Minmaxer's Delight

"I have no clue. I don't think it would be much fun honestly. Pun-Pun was never created with the intention of being played, and any game that allows a Pun-Pun character will quickly degenerate from there."

—Khan_the_Destroyer on the D&D character he created

The advantage/power/feat/character option equivalent of One Stat to Rule Them All. May overlap with Game Breaker, though the ability just might be a no-brainer to take or very good rather than broken.

Also, it may be a disadvantage whose point value far exceeds the inconvenience it causes, that is, the opposite of That One Disadvantage.

As the trope name indicates, it is a godsend to players who enjoy Min-Maxing.

These types of player abuses are most easily countered with Rule Zero—the Game Master is always right. Abuses can be completely averted with a simple "No" from the GM.

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Examples of Minmaxer's Delight include:

Advantages

MMORPGs

• The Bottomless Appetite ability in Billy vs. SNAKEMAN, especially when combined with TACOS (ally) and TACOs (items).
• Stamina from the Fitness pool in City of Heroes gives a permanent boost to a character's Endurance recovery rate, with the only drawback being that you have to take two other powers in the Fitness pool to unlock it. As a pool power, it can be taken by characters of any archetype, and so it came to be viewed as being a mandatory choice for any character to be viable. With the Issue 19 update, the Fitness pool has become inherent, granted to all characters automatically and freeing up the power choices that would otherwise be filled by Stamina and its prerequisites.
• World of Warcraft has the Talent system, which is a variant of the Alternate Advancement system from EverQuest. Some of the talents were so utterly ubiquitous that every specialisation branch of a class had its ultimate, mathematically proven to be the best, distribution and everybody was using it. Cataclysm redesigned the system for talent trees to still have a base skeleton of "must take" talents with everything else being useful in some cases, but optional and chosen on personal preferences.
  • One example is playing a Priest. You have 3 specializations to choose from: Shadow (damage dealer, enemy debuffer), Holy (healer), and Discipline (a little of both, plus being a Barrier Warrior). Now, if you're going to be a Discipline Priest, it's almost guaranteed you'll take those talents that boost you "Power Word: Shield" (the "barrier" in the Discipline's Barrier Warrior). Also, if you want to do more than just cast shields on everybody, you might want to take those talents that buff the few offensive Holy spells you have. Unless your group is totally incompetent, you won't need to heal them all the time, right?
• In the early days of Asheron's Call, the Item Magic skill quickly became almost mandatory to have in order to have a viable character in the game. Item Magic allows you to buff your items, debuff enemy items, makes locks easier to pick, makes it easier to identify the stats on items, and teleport to nearly any location in the game, provided there's a portal there and you've seen said portal (though you could only be bound to one portal at a time). The game world is approximately the size of Rhode Island and one easily accessible dungeon had portals to nearly every city. It didn't take long to reach a point where even an otherwise pure melee character would find it necessary to acquire Item Magic either from character creation or as soon as possible afterward, if only for the fast travel to that dungeon.

