Min Max is the Devil

[Krusk]

Over time the bliss of the early RPGs began to fade. Rulebooks began to look like textbooks on advanced statistical analysis. Role-playing turned to roll-playing. The rule lawyers, munchkins, and mix-maxers began to dominate.

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Where does this bullshit come from and why is it so common?

Whats the root cause of the unending hate sent towards the guy who opts not to take toughness on his 3.5 barbarian because "It sucks and I'm plenty tough I'm taking power attack".

[TheFlatline]

Over time the bliss of the early RPGs began to fade. Rulebooks began to look like textbooks on advanced statistical analysis. Role-playing turned to roll-playing. The rule lawyers, munchkins, and mix-maxers began to dominate.

.

Where does this bullshit come from and why is it so common?

Whats the root cause of the unending hate sent towards the guy who opts not to take toughness on his 3.5 barbarian because "It sucks and I'm plenty tough I'm taking power attack".

That's not min-maxing. Not even close. You're not breaking/abusing the system in your example.

[K]

When I think about min-maxing, I think about something like the Grapplemancer. Wizards were never designed to be grapple-specialists that far exceed Monks and other Warriors, but min-maxing makes it possible.

In some senses, that's kind of cool because it's a new way to extend the concept of a character. In another sense, it's downright bad for the game that your role-protection has failed so badly.

[Kaelik]

Fourth post, and four completely different views on what min maxxing even is.

Result: All conversations ever about min maxxing begin and end with people talking past each other and nothing being accomplished.

[ishy]

People look for easy things to blame if things don't turn out the way they like it.

Thus if for example one person has an attack of 1d20 + 50 and the other has 1d20 +25, they'll blame the one with a +50 bonus for not roleplaying (or minmaxxing or whatever buzzword you prefer) properly

[TheFlatline]

When I think about min-maxing, I think about something like the Grapplemancer. Wizards were never designed to be grapple-specialists that far exceed Monks and other Warriors, but min-maxing makes it possible.

In some senses, that's kind of cool because it's a new way to extend the concept of a character. In another sense, it's downright bad for the game that your role-protection has failed so badly.

That's close to where I define min-maxing. However, if your character can participate in other parts of the game you're not min-maxing.

I seriously had a player during a point build game ask if he could start with an intelligence of two, so he could buff other stats as close to their starting limit as possible. I mentioned that he'd have like an infant's intelligence (I think even a dog has an int of 3) and he literally said, with a straight face "we can just hand wave that the party dresses and feeds me, so long as I can fight." When I asked about interacting with the rest of the game he said "Well there's not going to be much of that so I don't care".

That's fucking min-maxing/munchkining.

[Aryxbez]

I'm starting to wonder as "The Standard Manual" had said, when was this ever an evident philosophy in RPG culture?! What seems to dominate these days, is people being ignorant of the very game they're playing, encouraging to ignore rules as much as possible, unless it's like combat for some reason.

I guess since most RPG players range from simply ignorantly apathetic, all the way to blatantly idiotic with self inflated self of being right, guess don't like anything that may stray from their adventure. Perhaps built a poor adventure that the PC's slammed through to their expectation, and rather displeased about that. On the player end, it can simply just be jealousy, so they seek to condemn others so they feel they're in a superior morale standing. So, most people are dumb and thus this mass of ignorance easier to see the dumb habits they adopt.

Can also just blame the concept of Gygaxian DMing I guess.

I find the concept of optimizing being a good exercise to maintain interest in an RPG, to broaden the horizon of the game itself, and otherwise just do bigger, badder, more awesome things. Course, there will be people who optimize to make an obnoxious character, most reasonable-ish people it seems, are referring to jerks messing with the experience at the detriment of everyone else.

Also TheFlatline, in the event there was only one part of the game that actually mattered, then optimizing for that I could understand. Much like in a combat heavy game, caring about social skills may just be useless, if it's ensured they'll hardly ever be used. Whether or not that was the case for the game you were involved in, I can't really say.

Course in short, can also be simply put as Dogberts signature says: "Power Gamer is anyone who plays in a way I don't like"

[MisterDee]

IMO powergaming can be a problem in two cases.

