Does this ever interfere with your enjoyment? It does me, and yet I'm compelled to do it quite a bit. Games like New Vegas are the worst, uhg!

Yes, I refuse to minmax. 2e was the worst. I made a concious choice to be happy with stats of "12". Play the concept, use your imagination. Minmaxing is one step away from reloading and reloading to beat random number generators.

EDIT: Minmax in Goblins is awesome! Looking for a good hyperlink now...

I am going to favourite this thread because I'm interested in what you guys have to say

What exactly is min/maxing? I've seen the term before, but I don't know what it means.

I'm a compulsive min/maxer usually I think but New Vegas isn't the worst of it in that sense by a longshot I think. Besides making the trip from level 1 all the way to vegas to get the intel implant there isn't much to Min/Max I think (apart from maybe planning out the perks you're going to take_

Oblivion on the other hand ... with it's really strange skillup system, where you basically had to avoid levelling certain skills, or taking them as main etc to get the best improvement... that took away from my enjoyment when I started getting into that.

On the other hand, games like Neverwinter 2 Stomrs of Zehir, where you get to create a band of adventurers from different races/classes etc. That's very fun to min/max :)

"I want to make a suuper bestest Wizard character ever, so I'll decrease the Strength and such to the very minimum, and increase the Intelligence and stuff to the very maximum"

Or similar with different attributes/skills/stuff you can decide and according to what you're trying to be best at. Making imbalanced characters and all that.

I end up doing it a lot, especially in Fallout games. I've tried to make balanced/natural characters, but I always end up being bothered by not being the best in the field of my current interest.

I'll do it with hack and slash games. Put it all in kill 'em all with stabby things stats and not worry about anything else until that's maxed.

Indeed he is. I was actually really touched when he made the birthday surprise for Kin.

More on-topic... I more often end up max-maxing (make of that what you will).

I'm surprised you mention New Vegas as an example. You only need to get most skills to 80 then with the comprehension perk all skill magazines buff them to 100.

Depends on the game. Some games really give you no choice, and the best option is to use only a few stats / skills / abilities / whatever.

In some cases just 64 since you can get 16 from skill books. So skill points are really the least of your problems in that game.

you may not get everything maxed, but you're really not going to gimp yourself in New Vegas unless you go really crazy. The preferred 'min-max' in new vegas is dropping Charisma to 1 since it is probably the weakest stat

Yeah a decent speech skill + books will see you though most of the game so Charisma is mostly useless. Intelligence is the one to max or at least put it at 9 then get the +1 implant. Some will say Luck is important but really that only helps in the casino's and eventually you get kicked out of them. The Finesse perk will give you the equvalent of 5 points of Luck in combat. New Vegas does force you to pick a build unlike Fallout 3 which was a munchkins paradise. You can go nuts in Fallout 3 and max everything.

Interfere with it? No, because if I create a min/max character it's because I wanted to play a min/max characte;, it's my choice for this run through of the RPG I'm playing (whether a computer game or a 'proper' RPG with real people).

I will be good at what I do but weak in a lot of other areas, makes for an interesting characterisation IMHO.

These [url=http://www.goblinscomic.com/03232010/]links best illustrate the concept of minmaxing and Minmax from Goblins (he's the Barbarian and he, and Goblins, are funny).

Min/Maxing is what kills most MMORPGs, sadly, mostly due to the incredible flexibility of their game systems and the pure dedication of the people who play them.

It's a s**t, because when some developers give in to the urge to balance the game around these Min/Maxers, (Hello Blizzard) it has a really nasty knock-on effect on the rest of the subscribers, and it kills a lot of really creative and fun character builds.

Min/Maxing in single player RPGs is a lot less of a problem, as it only effects the player themselves if they choose to play that way, and some games will automatically balance themselves to account for it. (Which is something I hate in RPGs.)