Role Playing Games

• The Gifted Trait in Fallout 1 & 2 gave you one towards each of your SPECIAL stats at a cost of some skill points per level. Not only does a 1 to each stat mitigate some of the skill point loss in and of itself (skill levels are based on stat levels initially, and higher IN gives you more skill points per level on its own), but there are far more skillbook powerups throughout the game than PIP-Boy stat powerups. The opposite Trait, Skilled, gives more skill points per level at a cost of reducing your Perk gain rate to 1 every 4 levels instead of every 3 levels... which is actually a ridiculously huge loss, since Perks provide unique bonuses like healing more HP with medical skills or vastly increasing the chance of getting a critical hit. Some perks gave free skill points, but the special effects were more powerful.
  • Not to mention the Fast Shot and Small Frame Traits. Fast Shot makes all weapons (Fallout 1) or all ranged weapons (Fallout 2) fire faster at the expense of being unable to make called shots. Since burst-fire guns can't make called shots anyway, the drawback vanishes around the second town, and at high levels can be used with a few traits to dish out six critical hits each turn (which can very easily make for six kills each turn). Small Frame grants one stat point (which is keyed to Agility, but points can be manually redistributed anywhere) in exchange for reduced carrying capacity. Not so great in Fallout 1 (followers aren't too bright and can't level up or equip better armour), and but in Fallout 2 you can get an NPC/Permanent Companion/pack mule in the very first town you enter.
  • Skilled in New Vegas. Instead of reducing perk rate (very bad) as in the first two games, it reduces your XP gain, which doesn't matter in a game where you hit the level cap far before end-game.
• In Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, at level-up you have to choose between increasing your HP by 5, your FP 5, or your Badge Points ("slots" into which you can equip badges) by 3. But there were badges which cost 3 BP that increased your HP or FP by 5, making the BP option strictly advantageous once you could start collecting those badges.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons (3.5 Edition): The Natural Spell feat allowed a druid to cast spells while in wild shape form, making it an easy pick.
  • Order of the Stick: "Wait, I'm confused--there are druids who DON'T take the Natural Spell feat??"
  • Likewise, anyone playing a Swordsage is going to pick up Adaptive Style at 1st level, as it lets you refresh (swap out) all of your maneuvers in the time it takes to recover one normally (The feat is considered good for most Martial Adepts, but key for Swordsage).
    • Though might not be a Min Maxers delight since even with it they don't compare to the two other martial adept classes. more fixing an inherant flaw in the class than Min-Maxing.
  • "Entangling Exhalation" is a must-have for any character with a Breath Weapon (particularly dragonfire adepts, who specialize in them), which lets them inflict a potent debuff in exchange for half damage.
  • Divine Metamagic (Persistent Spell) allows already-frightening Cleric spells like, say, Divine Power to last the entire day, without so much as a spell level increase. Made even worse if the Cleric carries lots of Nightsticks, which give you even more turn attempts to burn...
  • Being Human falls under this in 3.5, as it grants a free feat (a rare ability normally only gained at level 1, 3, 6, etc., that has an insane number of options and can help qualify for many a Prestige Class) and extra skill points (not as useful, but very helpful for qualifying for stuff and good for classes with the class skill options to make use of it).
  • Power Attack for melee characters. To wit, enemy HP scales quickly. Your damage output does not scale nearly so quickly. Power Attack, and the things that build off of it, end up being responsible for offsetting the bulk of this. Of course it's still a losing battle.
  • Likewise, the ability to Pounce (or something mechanically similar) is almost mandatory for higher level melee characters. It gives the ability to make a full attack after charging, so it can mean the difference between spending your first turn getting off just one attack, or half a dozen.
  • Tomb-Tainted Soul is the mandatory first-level feat for dread necromancers, because it means that their many negative-energy attacks can be used to infinitely heal themselves.
  • Then there's the Embrace the Dark Chaos/Shun the Dark Chaos feat shuffle. To explain, Embrace the Dark Chaos replaces one of your feats with a vile feat, but forces you to be evil, damned when you die, and no-one like you (not to mention that vile feats generally suck). Shun the Dark Chaos means you can swap out that vile feat for a normal one. This allows one to replace all the sucky mandatory feats with any other feat. Where it really gets broken is that some races, like Elves, get weapon proficiency feats instead of just weapon proficiencies like everyone else that can then be shuffled away to get much better feats (in the case of Elves that's six extra feats).
  • Dragon Magazine had the "Eidetic Caster" class archetype for wizards, which traded in the familiar class feature in return for not needing to use a spell book. You still had to prepare spells every day, but you could now prepare every spell you knew from memory instead of needing spell books and special inks. That saves you tens of thousands of gold pieces over the lifespan of a character, as well as making you effectively impossible to imprison for longer than a day.
