Well said. Totally agree.
Very poorly said. As I have already iterated:
A bunch of you guys are entirely missing the point. But I'll focus on this:
Also as usual people use extreme cases to defend minmaxing. Is a Str 14 barbarian inept? No, but minmaxer want you to think so.
The entirety of D&D is systemic...the game is literally built on the notion of maximizing odds of success and eliminating odds of failure. There is no reward built into the tabletop rules to punish a maxed out character and no rewards for a sub optimal character. Now this can become an issue at a table with real people where you can hog all the spotlight and reducing the enjoyment others get from the game and so on if your character shines too much so you shouldn't do it there. But in BG3 there is little reason not to do so...and the game heavily incentivizes min maxing by handing you items vastly more powerful than anything the tabletop would dare hand you even from act 1. BG3 even offers vastly more power still if you want to walk an evil path. BG3 is literally built to enable vastly higher min-maxing than the tabletop and it's not subtle about it...it offers you respec AND insanely powerful items right from the start. The game is literally saying: here, take this and see just how far you can push your power curve.
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?
