Minimax gaming

Numerical attributes. You start with each attribute at 0, and then you can decrease some attributes in order to increase others. Or you could think of these attributes as nothing more than features that enable you to do things, e.

Instead of starting with each attribute at 0, just think of it as if you start with each attribute at -5 and then you have points that you can spend to increase the attributes that will be most useful to you.

Character flaws. Consider a system where you can accept the burden of playing a character with a disadvantage in one area in exchange for an advantage in another area. For example, you can make your character illiterate in exchange for a fighting maneuver that gives you combo attacks. But instead of thinking of the disadvantage as a burden, think of a lack of that disadvantage as a feature.

If you know you will be spending more time attacking than reading, then maybe you should choose the "combo attack" feature over the "making sense of markings on a piece of paper" feature. When you apply this logic to many different "flaws", you might notice that the default build for your character contains plenty of superfluous features you can sacrifice in exchange for maximizing one really useful feature or choosing features that are useful together e.

Sherlock Holmes minmaxes his own brain using this logic. Minmaxing is to treat something like a higher-than-minimum attribute, or the lack of a flaw, as a feature, and to minimize your expenses on useless features so you can maximize your expenses on useful features.

In a system that is designed so that each character has strengths and weaknesses, minmaxing has the effect of choosing strengths that make your character very powerful while choosing "weaknesses" that are not really weaknesses because they do not prevent you from doing what you want to do. I like fallwalltall's illustration of minmaxing on reddit.

Note how the minmaxer in this scenario treats everything as a feature that can be purchased and evaluates those features by how effectively they let him do what he wants to do.

Also note how he sacrifices one feature e. Story based RPGer - My guy comes from a repressed, remote and rural community. I have never been to a big city and none of my friends have. The area is plagued by werewolves because of part of world's lore.

My family has for generations acted as werewolf hunters in times of need for the local region. However, the infestation of werewolves if very bad right now and many villages are disappearing.

I have been chosen to journey to the big city to petition the high lord for help and on the way I meet So, my character build. Well, I guess I will be a warrior based character. These people probably don't have sophisticated weaponry so I will take specialty spear. While I can go toe-to-toe with a werewolf any day, the idea of undead scare the hell out of me - phobia undead.

This gives me a bonus point that I will spend on family heirloom for killing werewolves - silver tipped spear. Since dual wielding nearly doubles my damage output and gets the bonus of two magical weapons later, I will dual wield.

At level 5 I am going to take - Dual Wield Finesse which will make my off-hand weapon act as a shield anyway. I will take phobias for three things, the maximum, that almost never come up - Cacti , bardic music even with a phobia I can easily overpower a bard and witnessing alchemy. OK, that gives me three bonus points. One goes to " resist fear " which will nearly eliminate any impact of the phobias.

I will put one point into Katana mastery. That leaves one bonus point. Oh, I will add correctable nearsightedness for two extra bonus points. One of those I will use for magic, invisible, corrective lenses that never fall off under the family heirloom trait. The remaining two bonus points are used to increase the critical damage percentage of katanas and then enhance the resulting damage.

OK, so I now have the maximum damage per round for a level 1 character. I got 5 bonus points for my phobias and weaknesses, but essentially removed the effect using 2 of the bonus points.

The net was 3 bonus points that I dumped into stacking katana damage bonuses for my two katanas. My backstory? I guess I am a ninja or something. It is a process of accepting certain flaws and deficiencies to improve a few strong points of a character. It relates to another term - "dump stat", which is an attribute of a character that is deliberately set as low as possible in an attempt to relocate resources e. The use of the term "minmax" well predates it's use in RPGs and usually refers to minimising losses and maximising returns.

Here the name refers to minimising the value of useless and irrelevant stats like Wisdom or Charisma for a Strength-based fighter in order to maximise the crucial ones like Intelligence for a Wizard. To differentiate from regular character building, which also places greater focus on desired stats, minmaxing aims to create a more specialised character, with greater advantages and disadvantages instead of a more generalist one, hoping to alleviate flaws by other means magic items, other party members etc.

