A Newcomer's Reflections On "Munchkinism"

 

Powergaming, or "munchkinism", is a common complaint among players and GM's alike. Powergaming is accused of turning the role-play into "roll-play", lowering the worth of other player characters, and overall making the game less fun. But is powergaming really as bad as it is made out to be? Is it truly even bad at all?

...being teenagers, they preferred to hack their way through a dungeon...
My first real tabletop gaming experience was that of the ever-classic Dungeons & Dragons. My father and his three brothers received an original DnD set as a present, back before the term "first edition" was even coined. My father, being the youngest, was forced to take on the role of Dungeon Master for his brothers and friends. The concept of role-play was strange and foreign to them, and, being teenagers, they preferred to hack their way through a dungeon than save the world or other similar tasks.

Time passed, the four boys grew old, got married, and left the house. Dad ended up with the DnD set, simply because he was the DM. I was born. My friend and I took an interest in the game, and learned the "roll-play" style of gaming. Ah, how I remember my very first character. He was an elf, a warrior/wizard hybrid. His name, surprisingly enough, was Keebler. Yes, I know, how very original. I chose to play an elf for four very simple reasons: 1) I wanted to use a bow, 2) I wanted to be able to fight in close combat, 3) I wanted to be able to use magic, and 4) Elves are flat-out really cool. I played him all the way to the second level. Then, we lost interest, and that first level dungeon with too-powerful equipment faded out of memory.

After that, I stayed away from tabletop gaming for a long period of time. Why? Many reasons. I could never find a consistent group, every session was the same-old, same-old treasure romp through the dungeon, looking for better stuff, in short, there was no challenge, no thrill left in it any more. It was too easy. I played several one-shot adventures, but never a dedicated campaign.

Now, I have attempted to take on the mantle of a GM in an entirely new, unfamilliar system, GURPS. I have some friends willing to try this role-play thing, but we're all pretty much new at it. I see how much more fun it can be, and how true storytelling can occur when the focus is the story and not whether this +3 sword is better than my +2 dragonslaying one.

Where does the munchkin drive come from?
Where does the munchkin drive come from? We could blame many things, such as capitalism, lack of attention at home, promotion of violence in our society, etc. A desire to shine and excel is not a bad thing, indeed, it is one of the main reasons the America is a world power. Reflecting back on my own personal powergaming, I don't see anything wrong with it. A different method, perhaps, and certainly a different goal, but not neccessarily a lesser one. As a GM, you can present a powerful, inspiring campaign, but it wont be worth a couple of beans if you players would rather find some goblins to smash than prevent that evil necromancer from usurping the throne.

It seems to me that as a GM, you have to cater to your audience. If your characters want to become legendary fighters and kill demons and whatnot, then let them. Remember, YOU ARE PLAYING A GAME. If everybody is having fun, why does it matter whether or not you role-play? This includes the GM, too. If you are frustrated with a group that plays characters similar to a cave troll who just had a lobotomy, I would suggest finding a new play group.

By all means, do not let this article convince you to allow powergaming if you disagree with it. I am just pointing out that powergaming can be just as fun as role-play, AS LONG AS IT IS IN THE PROPER SETTING. If everyone in your party is having fun smashing stuff, there is no reason to force role-play upon them. Don't let one munchkin screw up your story for the sake of being "TEH L337 HAXX0RZ", and likewise, don't let one strict RP-er get in the way of your pillaging and looting.

Munchkinism can be a whole lot of fun. Yes, I prefer to role-play, but there are some nights where hacking baddies to pieces is a lot of fun. Maybe you don't agree with me. That's fine. One man's ceiling is another man's floor. So how do we solve this debate? You can't, it's a matter of opinion. You can only flog a dead horse so much. Game with people that have similar goals in gaming. Do what you enjoy, and for the most part you can't go wrong. That's what this is all about isn't it? Entertainment exists to be enjoyed.

I've always found that the Munchkin players tend to be the more immature players in the group. First time players, kids in high school, people who take their work week frustrations out in the game, stuff like that.

You said something similar in your article. You started out as a munchkin, testing the limits of the game and what you could do in it. But as you grew and matured, the Munchkin style of playing got boring and stupid. You started role-playing instead and it opened up a whole new world for you.

Immature people are easily amused. TV shows like Jackass and anything on MTV, movies like Shaggy Dog and Dare Devil, games like D&D and Toon are all made and enjoyed by people who don't want their intellect stimulated, they just wanna have a good time.

But that's just my opinion.

"I aim to misbehave."

Sometimes my audience is diverse. In fact, my audience is always diverse. So when I Combo-Meal it, a little violence here, a little politicking here, who complains the loudest and does their best to take the spotlight away from the other players?

Munchkinism isn't hated because of our lack of tolerance, but theirs.

For further information, check out my blog here:

http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=16339638...

-Deathkitten

I tend to agree with you, Calamar. I've attempted to start a campaign recently (my first as a GM), and I've run into a problem. Well, several problems, actually. Do you think you could spare some advice and maybe an email address for a newbie GM and role-player? It would be much appreciated, but I certainly could understand if you simply can't.

