Fond memories AKA When you munchkined out as a newbie

[Corinthi]

My most horribly munchkin PC was generated for the 2E adventure 'A Paladin in Hell'. The DM was a newbie who none of us really like but we tolerated because he was someone's younger brother. He wanted desperately to run this adventure and would chortle about the awful things he had planned to do to us. And yes, he actually chortled.

Anyhow, we didn't have a group of PCs of the appropriate level, so he told us to create new pcs with a ridiculous amount of XP and any twelve magic items we wanted. One player had the gall to ask if our PCs met thier prime requisite

I can't even remember all the god awful abuses we saw that first session, but most of us did everything we could to abuse the rules. Dual Classing, in particular, was visciously abused.

My character was rather mild compared to most. I was a Human Dual Classed Fighter15/Bard 15 using the Myriddon and Blade Kits. Naturally as a 2E Fighter I specialized in dual Longswords and had +5 Longswords of Opposition. Basically, they'd take on the property of whatever the monster's greatest weakness was when they struck. I also had a Ring of Vampiric Regeneration. I remember getting zapped with a Dragon's breathweapon, dropped into single digit hit points, then taking my hasted attack routine on it and being fully healed by the 5th swing.

And I wasn't the most horrible character at the table. Poor newbie DM. We probably scarred him for life.

 

[Tratyn Runewind]

Hello,

To me, the epitome of old-school munchkiny goodness is to be found in the original "Sick Sword" story. Here's an excerpt, in which the munchkiny villain group is doing some recruiting:

"Name?" Clerasil questioned the latest entry.

"Rango."

"Class and level?"

"Ranger, level 17."

"Alignment?"

"Chaotic good."

"All major and minor psionic disciplines?"

"ALL of them? Why, no, I --"

"Tch tch tch. Armor class?"

"Negative ten."

"Good. Main weapon?"

"Longsword of dancing."

"Hmph. You're going to have to do a lot better than that. What's your saving throw against spells which normally allow no saving throw?"

"My WHAT?!"

Clerasil looked him square in the eye. "My God III, man, haven't you even heard of a scarab of protection? Look, you're obviously not prepared for this. Come back tomorrow after you've exchanged some of those gold pieces for real magic items."

Rango turned and left, disgruntled. As he kicked a pebble from side to side while walking away, Clerasil shouted back, "And don't forget to make whatever +6 sword it is you're going to get sentient! We can't have a union without special purpose powers, you know!"


As far as tales from gamers I know personally goes,

Spoiler

Wishing the Barrier Peaks starship back into flying condition

and flying around the campaign world bombing enemies with Mountain Seeds is pretty high on the Munchkin List. That was the same player who invented the "Gatling Wands of Chain Lightning", and ran around with parties pumped up enough that the only characters vulnerable to Symbols of Death were the Magic-Users' homonculi.

Hope this helps!

 

[Sarellion]

In a group I was in my old character was killed by his own group for a 1000 gp.
So I was a little bit pissed and asked the DM about the meanest thing my next character could become.
By the way the other guys were quite strange. We had a necromancer who could take your blood by litres without saving throw and he had a demon patron, a giant who could attack 6 people at once and he had an 18th lvl mage/cleric faerie cohort. And there was some other stuff. The dual wielding desert nomad on his lizard with strength 25 was really weak...

So the DM told me about his vampires.
I got an several hundred years old vampire with 220 lp, AC -2, WIS and INT over 20, immune to death and sunlight etc. I also had a 18d6 life drain hand to hand attack
He was a mage at 3rd level when we stopped. The DM said I could also get a cleric/mage of Myrkul with the special hand of death attack (both guy have to make saving throw against death) but ahem it was already broken enough.

I later got a personal bodyguard of 50 powerful ghouls that the Dm was really eager to give to me.

So this was low level play. Every mage had a wand of wonders with a random table. Enemies were transformed into hammers+1, we called Elminster in his night gown etc.

At level 4 or 5 we killed hundred kobolds, dozens of orcs and I don´t know how many ogres and other stuff in one battle.

Afterwards our necromancer and our giant got in a quarrel with each other. So the necromancer took the reins of the carriage of the giant (with extraplanar first class living rooms inside) and took of into the woods. He drove the carriage against a tree far away from the group and the whole thing broke apart. I used bat form and followed them. As I arrived the necromancer killed off the stunned faerie lady and was nearly finished with the giant. He said to me that I would be the next one if I would disturb any further.
So I waited until he killed the giant and then I pulled out my mighty SLEEP spell and sent him to sleep (no saving throw and he was still below the level limit). Afterwards I sucked him dry. Well, the would have probably said something about my vampire status so I had to wait until he was finished and the necromancer distracted.

 

[LcKedovan]

Has to be my Character "Raj Mean" god this was ages ago... like many here I had a hell of a "lucky" set of uhhh.... rolls... yeah thats it... rolls. He was just sick, Paladin of ungoldly level probably many other classes, ascended to godhood at some point. This was around the time that Beastmaster had come out, so I had also created the throwing "star" device that he had for my character. About 7/8 years ago before I moved to England and was cleaning up my stuff for storage at my parents I found his character sheet, and many others... Including all my old Top Secret Characters... my brother and I sat on my bed going through them all and man I can tell you.. besides the twinkiness of some there were some names that had us laughing so hard we cried.

