Going through some of the comments, I've realized that of course "building a min-maxed monster" represents challenge at the
strategic level, whereas building a non-optimal character that is what it is, and seeing how far one can push that character through the game is more of a
tactical challenge (how well one knows the combat rules and options).
IOW, it so happens that with every system there are exploitable gaps that allow the creation of a character that's like Godzilla relative to the game's mobs, and relative to average builds that would all work more or less similarly at a tactical level (balance). Finding that gap is the challenge the min-maxer takes on (and that's what makes it a kind of PvP in some sense: effectively that type of player is trying to "beat" the designer).
This is making it sound more complicated and grandiose than it actually is, but I'm putting it in the most general terms to cover the kinds of systems you get sometimes (like in MMOs) that
are quite opaque at first glance, and take a while for autists to figure out. OFC in something like D&D, which is long over-familiar to us now, it could be as simple as pushing STR to 19 and dumping CHA or INT (never dump WIS
). The type of character that represents is either a stinking hulk or a musclebound moron, who nobody would ever want or tolerate in a party (except the ultra pragmatist who says, "Wellllll ... if he can kill those orcs, can't we, erm, put up with the smell?"
)
But hang on (the autist can say smugly), isn't that just another one of your "imaginative characters that you've dreamed up and you want to roleplay?" HMMMM??? What's the difference between my magnificent "muscle-bound moron "and your "charming, effeminate weakling with nimble fingers?" Well yes, but it just so happens that computer games tend towards combat encounters just because they're easier to represent on a monitor than things like, "Darius' winning smile caught the Countess off-guard."
So in theory the two aspects
aren't immiscible. In fact, from the abstract point of view, "building any old character and seeing how it rolls"
is exactly what the min-maxer is doing.
It's just that
in practice it's hard to design a videogame that's rich in alternative, non-combat ways of getting from A to B. Many developers do try to some extent, but it ends up satsifying no-one really. Even trying to figure out the relative reward weighting for skull-bashing vs winning smiles is an impossible task. It's just so much more work that isn't worth the effort (and by now there's been a feedback loop: players have come to expect combat-centric gameplay - to a point where one almost agrees with the idea of just stripping the other options away and having all possible characters be muscle-bound morons, dextrous elves or cackling Mekons from the start). The conflict between rp player and powergamer was bad enough in the tabletop setting (because there has to be a fair amount of combat even in the tabletop setting), but it's just so much more magnified in a CRPG context.
So again, we come down to this. Until the advent of proper AI, the only way of solving the problem (apart from developers heroically putting tons more non-combat stuff into their games than the ROI warrants, and magically getting the reward balance for combat vs. non-combat solutions right) is to have online dungeons or persistent worlds, as in NWN/NWN2, where you have a (non-malicious) human DM in a videogame, guiding a party of players through the virtual world and designing, on the fly, encounters that give more elbow room for richly imaginative
non-combat solutions to problems (solutions that can be represented in interpersonal dialogue and don't always have to be represented in the game's graphics). The limiting case of that (having one DM per single player) is too ridiculous, yet it would be the only way of really solving the problem for single-player games (though it is solvable when you eventually have "one decently smart, but non-malicious AI per player").
The Gordian Knot cutting solution is of course to say, "Huh, well that's just what this virtual world is like, musclebound morons survive and thrive and weaklings die." So your cunning, effemininate, nimble-fingered weakling just has to wait for a game in which only those who can navigate court intrigue can survive and muscle-bound morons are shot on sight