"Every society needs a cry like that, but only in a very few do they come out with the complete, unvarnished version, which is "Remember-The-Atrocity-Committed-Against-Us-Last-Time-That-Will-Excuse-The-Atrocity-That-We're-About-To-Commit-Today! Hurrah! And So Forth!"
-Terry Pratchett, in his novel "Thief Of Time"

You can send all of your questions to b3rl1oz@yahoo.com

I will answer them within one or two days. I do have Thursdays and Sundays off, you will not get a response on those days.

"A mind is a terrible thing to taste."

if role playing is to survive, muchkining must be catered to just as the other styles of roleplaying must be catered to. I know this sounds odd, but if a player is playing solely to advance his private badass who are we to say that this style of play is immature or wrong? at one point i think we all munchkined. (if your the rare player that started off as a real role player or similer type i apologise. btw, looking for a game?)
I think what a munchkin is looking for in a game is a boost of self confidence to cover for something thats beating them down in the real world. like the kid whos parents made him do dishes before he came to your game, or the guy who works in an office and has to deal with idiots and screwballs everyday. these people are looking for something different from there roleplaying experiance. if your a good dm, you can keep there ego happily inflated and still have time for the elven cleric to advance her romance with the cute bard. if you find that running a game with a munchkin is beyond your abilitys, or that the munchkin is ruining the fun of everyone else try confronting them. make sure you have examples of this behavior and can detail exactly what is expected of that player to ensure everyone has fun. try to never insult a player like this... unless you WANT him/her to leave...
anywhoo, thats my 2 cents. i hope it offended someone. :D

It's nice to see a relatively unjaded opinion on munchkinism. That's become a pretty hard thing to find in my opinion...and I agree with all of what you said Lorthyne. Sometimes it's just plain fun to smash stuff and loot the bodies, which is part of what made Orc and Pie such a funny thing to read...the familiarity that all gamers felt when they read it the first time.

One thing I do have to take exception to is Calamar's comment...

"Immature people are easily amused. TV shows like Jackass and anything on MTV, movies like Shaggy Dog and Dare Devil, games like D&D and Toon are all made and enjoyed by people who don't want their intellect stimulated, they just wanna have a good time".

Kind of a blanket catch-all statement, don't you think? I'll agree with the part about Jackass, MTV, Shaggy Dog, Daredevil, and Toon...but why throw D&D in there? All the best, most intellectually stimulating campaigns that I have run or played in have used the D&D rules in one edition or another. It's not the rules set in the book that makes your campaign...it's what the GM does with those rules that makes your campaign.

To state that I don't want my intellect stimulated because of my choice of rules system...that's kind of a bullshit elitist position to take, isn't it? D&D, contrary to popular belief, does *not* encourage munchkinism. It may be one of the only systems that allows munchkinism to run rampant *if you let it*, but that shouldn't speak against the system's quality. In fact, it speaks to the fact that the D&D rules set allows for any kind of play imaginable. Because a system is flexible and allows anyone to run the campaign they want doesn't make it bad, does it?

Interestingly enough, the most difficult player I ever had in my group was an exchange student that couldn't find a GURPS game in the city he had moved to, so he joined our D&D group. He was never satisfied with anything, argued about each and every rules interpretation, and caused no end of problems to our group...in the end, the rest of the players asked me to talk to him about finding a new group that suited his style of play more, as he wasn't mature or intellectual enough. He was the epitome of power gamer, a consumate rules lawyer, and the biggest munchkin I have ever come across...and he had never played D&D in his life.

Furthermore, now that I think about it, all the problem players I have ever encountered were GURPS players first and foremost. They would spend whole sessions waxing about how "in GURPS it's done this way"; while the rest of us wanted to get on with roleplaying our characters, they were sitting and talking about ways to make the rules better.

I guess the lessons I've learned today are these:

1)D&D is immature and does not stimulate your intellect. It can also make you a knee jerk reactionary that feels the need to type long responses to elitist statements on the interweb, even though you know it won't make a difference to the original posters point of view or opinion.

2)Most GURPS players I have met would rather talk about how cool GURPS is than actually play a character in an intellectually motivated campaign, regardless of the rules being used.

All this can be boiled down to this simple formula for future ease of reference--->
a+b-c=x...where "a"= freedom of speech, "b"= the internet, and "c"= my patience for people that think the system they use defines the type of campaign they can run...

Without fail, "x" will always equal how much I spent on cigarettes last month.

It may be one of the only systems that allows munchkinism to run rampant *if you let it*, but that shouldn't speak against the system's quality.
It's funny, because I was thinking to myself as I read this: "No, that's not true; munchkins can thrive in every system I've met, and GURPS more than most." Then you start talking about GURPS players, and I had to laugh.
my patience for people that think the system they use defines the type of campaign they can run...
Sure, a good campaign can be run in any system, and you can use d20 or even earlier editions of D&D in as many settings as you can in GURPS, if you're so inclined. The story, the group dynamics, the players, the mood; all of these things are more important than the system being used. I've had some of the best times of my life playing with BRP (used by Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu, Pendragon, and Stormbringer), and that's a system that is arbitrary, deeply simplistic, and (in CoC at least) demonstrably broken.

