Whats a Munchkin? - Page 17

Lord Carnifex · 01-06-2006, 04:19 AM

Once again, in agreement with TK_D:

Triumphing/surviving (sometimes surviving can be a sort of triumph) a climactic or exceptionally difficult encounter is worth a few extra xp, IMHO. But I tend to not think that killing things should be inherently worth points, except in dungeon crawl games especially suited to that mode of play.

A lot of interesting things have been said on this thread... most of which I wont try to recapitulate. Still, my thoughts...

Powergaming, in my head, is different from playing at an epic or high power level. Playing in a game where all the PC's are umpteenth level/coupla hundred points, and the scale of the game and the adversaries matches is perfectly fine and goog. My defenition of a power gamer (which may be included in other people's defenitions of munchkinism) is one who tries or succeeds in building a character overpowered compared o the other PC's and villains, i.e. one who min/maxes the third level fighter so he can take on Olympians and win...

An element of what might be Munchkinism that seems not to have been noted is the player whose character conception must be good at everything. One of the players in the group I game with sometimes falls into this area (I would consider him to have munchkin tendencies, but he's easy enough to restrain.) In a quasi-realistically scaled contemporary period game, he wanted his character to be a successful Renaissance Faire jouster; competitive Motor Cross biker; and a charming, socially deft Irish musician. He was frustrated because the game system wouldn't allow him to have the skill/attribute levels he thought he should.

+++|<=== Lord Carnifex ---

Lord Carnifex · 01-06-2006, 04:39 AM

[donning asbestos suit]
or there's the old standby: A munchkin is someone who plays Rifts. Especially someone who takes it seriously.
[ducks]

Kuroshima · 01-06-2006, 04:53 AM

I've been watching this thread for a while, starting with the trouble of defining what a munchkin is (more on that later) and then how it degenerated into "munchkin-bashing", and posts on D&D failings.

First things first, though: to me, a munchkin is a player that fails to act maturely, and that's probably the root of the word. The usual symptoms of lack of maurity are cheating, bragging about how "über" his character, or his past characters with another GM, are, minmaxing AND expecting that every situation can be solved with what he minmaxed for (this includes things other than combat, though combat is the most usual), being an idiot, and doing things specifically to spoil other people's fun (this includes voluntarelly screwing the campaign on a whim [For example, aproaching the local autorities, and attacking them, just because], and then complaining that the GM should have acomodated for his actions), forgetting about the campaigns tone, background and genre conventions in character creation (the infamous florentian ninja subtopic) and afterwards (by, for example, arguing that back in the middle ages, everyone had a horse, and thus when confronted that a horse is expensive to own and maintais, whine),... The symptoms are multiple, but the reason behind them is unique, it's that, when liberated from the social constraints and the consequences of his actions the player "goes wild". This is a normal phase for most roleplayers (hell, I've been a munchkin), but one that you should grow out of.

Back on D&D, the product itself is targeted at munchkins. It does not mean that you can't have non-munchkiny games with it, but the very way it's construsted makes it munchkiny. Rewards for killing? check. Levels granting first and foremost, combat bonuses? check. Chalenge Ratings, designed so that only completelly optimized parties can tack them? check. New books that up the power level, so you need to have the latest feats/spells/prestige classes? check. Absolute morality, so that there aren't moral dilemas to slaughter, because you're "doing good" by "slaying eveil creatures", and with alignements designed to allow maximum freedom in that aspect? check. Need to level up, and thus gain combat proficiency, in order to increase your non-combat skills? check. And I could continue. Still, you can roleplay with D&D, but then, the most usual situation is that D&D is used only for combat, and ating is used for social interactions. I personally find that wrong, since if you're playing an acrobat, while being a crouch potato, whay can't you play a charismatic leader, while being unable to talk your way out of your own house?

GURPS, however, uses points as a mesure of general competency, not combat competency. One of the things that I really love about GURPS, is that combat isn't a separate part of the system. Combat skills are skills like any others, and priced equally. Same for social skills, and the game has quite decent rules for social interaction.

Well, I'll leave this as it is, I have my tea brewing (Just standard tea, though it's a blend that I particularly like), and I don't want it to overheat.

Rasputin · 01-06-2006, 05:38 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lord Carnifex

[donning asbestos suit]
or there's the old standby: A munchkin is someone who plays Rifts. Especially someone who takes it seriously.
[ducks]

In my gaming group, our one Rifts devotee is actually a pretty good roleplayer. He doesn't quite understand why none of the rest of us want to play Rifts, and why we call Cosmo Knights "Lensmen," but whatever character he plays, he gets into it but doesn't try to break the game.

