Although I think my favourite part of the series is when a witch casts a spell to unleash Jaime's greatest power fantasy--she figures that the power fantasies of a teenage superhero must be seriously messed up.
On evidence, though, it's not provocative: none of the answers have responded to it in that way, it doesn't have any close votes, and its downvotes are minimal.
@trogdor His other best friend. They'd gotten into a fix where the witch forced his friend to duel her champion for the life of a baby, and then she claimed Jaime's power fantasy as her champion.
It turned out just as one-sided as she'd hoped (Jaime's friend is unpowered), but on the wrong side.
@Lord_Gareth These days I read the word munchkin and power gamer as "they make things that I don't know how to deal with" since most of the people who use the word don't know what it means. I've had discussions with well versed optimisers who disagreed on the definition.
@BESW As usual our site guidance is - if a question is about a game approach so different from yours you don't have anything useful to add - stay away from the question. That's my advice on the subject...
@BESW It's not hard to unpack the term. In point of fact he's already explicitly discussed that a mechanical focus is harming the game experience he wants to present. Eliminate it and move on.
"How to ease down the [snip] factor?" "It so happens that my regular gaming group consists of 70% [purged]," "It is my conviction that toning down the [nuh-uh] factor will leave us with plenty more time to enjoy the game"
Eh. He defines his terms, "munchkins, meaning all effort goes into optimizing their characters, very little effort into background and playability of the characters." Arguments that one doesn't preclude the other are irrelevant since he claims that in his situation it does. And I think it's hard to argue the word Munchkin is hate speech since we all own multiple boxes of a game named that from SJG.
Obviously he's coming from a game approach opposed to some other folks' - that's fine, don't answer
But it is, and gets used, as a negative term in multiple places online. You'll find it used to denigrate and exclude players on Paizo's forums, on GitP, on SA, /tg/, and Bay12.
(In mildly related news, how has the same page tool not yet been linked?)
And match over. Lost but made them pay for every blood-soaked inch of it.
@BESW "How can I de-emphasize mechanics in my game?" "My regular gaming group mostly focuses on the ruleset." "I believe that toning down the mechanical emphasis will leave us more time to enjoy the game." Bam.
He doesn't have a problem with mechanics. He has a problem with optimisation trivialising and overshadowing other parts of gameplay.
> The fact that the players spend so much time tweaking and focusing on bonuses and feat-combos is not in itself a bad thing. The problem is that the time we spend together at the gaming table is finite and thus priorities as to what we spend that time on, must be made. I feel that the minmaxing takes up an unnecessary amount of time[.]
@Magician Maybe it hasn't been, at his table. Could be worth suggesting in an answer, actually; see if working on builds can be done between sessions, maybe via email.
@BESW Between-session discussion can still help with this in a lot of ways. It might, in my experience, also just be part of the growing pains of a new system.
When Tome of Battle got introduced at my gaming table, a lot of encounters took longer because we were discussing strategy with the new mechanics.
But as we gained more experience, that slowed down, then stopped.
Once the rules are a comfortable tool there's less need to read the manual.
There are people who have said "My players are being munchkins. How dare they care about mechanics! How do I fix this?" - but this isn't that. The person's being pretty courteous and using the term in a very neutral manner and stating he doesn't have a problem with his players being that way, except that it is creating problems in another fashion which BESW just quoted.
Basically they seem to be trying not only to optimise their characters (A-OK), but strategically optimise every single combat round.
If you have a problem with the use of "munchkin" in any context, that's fine. But if you want to have meaningful conversations about its use in this question and how to ask the same question without using that word--it's important to have a good understanding of the question.
To the point where from his description it sounds like they might realistically weigh up three different options, run calculations, predict following rounds, evaluate the consequences, then finally someone says "Ok, I'll cast grease."
@BraddSzonye If that's how they wanna play, man. DM's just a player at the table. If that's not the kind of game you wanna run, ask someone else to run it.
I had the chance to run a one-shot recently, bowed out of it when it became clear that the group and I wouldn't mesh.
In this particular case, I suspect it's the desire to play "well" by making the most out of a complex system. Not taking the time to figure out the perfect tactical move, given the breadth of options, may feel like half-arsing the game.
A lot of us ignored the “D&D Tactics” stuff from AD&D1, and in AD&D2 it didn’t show up much until the optional Combat & Tactics book. And then D&D3 picked it up and D&D4 ran with it.
I have not. Though when I've played CaH the points are considered important, mostly because the person with the most points gets crowned Worst Human Being at the Table, and the one with the least points doesn't have to pay for the pizza :p
Like many of the people who got into the ground floor of it, I saw 3.0 as being 2e with all the math going in the same direction because everything looked so familiar.
It wasn't until later in 3.5's run that I truly realized the extent to which WotC had created a different game, a different system.
