So back in high-school I knew this kid who played AD&D. I also played AD&D, but I never played with him.
Why not?
Because he was a Munchkin (although this was long before I'd ever heard the term).
He was more munchkin than I was, which was kind of saying something.
At the time, this was freshman year, IIRC, I had a character that I had leveled up from a first level D&D wizard into an Immortal character using the original D&D boxed sets.
I had leveled him, but I didn't exactly earn it.
See, back in the day, you earned xp for the gold you collected. It was only like 10% of the gold you'd get in xp, but that mattered.
There was this official Solo Adventure module called "Latham's Gold" and I either found a loophole or misunderstood how to run the thing, and I ended up finding (or creating) a situation where I could keep going back to this one point and get gold every time I went there (it was on a volcano that spat out molten gold bits now and then).
So I decided that my character would stake a claim and fill his ship full of this gold, effectively getting an unlimited supply of cash, and therefore an unlimited supply of XP.
Later I either found or created some rules for becomming an actual God, and played out a war between the gods, with my character becoming one of the major surviving Gods, who owned pretty much all the cool artifacts in the Legends & Lore book.
Munchy as hell, in hindsight, but this is probably why the suggested age for the game was 12 and up. I did all of that pretty much during Jr. High and before (although some still in early high school).
Then there was this other kid.
His favorite character was also a god, only he didn't put in any of the work that I had (which still wasn't enough to actually earn the power my character had).
He claimed that his character had defeated Hades in single combat, and had taken Hades' powers and job after killing the god.
Which wasn't something that fit with the rules of the game, and it turned out not to be the only area where this kid tossed the rules out the window.
For example, he ignored armor class.
He'd roll a strike roll on a d6; an odd number meant the attacker hit, an even number meant that the attacker missed.
And he tended to reroll misses for his character.
All of this pissed me off, because it was cheating. Hell, it was cheating on top of cheating; not only did he ignore important rules of the game in favor of illogical crap that gave anybody a 50+% chance of successfully striking a god, regardless of AC, he then proceeded to ignore his own rules and just hit every time.
Which made me wonder why he even bothered playing the game.
Of course, one of the reasons why he bothered playing was for bragging rights. He loved to talk about how cool his character (his frickin' cheat of a character) was, and when he got his first car the license plate was "Hades 1" or something.
Which pissed me off even more, because he didn't actually have any bragging rights; he hadn't done a damn thing worth bragging about.
At least I'd put in the time and effort or running a proper battle when my character took on gods and killed them, even if the methods I used to get to the battle in the first place were questionable at best, and I used the official rules of the game (as best as I understood them at that age) whenever I could.
In the end, neither one of us exactly stood out as shining beacons of proper game-play, but in comparison to him, my playing style looked pretty close to fair.
So why am I telling you all this?
Well, for one thing Nekira recently posted a thread about somebody in her gaming circles that she discovered is on the Sex Offenders Registry.
That reminded me of this guy, because he went away to prison a couple years ago for screwing (or trying to screw) a 12 year-old relative (or something like that).
So this guy's been on my mind.
The other reason is because the most recent thread about Snipers in Rifts has me thinking about Munchkinism and the causes of it.
Basically, a lot of people want to play snipers in Rifts who can reliably (or constantly one-shot kill their enemies.
There's nothing inherently wrong with this; that's what snipers try to do.
The probem is that these people want to one-shot kill opponents who are supposed to be significant foes. Borgs, Supernatural Creatures, even people in Heavy EBA.
I address some of the problems with this sort of thinking in that other thread, and I don't want to rehash them here.
(So if you disagree with me on this topic, which I know some of you will, that's cool... just don't clutter up this thread discussing it).
When I'm running, if a player wants to be a Sniper, that's great.
If he wants to one-shot kill enemies, that's great too.
I'll send him up against enemies that he can one-shot kill.
bandits in Plastic Man or Urban Warrior. Light MDC demons and monsters. SDC foes. Guys with non-environmental armor that can be taken out with a good headshot.
What I will NOT do is to create some sort of super-powerful sniping rifle that is capable of killing a heavily armored (or high MDC) opponent in a single shot.
And I will NOT create sniping rules that can bypass EBA, or create rules for sniper shots penetrating armor before the MDC is depleted.
Because all of those things miss the point; those foes are supposed to be tough.
Which is, I believe, why people (some of them, at least) want to one-shot kill these foes; for the bragging rights of how easily they took down a supposedly powerful enemy.
There's nothing wrong with bragging about taking out a powerful enemy, IF you came by it honestly.
But if you didn't come by it honestly, then it's just...
lame.
And Wrong.
Like that guy bragging about defeating Hades, when he double-cheated his ass off to do it, and didn't even expend any effort in the process.
What's there to brag about?
"I just imagined that I did something cool!!" is NOT worth bragging about.
Sure, a lot of people might say that that's all role-playing IS; imagining that you're doing something cool.
But it's not. Imagining that you've done something cool is a part of the game (like when you roll a nat 20 and kill an imaginary demon that was about to kill an imaginary ally of your imaginary character), but that's not all there is to it.
It's also about imagining you've done something stupid or inept (like when you botch an easy skill check and end up falling off a ladder or driving into a ditch or you roll a nat 1 and end up missing a 20' tall creature that's standing 10' away, with it's back turned).
The dice, the game master, the rules of the game, and YOU all (in theory) keep the game from just being the mental masturbation of pretending that you've done something cool.
You can actually accomplish things in role-playing.
You can play well, you can play smart, you can roll well, and you can and should get to brag about these things.
If somebody tells me that they one-shot killed a full conversion Borg, I'm not going to be impressed. All that means is that they cheated, or that they had a character that is so legitimately powerful that the Borg wasn't even close to a worthy challenge ("Man, when you've got a Synchro-cannon, Full Conversion Borgs aint' nothin'!")
On the other hand, if you tell me that your juicer in standard Juicer Plate, armed with a JA-11, slowly picked off a Full Conversion Borg in a deadly game of cat-and-bionic-mouse going by the official rules of the game, THEN I'll be impressed.
THEN you should brag about it.
What it comes down to is that a lot of people want to take out powerful foes without facing significant risk of losing.
The problem being that if you have to buff up your character (or nerf the enemy) to absurd degrees in order to win, you haven't really accomplished anything worth doing.
It's like saying, "I defeated Mike Tyson!!"
Except that you only did it because
a) He was tied up and gagged.
or
b) You had a shotgun.
or
c) Both A and B.
The way the contest is done completely undoes the point of having the contest in the first place.
Like defeating Hades using some screwed-up house-rules combined with straight cheating.