Another twinko moment was when we created L1 characters (mine was a bard= and had a tiered "ROYAL RUMBLE" tournament where you progressed after fighting a monster opponent. You got all their loot if you won, plus a level of xp in addition to their xp value. Demogorgon faced an orc first round or something rediculous... anyhow, somehow I made it to the final round and whupped Orcus' ass using by now my dastardly amount of magic items (oddly enough Orcus' only used his MM entry and nothing HE could have potentially accumulated) accumulating in the process all other Magic that had been obtained by my deceased fellow players... I have that Char in the old folder somewhere at my parents in storage as well... I find they are handy as a reminder of how bad it once was.... still... dumb and young as we were it was fun

-W.

 

[DaveMage]

Ooh, you have me on level, but that's about it!

Pharonn Steel, half-elf cleric/fighter/magic-user, level around 47th in each class. Psionic, of course. And he wielded Cleaver, forged by... ummm... some trog smith from the old Giants in the Earth column in Dragon, waaay back in the day (somewhere around issue 70).

Cleaver was a +27 longsword, fully vorpal, that worked when thrown (and returned); could cut any incoming attack (magic missiles, lightning bolt, dragon breath, arrows, a spelljammer ramming attack) in two and therefore avoid negative effects.

He went around enslaving gods and hopping multiverses to get more.

Eventually, his descendant- Pharonn Steel XXXXVII- got used as a MAJOR badass villain in my campaign, since outshone only by Tharizdun himself- not even by Felenga.

There you go!

Ah, the good old days.

I also had Lord Smedley, a 67th level fighter (with 1st ed psionic ability), but I think his sword was only +10.

It was fun going through the 1st edition deities and demigods...and killing them.

 

[diaglo]

Lothar Ironhand (i had the name first i don't care what the 1ed L modules say )


converted him from a Lawful Dwarf to lawful neutral dwarven Fighter/Thief with 1edADnD.

had a S 13 I 11 W 12 D 17 C 13 Ch 8

made it to 6th Ft/ 7th Th before dieing in Ravenloft. 34hp

had a backpack of holding.

 

[retan]

Although I never had any particularly munchkin characters (My first PC was a wizard (elementalist) with 3 dex in a swedish role-playing game called "Drakar & Demonar"), I fondly remember some old misunderstandings and munchkin PCs created by others:

1: Weapon damage is rolled when you buy the weapon. So for instance if you bought a longsword, you would roll 1d8, and the result was the damage that the sword would do in every swing.

2: My very first DMing experience. I only had the BD&D Basic set (red box), and the players rolled stats with 2d6+6. They all became Chaotic elves. After killing all the monsters in a fairly large dungeon, they came to the final monster: a white dragon. The PCs discussed how to defeat the dragon and came up with the following solution: If all of us cast "sleep" on it, that would certainly give enough HD to affect it (Sleep in BD&D had no save and caused 2d8HD of creatures to fall asleep). Not knowing better, I allowed this to work. However, one of the players decided that his Chaotic (Evil) elf wasn't going to share the treasure with his fellows, so he cast his sleep on them instead. That was the end of that campaign.

3: The first Drakar & Demonar campaign of my friend, in which basically every race was available, including such creatures as minotaurs and werebears, even though these creatres had ridiculous stats (I think a werebear had something like 4d6+12 in strength, while a human had 3d6). This of course resulted in parties composed entirely of monster characters and in which humans were quite rare indeed.

-- Retan

 

[Silverglass]

I have to admit to Lord Dorian Gyrfalcon, last played as dual Classed Cleric 20, Wizard 32, Paladin 48 with gross psionic powers (and I did do the probabbility travel/sphere of anihilation trick for the extra powers). Who was 12 ft tall and dual wielded a +7 Vorpal Artifact twohanded sword and an artifact Holy Avenger with sickening stats and AC who killed Ares with a barrier peaks laser rifle.

Or there is my Drow Fighter 22/Archer 6/Sorceror 25/Cleric 33/Monk 14 PC, from the campaign started in 1985 (and still played) but as its a homebrew system that doesn't give HP per level I wouldn't say she was munchkin yet (and she only has about a dozen magic items because the DM's dispel magics all work like Mordenkainens Disjunction). I mean there's a whole party of us and we sweat at the thought of attacking a half dozen giants or a single Djinni because in this gameworld the tough monsters are very very tough (and magic doesn't work on them very well because HP are a function of size as well as hit dice, so we reckon the Djinni has about 2000HP and saves vs magic are a modified by HP).

 

[Ruined]

Ah yes, the good ol' days. I had Michael Grimm, who ascended to become the Grandfather of Assassins for Greyhawk/Oerth. Had custom magic items ripped straight from the Sandman comics that allowed me to hop into people's dreams and assassinate them there. And in combat, he carried three long swords - one to hold in each hand after he started the first one dancing.

 

[Numion]

1st edition Barbarian, around level 13.

My weapon was a big axe that did 3d12 + bonuses damage. In one of our last adventures we killed Hera, the greek goddess. I guess the DM was using good ole' Deities and Demigods as a monster manual of sorts. She was a wimp, IIRC. We also offed some other gods, but I can't remember what they were doing in the dungeon, or how they earned our ire