The thing is, though Calamar does tend to say things in extreme and harsh ways, I find myself agreeing with him more often than not -- if not as vehemently. D&D, as written, promotes a certain style of play. It's easy, all too easy in my experience, to get in a campaign rut in D&D. It is my opinion that the system as written has a lot to do with that.

GURPS' addictive character-creation process and point-buy system of character creation lend themselves to munchkinism of the worst sort imaginable. There can be no doubt about this.

However, all other things being equal -- a good group, a good story, a solid mood -- I'd rather use GURPS any day. Bear in mind I've been running nothing but D&D campaigns, with the odd, short CoC investigation mixed in, for the past I-don't-know-how-many years. The rules in GURPS are (for the most part) sensible, cool, and easy to apply. Given my 'druthers, I'd be running GURPS campaigns. It's not without its faults, but it's the best RP system I've ever seen (barring, perhaps, Gilgamesh's EFRP, which I hope to see more about soon!).

I understand there are a ton of good systems out there; I'm just speaking from my personal experience.

I've said this before on other threads, but I'll recap here.

As I see it, Munchkinism is a phase that gamers tend to go through in the early stages of their acquaintance with the hobby - they are initially attracted by the 'romantic' aspects of the game but get sidetracked by the lure of seeking to maximise the effectiveness of their character within the framework of the rules provided.

After a while they may (or may not) experience an epiphany that brings them back to 'true' roleplaying. This might be after their 3rd or 4th Monty Haul character in a row divinely ascends having slaughtered every major baddie in the Abyss or whatever. Maybe they read a really good book one day and have that moment of revelation that *this* is how it is supposed to be. Often it's a collective, peer-group thing I think (certainly it was in the case of my circle of gamer friends).

Some people remain lifelong munchkins. They never 'mature' and carry on doing what they do for years and years. If they enjoy it then what's the harm? As long as they are all using the game purely as a vehicle for mutual enjoyment and everyone is pretty happy with it overall, and 'negative' in-game experiences don't spill out into real-life, there's nothing wrong in it.

There's a difference between Munchkins and Powergamers. Munchkins don't really know that they're munchkins. They lack the metacognitive insight to realise that they aren't really the roleplayers they may think they are. This may sound patronising but remember I am also talking about myself in the past tense here.

Powergamers do what Munchkins do but they do it with full conscious knowledge. They understand the concept of roleplaying, but they aren't really all that interested.

MMOG's (I omit the 'RP' deliberately) are ideal environments for Munchkins and Powergamers. In fact, I think that most pure powergamers will ultimately give up tabletop referee-moderated gaming and migrate to MMOG as it is the perfect environment for them. They don't like referees breaking their stride with 'house interpretations' of rules designed to keep them in check. They're not interested in 'game balance', the object is to win!

A little bit of powergaming is not a bad thing. There's nothing wrong with having motivation to develop your character. The key thing is not to be seduced into exploiting rule weaknesses to produce results that are unrealistic or 'unromantic'. Keep your game beautiful!

Do certain systems 'encourage' Munchkinism? Well, I think that blaming particular systems is an over-simplification. It is more to do with the interaction between the referee and the system and whether the referee *wants* to inhibit Munchkin behaviour, and whether the players are content with the referee's desire to do so. Some referees will find this easier to do with one system than another.

Every combination of system, players and referee will produce a different result and the success of that combination can only be measured by comparing the actual result with the players' and referees ideals.

Is roleplaying on the decline? I don't know. Maybe 'true' roleplaying was never all that big in the first place. I can't say I know many young tabletop gamers but I don't know many young people anyway. My gaming group are mostly late 30's/early 40's though we have one guy in his early 30's and one in his early 20's. I think there is probably still a trickle of people coming into the hobby.

The 'problem' (if it is thought of as one) is that in the eyes of joe public, 3D graphically enhanced computer gaming is a more high-tech, 'better' version of the old tabletop pen'n'paper games and so why would anyone want to play them anymore?

Is there any reason why roleplay can't be good in a cyber-environment? No reason at all in principle, as long as you think an audio-visual presentation on a PC is superior to the product of your own imagination. I think the main reason MMOG's aren't good roleplaying vehicles is the MM bit. Call me elitist, but I think MM and RP tend to be mutually exclusive......IME the 'collective roleplaying epiphany' I referred to earlier on tends to happen more easily in a small-ish peer group.

Making munchkins happy is within everybody's capability. All you have to do is be willing let them make all the other players miserable.

Yes, you did piss me off, but I'm over it. You have a right to your opinion. What I'm not over is how I can't LARP in the state of Idaho anymore, because of the kind of people you're defending.

