Min max means minimizing the downsides while maximizing the upsides.
That’s weird! I always understood it as minimizing scores you don’t care about to further juice your most desired stats. Eg. Sawing off a shotgun to make it more viable as a quick-draw close-range problem solver. What you’re describing means “Optimizing”, to me
To my knowledge you’re correct. In the context of DND you put the least possible points in attributes you don’t care about, while maximizing the stats that do your damage. So you can end up with a sorcerer with more charisma than Jack Nicholson, who is too dumb to tie his own shoes.
That’s max-max
As everyone else has said, this is not at all what min-maxing is. Min-maxing is dumping the things you don’t care about to be very good at the things you do. I present an example in the form of the excellent Darths and Droids.
I always think of quintessential min-maxing being to use 5e point buy to choose the stats 8, 15, 8 15, 8, 15 or whatever, literally making your relevant build stats maximum while dumping all else.
It’s not always downsides though. Just a less desirable stat for the build than the one(s) you’re maximizing.
Median max, aka Med Max
Mcgonagall: why is it always you three?
Artificer, warlock, druid
thanks, I’ve got to show this to several people
I remember back in the day of playing the original gold box Pools of Radiance - you can build your party of six characters - and it has a stat rolling generation method, where you can just roll over and over until you get stats you like…
BUT… at level 1 you can “customize your character” which lets you just manually assign stats (I think the idea was so that you could re-create your tabletop characters in the game.) - but as a kid we would always just set every stat to 18 with it.
