Don’t be the munchkin

“Did I remember to bring my gun?”

“No.”

“O.K. Well I pull out a handful of grenades and toss them with unerring accuracy at each of the MIBs, the explosions blowing each and everyone of them to itty-bitty pieces.”

Free-form. The absence of rules. (Also the absence of rules lawyers, but that is a whole other post) Free-form is the easiest type of roleplaying to play and game master. It is also the easiest type to abuse.

If you can describe it, your character did it. Just don’t ask stupid questions. Right?

So you are in this game, your players have cornered the big bad guys in a dead end tunnel under the city. There’s now way out, unless it’s past you and you have an army of barbarians in chain mail standing behind you hungry for a fight with lots of blood and no bodies left. The chase is over. Right?

“O.K. So, the vampire ghouls are actually mages – yeah, I know I never mentioned that before – and one of them casts a spell to teleport him and all his friends to a safe house that no one knows about before anyone can do anything about it.”

No dice are rolled. No rules were broken. The deed is done. Right?

Sound familiar? How did it make you feel? Frustrated? Angry? Feel like shoving the offending player/game master in a shoebox lined with acid?

OK Free-form doesn’t have to be this way. Granted there is always going to be some aggravating munchkin who just has to push the envelop so his character is the biggest, best, most powerful, richest, most attractive, and most virile not only in that game but every other game he’s ever played in. And if he doesn’t get his way, it’s like watching a two-year-old in the check-out line who’s mother won’t let him have one of every candy he can reach. I like to think that this is some attempt on the player’s part to feel better about himself because life sucks and he can’t deal. That might be true. Doesn’t matter. I think it and it makes me feel better.

So, why am I harping on this now? (I’m sure you’ve figured out by now that many – if not most – of my articles are written in moments of inspiration, and usually not the good kind. Someone or something has to really be bothering me and this is my outlet. Since there are a lot of little things that bother me in life – despite my attempts at Hakuna Matata – there’s a plethora of topics for me to chose from.

So here it is.

I joined a couple of email based games a while back. Play-by-Email and Free-form is a marriage made in heaven, right? What a wonderful opportunity to be creative, to get your role-playing fix, to help shape the future of your character and the game through your own ideas and writing. In my particular case, there is no game master. There is an administrator who acts more like referee and guide. The administrator is the big, bouncer-looking chap standing at the door of the chic club deciding who’s cool enough to get in and if someone causes a real fracas inside, he has the privilege of – ahem – eliminating the character and thrusting the player into the agony of email drought — play-by-email purgatory.

I’ve got no complaints about how this works. I like it. I am planning to start my own PBeM using the same philosophy. It’s a wonderful way to play, to write, to create. I find it very satisfying.

So? What’s the problem?

The problem is that the Free-form Play-by-Email marriage begets good players and munchkins. The good players are the ones that work together to create a realistic, continuous story that makes sense even when player characters take to different sides of the good/bad line or are somewhere in the gray middle area. Munchkins are the ones that look really cool when you first see them and they manage to dupe the bouncer into letting them in the club and then they abandon any sort of common sense and logic in favor of creating a mosh pit in the center of the club.

Huh?

Basically, here comes a munchkin who looks good on paper but once he’s in the game, he starts god-moding and building up his character to be the biggest, the best, the smartest, the most virile, the fastest, the most attractive, the richest, the most powerful, the all-knowing. Nothing, and I do mean nothing, can stop him. Nothing bad can happen to him that he doesn’t walk away from unscathed. No great tragedies ever occur in his life. He never fails at anything he attempts. He can leap buildings in a single bound; he is faster than a speeding bullet… he is perfect.

Some of you are thinking, “What’s wrong with that?” Well, I’ll tell you. He is boring. That and it just serves to frustrate the other players, which alienates the munchkin. Then the other players begin to plot against the munchkin and the munchkin can’t understand why everyone is out to get him, because, after all, he is wonderful and perfect and loved by millions. Isn’t he? Uh-huh. Sure. So then the resentment builds and the other players group up to present nasty obstacles in the munchkin’s path, but the munchkin snaps his fingers and suddenly his character is a mage, which he never mentioned in his character application or any of the 400 previous posts, and the mage has the power to wave his mighty hand and make all of the bad things disappear. This, of course, only causes more frustration and resentment and the players start to plot some more and… well, you get the idea.

It’s an endless cycle where the creativity of the game has degenerated into a thousand ways to kill a character and the munchkin is South Park’s Kenny.

So what have we learned?

Play-by-Email = good. Free-form = good. Perfect, wonderful, boring munchkin = bad. Don’t be that guy. Don’t be that one guy who ruins the game for everyone else because your character has to be the hero, loved by millions, better than any one else. Don’t be that guy.