Here's my opinion:

They're mean. They may have crappy home lives, but so do I. I've come to games, and ran events, and refrained from screaming at idiots, all through an extremely painful divorce. Those weak jerks don't have the self-control to let up, on anyone, for even a second. I've had people threaten my characters, after a game, because of something they found out Out-of-Character. That's weak, and I'm tired of showing mercy.

Everyone says, "A good GM can handle these guys." Absolutely true. A good GM runs invite-only events, so these idiots aren't inflicted on his players.

My 2 cents.

Careful Deathkitten, you're post comes dangerously close to demonstrating the exact same intolerance that you criticize in others. You seem to be taking every problematic gamer and grouping them under the single title of "munchkins" regardless of what problems they are creating or whether they have a munchkin style of play or not. I find this line particularly troublesome:

What I'm not over is how I can't LARP in the state of Idaho anymore, because of the kind of people you're defending.

The kind of people!? What type of elitist, stereotyping language is that? You didn't go into any details about the LARP situation that you are referencing, but I very much doubt that you can contribute whatever problems occured directly to munchkinism.

I am a self-described munchkin who has never had any desire to LARP. I grew from being a rollplayer into a wacko and from there into a munchkin which is exactly the reverse order of what normally occurs. I don't think I match any of your stereotypes at all.

Lastly, your conclussion of equating a munchkin's happiness with the misery of other players is ridiculous. Upon what are you basing this statement?

Here is my conclussion. It has been my experience that troublesome GM's are far more common than trouble players despite the popular perception. I've written a series of articles on this subject for Roleplaying Tips Weekly, but I had to suspend the series when I ran out of adequate real world examples of the less often observed types of bad GM's. As I wrote in each of these articles, the main problem with a bad GM is ones inability to match the style of the game with the prefered playing style of the players.

OK, I'll supply what I'm missing:

Their style of play: If it didn't revolve around combat, and lead to them getting cool stuff, they would immediately attack the nearest thing, and throw fits if he didn't have cool stuff they could take. (Like when one of them attacked a convenience store clerk, because the store was out of gas cans. They needed them, so they could break up a street party by throwing flaming gas cans into it. They needed to break up the party, so they could find someone there. But the person they needed to find was a vampire, and vampires run from fire. "So why do you need the gas cans?" "Didn't you hear, stupid? To break up the party!" "Sigh.") They acted completely out of character for the Vampire Covenants they were playing, only playing said Covenants based on their powers, or because they had heard that the game needed more members of "Covenant X", so they could take charge right away.

They would plan things their characters would do Out-of-Character, so that when they did them In-Character, there was no trail of evidence to lead it back to them. (How this worked: In the game, several characters spontaneously woke up one evening ready to kill the Prince. They met up and executed the plan flawlessly, without discussing it or planning beforehand. Because they never planned it, the players who wanted to find out who did it had very few resources to track how it happened. Thus, a free Prince-kill.)

Munchkin's Happiness = Other People's Misery
1. Any attempt to run a scene with someone not in the Munchkin Crew led to constant interruption, as they were always running up to ask questions that had to be answered RIGHT NOW! or starting something the Narrator on hand couldn't handle.
2. Several people (including myself) had their characters threatened, in and out of game, for not making combat characters, and/or running immediately to bail their stupid butts out of whatever crap they'd leaped in. For the hard-of-reading: It happened out of game, too. They were thoughtfully letting us know that our noncombat characters were useless, and they were ready to take them off our hands so we could play "Real" characters.
3. One of them threatened to kick real people's butts, in real life, for making the game "not fun anymore".
4. Yet, every time we tried to follow up on a suggestion they gave us, they ignored it. When we told them we couldn't run the game to their specifications unless they gave us detailed plans, they said, "Oh.", got a vacant look in their eyes, and wandered off to complain about how we weren't willing to change for them.

I spent months, with the Storyteller in charge, having weekly meetings where we constantly re-wrote the plot of the game to try to appeal to them. They would never give us details, and everything we did to make them happy was ignored. Then they would say we were pandering to the Drama Queens, which was a huge lie, because the Drama Queens got crumbs, and they knew it. The difference was, they Drama Queens knew what we were up against, and were grateful to be noticed at all. When we left the game, most of the Drama Queens went with us.

Is this enough? I can give you more. Lots, lots more. For this rant, I have only talked about the most recent Vampire LARP I participated in. I could bring up all the others (8 years of LARPing), or the DnD games, or the ill-fated Palladium game, or the White Wolf table tops. . .

More. More, more, more. But only if you want it.

Wow. And I used to think this was a family-fun board.

Wow.

It ought to be - I have a feeling our beloved Morbus is tending other pastures, and doesn't have time to babysit the forums.

