In one fight they wound up with half of an entire Torg deck spread out amongst the players. They had invaded a hive of cybernetic insects, originally planning to sneak through the place and wipe out the bosses. Stealth plans rarely work out for power-gaming munchkins. First, they seldom have the skills required and everyone knows that stealth is a sucker ability anyway. Either you spend a bunch of points on it then the combat monster clanking around in powered armor behind you bolos his check and absolutely refuses to spend cards, hero points, karma, or whatever to re-roll (and for good reason, he'll need those soon…), or you go it alone which means that you can make your stealth checks but you also gain the rare pleasure of fighting all the toughest bad guys by your lightly-armored self. Second, we're talking about combat monsters here; the "penalty" for boloing stealth skills is that you have to fight… So they botch the check, the entire hive attacks them, and bugs are always very bad news. Bugs mean spend everything you got time. Five Alien movies and memorable suggestions like "I say we nuke them from orbit" guarantee that you will never, ever, have an easy fight when you've got bugs in the picture. So the players start playing the cards and shooting the bugs and if you get into the right rhythm you can cycle up Leadership and Rally and the other hand replenishing cards. Even worse, this creates a feedback effect if you have just a few too many players. The normal cards get sucked up into the players' pools, reducing the number of them in the deck, in turn increasing the frequency of hand-replenishing cards in the deck so that it becomes even more likely you'll get some more replenishers. You hit a break point and randomness stops being a factor altogether; all that matters is correct card play and these guys lived for bloody, cutthroat games of Hearts and Bridge. They destroyed the entire hive. Except the bosses, who simply sneaked out when they realized that a crowd of player characters who didn't spend a dime on stealth skills entered the building. One thing about power-gaming munchkins, they can trash everything in sight but they generally can't see much. A nice upshot of this is that it makes it easier to create recurring villains. After that scenario we thinned out the replenishing-cards in the deck.

You still haven't said why you like munchkins…

Actually, I'm still trying to figure that bit out. Why do I like power-gaming munchkins? I'll give a couple possibilities here.

I Love the Smell of Napalm in the Morning

I doubt anyone reading this column needs me to tell them where I got that quote. Compare that to the following, "I went out the window." Crimes and Misdemeanors is one of my favorite serious movies, but the only quote I could remember from it off-hand was, "I went out the window." Even the scenes from the film aren't that vivid for me but I can almost perfectly picture the entire helicopter attack from Apocalypse Now, or the initial, abortive assault from Aliens 2, or the mall battle from Terminator 2. Maybe it's just a guy thing but the action scenes stay with me for a long time. If you look through my past columns I've filled them with horribly munchkin moments. The munchkin moments have stuck with me for whatever reason and the roleplaying moments, like images from Raise the Red Lantern, just don't have the same longevity. Maybe I just never had as many roleplaying moments or, again, maybe it's just a guy thing.

I Love the GAME

Munchkins play the game as a game. There's an art and skill to creating the most effective character given the resources you have. And there's an art and skill to crafting scenarios within reasonable limits so as to maximally challenge munchkin players. If a GM can turn 4 fifth level NPCs into a high-risk encounter for a party of 4 seventh level characters, then, as a munchkin GM, you can feel pretty proud. After all, I like to play the game too. This isn't about confrontation with the players though. You don't really want to win. You want to make them suffer. You want them to come out of the fight sweating and wondering where all their potions, scrolls, spells, and hero points went. You want them to think somewhere along the line that they weren't going to make it. If they do make it, that's because of their skill at the game, their ability to use tactics in the fight, and their ability to min-max their characters. This probably harks back to those wargame roots and cutthroat Hearts games. Or, maybe it's just a guy thing.

There's Something Liberating about the GAME

I went through a diceless phase. Like a number of gamers I suspect, this started with Amber Diceless Roleplaying then I tried again with a home-brew "system". Diceless roleplaying itself seemed pretty liberating. Without the strictures of rules I had the freedom to resolve in-game actions in all kinds of inventive ways. Instead of fighting a battle with a simple sequence of dice rolls I evaluated the situation and the subtle ways a fight played out. If the player wanted to duck down low and slash at the legs of a creature I could describe the effect. When I sent a creature that, on the surface, outmatched the players I'd describe the way the monster fought, maybe mentioning that it usually led with its left side. Players could then pick up on these descriptive clues and react appropriately. It worked even better for non-combat skills. When the players needed to disarm a trap, or pattern shift to a strange location we'd play out the resolution of this action through dialogue with me essentially giving hints and them getting closer or further from success. For characters I simply wrote up descriptions of people with odd collections of powers and let the players choose their character in a sort of draft. I could make any kind of character this way. When it worked it worked extremely well. But sweet-weeping-Jesus was it ever a lot of labor. Playing the game became a chore because I had to make up all the rules as I went; I had to resolve everything in my head; the players had to figure out how I thought situations would resolve; and it almost always had that tinny taste of gamemaster railroading.

The game takes a lot of that weight off the gamemaster's shoulders. You take a system, lay out a few house rules, and write up some monsters and places. That part's still work, perhaps a similar amount of work to preparing for a diceless game, but once you get to the table you can focus on the game itself. The rules are in place and it's just a matter of resolving them and making the occasional judgment call. At least everything isn't a judgment call. Sometimes you roll well and the players suffer; sometimes the opposite. It retains the fun of Monopoly but without the restrictions and with cooperation. I can let my munchkin players have at the rules because I'll have at them. The Fly Lord sample creature from Bodies and Souls was originally Wizard 6/Rogue 2 but it occurred to me I'm spending a CR 11 encounter anyway so I might just as well bump him to Wizard 8/Rogue 2, have him spend the ritual cost off his "phantom" gold, and get full value for my CR money. That's a rat thing to do but munchkin players like to earn their kills. And they're capable of handling nasty encounters anyway.

Munchkins Make You a Better Game Designer

Finally, munchkins do make you a better game designer. You see munchkins know there's no such thing as game balance compared to the gamemaster. The GM can just make stuff up after all, or start picking from the nasty creatures a bit earlier, or starting adding templates and prestige classes to every monster you face. What's left then? Where's the competition? The competition is the other players of course. In theory all the players have the same resources. But with skillful min-maxing you can blow the rest of those goons out of the water. And that will really piss off the other munchkins in the party; especially if it's because of a rule. They'll either all have to exploit the same rule or get you to fix things. And, believe me, munchkins don't want to all look alike. They want to min-max in their own particular way. They want to demonstrate their skill by coming up with innovative new ways to min-max. As they get older the innovation part becomes the most important thing. After all, they've mastered the rules long ago so the way to distinguish yourself now is to min-max artistically. And exploiting a clearly unbalanced rule lacks finesse. Any clod can create a character whose powers are all based on an always-on power. (And don't feel bad if you did that; probably every Champions player did that at some point in their life. But the fact that every Champions player did it demonstrates why it lacks finesse.) It takes a stroke of genius to see the synergy between pushing, large numbers of low point value powers, and endurance batteries. And if you gamemaster these avant-garde finks you better make sure your rules are tight. And by making your rules tight when you go to publish, you'll make some other poor, overworked gamemaster's job a little bit easier. They'll be able to spend more time working on their campaign and not worrying about one of their munchkins complaining about another munchkin exploiting a clearly broken rule (and demonstrating an appalling lack of min-max finesse).

* BTW, if you're wondering why armor of command doesn't fit perfectly with three levels of paladin that's because who are you going to use remove disease on, an NPC?

The Second World Sourcebook

RPGNow

ENWorld Gamestore