I have tried to introduce Munchkin to friends who've never roleplayed, and it's really hard to explain to them that breaking the rules and lying about what your cards do is a natural part of the game. It's like they've never seen a guy roll a 27 on a D20 with only a +5 modifier.
Going back to my youth, when dinosaurs walked the earth and cell phones didn't exist yet,... late 80s specifically,... I'm guessing it's the earliest I'd heard the term munchkin,... back then it had a more specific meaning. It basically meant a min-maxer, who completely ignored any kind of personality or role playing in any game, and just stuck to their numbers and combat,... That was really all it started out as,... the slur has changed its meaning over the decades, or rather it's expanded to include other kinds of behavior, but the original meaning is still in there,... ;)
Its like trying to roleplay and tell a story to someone that skips all the dialogue in videogames to get straight to the combat, cause that's not the gameplay to them.
Every time I think about it, I think not just about how it was the first time I got totally rebuffed for suggesting a tongue-in-cheek dungeon idea, but also how they actively chose to do no roleplaying, and then for years always defended it as objectively the best thing they could have done. The guys that did it never, ever, over years of playing with them, fully understood why it bothered me so much. It's an event I think of frequently whenever I plan game stuff now. Not "What if the party has a better idea," but rather, the more insidious, "What if the party chooses to have no ideas."
Our play group has a munchin, but we're slowly getting him out of it. It helps that all of his characters keep having identity crisis because his characters don't really have one. Always a fun story beat in each campaign. So helping him make his character each game bascially is a group activity as we help him figure out what the actual character of his character is.
I feel like Munchkins would perform really well within campaigns focused around service within a fictional military or law enforcement/gaurd style force: They have a clearly defined command structure, clearly defined missions and objectives, hard gaurdrails guiding what kinds of decisions they're allowed to make without in game disciplinary or even legal repercussions, rules of engagent, access to a certain level of equipment and supplies (so they don't need to deal with shopping), and an inherent component of their job is to generally follow orders and trust their command to handle the bigger picture stuff. It could even force them to do a small, measured amount of narritive role play even they might enjoy, if their objectives require them to do a little bit of talking to people.
Pathfinder absolutely breeds munchkins, it's just kinda a product of big number-crunching and heavy amounts of customization. If you're talking about first edition, at least, it probably has something similar in second edition.
It's really hard to turn my "video game mode" off when I play Baldur's Gate 3 with friends. I see a character that's part of a quest, I start the quest. Locked door off the beaten path? Let's open it just because there's obviously CONTENT behind it for us to go and experience. I think my biggest issue with taking my characters seriously and stoping using my personal wants (as a video game player) as their motivations is that nothing in the story relates to your character's background. They never ask you to think of who you are playing past the character creation screen and the rare few dialogue prompts those choices might unlock.
I'm not even sure it's a good idea to try to turn 'video game mode' off with bg3. It is, after all, still a video game. It's got a decent amount of choices and content, but yeah, as you've said, it's not really background based. Might be best to pick an origin character if you want to try and play like that?
Depending on the game and my mood, I've done both. Loved your thoughts/rant, I was snickering the whole time and then your final line had me in stitches!
I liked this video, but I have some issues with it. The first thing is that I don't really think Munchkins is the appropriate word. The etymology of Munchkin is well-known. Power gamers in the AD&D days tended to play halflings because of their crazy bonuses. It's a word that describes a minmaxer. I think it has some overlap with your description of Munchkins, but it isn't quite right IMO. I think a more productive discussion would be around the distinction between players who engage with the Mechanics of the game and players who engage in the Narrative. Towards the end of the video, Greg makes the assertion that narrative games are better. If I understood right, the argument was essentially: "nothing matters in a munchkin game. Nothing matters in a narrative game either, but you end up with a cool story and everyone has cool stories about it." Which is fine, if you value cool stories, but if you play the game for the experience of winning (I.E. overcoming mechanical challenges), then the munchkin game would be more meaningful to you. The Munchkin might say "So you have a cool story, so what? I don't play for that. I read books for great stories and I play D&D to kill monsters." Greg's point about motives vs objectives was really insightful and well-taken. I had never thought about that before, and I'll put some effort of incorporating that into my play from now on. On the other hand, it's unfortunate that Greg couldn't make the leap to apply the motive vs objective logic to the actual players. He really doesn't seem to consider that other players have different motives for playing the game. It's fine to assert that Dark Souls is better than FIFA, but you can't just say one is cool and the other is lame and move on. I actually do agree that narrative-focused games are better, but I don't think Greg really makes a compelling reason to accept that. My reason is probably unpopular. I think that Table-Top is better than video games because it's more mentally and emotionally edifying, and I think that narrative-focused games are more-so.