Scott Free & Calamar - guys, please: I respect you both and find your posts occasionally informative, amusing, or both. Will you please lay off the invective?

a 10th level chara would take respectivly less damage because he/she would have the experiance to roll when he hits the ground. his body would also be more used to taking insane amounts of punishment by this level, also minimizing the effect of the damage.
once again, its the dm/gm/zargon (if anyone recognises that term.) that makes the system shine or suck. yeah, by default DnD promotes a "kick down the door and charge anything moving" style of play. this is probebly because most newer gamers perfer this to the myriad other styles. as i stated in previous posts, all styles of play must be catered to in order to run a game thats fun for everyone. a jerk player is still a jerk, munchkin or not. i don't think the two are sinomimous.
as a side note, my 11 year old son reads these forums in his quest to learn how to dm. please keep them suitable for him.

I'm beloved? Awwww. If there's a consensus to remove some comments, then never think twice about email me at morbus@disobey.com or aeon@gamegrene.com. I'm generally against banning people though.

I agree; banning people isn't in our board's best interest.

Some of the rhetoric in this thread should be removed, though. It in no way furthers the thread or makes any relevant argument. I understand time constraints and also feel that no one should have to baby-sit the forums. We can all act like adults if we really try hard enough.

But there needs to be a point at which insulting comments and overly abusive language should just be removed.

Alright, I've deleted about eight comments - one big thread, and then a few "rationale" followups. I originally thought about replacing the juicy bits with [MORBUS-RULESZZZZZ], but ultimately decided that the opionions within weren't anything we haven't seen before (really, truly), so there was no use in re-arguing them, least of all aggressively. For the regulars whose comments have been deleted, no hard feelings: I, *personally*, don't have a problem with a good ol'fashioned flame or troll war (hell, I start 'em myself), but when another reader complains about 'em, in a situation where I already thought they were overboard on a "civil" or "serious" site, then I'll lean toward deletions. We're smarter than this.

Thanks.

I think that the problem was that this wasn't a "good ol' fashioned flame war". Some of those can be quite witty.

oh, so i missed all the name-calling and head-bashing? poor me
:-)

Ah man, that sucks... I got deleted and I never cussed or said anything mean. Oh well, better luck next time I guess ;-)

Your comment was deleted because it was a response to the thread.
Without the thread in place, your response was confusing.

I missed out on all the drama! Oh well... : )

I agree with lurkinggherkin -- there is a distinction to be made between "Power Gaming" and "Munchkinism".

Sometimes, you just want to play over-the-top, larger than life heros taking on demons, demi-gods and all kinds of egomaniac evil genius overlords. I'd classify that more as Power Gaming... A high-level, high fantasy, super powered campaign. These can be a lot of fun and can often boil down to "Let's beat some things up for the heck of it." Nothing wrong with that if your group is all on the same page.

I'd even like to emphasize two different types of Munchkins... Those who munchkin due to inexperience, and those who munchkin with a purpose.

Inexperienced munchkins gather power and wealth because they just don't realize that the games can bring other forms of satisfaction, so they play a kick-in-the-door style game. Again -- nothing wrong with that if that's what you want... but for a group with one of these players, I think it isn't too hard to share the joy. Give the inexperienced munchkin the fun of old-fashioned toe-to-toe combat, but also give some story elements to the experienced players. A good group will bring the less experienced player along and he or she may get more from the game as s/he learns there is more to it than just combat experience points.

Then there's the other kind. This is the one with whom people have real problems: the head trip ego Munchkin. Their goal is to "win" -- have the best loot, the biggest baddie character, "pwn" other players/monsters because they are just "one of those people". We all know them -- even outside gaming circles. They think they're smarter, cooler, wiser or whatever than everyone else around them, and want to make sure everyone else recognizes their superiority. These are the same people who PK in the newbie zones in MMOGs (or stab you in the back at work to try to finagle that promotion). There are bastards all around us.

I think the disagreements here have been more about whom we are talking. The derogatory "munchkin" word is used for the latter -- not the power gamers or the inexperienced, but for those that make life difficult for everyone else because they want to feel superior. They argue rules to their advantage, find every loophole to exploit, come within a hair's breadth of cheating (or just cheat outright) and make the game no fun. These are the ones who are hard to bring around and fit in with the other players.

Any reasonable player can be convinced to try play styles outside their normal comfort zone so that everyone in the group has fun. It's the unreasonable players that we often have to give the boot... but occasionally if we try to explain what we find objectionable about their behavior, the lightbulb might go on in their head.

But often not.

Oh... PS -- it doesn't matter what system. The Ego Trip Munchkin will min/max points in GURPS/Hero/etc, pick the most combat monster prestige classes and feats in D&D, build a $100,000 Semi in Car Wars, own a Super Star Destroyer in Star Wars, have the hunkiest/sexy Sim, buy items and gold from gold farmers to get epic WoW drops... you name it. It doesn't matter what system -- they will find the way to abuse it to be "the best".

Calamar, it was never even about *what* you said...it was about the haughty tone you said it in. I was trying my best to be funny right up till you took that "holier-than-thou" tone my man. I was raised to take no crap. 'Nuff said...bygones are bygones. We've learned that we don't like each other...I think I can live with that.