Minmaxing is quite simply Min imizing your disadvantages in a game system while simultaneously Max imizing the effectiveness of your character in their specific role during a game. MinMax is a type of character-building practice in RPGs. Players choose options for their characters that minimize their attributes in less-desired abilities Min and Maximize their attributes in desired ones Max.

MinMaxing is done in an attempt to create powerful characters that are focused on specific abilities, in lieu of other abilities not important to that character.

Among players who like to create characters that can 'win' a game, or those that wish to create characters that are effective in their roles, MinMaxing is a popular option for character-building. This is because, in many RPGs, you are given character-building options that allow you to assign points to different attributes. Examples of RPG systems like this are DnD with either dice-results that a DM lets you assign, or the point-buy system, and Whitewolf with their dot system.

MinMaxing can also refer to the general idea of trying to create a character within an RPG system that maximizes the benefits of that system specifically, and minimizes mechanics that aren't as powerful. But this is not necessarily true for all characters - though a Fighter is considered a low-tier class in DnD 3.

While some players consider excessive MinMaxing to be a negative player trait, or a sign of a Munchkin Players primarily concerned with stat-crunching and not role-playing , MinMaxing is advisable for character creation, as it allows a player to contribute to a group in a specific way more effectively, and allows other members of the group to contribute in their own specific way, while maximizing the total group effectiveness.

Even in solo play, some MinMaxing allows a character to be more effective, as it allows that character a better chance at succeeding at the task they do best. The term minmax comes from the mathematical study of Game Theory or Decision Making.

It means you select from the available options to minimise your losses and maximise your gains. In theoretical games like Zero-sum both player are assumes to use a minmax selection constrain. This reduction of loss and increasing your gain has been extended into roleplay games where you get to select from a set of option in character generation and is generally used negatively by some, that you should play your character and not play the rules of the system.

It comes from the term minimax , which is a zero-sum game theory in a zero-sum game, your gains are exactly your opponents losses. The minimax theorem involves increasing your overall gains by minimizing your opponents maximum gains. This means you maximize your overall performance by minimizing your opponent's best performance. Since many games in the gaming community are non-zero-sum games you don't win most fights just by taking less damage , the term has been expanded to include the maximin theorem as well.

Maximin involves maximizing your own minimum gains. An example of this is sacrificing hard-hitting spells that could miss for moderate damage spells that will always hit, lowering your highest potential damage but increasing your worst-case damage. The origin of the term, however, is a specific kind of optimization: "minimization of the maximum"; it is the strategy of trying to optimize for the worst case scenario.

When deciding between several alternatives, you rate each alternative by the absolute worst thing that can happen as a consequence, and then you choose the alternative that rates the least bad.

The good fighters of old first put themselves beyond the possibility of defeat, and then waited for an opportunity of defeating the enemy.

For the sake of clarity, I will explicitly point out that in gaming, the term is often used to describe things that are pretty much the exact opposite of the original meaning: making sacrifices to improve average performance at the cost of making the assumed to be rare worst case scenarios much, much worse.

Minmaxing refers to the process of creating a character that is very good at one thing, but very bad at many other things. For example:. Minmaxed characters are a problem because they're unable to participate in certain parts of the game. For example, if the characters are negotiating with a boatman who doesn't want to take them into the alligator swamps, the warrior will be useless, and will feel frustrated and bored. In the worst case, the warrior might decide to provoke a battle with the boatman, so that they could use their greataxe skill and be the star character again.

And, likewise, the rogue and bard might try to persuade the other characters to avoid all combat scenes because they're "too dangerous". A certain amount of specialization is inevitable as people build different classes, but it's bad when people take it to extremes. I try to remind people as they build characters to think about both combat and non-combat encounters.

Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. What does "minmax" mean? Ask Question. Asked 6 years, 6 months ago. Active 20 days ago. Viewed 89k times. What does minmax mean and where did the term originate from? Hence the optimal move for the maximizer is to go LEFT and the optimal value is 3.

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