@BraddSzonye Well, I joined in approximately '98 if that tells you anything. Dad was the DM, and the books he owned that weren't adventures were PHB, DMG, Unearthed Arcana (oh man that book), Complete Elf Handbook, Complete Paladin Handbook, and All the Ravenloft Supplements Ever, Ever, Ever, Ever, Yes, Even That One
In any event, 3e looked familiar to me when it came out. The long and painful story of how I lost my innocence playing and designing for it has been told already.
Though I couldn't dig it up. My google-fu is weak.
Unlike @BESW, who could Google the contents of the lost library of Alexandria
My college game group played AD&D2.5 with all of the Players Option expansions, although we kept a tight lid on Skills & Powers because it was so easy to munchkin.
And yeah, it was definitely a precursor to D&D3.
At the time, we thought that was a good direction to go in.
It's odd to think about and even odder to say out loud but despite having nothing but positive memories of 2e - even the character deaths - I still hate it.
@BraddSzonye 1e and 2e were the foundations of the RPG genre and have to be acknowledged for that, in much the same way that you have to teach Freud at school. "This happened, now never listen to this guy ever again, he's a psychopath."
3.X did a lot of things for the RPG community just by existing; that is, the system didn't do them, but the community that played the system did, because of aspects of that system.
4e is the most honest form of D&D and learned a ton of very good lessons. It was, and is, comprehensible, easy to make rulings for, and frank about what it was and wasn't good at.
I might suggest that this chat would be more friendly and welcoming to others if it wasn't a continuous screed of how much various popular games suck, and we hate them, and hate their designers. I suspect that evaluating specific design decisions is possible without that.
It’s tricky sometimes though, because of that whole thing Lord_Gareth and I were just discussing where we have had a lot of great times playing games, that worked pretty well in practice, and yet in hindsight we think were terrible.
Why do we think they’re terrible, if they were fun and got the job done?
Like, take the Maid RPG that has come up in a popular question. The game design has a lot of elements that would be sheer non-starters for a lot of people, and yet I can obviously see how it’s a lot of fun. I think the comparison @mxyzplk made to Paranoia is apt.
@BraddSzonye Sure, and that's worth exploring. But in a non-hate-filled screed way is probably good
@BraddSzonye Yeah Maid isn't just like any indie RPG. It's very random-chart driven and stuff. Different from the whole new-gen-narrativist-gamist Rules As Enforcement Of Narrative like Dungeon World. Dungeons and Toons or Big Eyes, Small Mouth: Dungeon are pretty similar.
@BESW Yes, you will notice the last comment along those lines has been deleted as offensive. Speak about others like they were here (and like you don't want to get booted for code of conduct violations, of course)
@BraddSzonye Well. Paranoia, to my uninformed eyes (I've played one game), is about, in no particular order: GM vs players; backstabbing; absurd situations; dystopian world.
Anyway, there's the older kinds of indie games that don't have rules as direct narrative devices - more like light rules that drive story ideas and stuff. I personally am left cold by the "rules as narrative device" games - played some of them, don't like the feel. But Maid, like those others, doesn't play like that...
@Magician Paranoia (at least, the edition that I played) emphasizes strongly that while the world is dangerous, the GM should not be the real reason you are dying.
Anyway, @LordGareth sorry about that, didn't know a comment delete for offensive caused a 30m suspension. Though in the future I will still flag as offensive random disses on specific people, so I guess it's a learning experience for us both.
@Smurfton I have heard good things about that version. I personally avoided it because of Mongoose’s reputation for poor quality control, because Paranoia + poor quality control is part of what drove the game underground for a long time to begin with.
I thought of buying the rulebook, I think it was XP, but was scared off by its thickness and small font. Seemed like a lot of effort for an occasional one-off I'd use it for.
Yeah I have so many games that I've had to start saying "Wait... Does this new version really have compelling stuff for me besides the opportunity to buy all the old stuff again?"
I have a bunch of the classic 2e adventures and so didn't want to reinvest
Happened with Mutants & Masterminds too - they revved versions 1 to 2 to 3 and I was just like "I liked 1 ok guys... and I bought all the stuff for it..."
@Smurfton When I moved into my new house, I got one with a great room as the front and turned it into a library with 8 of the max sized ikea bookcases with extensions.
@mxyzplk I’ve found that’s less of a problem with Hero System because so little of that game seems to change from edition to edition, and old supplements tend to still be usable for a long time.
Ants are harder to deal with non-toxically, but if they aren't in the house (just visiting) you can drive them out with regular spray-and-wipe applications of lavender, bleach, and soap on their trails. Three times a day for a few days and they'll usually give up.
@BraddSzonye [face/palm] At my old house when we'd get particularly bad rainy seasons, the ants would get flooded out of their outdoor nests and move indoors.