The other crazy thing about these sorts of labels besides the shifting definitions is how well they bleed together on a spectrum. You have your powergamers that like to make powerful characters, which may or may not be a min-maxer that minimizes some attributes to let them maximize others, but both of them are under the group of "roleplayers" that ultimately only care for playing their characters' role, weak or powerful, than "winning the game." Then there's the other part of the Venn diagram of "rollplayers" who only care about the mechanical success or failure of their gameplay; the gamblers that get dopamine hits from seeing the random number show up rather than from fulfilling a character goal. The Munchkins are the epitome of that, making builds that are basically all but certain to succeed so that they can turn every die roll into a shot of "yes, luck worked" even though it's nigh impossible to fail.
I think what you're describing is a normal powergamer, with some murderhobo overlap. A munchkin is a subset of powergamer who will stop at nothing- including cheating to get their objective. At least that's my understanding.
fair definition, but 'munchkin', as I've ever heard it, includes some element of min-maxing your character. like, multi-classing with homebrew and trying to..."outsmart" the game before it even starts. optimizing the danger and stakes and roleplay out of the game. but as I kept watching, you more or less touch on this in the back half of the video, so. yeah
Did not realise being a ‘TPK GM’ was a faux pas in some gaming circles o.o I have a feeling my players would get instantly bored if encounters weren’t potentially fatal… then again even though all of my encounters are leaning to the ‘deadly’ end of encounter building math I seldom have players actually die… so maybe that’s why no one is angry at me x)
Murder hobo is another phenomenon and worth it's own video. Have you ever noticed a lot of roleplaying parties consist of homeless drifters who kill for hire? Murder hobos. But because it's also a slur, it gets applied in a couple of different ways, and often gets thrown at munchkins too.
11:20 This has happened to me in my first tim playing hero, I was hoping to make a character who mechanically wasnt the best for combat, and had the living shit stomped out of that idea. Never gonna forget my boy
I notice alot if your complaints are the players not making interesting choices, but perhaps some players dont know their choices. Its always good for a dm to ask, "What would you like to do?" And let the world interact with their choices.
I feel like in many respects they are a problem born of D&D, as a mechanically ungainly and (originally more than now) punishing tactical combat game without much in the way of anything else it creates a mindset of well if this doesn't help me in the next fight it's basically useless. Why would you willingly do something that puts you at risk of losing the game, when you could instead win it by optimising how many monstrous creatures you defeat and how many valuables you loot. And because in the minds of a lot of people the ampersand is synonymous with roleplaying games of course it ends up everywhere else too.
Real talk though Munchkin is a great game as long as you're cheating the whole time.
I have tried to introduce Munchkin to friends who've never roleplayed, and it's really hard to explain to them that breaking the rules and lying about what your cards do is a natural part of the game. It's like they've never seen a guy roll a 27 on a D20 with only a +5 modifier.
Going back to my youth, when dinosaurs walked the earth and cell phones didn't exist yet,... late 80s specifically,... I'm guessing it's the earliest I'd heard the term munchkin,... back then it had a more specific meaning. It basically meant a min-maxer, who completely ignored any kind of personality or role playing in any game, and just stuck to their numbers and combat,... That was really all it started out as,... the slur has changed its meaning over the decades, or rather it's expanded to include other kinds of behavior, but the original meaning is still in there,... ;)
I'm in a Munchkin group, it sucks
One day Greg, when you don't expect it, I will appear in your server and be one of your players.