I think that we can agree to disagree on this, Scott. Just FYI, at the urging of a very good friend who found this whole thing amusing, I am currently running a D&D 3rd ed. campaign. She made the rather valid point that I couldn't make fun of D&D without playing 3rd ed enough to know it well enough to talk about it intelligently. As much as I hate level based systems, I took her up on her challenge.

Consistant with my normal games, I made the characters based on the backgrounds that the players submitted. Fitting the characters into the restrictions of classes was pretty hard. Alignment was largely ignored as that is a pretty foreign concept for us. We did pick alignments that suited our classes.

Another problem that we had was the clerical class. In this world clerics were based loosely on Catholic Priest and had no magic at all. What good is a cleric in D&D without magic? One player had to change their character concept to something completely different.

I have one character who was a castle scullion, has some knowledge of reading, writing, and history, but not much else, and was supposed to be 14 or 15 years old. I had to default that character to a fighter (that's what he would have been after some experience), even though that didn't even come close to fitting.

Another character was a half elf-half orc. It stands to reason that since D&D has half elves and half orcs, then a combination of the two is physically possible. Of course, it'd have to be the result of rape, but these are orcs after all.

This character was raised by a bunch of eskimo halflings. She learned hunting and other woodcrafty things, as well as history, reading and writing in the languages, theology for two races, and other scholarly pursuits. The only thing that I found that came close class-wise was a Ranger, and that was a stretch.

All in all I can say that we had a lot of fun once we got playing. Luckily, one of the players is familier with D&D (it was his game that I had borrowed to run this campaign) and provided a lot of information that we would have had to spend a lot of time researching.

The one thing that the players REALLY liked was how powerful magic was at such a low level. One player is playing a half-elf raised by elves and is a combination ranger/druid (she had to start as a multiclassed 3/3 level character in order to be comparable to elves in my world). Using only nature spells, she was able to subdue a pack of twelve very nasty hounds that had treed two young children.

Without her, things would have gone very poorly for the other characters.

BTW Combining the spells Entangle and Growth on enemies in a forest is a cruel yet highly effective way of taking out a large number of foes with minimal effort.

My overall opinion is that D&D does work as a game as long as you stick with a world that the game is designed for. Too much creativity on the GMs part results in having to rewrite classes and races. Outside of that, the rules seem to be mechanically workable. I'll probably write more on this later.

"It's always better to kill your enemies far off than close at hand."

Another character was a half elf-half orc. It stands to reason that since D&D has half elves and half orcs, then a combination of the two is physically possible.

Not necessarily so, Calamar. Ever heard of ring species?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species

My overall opinion is that D&D does work as a game as long as you stick with a world that the game is designed for. Too much creativity on the GMs part results in having to rewrite classes and races. Outside of that, the rules seem to be mechanically workable.

Ah, but this was not the point in dispute! Your original assertion was that D&D encouraged Munchkin behaviour to a greater degree than other systems. So did you find yourselves getting the urge to weild twin +5 vorpal chainsaws of life-stealing as soon as you started rattling those d20's?

"So did you find yourselves getting the urge to weild twin +5 vorpal chainsaws of life-stealing as soon as you started rattling those d20's?"

Of course not, me and all my players are much too mature for that. However, the game mechanics do encourage (in fact they almost insist!) on Munchkinism.

Take clerics for example. Without magic, their useless. Especially if they are pacifists. In a political campaign, they can be intriguing and useful characters. But not in D&D.

Nor is it possible to play characters that don't fit into a preconcieved niche. And non combat oriented characters don't exist. Even mages are geared towards combat unless you try to learn pacifist spells. Most spells though, deal with combat (and/or spying for some reason). I include healing spells here for the obvious reason that injuries in a roleplaying game are usually the result of violence.

You cannot play a scholar or sage in D&D. Especially one without magic. Imagine having to pick a class for that! If you take away magic, the only classes that fit are cleric and fighter!

Outside of combat, there exists very few options for resolution. For example, haggling with a merchant is not something that a lot of players can do. Other games provide skills like merchant, haggling, barter, or fast talk. D&D doesn't (without adding house rules or finding supplemental rules).

"Not necessarily so, Calamar. Ever heard of ring species?"

No I haven't, thanks for the link though, that helped. I don't think that it really bears on what I was saying though. Keeping in mind that this is a fantasy game and science is... somewhat flexible, I would think that if humans can mate with elves, orcs, and in some worlds even dwarves and produce offspring, then why can't these other races do the same?

I don't think that humans have Super Sperm (comparatively speaking) nor do I think that humans are the genetic bridge for other species.

What would happen if a half orc and a half elf mated? Would they produce a human or a mixture of the three races?

The chances of other races mating and producing offspring are minimal and most likely, at least in the case of orcs, the result of rape rather than love.

Just as an opening remark, I find it odd that I, a fellow GURPS enthusiast, am about to defend d20 to you. Gads.

Nor is it possible to play characters that don't fit into a preconcieved niche. And non combat oriented characters don't exist.

Sorry, these statements aren't entirely accurate.

