Are you alright comrade? Vodka finally got your last braincells?
Da.
You seem unable, or unwilling, to understand my post. I never professed to a game designer, and your tirade still conflates entirely different things.
Or maybe you haven't understood mine AND you don't understand how some things you think different are ultimately the same.
Minmaxing, as I said, is the process of making your character as powerful as you can. This process may be too easy ("should have done the bloody obvious"), or the game may be lacking in documentation ("look it up in wiki"). But those problems are not inherent, or required in the process of minmaxing.
Sure they are. And the reason for that is very simple: all those chargen menus are not where your systems are and not where your gameplay is. They are simply not meaty enough for that and they actually shouldn't be for that would just be obtuse design.
And if the power is easily quantifiable in your RPG, especially between characters at the same stage of their careers (level basically), I'd say it already failed to be a good RPG.
And no matter what game you might have in mind that is not guilty of these sins, I guarantee you one of two things is true: Either your choices don't matter at all, or you can minmax and you were too blind to see it.
Why not take the third option: The choices matter in that they change the nature of game being played. They do so by defining the role which determines perspective on game's challenges, and possibly even goals to some extent. You know, 'role' as in 'Role Playing Game'? Sounds familiar?
The bottom line is that chargen is not a (mini)game. It's an interface for expressing a character. As an interface it should follow all the rules of well designed UI - be expressive, clear, and not force user to spend extra effort avoiding invalid states (failing builds in this case). Minigames tend to make games shittier - why would you expect chargen to be an exception from this rule?
You are so close to getting it, that I cannot understand what your issue is. Minmaxin IS how you become a rogue who can "sneak, break in and manipulate people".
First thing first: I used worn out archetype in my example because I wanted to set up a simple, easily understood example.
If you do not minmax at all in a proper RPG, what you get is a terrible character that can't do anything.
And that's the actual problem here: RPGs (proper or not) tend to be designed by mouth-breathing retards who unsurprisingly do excessively poor job doing that.
If your RPG features different ability scores than maxed out and dump stat, then they either serve a purpose or are excess fat in need of trimming. If to make an effective %classname I have to build a cookie cutter archetype, then just give me a bunch of prefabricated archetypes with ability to slap different portrait and name on them, drop all that pointless ability score shit and put the effort somewhere where it will matter instead.
Alternatively make it so I can actually get interesting outcomes out of non-standard builds, and no, without calling those builds suboptimal. But then you have got no minmaxing.
You can mix and match too, for example you can block a portion of your build space off as not viable PCs but still use it for NPCs.
Characters are defined by BOTH. A rogue and a commoner are equally unable to cast spells or take a sword to the face. What separates them are all those things a rogue CAN do. A properly built rogue, that is.
Sure those two are just flipside perspectives, but perspective matters.
A good perspective is one that realizes that in a computer game player gets a finite toolbox - basically moves actions and types of interaction you have built into your game. In an RPG your character build delimits a subset of that. Being able to do everything is hard baseline, actual characters are below that. So yeah, a character is defined by what they cannot do and grow by taking off some of their limitations.
Min-maxing shouldn't be the base design of your game unless you are creating anti-fun game like AoD. But a game shouldn't be designed to keep min-maxing out entirely. It should be designed as a normal game but if the player is capable of finding the min-max buried beneath it then it is reward for the player to break the game.
That's actually the problem with min-maxing it shares with all the other design anti-patterns like grind, RTWP*, combat XP in not exclusively combat based game, even savescumming (though designing good save system avoiding scumming other than mandatory ironman is non-trivial) - the "right" amount is completely arbitrary and game gets broken when player leans in too hard.
*) Yes, RTWP. It is designed around specific amount of micro.
I wouldn't call optimizing a character to be min maxing. You're not looking to break the character, nor are you looking to break the character's identity. All you're doing is making them better at their job. For example, if someone is a fighter, it'd be natural for them to have a high STR. After all, being a fighter is quite physical intensive and laborious. On the same coin a wizard will too have a high INT.
It is breaking the character's identity if you, for example, want to make a smart fighter, but know that you will actually be wasting the points you should have put in str and make a dumb oaf. It is indicative of poorly designed game that you will want to maximize that strength score even at the expense of other abilities rather than consider a more rounded character.
And there you have it - where minmaxing pokes out you don't have to dig deep to find a massive heap of dung.
It's like some kids like to play with their toys, while others like to break them open and see how they work.
It has always been breaking them open to see how they work then reassembling them for me.
It seems rather pointless to try to continue playing with broken toys.
