4 Ways Your Min-Max Build is Trash

So before the mob burns me at the stake, I want to be clear; if you are playing in a campaign that is all about having the best build with the best damage output and to average over 100 damage per round per character, have fun you gods among men! This one is for the average game of Dungeons & Dragons where you don’t normally take on armies by yourself.

Now that I hopefully have avoided fireballs aimed at my house, let’s talk about why your super broken build is actually trash.

1. It hurts party dynamics.

D&D is a cooperative role-playing game. Making a character who can run up and take on a tarrasque by themselves while the rest of your party struggles against the lone fire giant can suck the fun out of it for others. This makes your party feel like they aren’t playing their character right and doesn’t give them a chance to shine. The fighter probably wants to have their moment of glory — so does the bard and rogue — but if you out damage the fighter, out talk the bard, and out stealth the rogue…. then there’s no real point for the party to be there. Making a character overpowered by casting spells like haste or holy weapon is a blast and makes it feel like the entire team had a hand in the success instead of you doing everything yourself.

2. Makes the game harder.

I have been a dungeon master for many years as well as a player and can say with absolute certainty that it is difficult to balance combat for a party when one character can take on enemies much stronger than the rest of their party.

Case in point: I had a player who would spend hours trying to find out how to maximize their damage every single round. When the player next to them would cast moonbeam or heal because there wasn’t as much of a point to do much else. These scenarios make combat either extremely easy or way too difficult — or both.

Whenever it became the min/max player’s turn, they would destroy anything they touched so other players had no chance to shine and would often become bored and frustrated during combat. On the other hand, the dungeon master might make a combat that is hard for the min-max player and wipe out the rest of the party in a single round.

In my scenario above, to make combat interesting for everyone, I would change mechanics of monsters to make it harder for that one player but a steady combat for the rest, which made me feel like I was picking on the min-max player. Don’t get me wrong! They made an awesome character but everything was suddenly immune to a type of damage or knew silence or had antimagic cone in an effort to balance against them.

The goal of D&D is for everyone to have fun. These kinds of combat encounters create imbalance and no matter which way the dungeon master tries to go, someone at the table will either be bored or feel picked on.

3. Ways to get around it.

As mentioned above there is enough ways in DnD to specifically get around every type of supernova you have. Antimagic cones are the bane of coffeelocks. Saves are the bane of super high AC tank builds. Damage immunities are a nice way to stop a specific kind of nova’s damage output (i.e. fire, bludgeoning, etc.). Now it isn’t cool to build an encounter that way just to make a player useless, but it’s just not as cool to make a character where the rest of your party doesn’t need to be there. The build itself could cause more problems and arguments in your group than anything else, and can suck the fun right on out of those dice rolls.

4. They aren’t as fun as you think

Everyone has that in-game moment where they roll a Nat 1 and it becomes something they will never forget. One of my players was killed by finger of death at the beginning of combat. (I rolled really well) and they became a zombie. The player immediately took this in stride and role-played a darkened grave cleric bard zombie. They even assisted the enemy. It stole the show, not the person who did 80 damage the next round. The person who died and became a lowly zombie had the most fun, caused the most laughs, and was the most memorable months later.

So Basically

There is a mindset with video games that the end goal is to beat the game and win. However, winning with D&D is telling a fantastic story with your friends and having fun, rolling with your character’s failures as well as their successes, and overcoming obstacles as a group. In fact, failures can make the best memories in D&D if you embrace them.

There is no wrong way to play D&D. However, min-max builds can create problems. Anyone can look up the "best" build for their class, but to make something special (even if it doesn’t put out the max damage every round) is just as exciting as destroying a lich in one round. Maybe even more so.