Min max means minimizing the downsides while maximizing the upsides.
That’s weird! I always understood it as minimizing scores you don’t care about to further juice your most desired stats. Eg. Sawing off a shotgun to make it more viable as a quick-draw close-range problem solver. What you’re describing means “Optimizing”, to me
To my knowledge you’re correct. In the context of DND you put the least possible points in attributes you don’t care about, while maximizing the stats that do your damage. So you can end up with a sorcerer with more charisma than Jack Nicholson, who is too dumb to tie his own shoes.
That’s max-max
I always think of quintessential min-maxing being to use 5e point buy to choose the stats 8, 15, 8 15, 8, 15 or whatever, literally making your relevant build stats maximum while dumping all else.
As everyone else has said, this is not at all what min-maxing is. Min-maxing is dumping the things you don’t care about to be very good at the things you do. I present an example in the form of the excellent Darths and Droids.
That’s how the modern DnD community has been using it, but that’s absolutely not what it means. It’s just been kinda lost since 5e has basically no options to “Min” anymore. Back in the 90s and early 2000s, most games had options to take flaws that further reduce stats or add other complications in exchange for better base stats or more feats.
It’s not always downsides though. Just a less desirable stat for the build than the one(s) you’re maximizing.
Median max, aka Med Max
The min is the fun part though, you gotta balance out those high stats with lows. One of my favourite characters I’ve played was a sorcerer who was dumb as a brick and thought he was a wizard, since he could cast spells and knew wizards cast spells, therefore he was a wizard
When the That Guy player comes to the table with a character he “rolled at home” with nothing but 16s, 17s, and 18s
That is positively cursed, thank you
Mcgonagall: why is it always you three?
Artificer, warlock, druid
I remember back in the day of playing the original gold box Pools of Radiance - you can build your party of six characters - and it has a stat rolling generation method, where you can just roll over and over until you get stats you like…
BUT… at level 1 you can “customize your character” which lets you just manually assign stats (I think the idea was so that you could re-create your tabletop characters in the game.) - but as a kid we would always just set every stat to 18 with it.
I did the same thing with the Buck Rogers gold box computer games. They were hard enough even with maximum stats.
thanks, I’ve got to show this to several people
For the last time, you can not start a level 1 character with 18’s in every attribute!