• In the D20 Modern sourcebook Cyberscape (a sourcebook about cybernetic implants), you get that little gem: An implant called Nasal Filter. It does Exactly What It Says on the Tin, filtering any airborne harmful chemicals or bacterias, giving a +6 to Fortitude saves (i.e. good extra protection) against airborne poisons and disease (including tear gas). But Wait! There's More! It's purchase DC is a mere 18 (meaning it can be purchased by any level one character) and it doesn't counts against implant limits (in the standard cybernetics rules, you can only have a limited number of implants, depending on how much constitution you have (that is to say how physically healthy you are)). Far from a gamebreaker in a game where gas masks can be readily bought from the Internet, but still an implant you have no legitimate reason not to take, just in case.
• Combat Reflexes in GURPS. A poster on RPG.net claimed every player in his group took it and renamed it "Don't Suck". It costs 15 to give +1 to dodge, parry, and block, then a pile of minor effects. Enhanced Dodge alone (+1 to dodge) costs 15 points. Puzzle that out. By Word of Kromm, it is intentionally under-priced to help lower-point characters "not die all the time."
  • The ability to assemble advantages by modifying pre-existing ones makes inventing these an amusement for some. M.U.N.C.H.K.I.N. is one classic (though not actually legal) example. Game Masters are expected to regulate player-designed advantages.
• BESM has the same thing with Extra Actions. A single extra action essentially doubles your combat prowess (making two attacks instead of one), a second is tripling your ability, etc. Most GMs either ban the ability completely or limit it to speedster-type characters.
• Earlier versions of the merit Silver Resistance in Werewolf: The Apocalypse.
  • Similarly, Fair Glabro. Glabro Form is one of the five werewolf shapes, and while it typically boosts your Strength and Stamina, it leaves you looking like Lawrence Talbot under the full moon. That is, unless you take this two-point Merit that merely leaves you looking like a very hirsute bodybuilder.
    • Of course, you have to balance that against the fact that Werewolf was never heavy on the sorts of situations where looking weird would actually be a problem.
• In 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons, the release of the Weapon Expertise and Implement feats was heralded by many screams and gnashing of teeth. Being a re-institution of the forbidden Unnamed (now a feat bonus under official errata) Bonus that, for just a Heroic feat, still scales into Paragon and Epic tiers. Widely remarked by CharOp superstars as making every class "have one less feat" for any character that does any attacking. What's even worse is that when you break the system in half and look at the gooey math, you can see that the +1 bonus at around the half-way point at all tiers is pretty much expected—so in some ways, this is a Game Breaker that is pre-broken to be necessary (if one considers a 15% shift in accuracy to be necessary)! Some suspect that this was pretty much a patch to the game system, albeit one accomplished through a feat rather than through more permanent adjustments.
  • To clarify for those who haven't played it, player modifiers only automatically scale at +1 every two levels while monster modifiers scale at +1 per level meaning that you needed to come up with +15 in modifiers over 30 levels through feats, magic items, ability score increases, and tactics just to keep up. The game comes prebuilt to require this minmaxing and tells you the basics of how to do it.
  • The Essentials supplement line added variant versions that also give specific secondary benefits based on the type of weapon (or magical implement) they're taken for, in order to add a little more consequence to weapon type as well as make the feat do more than just dully ratchet up your attack roll bonus.
• Though the specific rule has since been removed, the original Zelda d20 rules included the feat "Attunement", which bonded the character with any creature with intelligence of at least 3, and provided bonuses that varied based on what creature it was. Attuning a character with a fairy provided a +1 bonus to all attack rolls (which beats out weapon focus, since the latter only applies to one kind of weapon) and a +2 bonus to Reflex saves (identical to the bonus given by the feat "Lightning Reflexes"), essentially giving the character two feats for the price of one. In addition, faeries had the ability to cast Cure serious wounds once per day as a 5th level caster. There was, however, the disadvantage that the player had to be within 50 ft of the attuned creature, and could thus be separated from it (or the creature could presumably be targeted and killed).
  • Not to mention the fact that Fairies are known to never shut up. "Hey, Listen!".
• In Legend of the Five Rings, there both Elemental Blessing and Enlightenment reduce the cost of increasing your traits, making them more than pay for themselves in the long run. It's not even that long of a wait if you spend your points right.
  • Friend of the Elements is also very good because it gives you a free Raise on all rolls involving a Ring of your choice for only a few points. For those keeping track, this means that you get roughly the equivalent of a +1 to two traits for a fraction of the cost of improving one.
• In Los Angeles 2035, two levels of Aikido are almost mandatory for every character. With those two levels, you have enough to buy the Reaction technique, giving you one free defensive action per turn. In a game here you gain actions as a result of your initiative roll, which is remade every turn, and need to spend one of your action to dodge or parry once, one extra defense each turn is a really good ability.
• One Exalted merit, with a name like Brutal Attack, allowed you to use Strength instead of Dexterity for attack rolls. This was a must-have for anyone who intended to engage the enemy in close combat, for a simple reason. Until the sourcebook containing merits and flaws came along, Dexterity was One Stat to Rule Them All and Strength was meh. As a result, there were a lot of cheap ways to increase your Strength, not so many for Dexterity. Especially absurd for Lunars, who could just take a tyrant lizard spirit shape and access, from character creation, Strength 14 in a system where 5 is defined as "peak human" strength.