@BraddSzonye I finally gave up and got an exterminator to wander through monthly. it was OK in the dry years but we finally got rain this year and there was a lot of stuff
I dunno whether the ants are actually nesting in the house. Haven’t seen evidence of it, but we are a bit overcrowded with stuff from my fiancée moving in and so we might just not see it.
I think they are coming in through windows and bathroom vents. Especially the latter, given that we can see their trails going to the fixtures.
Some friends of ours just had to wipe out a colony in their crawlspace. Eww.
@BraddSzonye The most basic reason is that group > system, which is part of what makes it so hard to have a common discussion about RPG systems. Have you read @Magician's No Such Thing as D&D article? Any group can make almost any system fun, and I only say almost because FATAL and Racial Holy War exist.
@Lord_Gareth Yep, that’s a big part of it. I think another important thing though is that a lot of things that seem horrible from an armchair critique point of view just really aren’t that important in play. Or actually work out well in play when you wouldn’t expect it.
Like, most early dice pool systems didn’t really work as advertised. They generally featured splitting pools that was either overpowered or pointless, and a lot of folks really hated them.
But in play, you just got to roll a bunch of dice and had fun and it worked.
And then there’s stuff like random chargen and random storygen and such, which has all sorts of things wrong with it, and yet in my experience most folks actually like them in practice.
@BraddSzonye Where I tend to not trust anecdotes from play because people forget about house rules or spot rulings and then assume others play like they do.
@Lord_Gareth A lot of people play from a place where they’re doing collaborative storytelling and they really only need rules when people disagree about what should happen. And so they ignore the rules any time people agree about what should happen.
Or collaborative exploration, or puzzle solving, or whatever.
Lots of folks describe RPGs as “cops and robbers where there are rules when you can’t agree,” and that’s an apt description of a lot of play.
So I can think of at least three really old-school traditions.
I think Champions/Hero was written from the cops & robbers tradition. Where everyone has a common goal and the rules are just supposed to be lubricant to get you there.
And even though it has elements that look a lot like wargaming, Champs/Hero plays really poorly if you play it like a wargame or competitive exercise.
(Unrelated: I seem to have unlocked some kind of new chat superpower to review flags)
And even among the more competitive approaches to trad gaming, there are still some major stylistic differences. Like, some people really want to pin down all of the rules in stone and triplicate with no house rules or judgment calls all in one easily accessible volume. And other people are like, eh we’ll sort it out.
Like, some groups are very cooperative and it’s like a group puzzle-solving session where most of the stuff plays out in theater-of-the-mind based on the unique details of the puzzle you’re facing.
@BraddSzonye My take on this, as a designer, is that you hurt no one by making clear, comprehensible rules. The people who enjoy the legalese will thank you. The ones that don't never cared to begin with. And new players still figuring out where they fall will, in the meantime, face much less confusion.
You could arguably say it was clearer than its predecessors but that's only because all the math is based on the same RNG and moving the same direction.
I'm loving the high crunch of ARRPG, but even in such a well-indexed, cross-referenced, and neatly coherent manual, sorting out the interconnections can be a bit of a chore sometimes.
@BraddSzonye Nah, that end result happens because of a desire towards simulating a campaign world. When you want to simulate legalistically, you get tons and tons of rules.
FATE and Legend are both examples of games written with clear, comprehensible rules that did not care about simulating.
@Lord_Gareth I think it comes more from a desire to lock down fairness and game balance. Which is a big concern for games like Magic too (and that’s a game that obviously has no campaign world)
'cause that's a rather unique challenge: simulating reality, if taken to its logical extreme, ultimately means recreating physical laws we don't even fully understand yet!
@BraddSzonye Magic belongs to a wholly different genre of thang, though. You can have balance without having to worry about every single case, if you make the rules correctly. Where a lot of RPG writers stumble is forgetting that elegance is beautiful.
If you can say something clearly in 20 words, don't say it in 100
By contrast, Cthulhu Dark is about simulating the descent into madness: that's its only concern, and all its rules move toward that goal. It doesn't care about the world, it cares about the madness.
In any event, even if you're not going to play it, look at Legend sometime. I can provide you with a link (it's free), and it's a glorious example of mechanics design done absolutely correctly.
I do really like things like the Fate point economy, and D&D advantage, that make something regular and simple out of a huge range of possible situations.
But even aside from Legend, FATE has been great. Reading it, I can see that it's written by people who understand how mechanics work, not because of the math, but because they understand that mechanics affect how play feels
And that how play feels affects the tone of the game
Rules influence play experience, play experience influences the mood and social dynamic, which influences how characters get played, characters are the main components of the story.
@BraddSzonye "That one time we kicked in a door and it turned out to still be trapped," is a story. It might not have in-universe narrative but it's a tale you tell again later.
