Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Min-maxing good? Bad?

The only people who want to start on fair footing with minmaxers are other minmaxers.

Edit: also, where did you find the info about 5e being fundamentally designed for starting with 16 in the attribute?

Being a hero doesn't require minmaxed stats.

And its related to ASI because the biggest reason ASI was changed was to allow minmaxers to play other race/class combinations than the previously optimal ones, meaning WotC now confirmed that their way if thinking that a character firs and formost needs to have minmaxed stats is the correct one and that playing what you want even if not optimized was wrong. Hence they made it easier to minmax even to the detriment of immersion and lore.

Not quite true. 2014 5E D&D's baseline playtest characters have a 15 in starting main attribute. Races with handy ASIs are for newer players to help steer them to optimal builds that match popular archetypes. Experienced players then try unusual combinations, like Half-orc bard, which are viable.

This all said, OneD&D has increased baselines across the board. It looks like all characters now baseline at 16/17, and start with an extra modest feat.

I don't have an official source that would tell you so. It's more of an understanding I've developed over the years of dm-ing 5e and interacting with the math. The whole CR system for rating monsters factors their AC and HitPoints into a defensive score which represents how difficult they are to kill, which factors into their overall challenge rating, which is then used for designing balanced combat encounters. Whenever I deviated from the curve by, for example, allowing players to start with 18+ abilities, they would easily steamroll any by-the-book encounter even after adding an enemy or two. As a similar example, I once had a player with a tiefling fighter with 15 Dex, whom I later allowed to respec as if they'd started with a 17 because it was an atrocious experience for them. A +1 difference is very easy to underestimate, but its impact is far-reaching in a d20 system, especially when it affects frequent rolls which are crucial to your success..

If it sounds like I'm only generalizing based on intuition and personal anectodes, please bear in mind that all BG3 companions as well as pre-made characters at dndbeyond follow the same pattern and I'm quite sure they do so for a reason.

That's interesting. I had no idea since I wasn't around for the release of 5e, but I can't seem to verify this. According to this page all playtest characters for 2014 5e started with a 16 or 17 in their primary ability, and so did those during the 2013 DnD Next playtests.

I wonder where I got that idea from?

I read so much back then, 5E was to D&D what BG3 is to CRPGs. Can't verify, so withdraw that position.

There is usually a ton of diplomacy and intrigue in these games, even if the main bad guy has to be fought. You ally with factions, convince street gangs to leave you alone, help someone out to gain a specific piece of information and so on. What I want is for that to matter, and for the game to regard diplomacy or intimidation as an equally valid approach where it appears plausible, in terms of xp. I do not demand it to be plausible all the time, just to apply some damn realism. You might get into countless brawls in a day depending on where you are, but people do not enter lethal fights lightly.

Well said. Totally agree.

Very poorly said. As I have already iterated:

What you described is a wargame like Warhammer AoS/40K or Heroquest, not a role playing game.

What I described is literally what every tabletop RPG is...D&D, Pathfinder, etc...whatever your favorite is. If there are dice involved your main task is creating a character with the best chance to land its attacks and spells, and the best chance to negate damage coming your way. If it's a game of chance you are ALWAYS playing the odds...no matter how much or how little you think you are min-maxing, no matter how much you think should be optimized, the game forces you to play the odds and to optimize to some extent...the entire game is literally ALL about your odds. Every action is about your odds of success vs odds of failure.

You are literally not allowed to play until you created a character...and that entire process is optimization...what's your role in the party, what abilities do you take, how do you attack, what are your odds of success and how much damage do you do, etc. etc. etc.

And here we have the problem. This is the attitude currently catered to which leads to the decline of rpgs. Reducing role playing games to war games where "the main task" is to create optimized combat character for combat encounters. Immersing you into the world? Experience a story with interesting characters? Playing a role in a fantasy world? All of this is playing wrong, unless your role is +5 attack 2d6 damage DD/off-tank.

Attitudes like this are literally destroying the very core of rpgs and should be opposed instead of catered to by butchering the immersion of settings to make minmaxer happy like with the ASI change.

That's the thing...it's REALLY not just about combat encounters...literally EVERYTHING you do in DND lives and dies by the odds of the dice. If you need to talk your way out of a situation, best hide behind the face of the party...whoever has the charisma and deception/persuasion rolls. Want to steal an item? Better let whoever has the best slight of hand and stealth proficiencies. etc.