Casey · 01-06-2006, 07:33 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lord Carnifex

[donning asbestos suit]
or there's the old standby: A munchkin is someone who plays Rifts. Especially someone who takes it seriously.
[ducks]

Bah, it takes a *real* roleplayer to play a Rogue Scientist or Vagabond (?) in Rifts when the rest of the party are Dragons, Gods, and Glitter Boys. ;)

~~Tom Kalbfus~~ · 01-06-2006, 08:10 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by cccwebs

Munchkin has nothing to do with genre or game system. It has nothing to do with point values or the characters built. Munchkin is a play style. It is the win at all cost style. Munchkins aren't in the game for fun. They're in it for the "glory", and usually they take delight in making everyone else at the table miserable in the process.

Arrogant snobs who put people down and call people names because they are not playing the game they way they think it should be played also ruin the fun. Munchkinism is harmless, if they want to be an all powerful ruler of an imaginary kingdom, let em, that way they learn how meaningless it is. Some people have fun in the power climb, hey if it works for them, don't knock it. D&D was originally set up as a power climb game, with each creature you killed, you collected treasure, gained experience and became more powerful, and there was nothing wrong with that. How else does one get to run kingdoms and set oneself up as an imaginary ruler of an imaginary country. There are plenty of challengers the GM can throw up against rulers of kingdoms. I thought it was quite fun, and I don't see how anyone can tell me it wasn't fun when it was.

I remember a campaign we played when we started out as mercenary adventurers. We accumulated some money and experience, killed plenty of monsters, participated in some war, and slowly we gained in power, We built a ship and started a merchant busness, some of the goods we shipped were illegal in some countries, some of the players got arrested, so the rest of us hired some mercenaries and attacked the prison fort to free the imprisoned PCs, that was alot of fun. Then we got a hankering to circumnavigate the world, we built a larger ship and did some deep ocean voyaging, after we got attacked by dragons, sea monsters and undead ghostships, we became even richer, we settled on an Island and build a Kingdom their, and had to fend of hordes of invaders, monsters and the like. There were challenges at every level, not only at the lowest levels, and it was alot of fun, we all enjoyed ourselves. Now to have some arrogant fellow call all that Munchkinism, I just don't see it, we had fun and that was all that mattered. Nobody can tell us any different.

whswhs · 01-06-2006, 08:57 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tom Kalbfus

Arrogant snobs who put people down and call people names because they are not playing the game they way they think it should be played also ruin the fun. Munchkinism is harmless, if they want to be an all powerful ruler of an imaginary kingdom, let em, that way they learn how meaningless it is. Some people have fun in the power climb, hey if it works for them, don't knock it. D&D was originally set up as a power climb game, with each creature you killed, you collected treasure, gained experience and became more powerful, and there was nothing wrong with that. How else does one get to run kingdoms and set oneself up as an imaginary ruler of an imaginary country. There are plenty of challengers the GM can throw up against rulers of kingdoms. I thought it was quite fun, and I don't see how anyone can tell me it wasn't fun when it was.

(a) That sort of roleplaying becomes a problem if you try to do it in a campaign where everyone else has different goals and foci.

(b) Immature players are likely to deal with a clash of playing styles, not by adapting to the style of the group they're in, or negotiating with the other players, or voluntarily resigning, but by making in-game moves that are intended to force the game to be what they want it to be. There's anecdotal evidence of a correlation between immaturity and "kill the monster/grab the treasure/level up" gaming, so people who play that way are likely to be suspected of intending to spoil other people's enjoyment, or at least of not caring if they do.

(c) The play style in itself is harmless, as you say, if that's what the players want.

ed_209a · 01-06-2006, 09:10 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lord Carnifex

[donning asbestos suit]
or there's the old standby: A munchkin is someone who plays Rifts. Especially someone who takes it seriously.
[ducks]

Rifts has a really nice RPish setting, but the stat inflation is very munchy.

I feel it leads to the kind of rollplay, not roleplay this thread is about.

Playing RIFTS and becoming a munchkin is like sniffing cocaine and becoming an addict. Some won't, most will.

yam · 01-06-2006, 09:55 AM

RIFTS is a guilty pleasure for me and my GURPS group. One of the guys bought many books in high school, and once every couple years someone says
'Lets do a RIFTS campaign ... it'll be fun!'