Many of the classes can be played in different ways. The Fighter and the Rogue are especially flexible here, and the varieties of both classes I have seen in 3.0+ have very pleasantly surprised me. Far from being restricted to a preconceived niche, either one of these classes can carve their own. Now, if you're complaining about the constrictive nature of classes per se, you're preaching to the choir; but there's almost no way to have classes at all and not have the characters nudged into one niche or the other. To some extent, the multi-classing system makes up for this. No, you can't have (at low levels anyway) armor-clad sorcerers as we sometimes see in GURPS, but you can have a character who excels at fighting and magic together.

Furthermore, there are NPC classes in the DMG which a creative, savvy DM will take advantage of. The Expert is an easy template for the magic-less scholar whose absence you lament, and I have used it (as well as the Commoner and Aristocrat) as stepping-stone classes or even player-character classes in their own right in some of my games.

Outside of combat, there exists very few options for resolution. For example, haggling with a merchant is not something that a lot of players can do. Other games provide skills like merchant, haggling, barter, or fast talk. D&D doesn't (without adding house rules or finding supplemental rules).

Though the system is explicitly set up with a combat-oriented focus, it can be played differently. I chuck the whole XP system and use my own, which rewards plot advancement rather than combat.

Also, the skills have broader range than you give them credit. For Merchant there is Profession (merchant), for Haggling or Barter there is Diplomacy, for Fast Talk there is Bluff. Furthermore, it is just as easy to add new skills of the GM's invention to d20 D&D as it is to do so in GURPS -- and I find myself augmenting both systems in such ways, every time I create a new campaign setting.

Overall, I agree with you: I judge a system by how much I have to modify it, and so far I've preferred GURPS because I've felt the need to modify it least. However, many of the things you complain about D&D have never really been intrinsic limitations: if you pay attention to the posts of OldTimer, Rogue Githyanki, and others, you will see that thoughtful, interesting, complex, detailed campaigns are being run with some very old systems indeed. As so many people keep saying, it all depends on the GM and the player group. The system does contain biases toward certain modes of play, but these biases have been surmounted by many a good group of gamers. As tempting as it is to say: "Your campaign may be great but your system sucks," that doesn't always help things or state the case accurately. If the limitations of the various systems have inspired GMs to write great campaigns, and they demonstrably have done so, then they're not so much a bad thing.

Not necessarily so, Calamar. Ever heard of ring species?

Nor had I. Man, I love some of the stuff that gets posted here. I read a thing like that wikipedia article, and it makes me feel smarter.

Being a "munchkin" just means you focus on the material aspects of a roleplaying game. This is exactly how movies and video games work. The real material rewards are what you can equate as "progress", and in a role-playing game, that either requires imagination, or referencing all of your cool items. That doesn't mean munchkins aren't creative, because I know as well as everyone else here that takes work. I will say that I won't play with munchkins, but that's only because it doesn't work with my play style, usually. I've done one-shots like that, and it's fun, but for me, you build a campaign off of substantitive things, like character development and story.
The system argument is, frankly, a load of crap. Some systems do lend themselves to different styles of games, but you can roleplay with any system. The GURPS experience noted above seems to be a fanboy issue, not a system issue. I personally have done story-oriented campaigns in D&D, Cyberpunk 2020, and now GURPS. I must say, the actual writing was pretty much the same in all three, and the experience I had with each game was dependent on the players, not the game.
In conclusion, the whole "munchkin" issue comes down to play style. I knew power gamers, and they frustrated me to no end. This was because I do not play like that. If they can't enjoy my style of play, they shouldn't be in my group, and vice versa. There's no value statement in that.

I would think that if humans can mate with elves, orcs, and in some worlds even dwarves and produce offspring, then why can't these other races do the same?

I didn't say they couldn't. I was merely pointing out a rationale for why elves and orcs might be incapable of mating with each other whilst they might be individually capable of mating with humans. However, as referee you get the final say in this, of course. If you think that all humanoid races are sufficiently genetically similar that they do not constitute seperate species or even a ring species, then you can have them all cross breeding (consentually or otherwise). It's up to you as referee. But if you don't like the idea of elf-orc hybrids and you get some shirty player whingeing 'well why not then?' you can tell them about ring species.

An interesting subject that rarely gets any attention in RPGs is whether half-orcs and half-elves are fertile or not. If they have low fertility this would explain why there isn't a half-orc or half-elf race in its own right and would also explain why the gene pools of the three races involved haven't homogenised. Half-elves and Half-orcs would be like Ligers (or Tigons).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liger

Some hybrid species do have limited fertility, such as Wolphins:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7508288/

I don't think that humans have Super Sperm (comparatively speaking) nor do I think that humans are the genetic bridge for other species.

That's entirely up to you. In my campaign world, demons and other outer-planar creatures DO have 'Super Sperm' or 'Super Eggs' and can mate with anything on the material plane (should it take their fancy to do so). That's because they are *magic* of course.....and this is how wizards breed monsters, using bound or coerced demons. Some of the resulting hybrids are sufficiently genetically stable and fertile to give rise to viable new species - like manticores and such like.