There is literally no game to be had at all without considering optimization first.

And D&D is a very brutal game...you can be fighting gods, running into instant death traps. Pull a card from a deck and the soul of your character is taken away and locked in a prison in a different dimension without your party having even a clue as to what happened. You REALLY are forced to optimize to a large extent.

I do not think you are wrong in your summary of how 5E works mechanically. I also do not think that this is a strength in 5E. To me it feels more like a massive flaw, insofar as the purpose of 5E is to be a foundation for "role playing" instead of math attacking, number crunching, rules lawyering, and aggressive resource optimization.

Now, those things can all be fun but they are not, in my view, remotely related to anything that constitues "role playing" unless your character happens to be an accountant or an economist. In which case, I recommend a gnome and I recommend shouting at your raging barbarian friend to take out the smaller gobbos first, based on the principle of the lowest hanging fruit, so 80% of the tasks to be achieved can be gotten out of the way early, which will no doubt impress shareholders into a more bullish investment profile. I'm sure your barbarian friend would also greatly appreciate this advice.

The salient point, however, is that role playing is different from ARPG toon optimization in that your character isn't just a "toon". It's an actual character, like one you'd find in a movie or a book. And the task at the table is to try to be that character. What does he see, what does he feel, what does he think, what does he do, how does he do it, and when does he do it? When you instead resort to using your knowledge of D&D rules to optimize everything to hell and back, you're really not acting in character. The choices you're making on behalf of your character are not being made because they make sense to your character but because they make sense at a meta level that is way beyond your character.

This isn't to say that min-maxing is wrong, particularly not if it isn't bothering anyone else, but could we please not pretend that min-maxing constitutes role playing?

Nothing of that requires minmaxing.
Your character might be good at something and bad with other things, but that doesn't mean that he will always use his abilities optimally. He might be overconfident and pick fights he can't win, or too scared to play out his stength.
That is the true strength of RPGs. Creating a character, immersing yourself into a fantastic world and experience the story of this character with all the ups and downs, successes and failues. Even Larian still markets the game with choices and consequences instead of the tactical combat

Not everyone plays like this, but this is the true strength of rpgs and all of them should at least aspire to offer this.
What you described does not. It takes all the unique things rpgs can offer an throws it into the garbage. The only thing remaining is tactical combat/conflicts. Gone are the wants and fears of a character, its now only a block of numbers and the only correct way of playing is to match the highest bonus to the current problem. If Larian would have followed that philosophy to the end BG3 would be a tactical combat game like the Blackguards titles.
And yet both Larian and WotC more and more reduce their rpgs to tactical combat games, including by showing that optimized combat characters are more important than immersive and consistent characters, for example by removing racial ASI, no matter how nonsensical that is, or allowing complete respecs

I find it bizarre that someone would say that min-maxing is required to play DND. What kind of awful DM would allow a TPK a group of people having fun and roleplaying simply because they weren't min-maxing? Sure, dice are part of the game, but the point of the game is to have fun, and good DMs will constantly fudge rolls, or change stats to let their party have a more enjoyable experience. That level 1 wizard that technically gets focused by two goblins and is insta-gibbed? oops, that 20 roll is now a 12 and they barely survive.

It's a bit sad to hear of DND in such dry mechanical terms. It's supposed to be an RPG, not just a table top strategy game like 40k.

Combat has always been a central pillar of rpgs, but it's not necessarily all they've been about throughout the years. To paraphrase the very video that kicked off this entire thread, war gaming is literally the root from which ttrpgs as we know them today sprouted, even if they're about something else today and focus much more on roleplaying and narrative. No "core" is being destroyed here. The purpose may differ, but the underlying mechanical principles are still there. To create a character is to decide what you want to be good at and then finding out how to be good at it. This is technically optimizing. It may not always be a priority, but setting your starting Charisma to 16 because you envision your character as a diplomatic smooth-talker who's good at defusing conflict is a kind of optimizing (as opposed to just making a talkative character with average charisma). Interesting characters have memorable strengths and weaknesses and in a game I would expect the mechanics to reflect them.

