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Message: <blockquote data-quote="steenan" data-source="post: 7478247" data-attributes="member: 23240">Some people just get a lot of fun from playing with numbers and ability combos. This kind of players often take strange, sub-optimal character concepts and make them surprisingly viable. They also often take support roles where they can have enormous effect on party effectiveness without overshadowing other players. I am one of them - I min-max because it's fun in itself.Some people get their fun from winning. Not being challenged, but just winning. They optimize characters to ensure that they win. This may be very problematic if it doesn't mesh with the group's playstyle, but is not a problem when everybody approaches play this way. This case is often made worse by a GM who focuses on challenging the optimized character, thus incentivizing the player to make them even more powerful.But the reason for min-maxing that I encountered most often is much more basic and universal. It's about player agency. In many games, failing rolls means that the player can't affect the fiction in the intended way. Bad rolls kill characters, thus negating the agency entirely. So to avoid that, players make characters who don't fail rolls they are interested in and who fight well so that they are hard to kill. That's not the only reason for focusing on combat. In D&D and similar games combat is the most mechanized part of the game and gives the most mechanical assurances. When I kill somebody, they are dead. Social and exploratory situations are much more handwavy, with less clear stakes, DCs dependent on DM judgement and no guarantees for how long the result will hold. Thus, players who want to feel in control focus on the part that is the most driven by hard rules.And it's clear that that's the reason when one observes how the same players make characetrs and play in different games. Games where players have more control over the narrative than just what their characters do, games where PC death is never a result of a random roll, games where social mechanics are as robust as combat ones.</blockquote>

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