Bear in mind that this would require a sufficiently diverse starting gene pool - in other words, to kick-start a new species in this way will require numerous cross-breedings between different specimens to create a starting population that will then flourish by itself without further infusions of demonic blood. This is kind of mixing science with fantasy, of course....but it makes it seem a bit more realistic to retain some semblance of real-world mechanics in these processes.

You might not need to use multiple outer-planar breeding specimens to get the necessary diversity - 'demon DNA' might be so mutable that it changes from one mating to the next! But you do need multiple material plane specimens to get the diversity in their half of the chromosome input. At least that's the way it works in my world. Not that any player character has ever gone so far as to carry out experiments of this nature....

What would happen if a half orc and a half elf mated? Would they produce a human or a mixture of the three races?

It's very much up to you as referee. They might be infertile together; or they might be able to produce viable human, half-orc, or half-elf offspring. If you decide that elf-orc hybrids are non-viable then this combination simply won't appear or may miscarry or be born with deformities.

According to real-world genetics you wouldn't get a mixture of all three appearing - but there may be some unexpected throwbacks in the next generation!

The chances of other races mating and producing offspring are minimal

It's your call on this! There is a sufficiently diverse range of possibilities even allowed by real-world genetics, let alone introducing the 'fantasy' argument, for any referee to choose the scheme that suits them and their players.

Calamar, I'm glad you decided to give d20 a go. I was going to point out some of the things that previous posters did before I read their responses, but they did it for me!

The Expert is a fantastic class for those that don't want a niche carved out for them by Ryan Dancey and company, but would rather carve their own. I once ran a whole campaign where the players started as Experts and went from there. Most of them stayed in the Expert class for the whole campaign rather than multiclass into something else.

There are also a lot of supplemental books that handle some of the issues you had with D&D...the Book of Exalted Deeds comes to mind in relation to the whole problem with non-combat classes falling behind. It's true that this causes a deep dent in gamers pockets, and one of the HUGE issues I have with D&D is the tendency to put one or two cool things in a source book and then fill the rest of the 176 pages with garbage...but that's marketing for you. If I owned WoTC I'd probably do the same damn thing, much as I hate being on the receiving end.

As far as bargaining and haggleing goes, the Skills your looking for are Diplomacy and Bluff. Maybe even Intimidation if you bargain the way I do ;) There's very few social situations that arise in play that can't be handled with a roll against one of those three skills. You even get a synergy bonus to that roll if you have another applicable skill...for example, if you were bargaining on the price of a breastplate, and had the Craft (Armor) skill, I'd give you the +2 synergy bonus on the roll. To take the point of d20s skill system flexibility further, if you had Profession (Shopkeeper) as a skill, I would let you roll on that instead of one of the social skills if you had a higher score in the Profession skill.

I suppose one of the problems with d20 as a rules system is that it doesn't just lend itself to munchkinism (sometimes), it lends itself towards tinkering. I suppose the things about it that are broken are as endearing to me as the ones that aren't. Come to think of it, I've never met a mechanic that had a *really* nice car.

And I'm sorry everyone, but I can't resist this...one last parting shot in good humor before we let our dirty water slip under the bridge forever:

-"So did you find yourselves getting the urge to weild twin +5 vorpal chainsaws of life-stealing as soon as you started rattling those d20's?"

-"Of course not, me and all my players are much too mature for that."

And yet...

-"Immature people are easily amused. TV shows like Jackass and anything on MTV, movies like Shaggy Dog and Dare Devil, games like D&D and Toon are all made and enjoyed by people who don't want their intellect stimulated, they just wanna have a good time."

So the question is, did you *enjoy* playing D&D?

Amen to the Kabbalist Ninja! You are far more concise than I.

Calamar said: It stands to reason that since D&D has half elves and half orcs, then a combination of the two is physically possible.

Heh... we had a campaign with a half-orc... player said his character's father was human who was "taken" during an orc raid.

Make your own jokes here.

2)Most GURPS players I have met would rather talk about how cool GURPS is than actually play a character in an intellectually motivated campaign, regardless of the rules being used.

Holy Moly, it's true. I know these people. I can't recall the last time any of them actually accepted an invitation to play any game. This is a brilliant observation, Scott Free.

The problem I have with munchkins is, they specialize to such a degree that other PCs become either cannon fodder, or the saviors of the super-overspecialized munchkin (who can kill pretty much anything, but frequently can't do anything else!) I discourage munchkins in my game, but if a player REALLY wants to have a killing machine with no other skills, I allow it - and then let the munchkin try to solve all problems with sword/gun/fist/magic missile/etc. Usually these munchkins get enough flak from the rest of the party (who has to deal with the aftermath) that I don't have to do anything to get them to make more balanced characters - they get as tired of their combat monsters as everybody else does. On the rare occasions that I get a party full of munchkins, I scale their adversaries up to the point that they have a challenge, and let them solve all their problems with guns - after all, while the GM is in charge, the only way the game will keep going is if the players are satisfied.

Stray Catalyst