Turn-Based Strategy

• In Final Fantasy Tactics, there's the Archer class's Support Ability, Concentration, with which you never miss in physical and some magical attacks. Then there's the Samurai class's Blade Grasp Reaction Ability, which ensures that your units will rarely get physically hit ever again.
  • And then there's the Calculator skillset, which lets you cast nearly any spell instantly, at infinite range, at 0 MP cost, essentially turning the character you give it to a Person of Mass Destruction. The Calculator has the shortcoming of its spell targeting being very different from any other class, with the result that the only way to hit the intended target(s) might also put some (or in extreme cases, all) of your own party members in the line of fire. Fortunately, that flaw can very easily be turned in an asset by spamming Holy (a strong spell that no enemy is immune to) and equipping your party members with items that absorb Holy. Once that's done, it's a good thing if your Calculator hits himself and/or an ally with his spell, because they'll be healed by it. The sheer amount of math required to use this effectively is easily bypassed by setting a calculator to be computer controlled, as the AI uses this class surprisingly well considering the lack of enemy Calculators.
  • Final Fantasy Tactics Advance also has Concentrate, here increasing the accuracy of physical attacks by a flat 50% and status effects by 20% (20 and 50 of 100, not of base accuracy). This includes Instant Kill moves whose only weakness was a low natural accuracy. Less celebrated but still potent is focusing on classes with a large speed growth, since the game's initiative system allows sufficiently fast characters to get multiple turns.
  • A2 nerfed Concentration to a flat 5% accuracy bonus (as in 5% of 100%, not 5% of the current accuracy) and also made base accuracy for most physical attack 99% instead of tremendously varying by class. Speed is also nerfed by changing it to a percentage chance to increase by 1 each level. Though it has its own in Halve MP (because MP starts at 0 and grows each turn) or Blood Price for any Magick-user.
• SP Regen in Super Robot Wars Original Generation. SP, the SRW series equivalent of Mana, is the most limited resource in the games and the hardest to replenish. In most games, you must equip a consumable item at the expense of mech parts or use very expensive support spells. SP Regen gives 10 SP per turn and many characters get very useful spells that only cost 10-15 SP.
  • Ditto Attacker. Giving a 1.2x multiplier to damage dealt when above a certain morale threshold makes it mandatory for any boss-slayer and arguably just any unit in general. Attacker is meant to make up for the lack among the Original Generation cast of abilities like Mazin Power which do the same thing, but it just translates into everyone getting the skill instead of it being someone's signature trait.
  • SRW Alpha 3 and Z took the less minmax-friendly route of making SP Regen an inherent skill available only to a select few pilots such as Loran Cehack and Lacus Clyne. These pilots are usually top-tier just for having SP Regen alone. SP Regen can also be given temporarily to other pilots using an extremely rare part, but only two-three of these are typically made available.

