicaps until your character's Backstory looks like a Joss Whedon character's resume.
Seen from a purely mathematical and gamist perspective, it's an elegant process of minimum expenditure for maximum result.
Seen from a more narrativist perspective, the process may end up creating a character with absolutely no unifying reason to have the abilities that it does.
For some mysterious reason, usage of katana, trenchcoats, and shotguns are mandatory for a truly minmaxed character, except in D&D 3.5 edition, in which, for the Fighter class, the Spiked Chain is just about mandatory, and in which kind, gentle users of divine magic invariably become CoDzilla.
Of note is the "Stormwind Fallacy," which states that a min-maxed character and a well-roleplayed character are not mutually exclusive: an effective character is not necessarily something that gets in the way of narrative. Similarly, purposefully weakened characters may not always be better for the narrative.
Related to Disability Superpower. See Whoring for the Video Game equivalent trope.
Examples:
- Darths And Droids. See the quote at the top of the page. In keeping with its concept of presenting the Star Wars movies as an RPG campaign, it imagines the player of R2-D2 (Pete) as a minmaxer. Think about it; high levels in all mechanical skills... at the cost of being a non-humanoid robot with no limbs, only able to talk in beeps.
- Eight Bit Theater has Red Mage, who can minmax almost any situation, even in mid-panel.
- Goblins features Minmax the Unstoppable Warrior, who amongst other things has traded in his ability to read for an extra attack bonus.
- Steve Jackson Games published The Munchkin's Guide to Power Gaming, a humorous look at how to fold, spin, and mutilate the rules (and if that didn't work, cheat).
- Maple Story does this with certain builds. While normally it is very much still a min maxer's game (A mage for example can not put one point into dex or strength, and no one ever puts points into MP or HP) There are dexless and luckless builds involve using stat increasing items for stat deficiency.
- Order Of The Stick brings us the valuable lesson that even a min-maxer won't go far without a clue
 . Most major characters are baseline or hilariously badly constructed though * The main group features a cleric that is a healbot, a wizard that specializes in what is considered the worst school in the game while baning 2 of the most powerful, and a Ranger who specilizes in Dual Wielding, usually considered a sucky fighting style, due to all the accuracy penalties. Oddly the The Ditz Spoony Bard Elan is the one with the most optimization, taking a Prestige Class to base most of his abilities on a single very high attribute. .
- It's worth noting that an easily-missed sentence in the rules means that half-ogre's trick shouldn't be as effective as it's portrayed:
Moving out of more than one square threatened by the same opponent in the same round doesn’t count as more than one opportunity for that opponent.
- Roy did get a C- in his Attacks of Opportunity class, so he is forgiven for missing it. And combat in the universe is shown to be affected by how good the being fighting is at remembering the rules and bonuses covering his fight.
- Averted in tabletop RPG Paranoia, where knowledge of the rules is considered treason and will get your character (and its clones) summarily executed.
- More iterations in Warhammer 40000 than you can count, and that the designers have spent literally decades trying to balance, such as:
- Lasplas: a Lascannon and a Plasma Gun in every squad (patched by making it so you need a 10-man squad to have a Lascannon and a Plasma Gun, as well as making both prohibitively expensive compared to other guns)
- Stealer Shock: using Genestealers with a previously only moderately helpful upgrade called Scuttling to move your entire army onto the table from the board sides, effectively jumping a castled enemy and assaulting without even being shot
- Assault Cannons: using tons of units in as minimal quantities as possible to ensure that there are as many Assault Cannon upgraded models as possible (patched with recent fixes to limit the spam of Assault Cannons to every Marine faction except Black Templars.)
- The first Splat Book of Second Edition, featuring the Space Wolves, allowed for a single unit of up to 20 veteran Terminators (who, back then, saved on 3+ on two dice), and each of them could be equipped with an Assault Canon or Cyclone missile launcher. The cheese factor was pretty high, even if such a unit was ridiculously expensive pointwise.
- Wraithlords: it was a common practice amongst Eldar players to spam Wraithlords because in a previous edition they were completely imbalanced for how powerful they were (patched by a new army book coming out making the Wraithlords significantly less powerful than they were; the current unit-to-spam is the "Holofalcon")
- Nidzilla: a Tyranid list that fields little to no Gaunts, while taking as many Carnifexes as possible, capable through a rule in the army book that allows Carnifexes under certain points costs to be taken as Elites instead of Heavy Support choices, effectively doubling the amount of available Heavy Support slots there are.