An hour of character creation and four hours of munckiny goodness later...

'god these palladium rules suck... do we still have time to play a GURPS adventure?'

Stonebender · 01-06-2006, 10:04 AM

I play games to win, but I think my concept of winning is probably a bit different than what you guys are talking about.

To me playing to win means.

Keep myself alive. With few exceptions, at all costs. (Exceptions would include placing myself in great danger to save buddies (squad mates/PCs) though if they constantly did stupid crap or over-risked themselves I would think twice about it. Another exception would be if my character concept included the desire/purpose of saving others like a cop, medic or fireman.)

Keep my buddies alive. This would include those in the adventuring group/squad. Not limited to other PCs. Sometimes, if the situation feels right, this one may become more important than keeping myself alive. I like it when someone saves another at great personal risk.

Advance my station/position in life. Depending on the game and my character concept, this can mean drastically different things.

I don’t play “unwinable” role-playing games. Chuthulu comes to mind as an example of this. My understanding is that there are only a few outcomes for a Chuthulu game.
You die
You don’t die, but you are driven completely insane, gibbering in an asylum somewhere.
You go insane and then you die
You die, and then you go insane

For the most part I like to play serious type characters. I’m not much for the outré.

Regarding Rifts:

Out of the two dozen or so game systems I have played, Rifts lends itself more towards munchkinism/powergaming than any other. I think I have been involved in about 8 rifts campaigns. All but one lasted only a month or so. The last one I was involved in ran about 9 months. The characters were required to be human and could not be “mega-damage” creatures. This still didn’t quite get rid of the “uberness” of the game. It finally broke up because of differences of opinion between some of the players and the GM. (He desperately wanted us to go dimension hopping and we desperately DIDN’T)

The GM has contacted us again with some new campaign ideas and I’m listening. Its really unfortunate he has a fixation on Rifts as he is a superb GM otherwise.

01-06-2006, 04:19 AM	#161
Lord Carnifex Join Date: Oct 2005	Re: Whats a Munchkin? Once again, in agreement with TK_D: Triumphing/surviving (sometimes surviving can be a sort of triumph) a climactic or exceptionally difficult encounter is worth a few extra xp, IMHO. But I tend to not think that killing things should be inherently worth points, except in dungeon crawl games especially suited to that mode of play. A lot of interesting things have been said on this thread... most of which I wont try to recapitulate. Still, my thoughts... Powergaming, in my head, is different from playing at an epic or high power level. Playing in a game where all the PC's are umpteenth level/coupla hundred points, and the scale of the game and the adversaries matches is perfectly fine and goog. My defenition of a power gamer (which may be included in other people's defenitions of munchkinism) is one who tries or succeeds in building a character overpowered compared o the other PC's and villains, i.e. one who min/maxes the third level fighter so he can take on Olympians and win... An element of what might be Munchkinism that seems not to have been noted is the player whose character conception must be good at everything. One of the players in the group I game with sometimes falls into this area (I would consider him to have munchkin tendencies, but he's easy enough to restrain.) In a quasi-realistically scaled contemporary period game, he wanted his character to be a successful Renaissance Faire jouster; competitive Motor Cross biker; and a charming, socially deft Irish musician. He was frustrated because the game system wouldn't allow him to have the skill/attribute levels he thought he should. +++\|<=== Lord Carnifex ---

01-06-2006, 04:39 AM	#162
Lord Carnifex Join Date: Oct 2005	Re: Whats a Munchkin? [donning asbestos suit] or there's the old standby: A munchkin is someone who plays Rifts. Especially someone who takes it seriously. [ducks]