1-Characters that end up being non-entities except for their combat stats. I don't mind a 6-int fighter if the player is roleplaying that 6 int (and by that I mean "is roleplaying, period" - honestly I'm not going to fucking argue that the player is playing his uneducated oaf as a 9 or 12 int fighter if he's involved in the game), but I do mind the party having what basically amounts to a flesh golem following them around because the guy switches to his iphone whenever we're not in combat.

And I guess that having someone put a 4 in intelligence and then use his brain instead of his character's could suck.

Then again, the problem isn't powergaming, it's having a shitty player.

2-If I'm running a pre-built adventure or designing one with about 15 minutes to play with, I want to be able to trust that my EL7 encounter is not a cakewalk for my 5th level party.

In other words, if the EL/CR system wasn't a steaming pile of shit, powergaming might be an issue. But since even the iconics played by halfway-competent players can rape half of the level-appropriate encounters in the books, I don't worry about it too much.

[CapnTthePirateG]

What's your opinion on a dude stacking -int templates till his int is 4, and, when asked how he's going to roleplay, describes his character as an animalistic hunter of men?

And I honestly believe it comes down to "I want to be awesome, but am too lazy to put in work/learn the rules so I will cry like a little bitch and whine at competent people!" I HATE those fuckers.

[NineInchNall]

And I honestly believe it comes down to "I want to be awesome, but am too lazy to put in work/learn the rules so I will cry like a little bitch and whine at competent people!" I HATE those fuckers.

In my experience, this is representative of most of the people who complain about "min-maxing" or "powergaming".

The only time I have a problem with min-maxing is when it creates a situation where there's some serious intraparty balance problem, or when a character's power level makes the type of story we want to play untenable. If we're playing a game where typical, Hollywood-style werewolves are supposed to be scary, then I'm not going to be happy if you bring a world-warping spellcaster to the table.

This also applies in reverse, however. If some jackass decides to be an idiot and play a Sorcerer/Favored Soul/Mystic Theurge in a 9th level game, I'm going to be pissed.

[Ted the Flayer]

I had one guy try to tell me the height of min-maxing is taking toughness for every feat as a fighter. After telling him that will saves would ruin his day, he said a Ring of Mind Shielding would make him immune to everything that required will saves. Although I could have brought up the "no save, just die" spells, I decided after that argument that he was borderline retarded.

Edited: clarity

[koz]

I had one guy try to tell me the height of min-maxing is taking toughness for every feat as a fighter. After telling him that will saves would ruin his day without saves, he said a Ring of Mind Shielding would make him immune to everything that required will saves. Although I could have brought up the "no save, just die" spells, I decided after that argument that he was borderline retarded.

Just borderline? Are you sure?

[Maxus]

My rule of munchkinism is "If you can play it out of combat, you can play it in combat".

So it's completely fine to play a wizard who telekinesis-spams and uses other creative nasty tricks in combat, as long as he's bringing it up outside combat--maybe has a notebook about combinations and tactics, gets excited and tells other party members what he's come up with.

Or at least gives SOME indication that the character is the same in-combat as he is outside of combat.

[CapnTthePirateG]

I had one guy try to tell me the height of min-maxing is taking toughness for every feat as a fighter. After telling him that will saves would ruin his day without saves, he said a Ring of Mind Shielding would make him immune to everything that required will saves. Although I could have brought up the "no save, just die" spells, I decided after that argument that he was borderline retarded.

He does realize the ring of mind shielding only blocks detect thoughts, discern lies, and detect alignment right? Not charms or dominates?

Did he actually try this?

[Ted the Flayer]

I had one guy try to tell me the height of min-maxing is taking toughness for every feat as a fighter. After telling him that will saves would ruin his day without saves, he said a Ring of Mind Shielding would make him immune to everything that required will saves. Although I could have brought up the "no save, just die" spells, I decided after that argument that he was borderline retarded.

He does realize the ring of mind shielding only blocks detect thoughts, discern lies, and detect alignment right? Not charms or dominates?

Did he actually try this?

It's a weakness of mine. If someone makes an argument stupid enough and obviously 100% believes what they are saying to be true, I tend to simply not know how to reply and walk off. I would have liked to put him to the test as a player, but mercifully his path and mine diverged and have not converged again.