- Chaos Space Marines: As a whole, many units and unit builds are simply so powerful (the "Lashprince" being the most common, also Obliterators and Plague Marines) that they are used in exclusion of other units that are otherwise perfectly decent (Chaos Space Marines themselves, Chaos Raptors, Lesser Daemons), and others that are so terrible that no one dares use them (Dreadnoughts, Possessed, and Spawn). As such, the most commonly sighted Chaos Space Marine army features two "Lashprinces", nine Obliterators, and the remaining points are spent entirely on Plague Marines, when other armies would kill to have even some of the less-popular units in the army book.
- Orks get a big cheese with their new codex. A unit called Nobz (essential Ork "nobles") are able to be put on bikes. You take 9 of those, add a painboy (doctor), also on a bike. He allows the Nobz to ignore wounds, and gives them Cybork armor (which gives them an invulnerability save of 5 or higher). The Nobz on bikes are able to move really fast, very easily, give the nobs extra toughness and a 4+ Armor save (compared to the normal 6+), and a 4+ cover save, so you always have a chance to negate a hit. Combine this with their 2 wound and the painboys making them Feel No Pain, they are very, very good, and the winner of the grand tournament field these. Their only downside is their ludicrous points cost, and they can't score objectives. Also, due to rules regarding wound allocation, an Ork player can usually distribute numerous wounds among individual Nobz with different equipment, drastically reducing the chances of outright killing a Nob in a round of shooting or combat.
- Eventually answered with the Imperial Guard codex, which readjusts the Guardsmen in such a way that they are the worst enemy of the Nobz. When you're facining forty-plus hits, even the most judicious wound allocation is still going to cost you the entire unit. The Nobz Mobz have essentially evaporated.
- Dungeons And Dragons, obviously. The main article notes that Spiked Chains are nearly mandatory for optimised Fighter builds. This is not because they are a Badass Improbable Weapon User. It's because it is mechanically superior to almost any other melee weapon, with special properties that make it well-suited to a range of effective melee strategies... of which there are few to begin with.
- In the fourth edition, things have been toned down; however, the Swordmage class almost seems like it was meant to be like this: Sink all your points into intelligence, and choose a race with a racial INT bonus as well, leaving you with INT 20. Then take the Intelligent Swordmaster feat, select an origin in the Forgotten Realms locale of Thay, and wear cloth armor; your AC (which gets a class bonus anyway), HP and attacks then all draw from the one bloated stat.
- Alternatively, a level 2 human swordmage who's taken the feats to wear platemail (and is equipped as such), as well as wielding a Broadsword, will have an AC of 22 as long as he is conscious and holding the sword in one hand, while still dealing d10's of weapon damage.
- No need for platemail - with maxed out intelligence and either Improved Swordmage Warding or Hide Armor Proficiency you have the same AC, but with much less feat investment, faster moevment and no need to put a lot of points into both strength and constitution. It's also worth noting that Swordmages aren't usually the favorite class of minmaxers, as they tend to be rather low on damage output.
- To give an idea of how toned down 4e is on this front; the current big thing in min maxing is a feat that gives you +1 to attack rolls with one weapon or implement.
- To be fair, increased hit chance in RP Gs is almost universally the One Stat To Rule Them All up to a certain point, and 4th edition never lets you get anywhere near that point. The only reasons that the optimisers didn't bug out about 3.5 Weapon Focus were that there were so many ways to ignore both your opponent's AC and hit points, and an unhealthy dose of Linear Warriors Quadratic Wizards, with a cross-over point of around 3rd-4th level (of 20).
- Sorry, but that does not even the amount of cheese one can get by (ab)using all 3e sourcebooks. The highlights include infinite stats, ascending to divinity at level 1, doing thousands of points of damage per round, and leveling cities with a 4th-level spell. There is even a way to make magic missiles (a plain level 1 attack spell) so cheesy that they can kill high level characters.... Even if you only use the basic set, there still is a class that can heal, nuke and tank.
- Much like the Maple Story example above, Diablo 2 is pretty much an exercise in Min Maxing. Every build has optimal stat and skill placement and item choices. Deviating from the build in anyway, or heaven forbid trying to make something unique or using whatever equipment you pick up off the ground, ensures that you have no chance of making it through hell difficulty. Furthermore, Min Maxing extends to the items as well as characters. Getting items with stats that are perfect or near perfect cost many times more than the going rate, even if the difference is only a 1%.