Not a munchkin, just a longtime fan.
Time to rewatch Children Of The Sandler and evaluate whether it came from a Munchkin playgroup or a Narrative one.
Its like trying to roleplay and tell a story to someone that skips all the dialogue in videogames to get straight to the combat, cause that's not the gameplay to them.
Greg will never let those mines go. Not that I can blame him, but it's amusing to hear it keep coming up.
Every time I think about it, I think not just about how it was the first time I got totally rebuffed for suggesting a tongue-in-cheek dungeon idea, but also how they actively chose to do no roleplaying, and then for years always defended it as objectively the best thing they could have done. The guys that did it never, ever, over years of playing with them, fully understood why it bothered me so much. It's an event I think of frequently whenever I plan game stuff now. Not "What if the party has a better idea," but rather, the more insidious, "What if the party chooses to have no ideas."
You forgot them initiating PvP because they want all the loot.
Our play group has a munchin, but we're slowly getting him out of it. It helps that all of his characters keep having identity crisis because his characters don't really have one. Always a fun story beat in each campaign. So helping him make his character each game bascially is a group activity as we help him figure out what the actual character of his character is.
I feel like Munchkins would perform really well within campaigns focused around service within a fictional military or law enforcement/gaurd style force:
They have a clearly defined command structure, clearly defined missions and objectives, hard gaurdrails guiding what kinds of decisions they're allowed to make without in game disciplinary or even legal repercussions, rules of engagent, access to a certain level of equipment and supplies (so they don't need to deal with shopping), and an inherent component of their job is to generally follow orders and trust their command to handle the bigger picture stuff.
It could even force them to do a small, measured amount of narritive role play even they might enjoy, if their objectives require them to do a little bit of talking to people.
Yes. Good.
When is your Speech-to-Text Generated DnD Bible coming out, this is priceless wisdom you're freely giving.
I've started playing Pathfinder recently, and this is really insightful for me. We might have a munchkin in our group
Pathfinder absolutely breeds munchkins, it's just kinda a product of big number-crunching and heavy amounts of customization. If you're talking about first edition, at least, it probably has something similar in second edition.
It's really hard to turn my "video game mode" off when I play Baldur's Gate 3 with friends. I see a character that's part of a quest, I start the quest. Locked door off the beaten path? Let's open it just because there's obviously CONTENT behind it for us to go and experience.
I think my biggest issue with taking my characters seriously and stoping using my personal wants (as a video game player) as their motivations is that nothing in the story relates to your character's background. They never ask you to think of who you are playing past the character creation screen and the rare few dialogue prompts those choices might unlock.
I'm not even sure it's a good idea to try to turn 'video game mode' off with bg3. It is, after all, still a video game. It's got a decent amount of choices and content, but yeah, as you've said, it's not really background based. Might be best to pick an origin character if you want to try and play like that?
Depending on the game and my mood, I've done both. Loved your thoughts/rant, I was snickering the whole time and then your final line had me in stitches!
I liked this video, but I have some issues with it.
The first thing is that I don't really think Munchkins is the appropriate word. The etymology of Munchkin is well-known. Power gamers in the AD&D days tended to play halflings because of their crazy bonuses. It's a word that describes a minmaxer. I think it has some overlap with your description of Munchkins, but it isn't quite right IMO.
I think a more productive discussion would be around the distinction between players who engage with the Mechanics of the game and players who engage in the Narrative.
Towards the end of the video, Greg makes the assertion that narrative games are better. If I understood right, the argument was essentially: "nothing matters in a munchkin game. Nothing matters in a narrative game either, but you end up with a cool story and everyone has cool stories about it." Which is fine, if you value cool stories, but if you play the game for the experience of winning (I.E. overcoming mechanical challenges), then the munchkin game would be more meaningful to you. The Munchkin might say "So you have a cool story, so what? I don't play for that. I read books for great stories and I play D&D to kill monsters."