Disadvantages

Role Playing Game

• High elves in Daggerfall are immune to paralysis. The player can make a custom class with a critical weakness to paralysis, which allows the selection of more advantageous options, and will never trigger because the immunity takes priority over the critical weakness.
  • Worse than that. Your custom class can have crippling weaknesses to virtually everything, and then just ignore them by buying immunity to all magic.
  • Fixed in the Daggerfall Unity recreation. Purchasing a weakness to something a race is immune to reduces their immunity to a resistance.

Tabletop Games

• Flaws in Dungeons & Dragons (3.5). For the low, low price of making you worse at something you're probably never going to do (for instance, taking the "Shaky" flaw for a pure melee character that doesn't plan on ever making a ranged attack), you get bonus feats, which are very, very, very precious. In extreme cases, your new feat can make you completely immune to something the flaw gave you a weakness to.
  • This applies to flaws in pretty much any system where they raise their ugly head. In oWoD games and GURPS you can almost always pick a bunch of minor disadvantages that will never ever hinder you in actual play. In worse cases, these disadvantages actually give you justifications for being an asshole.
  • GURPS does price its advantages higher than the point value of the opposite-number disadvantage, though, in an attempt to mitigate this (ie. to pile up on points from disadvantages you generally have to take severe ones.)
    • GURPS also forbids taking an advantage and its corresponding disadvantage.
    • In addition, a disadvantage can be taken only if it would actually come up in normal play. Taking 'Phobia: Fear of Oceans' if you were doing a game set on the planet Arrakis, for example, would be worth zero points.
  • The New World of Darkness games have a flaw system that averts this; you get no extra points at character creation for taking the flaw, the only way your flaw gives you EXP is if it actually affects you in a completely negative way in play.
  • Deadlands did the same thing: Hindrances, as they were called, must come up in play to give you an advantage, though some of them were hysterically fun (like the one where your character knows he's in a pen-and-paper RPG and is paranoid about his "character sheet" burning up in a fire.)
  • Dragon Magazine had some of the best 3.5 flaws for this trope. One of them was called "No Familiar," for Sorcerers and Wizards, which was the same as a free feat with no drawbacks, since nobody ever used the familiar anyway (a weak creature that caused you to lose XP if it was killed.) If you actually did want your familiar for some reason, there was a feat that granted you a one with abilities based on your caster level instead of your class level, so if you were going into a Prestige class, this flaw-feat combo amounted to a free net advantage.
  • D20 Modern has the "Sponsored" enchantment that reduces the cost of magic armor by 2 in exchange for being covered in logos. If for some reason paint doesn't work, there's a second property that lets armor look like normal clothing while still protecting as armor and it increases cost by only 1.
• Abstinent (Tobacco) in Aces And Eights: Shattered Frontier. Free points, greater life expectancy, plus some money saved on top of it.
• Depending on the game, a min-maxer in some Old World of Darkness games could get points for some truly pathetic flaws. Do you wear glasses and have a mild caffeine addiction? That could be leveraged into two points in a game where new characters have only 15 discretionary ones to spend. A real munchkin could go so far as to buy shatter-resistant lenses, carry a back-up pair, and then have a small supply of caffeine pills on hand just in case the Story Teller ever tried to put the character at a disadvantage. Such lame flaws tended to get rejected by the GM, of course, but they were there in the rules as written.
• Despite the game's nature of having deadly, deadly disadvantages, Legend of the Five Rings is unique in that many of the disadvantages can simply never come up. A Caster can take Elemental Imbalance at maximum ranks for up to 8 free points, and all they have to do is simply never cast from that element which would otherwise be available to them. A Fire Shugenja giving up the ability to cast Earth spells doesn't lose much. Doubt gives several points, at the expense of being slightly worse at a skill you never use. Ascetic is similarly a good choice for characters who don't rely on equipment.