- The problem with Diablo 2 is they made hell difficulty hard enough that without min-maxing completing the game is impossible. Also the classes are uneven. Uber Tristram is near impossible without a well min-maxed Paladin, though I've known Necromancers to do it, and even the regular game is hard for a Barbarian. In Pv P Paladins still own but Assassins are also good, while Necromancers, perhaps the easiest class in Pv E (sit there and watch everything die) suck unless you use a specific build that sucks at Pv E but can kill a PC in one hit.
- Patch 1.10 increased the difficulty of Hell to present a challenge to the best character builds. The result? No other build can complete the game. Meanwhile even more powerful builds have surfaced that turn the game into a joke. There is no reason why the game even allows the player to manually distribute stat and skill points; there is essentially only one viable way to spend them - unless you are a druid or assassin, in which case there are zero ways and you will be useless in Hell unless you buy godly (duped) items from the item trading sites that have popped up like mushrooms.
- Nodoka of Mahou Sensei Negima starts doing this after joining an adventuring party, gathering a collection of seemingly useless magic items which synergise extremely well with her artefact.
- To be specific, her artefact is a large book which diplays someone's thoughts if Nodoka calls their name. One of the items tells her the name of anything she points at and another is an earpiece which reads the book for her while it's in her backpack (allowing her to make use of it in combat).
- A minor example is that of Fallout 3. Each level the player gains grants a number of "skill-up" points. The number of points you gain is dependent on the character's Intelligence stat, so maxing out Intelligence from the game's start leads to a far more capable character than one who doesn't.
- Putting your intelligence at 3 leads to the most capable character. If you want to make a godlike character by min-maxing, you can easily max every single stat with an intelligence of 3, a lot of planning, and way too much free time. However, min maxing in Fallout 3 really doesn't matter because you could run through the game with a horrible stat build and just using weapons you found and still be near invulnerable to anything but intentional stupidity by level 20.
- And at level 30 a perk raises all your stats to 9 — and, since you were obviously planning this, you haven't gotten the ability bobbleheads which will then raise the stats to 10. So yeah.
- Mutants And Masterminds, being a point-based tabletop RPG, is very easy to min-max. However, the creators seem to realize this and go out of their way to point out potential abuses and give advice for G Ms to deal with problem players. This is, after all, a game where one of the official variants is unlimited points to buy abilities - as in the only limit is what the player thinks is reasonable.
- Hilariously, this also has the unintended effect of telling min/maxers exactly which abilities to pick.
- At which point the Game Master smacks them down and tells that that just because it's legal, doesn't mean it's allowed.
- Shadowrun offers some opportunities for min-maxing. For example, melee weapon damage is based on the STR score. A Troll character gets +4 STR beyond the normal human maximum of 6. Assume your Troll is a Physical Adept with 6 points in Armed Combat skill. You buy a Spell Lock focus and have your Mage friend cast Increase Strength +4 on you - which remains on you as long as you have the Spell Lock item. You spend 1 karma to bond the lock (a pittance compared to the 12 karma it costs to raise your skill from 6 to 7). You do the same for all five other stats, and Reflexes +3d6. Your melee weapon is a Combat Axe. Out of your 6 Magic points you spend 1.5 points to get +6 to Armed Combat rolls. The axe has a damage code of (STR)S. Your Strength is 14, so your damage code is 14S, equivalent to a sniper rifle or a really nice shotgun. With your natural reach and the reach on the axe (total 3), you just need to roll 2 or better on a die for a success unless you're fighting someone who has a long weapon or is a troll with a sword. This means against most people and critters you roll 12 dice and succeed on 10 of them. Even if the target wears the best possible armor he will still die automatically unless he is also a beefed-up Troll with cyber or magic. It's quite possible to destroy cars completely with this Troll.
- A more terrible version comes in when you pick up a Weapon Focus (6) combat axe and suddenly roll 18 dice, with 15 of them usual successes. If you toss in Combat Pool you're rolling 24 dice, 20 successes. Slap on a Spell Lock for Armor from a min-maxed Shamanic Sorcerous Adept and you could see a Body score of 25+, like a Great Dragon.
- GURPS is very easy to Min-Max in unless the GM sets firm limits on what options are available to the players. Characters are also theoretically balanced by their point total, but this is only really true in fairly narrow circumstances.
- Ace Online is full of minmaxing, with A-gear players comparing the power of their mighty Bigsmashes in terms of volume of fire, B-gear players competing for either the most powerful, accurate, or fast-firing missile (bomb) barrage, and the numerous semi-serviceable weapons being sold at low prices due to market inflation on weapons with the crazy Super or Hyper fixes.
|
|