Greg's point about motives vs objectives was really insightful and well-taken. I had never thought about that before, and I'll put some effort of incorporating that into my play from now on.
On the other hand, it's unfortunate that Greg couldn't make the leap to apply the motive vs objective logic to the actual players. He really doesn't seem to consider that other players have different motives for playing the game. It's fine to assert that Dark Souls is better than FIFA, but you can't just say one is cool and the other is lame and move on.
I actually do agree that narrative-focused games are better, but I don't think Greg really makes a compelling reason to accept that. My reason is probably unpopular. I think that Table-Top is better than video games because it's more mentally and emotionally edifying, and I think that narrative-focused games are more-so.
The other crazy thing about these sorts of labels besides the shifting definitions is how well they bleed together on a spectrum. You have your powergamers that like to make powerful characters, which may or may not be a min-maxer that minimizes some attributes to let them maximize others, but both of them are under the group of "roleplayers" that ultimately only care for playing their characters' role, weak or powerful, than "winning the game." Then there's the other part of the Venn diagram of "rollplayers" who only care about the mechanical success or failure of their gameplay; the gamblers that get dopamine hits from seeing the random number show up rather than from fulfilling a character goal. The Munchkins are the epitome of that, making builds that are basically all but certain to succeed so that they can turn every die roll into a shot of "yes, luck worked" even though it's nigh impossible to fail.
I think what you're describing is a normal powergamer, with some murderhobo overlap. A munchkin is a subset of powergamer who will stop at nothing- including cheating to get their objective. At least that's my understanding.
fair definition, but 'munchkin', as I've ever heard it, includes some element of min-maxing your character. like, multi-classing with homebrew and trying to..."outsmart" the game before it even starts. optimizing the danger and stakes and roleplay out of the game. but as I kept watching, you more or less touch on this in the back half of the video, so. yeah
Great video!
Did not realise being a ‘TPK GM’ was a faux pas in some gaming circles o.o I have a feeling my players would get instantly bored if encounters weren’t potentially fatal… then again even though all of my encounters are leaning to the ‘deadly’ end of encounter building math I seldom have players actually die… so maybe that’s why no one is angry at me x)
i thought the term was murder hobo
no attachment to a story just kill and progress to next place to kill
Murder hobo is another phenomenon and worth it's own video.
Have you ever noticed a lot of roleplaying parties consist of homeless drifters who kill for hire? Murder hobos. But because it's also a slur, it gets applied in a couple of different ways, and often gets thrown at munchkins too.
🎵You got a friend in Randy Newman🎵
Also a hero fan
shit there back!
11:20
This has happened to me in my first tim playing hero, I was hoping to make a character who mechanically wasnt the best for combat, and had the living shit stomped out of that idea.
Never gonna forget my boy
I notice alot if your complaints are the players not making interesting choices, but perhaps some players dont know their choices. Its always good for a dm to ask, "What would you like to do?" And let the world interact with their choices.
Who are you and why am I subbed? D:
I had way more fun with the character arcs than the dungeon crawling in table top games. The combat is all math and spreadsheets.
I feel like in many respects they are a problem born of D&D, as a mechanically ungainly and (originally more than now) punishing tactical combat game without much in the way of anything else it creates a mindset of well if this doesn't help me in the next fight it's basically useless. Why would you willingly do something that puts you at risk of losing the game, when you could instead win it by optimising how many monstrous creatures you defeat and how many valuables you loot. And because in the minds of a lot of people the ampersand is synonymous with roleplaying games of course it ends up everywhere else too.
tell me you're frustrated with your DND without telling me😂
Nice overview about how to create a deep interesting character vs a robot with no personality that is programmed to do 1 thing (
248 like
wee bit unrelated but can you post an invite link to your discord?
Expires in short time. Tell no one!
discord.gg/2hvBRSa