In fact, I'll go as far as to say that min-maxing your ability scores is fantastic for roleplaying and creating memorable characters, because it gives them both prominent strengths and weaknesses. Take Minsc, for example - the pinnacle of physical perfection with a hamster-sized brain.

Not “wrong” - ther “wrong” way of playing is whatever you find unfun. But that’s not something the game is set up to encourage and take into account.

BG3 is a fine example to examine - I didn’t multiple playthroughs, with different classes and builds and the major difference between the runs was the combat. My capabilities and options outside combat were mostly the same in each playthrough. This is partially because D&D systems are very combat heavy, and partially because for some reason Larian took steps (at least in EA) to unify tools available to everyone - with Speaking with Dead/Animal, vision cones and stealth rarely relying on stealth checks etc. “social” skills just aren’t much of a concern. What would be a benefit if coming up with unusual attribute spread? I see those more as a test of player’s system knowledge, rather than a meaningful choice. Whatever attribute spread I pick, same roleplaying choices will be available to me.

I don’t think those combat heavy RPGs are necessarily bad - I like them a lot - but character building does mostly encourage thinking about your character’s combat efficiency.

There are games that are more roleplay focused. Classic Tim Cain RPGs had a wider array of character roles, with combat being one of potential expressions, not necessarily a main gameplay pillar. Lowering intelligence would change conversation options. Recently Disco Elysium tried some interesting thing with specialisation - with high ability scores coming with downsides as well as benefits. Those games reward and encourage roleplaying.

Literally no player would do that in high stakes circumstances unless the player has no idea what he's doing and what he's messing with. D&D gets very brutal and very real. There high level enemies that pose very real TPK threats and at a tabletop game there's no reloading the last save either. There are enemies designed very intentionally to basically never be messed with and even the most min-maxed of level 20 parties can fall to them if they get a couple unlucky rolls. You spellcaster better not fail that saving throw against the Feeble Mind Spell. Your better be sure you want to mess with disarming the instant death traps rather than walk around them, etc.

Some people act like minmaxing is a dirty word or oh you better not optimize too much or else. But the game is absolutely mercyless. Even with mastery and guidance and everything else stacked in your favor all it really takes is one nat1 roll at the worst time and you are done...permanently, irredeemably done.

Fortunately, we can decide ourselves how we’re likely to have most fun playing BG3. I think it’s reasonable to assume that EA difficulty will more or less equate to normal in the full release, and minmaxing certainly isn’t a requirement for that. It can make fights easier if that’s what people want, and it’s of course perfectly fine if they do. And having a really poorly-built character can make things much harder and more frustrating, but as folk have said, there’s a long distance between trying to make sure your character doesn’t suck and minmaxing.

There aren’t any right or wrong answers as to how the game should be played, beyond us playing in the way that we each will find most rewarding. But over the course of EA my experience has been that the game’s very flexibility can make it hard for us to work out the best way to interact with its systems to extract maximum enjoyment for ourselves. And it doesn’t hand-hold us through the process, so I suspect it would be possible for someone to play in a way that succeeded, but that they didn’t hugely enjoy, when they could have had more fun with a different approach. I certainly found it took many tens of hours playing the game before I figured out what worked best for me. And I’m now very grateful to BG3 as some of those lessons also apply to other cRPGs that I now realise I have been playing “wrong” all these years, by which of course I mean in a way that doesn’t maximise my enjoyment of them.

Personally, I know I have more fun if I pick a roleplay concept and stick with it, even if it makes some elements of the game harder. Finding ways as a player to overcome those weaknesses is one of the challenges I find interesting and rewarding about cRPGs. I still try to make a reasonably effective character, but wouldn’t sacrifice roleplay for it. Others might prefer the challenge of finding the “perfect” build. Or want a different challenge each time they play.

Because of this, I think it’s totally valid for the PC Gamer article to suggest that people reflect on whether they might have more fun taking a different approach, from the experience of someone who had previously enjoyed minmaxing but found that wasn’t the best way for them personally to enjoy the game. Everyone’s different, of course, and people are of course perfectly at liberty to ignore the suggestion but it seems a fair enough one to chuck out there for people to ponder.

Maxing your primary stat isn't even min maxing, it's just the standard way to play the game.