01-06-2006, 04:53 AM	#163
Kuroshima MIB Pyramid Contributor Mad Spaniard Rules Lawyer Join Date: Aug 2004 Location: The ASS of the world, mainly Valencia, Spain (Europe)	Re: Whats a Munchkin? I've been watching this thread for a while, starting with the trouble of defining what a munchkin is (more on that later) and then how it degenerated into "munchkin-bashing", and posts on D&D failings. First things first, though: to me, a munchkin is a player that fails to act maturely, and that's probably the root of the word. The usual symptoms of lack of maurity are cheating, bragging about how "über" his character, or his past characters with another GM, are, minmaxing AND expecting that every situation can be solved with what he minmaxed for (this includes things other than combat, though combat is the most usual), being an idiot, and doing things specifically to spoil other people's fun (this includes voluntarelly screwing the campaign on a whim [For example, aproaching the local autorities, and attacking them, just because], and then complaining that the GM should have acomodated for his actions), forgetting about the campaigns tone, background and genre conventions in character creation (the infamous florentian ninja subtopic) and afterwards (by, for example, arguing that back in the middle ages, everyone had a horse, and thus when confronted that a horse is expensive to own and maintais, whine),... The symptoms are multiple, but the reason behind them is unique, it's that, when liberated from the social constraints and the consequences of his actions the player "goes wild". This is a normal phase for most roleplayers (hell, I've been a munchkin), but one that you should grow out of. Back on D&D, the product itself is targeted at munchkins. It does not mean that you can't have non-munchkiny games with it, but the very way it's construsted makes it munchkiny. Rewards for killing? check. Levels granting first and foremost, combat bonuses? check. Chalenge Ratings, designed so that only completelly optimized parties can tack them? check. New books that up the power level, so you need to have the latest feats/spells/prestige classes? check. Absolute morality, so that there aren't moral dilemas to slaughter, because you're "doing good" by "slaying eveil creatures", and with alignements designed to allow maximum freedom in that aspect? check. Need to level up, and thus gain combat proficiency, in order to increase your non-combat skills? check. And I could continue. Still, you can roleplay with D&D, but then, the most usual situation is that D&D is used only for combat, and ating is used for social interactions. I personally find that wrong, since if you're playing an acrobat, while being a crouch potato, whay can't you play a charismatic leader, while being unable to talk your way out of your own house? GURPS, however, uses points as a mesure of general competency, not combat competency. One of the things that I really love about GURPS, is that combat isn't a separate part of the system. Combat skills are skills like any others, and priced equally. Same for social skills, and the game has quite decent rules for social interaction. Well, I'll leave this as it is, I have my tea brewing (Just standard tea, though it's a blend that I particularly like), and I don't want it to overheat. __________________ Antoni Ten MIB3119 My GURPs character sheet My stuff on e23

01-06-2006, 09:55 AM	#169
yam Join Date: Aug 2005 Location: Chicago	Re: Whats a Munchkin? RIFTS is a guilty pleasure for me and my GURPS group. One of the guys bought many books in high school, and once every couple years someone says 'Lets do a RIFTS campaign ... it'll be fun!' An hour of character creation and four hours of munckiny goodness later... 'god these palladium rules suck... do we still have time to play a GURPS adventure?' __________________ "Man does not strive for happiness; only the Englishman does that.”

01-06-2006, 10:04 AM	#170
Stonebender Join Date: Dec 2005	Re: Whats a Munchkin? I play games to win, but I think my concept of winning is probably a bit different than what you guys are talking about. To me playing to win means. Keep myself alive. With few exceptions, at all costs. (Exceptions would include placing myself in great danger to save buddies (squad mates/PCs) though if they constantly did stupid crap or over-risked themselves I would think twice about it. Another exception would be if my character concept included the desire/purpose of saving others like a cop, medic or fireman.) Keep my buddies alive. This would include those in the adventuring group/squad. Not limited to other PCs. Sometimes, if the situation feels right, this one may become more important than keeping myself alive. I like it when someone saves another at great personal risk. Advance my station/position in life. Depending on the game and my character concept, this can mean drastically different things. I don’t play “unwinable” role-playing games. Chuthulu comes to mind as an example of this. My understanding is that there are only a few outcomes for a Chuthulu game. You die You don’t die, but you are driven completely insane, gibbering in an asylum somewhere. You go insane and then you die You die, and then you go insane For the most part I like to play serious type characters. I’m not much for the outré. Regarding Rifts: Out of the two dozen or so game systems I have played, Rifts lends itself more towards munchkinism/powergaming than any other. I think I have been involved in about 8 rifts campaigns. All but one lasted only a month or so. The last one I was involved in ran about 9 months. The characters were required to be human and could not be “mega-damage” creatures. This still didn’t quite get rid of the “uberness” of the game. It finally broke up because of differences of opinion between some of the players and the GM. (He desperately wanted us to go dimension hopping and we desperately DIDN’T) The GM has contacted us again with some new campaign ideas and I’m listening. Its really unfortunate he has a fixation on Rifts as he is a superb GM otherwise.