[Josh_Kablack]

The problem is really threefold.

Firstly, most RPGs involve a complex rules system that includes interactions between a metricrazycraptonne of bonuses to various things.

Secondly, most RPG players and MCs have far less than complete understanding of the rules system and all the interactions between it.

Thirdly, most RPGs have a bunch of fluff that has fuck-all to do with the crunch. (if it's not outright contradictory, due to authors having even worse understanding than the players)

This results in games systems having a lot of unexpected results. The aforementioned example of the wizard being the best grappler in 3.x D&D being a prime example. A player wanting to build a grappler is likely to choose a Strength based class and race -and when the Int-based character outshines them at their intended specialty that creates resentment between the players. When the same grapplemancer singlehandedly chokeslams half the encounters, that creates resentment in the MC.

And while mature, socially adept adults can talk things out and come to some sort of reasonable resolution or houserule to mitigate such resentment......lets face it, most gamers aren't mature, social adept or even all that adult.

[shadzar]

roleplay v rollplay is the fight had between wargamers and newly created RPG gamers.

wargamers wanted RPG to supplement their wargames, roleplayers wanted RPG to be its own thing. RPG players didnt need everything to provide a bonus, while a wargame there is no need to take something that doesnt provide a bonus.

min-maxing if how to best spend your points on getting the most out of your army pieces.

the fight has actually always been trying to make RPGs into something NOT wargames to finally take them away from the wargames to become its own thing.

remember where D&D started. a supplement to a wargame, Chainmail. then it grew into a beast beyond that supplement, and has ALWAYS been trying to be its own thing leaving the wargames behind, though the wargamers still fight to reclaim it, even after 40 years and new generations that dont understand the fight.

[Krusk]

That's not min-maxing. Not even close. You're not breaking/abusing the system in your example.

And yet he still gets the hate.

I guess I have too much faith in people to really think the majority of them are just "too dumb/lazy" to get it. Its seriously the vast majority of the hobby. If I could go to [dnd]con at some point, I'd love to poll the people there. I'd be shocked to see a ratio of 1-100 that don't have negative things to say about optimization.

Go into your local game shop and ask people to explain their house rules to you, saying you are looking for a game. After they are done being really hesitant because they think you are trying to break their game, they will explain. Its never "Fighter/monk/paladin suck so we mandate the TOB classes instead. We also ban wiz/druid/cleric". Its always "We had munchkins, to keep them in check we don't allow toughness to stack, and iterative attacks don't exist".

You can swap local game shop with online looking for group posting, chat with the guy at the books at borders, or amazon thread. Posting in a message board is usually a little better but its still astonishing.

I generally game with people I know out of games, and without fail every person they introduce to the group as "this guy I know from ___ plays" says the same shit.

[Wrathzog]

The only time I have a problem with min-maxing is when it creates a situation where there's some serious intraparty balance problem

This is the exact issue that I'm running into in my game currently. We have one guy who is awesome at optimization and then we have the rest of the party who play about average power level characters.

To provide a "Challenge" to the party I have to regularly set them up against CR+4-6 encounters or the awesome guy rapes everything. The rest of the party ends up using up all their resources in pretty much every fight and are more or less ineffectual. As far as I can tell, there's no way to set up an encounter that would be fair for everyone else without being completely arbitrary about it (oh shit your level 4 character just got mazed for 10 rounds).

When he's not in combat, he's also literally doing everything else. He's playing the Face and he's the one running around disabling traps.

And I'm okay with this as long as the rest of the party is okay with this. If they don't mind being borderline useless in every situation in the game then we can continue playing The Dude and his three stooges.

[TheFlatline]

What's your opinion on a dude stacking -int templates till his int is 4, and, when asked how he's going to roleplay, describes his character as an animalistic hunter of men?

If I'm running a meat-grinder game or a game where PCs can and do kill other PCs, then I have one reaction:

SWEET. This very well might be a short-lived character.

Which if the player understands that, game on. I used to love occasionally playing Malks in Vampire that were "too fucked up even for malks" and usually ended up having to be put down. It tended to be the darkest theme in the fanged superheroes games we played, but the other players kind of dug it. And it helped eschew the fuzzy bunny slipper fishMalk stereotype.

