MaxKaladin
First Post
med stud said:
Hmmm, I'm only familiar with the term 'Twinked' in reference to Everquest players who use their high level characters to give high powered stuff to their low level characters. Do you mean that differently?
Anyway, IMO, the problem for powerplayers is that (almost) nobody claims to be a munchkin. Munchkins always claim to be powerplayers, roleplayers, or something else. What makes things worse for powerplayers is that munchkinism and powerplaying are hard to tell apart sometimes because both focus so much on, well, character power. While powerplayers don't engage in a lot of the things munchkins do that makes them so reviled, the munchkins *claim* they don't do them either and claim they're just powerplayers themselves. Thus, you're stuck looking at two really powerful characters trying to tell which one is really a powerplayer and which is a munchkin *claiming* he's a powerplayer. It's even worse if someones first exposure to 'powerplay' is munchkins who are just claiming to be powerplayers. It will leave a bad impression about the wrong group.
That's why, IMHO, powerplayers get a bum rap.
med stud said:
You haven't talked to some of the older players in my group then. I've got a pair of players who both went to the same university around 1980 and are familiar with a lot of the same gaming circles from that time and place. They've got a lot of horror stories about the way roleplayers used to be treated by the extremely munchkin DMs and players that dominated the gaming scene there at the time. Most of these stories revolve around setting up situations where not using OOC knowledge would doom your character and many of the rest depend on the fact that characters HAD to be min-maxed to survive. Then there are the stories about munchkin DMs who would actually give XP rewards to players who made life miserable for people who tried to roleplay. Lots of roleplayers got their characters killed and looted by the rest of the party back then.
Some of my own experiences were with a DM back in college who used to run huge games in the Student Center with a computer programmed with his dungeon map and random encounter tables. He would instantly smack down anyone who dared try to talk before fighting or design a less than optimum character.
In the case of my future players, they both wandered off to other games where RP wasn't punished. I myself drifted off to eventually end up running a RP heavy AD&D2e game with a select bunch.
The thing is that it's easy to smackdown a roleplayer who tries to be different in a munchkin game. All you have to do is keep doing what you're doing and they'll get smushed by stuff the munchkins can handle but the non-combat-optimized roleplayer will get smushed. You can adjudicate against attempts to parley or get around combat other ways. You can count on munchkins in the party to initiate combat and ruin negotiations, etc. It's easy because roleplayers generally require some cooperation from the rest of the party and the DM to operate. Roleplayers just don't stand much of a chance of disrupting a munchkin game.
On the flip side, munchkins don't require as much cooperation. If you try to smack them down in combat, you're just playing up to their strength. If you try to ignore them, they'll disrupt things by attacking during negotiations the roleplayers are trying to hold or while theyre trying to sneak into the castle. One munchkin can easily disrupt the activities of a group of roleplayers.
That's why you hear so much about munchkins ruining things and so little about roleplayers ruining things.
) I guess I'm just annoyed at reading on messageboards over and over again how powergaming is wrong. It is just one way of playing D&D and I say, if the munchkins enjoy it, let them play. Maybe not in your group if you wish (as is anyones right) but let's not keep saying it is "wrong".
