Min-maxing
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Min-maxing is the practice of playing a role-playing game for the intent of creating the "best" character by means of minimizing undesired traits and maximizing desired ones. This is usually accomplished by improving one specific trait or ability by sacrificing ability in all other fields. This is easier to accomplish in games where attributes are generated from a certain number of points rather than in ones where they are randomly generated. Min-maxing is particularly common in games where the cost of traits does not reflect their expected usefulness; for instance, in a combat-heavy game a player may focus on physical traits, giving a character abnormally low mental and social skills so that the remaining points can all be channeled to physical statistics that are more likely to come into play.
Min-maxing is usually associated with powergaming, though the two are not necessarily the same; min-maxers often min-max during character creation but play the game the same as any other player, and powergamers often create characters within the normal scope but then proceed to build them up by earning their power-ups during gameplay. A certain amount of min-maxing is expected and even desirable, as it indicates interest in the game, but beyond a certain threshold it becomes destructive to the game.
A similar phenomenon exists in strategy wargames, where the Min-Maxer, during army selection (the analogue of character creation) takes the absolute minimum of the basic, compulsory forces (the Min) in order to gain the highest possible proportion of specialized, powerful troops (the Max). This technique often leads to extremely unbalanced and thus boring forces, so practitioners are rather unpopular foes.