  • Touch of the Void has a chance to daze you when you use Void Points, but improves their benefit. Once you have a high enough Willpower trait to resist being dazed, it becomes purely benificial. What's more, the penalty from daze doesn't last as long as the bonus from using a Void Point for tasks that take multiple rounds to complete.
• In most tabletop RPG that have it, the compulsive gambler disadvantage is basically free points for cool stuff. You don't have big problems with it because: 1) Having to win or lose 200 gold pieces a day or suffer stat reduction is no big deal when you earn mountains of gold in one adventure. 2) Gambling is usually legal, unlike drugs, and even if it's not, it's hard to enforce. 3) Aside from possible money loss, you don't suffer ill effects from gambling. 4) Thanks to the way disadvantages are defined, you could play a rogue addicted to games requiring high dexterity, basically ensuring you have a positive expected value with these games (ie: on the long run, you win more than you lose).
• GURPS has several "disadvantages" that compel you to kill things and take their stuff.
  • On the flip side, for anyone playing on the complete other end of the heroic scale, you have disadvantages that compel you to act heroic or tell the truth (though for the latter one, there's also the possibility that you're just very blatant when you lie).
  • Let's not forget the Weirdness Magnet "disadvantage." Attract all the weirdest possible events in the world? Some people call that condition "being player characters in an RPG."
    • It notably gives exactly the number of points needed for the Unflappability talent, which keeps you from panicking when the effects of Weirdness Magnet turn up.
  • There is nothing technically illegal about taking the "emergencies only" modifier for a discount on advantages like Hard to Kill, which are by definition emergency powers anyway. In many cases it may be a good idea for combat powers in general, assuming that combat in your setting is, in general, life-threatening. A case can also be made for taking a temporary Bloodlust disadvantage for emergency combat powers that will only come up in lethal-force situations anyway.
    • Actually, Hard to Kill also has non-emergency uses, such as making your character more likely to not die from illness or critical failures during medical treatment.
• Averted for plot-related disadvantages in Mutants and Masterminds, called "Complications". They only yield their benefit (free Hero Points) when and if they disadvantage your character in some way.
• "SINner" in the new version of Shadowrun. You have a SIN, an ID number (basically an American Social Security number) that allows the government to track everything you do with it. The catch? There is nothing preventing you from purchasing and using fake SIN cards (and indeed, one of the sample characters has this combo!). Five free points and legitimacy as a citizen. Not a bad catch.
  • There is actually a disadvantage -- for as long as you have a legitimate SIN in the system your real biometric data (fingerprints, DNA, etc.) are also in the system, meaning you have to be very careful not to leave behind physical evidence at crime scenes. SINless people riding the fake SIN train don't have this problem because they effectively can be DNA-matched only after they've already been arrested.^[1]
  • The alternative -- hacking your real SIN registry to change your biometric data -- is also non-feasible, because biometric identity verification is routine in many areas of 'civilized' daily life and an inability to use a fingerprint scanner or a retinal ID during your 'civilian' life would render you incapable of having one unless it was in some SINless zero-zone such as the Redmond Barrens anyway.
• In 5th edition The Dark Eye, Principles: Loyalty is a disadvantage worth 20 points, which means it gives the same number of points as missing a hand. Even if the character has to be loyal to more than party members, Obligation to the same target (10-30 points, depending on how powerful and disruptive to life it is) can be stacked with minimal extra penalty. Half the professions (premade selections that can be picked to speed up the otherwise slow Point Buy based character creation) in the Aventuria Companion splat outright have the combo.

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...I said a tip, top, The tippy, the tippy To the tip-tip top, your stats pop You're gonna rock a Bang bang to CHA So up jumps your STA So every monster you can beat!

1. ↑ It doesn't really matter how many names you have for Crime-Scene Fingerprint Match #XYZ if the address for all of them is "1060 West Addison" or equivalent, but a legitimate SIN has to use your real address.