Full Video Transcript

Hey everybody, welcome to the table. Today I wanna talk about min-maxing.

You may have heard this term being thrown about, sometimes in a negative light, and I wanted to go over what does this mean? First of all, minimum, maximum, worst and best. People do this min-maxing idea to try to make their character as optimal as possible. This means making the choices that will make it the strongest version of their type of character. You may even hear people talking about builds. Where they might like “I’m making an Assassin build” or something to that effect. The idea is to be the strongest version of that that they can be in the shortest amount of time.

Now, personally, I don’t min-max a lot, maybe a little bit here and there on certain aspects. I tend to try to see how my character would develop over time and kind of see as it goes. But I have an idea of where I want to go with the character. I don’t, for example, build a rogue and then give it no dexterity. That could be a fun idea to do. But I try to at least optimize a little bit for the choices I’m making.

If you really want to get into min-maxing, there’s a lot of different things that you have to know about the system and learn from others, so I don’t advise it as a beginner. As a beginner, you should be learning about how to play the game. You should be learning about what the different classes do and getting a baseline. I think min-maxing is something that’s great when you then want to go to the next level and really start getting control of progression through levels. Progression of your character.

If you don’t ever want to min-max, that is absolutely OK. Sometimes you want to build a character with a specific idea. There is going to be limitations on that character. There are flaws. That is a great way to play. It’s something I really like to do a lot. If you’re in a story though that is very combat heavy, min-maxing can sometimes be helpful. You don’t want to be the one dragging the party down because you’re not at the optimum level that everybody else is.

That being said, when we’re talking about making an inclusive table, your dungeon master should be trying to make it so that whether you min-max or not does not affect your ability to enjoy the game.

So my advice is, if you’re brand new to this, avoid the min-maxing. Maybe learn about that later. See what other people have done, ask some questions in forums, but start by just playing through the system and not worrying about whether or not you have the greatest build possible.

Remember, you’re always welcome at the table!