One of my first homes on the internet was the official D&D 3rd Edition Character Optimization Forums. It was a place for weirdos who'd read every book cover to cover, and it had two sides. One was helping people make a cool character that would also be effective in an edition of D&D that was notoriously full of bad build choices. The other was just absolutely breaking the game: finding strange combos among dozens of rulebooks that used and abused the "rules as written" to spit on "rules as intended" and crank out unplayable combos that did things like make a guy who could throw boulders hard enough to kill a god, or a kobold who could abuse shapeshifting to become so strong even boulder guy couldn't kill them.
So now, more than two decades later, I am really quite excited to be a little powergaming freak in Baldur's Gate 3. Unlike PC Gamer editor Robin Valentine, who recently argued that you'll have more fun if you don't min-max in Baldur's Gate 3, I'm going to squeal like a hog in mud while I min-max just the most absolutely, positively busted characters I can using every ounce of power this videogame gives me. That's my kind of fun.