In a LARP my friend played a barbarian named "beast", whose back story was that he essentially was a human trained as a hunting dog by some seriously fucked up noble. Beast knew three words. His name, "no" and "kill". He understood the concept of hunting and wolf pack tactics. That was kind of it. Very low on the intelligence capacity. But my friend played it to the hilt. It was actually an awesome character. He'd tune out actual conversation going on and rely totally on body language. If things started looking hostile he'd start flanking whoever the party was interacting with.

So it's *totally* doable. But you have to understand the implications and be willing to accept them. In my friends case, the implications were the reason he created the character. The uber-fighter stats were kind of a side effect.

[infected slut princess]

This is the exact issue that I'm running into in my game currently. We have one guy who is awesome at optimization and then we have the rest of the party who play about average power level characters.
...

When he's not in combat, he's also literally doing everything else. He's playing the Face and he's the one running around disabling traps.

And I'm okay with this as long as the rest of the party is okay with this. If they don't mind being borderline useless in every situation in the game then we can continue playing The Dude and his three stooges.

Putting aside that the game is not inherently balanced by default, aren't you responsible for this? If you have a top-level optimizer as a player in your game, and a bunch of bulk-rate non-optimizers for all the other players, should you not help out the poor optimizers so they can contribute more? Whether that's with actual character design OR cheesy stuff like uber magic items or special powers.

Obviously the hardcore optimizer who dominates the show is not going to sandbag voluntarily, so you have to man up and intervene to mitigate that lack of balance. Unless, of course, like you say, the everyone WANTS to play The Hero and His Retarded Friends.

[TheFlatline]

This is the exact issue that I'm running into in my game currently. We have one guy who is awesome at optimization and then we have the rest of the party who play about average power level characters.
...

When he's not in combat, he's also literally doing everything else. He's playing the Face and he's the one running around disabling traps.

And I'm okay with this as long as the rest of the party is okay with this. If they don't mind being borderline useless in every situation in the game then we can continue playing The Dude and his three stooges.

Putting aside that the game is not inherently balanced by default, aren't you responsible for this? If you have a top-level optimizer as a player in your game, and a bunch of bulk-rate non-optimizers for all the other players, should you not help out the poor optimizers so they can contribute more? Whether that's with actual character design OR cheesy stuff like uber magic items or special powers.

Obviously the hardcore optimizer who dominates the show is not going to sandbag voluntarily, so you have to man up and intervene to mitigate that lack of balance. Unless, of course, like you say, the everyone WANTS to play The Hero and His Retarded Friends.

No, it's not my duty as the GM. I'm not there to hold hands, or create masturbatory theater. I'm not there to justify an asshat player who is screwing the game over. If the "hardcore optimizer" is willing to disrupt/ruin the game for everyone else, he is the problem, not the rest of the group. He should probably find a different game, and in reality I'll punt his ass out of the group before I increase my already overwhelming workload another 400% because he's a disruptive player. I don't owe him an ego stroke or power trip.

I'm already running the game, running all the NPCs, coming up with interesting stories, engaging combat, rules arbitration, and staying one step ahead of 4 or 5 PCs. Now you're telling me it's my *duty* to become as obsessive as the problem player for 3 other players? It's frankly insulting to have someone say "well just pick up the slack for everyone else" when one person is *intentionally* blowing the game for everyone else. It's spoken like someone who has no real practical experience running games.

Seriously, if the players aren't responsible for *fitting into the game*, what the fuck *is* the players' responsibilities in an RPG?

[hogarth]

I thought whiskey was the devil, not min-maxing. For instance, it led me astray, over hills and mountains and to Americay.

[Stahlseele]

Well, the first settlers could be called min/maxers . .
They wanted everything their religion could give them without the problems that would come with following that specific delusion . .

[Mask_De_H]

As the Mister Cavern, Flatline, you are also a master of ceremonies, which means the onus is on you for your players having a good time. Part of that is teaching them some of the neat shit they can do within a system. You don't have a responsibility to teach your players the ways of optimization, but you do have an obligation to help them play the game on equal footing. Whether you do this by kneecapping the optimizer or bringing the others to that guy's level is up to you.