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PostPosted: Sun May 30, 2004 9:02 am 
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1: The D20 license is at its heart a clever trick to get people ty buy WotC sourcebooks. And why shouldn't it be? They're the ones who went through the trouble of setting the generic base material up for everyone to toy with. Personally, I dislike the D20 OS license because I find the system leads to a lot of silly munchkin exploits. If I were to pick a system to tailor for a custom campaign, I'd probably go for GURPS myself. A little more fiddly to get to work, but the effort pays off in the end.

2: This would vary from group to group. Combat should crop up at least once every two sessions, but if you go overboard you might as well play a tabletop combat game (not necessairely a Games Workshop one, mind you). Having people invest skill points in things like Polka, Nose-picking and Coffee Brewing is a potential minefield though. If people start making up exotic skills for flavour, they'll expect the poor overworked GM to somehow work situations that require them into the campaign.

3: I'm personally a big fan of spiked chain, longbow, rapier, shortsword and scimitar. All for different reasons, and it'd depend on the build. If you're going for sheer damage done, I can recall a Epic Character build who did 715 damage minimum on a hit vs. any evil alignment and 2015 damage minimum on a crit. This was without any buffing or magical equipment a lv40 PC would be expected to have, of course.

4: Somewhere in-between. God-omnipotent usually comes up with the most challenging and interestign campaigns, but sometimes you really do need that special chum who fudges a monsters dice roll to save your favourite little character.

5: Both, if possible. For all its faults and idiotic complexity, hackmaster actually pulled this off reasonably well. Rigid class-structure, but quirks/flaws and building points on character creation provides a ton of customizability.

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PostPosted: Mon May 31, 2004 12:57 pm 
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GURPS being less muchkiny than d20?

ha...

haha...

hahaha...

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

My crippled, blind, atrophied retarded super-hero who can destroy entire galaxies with his fucking mind disagrees with you.

-MiB

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PostPosted: Mon May 31, 2004 1:47 pm 
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SegFaulty wrote:
If I were to pick a system to tailor for a custom campaign, I'd probably go for GURPS myself.


Operative word being tailored. You can alter any ruleset to be both more or less munchkin-friendly. I found GURPS easier to alter in this respect to acheive a semblance of game balance. It's all a question of personal preference.

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PostPosted: Mon May 31, 2004 2:31 pm 
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See, I can do that with d20, too, it goes like this...

"that feat/stat/skill use/spell is munchkiny, dump it."

omg hardu.

ORE 4eva, though.

-MiB

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PostPosted: Tue Jun 01, 2004 7:58 am 
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GURPS is definately easier to Munchkin in than D&D, but less fun- in D&D you have to spend ages combining PrCs, picking feats, and generally abusing the spirit of the rules to get the perfect combo, whereas like MiB sail, whereas making an uber-GURPS character like MiB talked about is pathetically easy- just line up your maximum disadvantages, put all your stats to the lowest point (where they don't come out of your disadvantage limit) and pump all those points into a single use psionic or super power; case solved. This is why GURPS takes so much wrk, but ultimately I feel it is worth it as it allows much more freedom in your character and world creation: but that freedom is much easier to exploit (since D&D exploitation mostly consists of using broken stuff like the Vow of Poverty, gestalt classes, and the completely rediculous Illithid Savant- which can easily be banned; on the other hand in GURPS you have to carefully veto each character to make sure their okay- there are few official rules that are broken on thier own).


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PostPosted: Tue Jun 01, 2004 11:10 am 
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SegFaulty wrote:
Having people invest skill points in things like Polka, Nose-picking and Coffee Brewing is a potential minefield though. If people start making up exotic skills for flavour, they'll expect the poor overworked GM to somehow work situations that require them into the campaign


Speaking as a long-time GM, I have to say that those flavoring skills can be opportunities more than headache. Let's face it, if every encounter can be solved with "I deal more damage than the other guys," you're never going to get a rep as a very challenging or imaginitive GM. On the other hand, if a clever player uses his stupendous Nose-Picking skill to impress the ogres that opportunisticly joined the party's fight with a bunch of goblins, encouraging them to pick on the goblins and not the PCs, you get major kudos for working in flavor, and you give yourself an excuse to up the difficulty of the average combat encounter ("Well geez, guys, if you'd just thought to use your Nose-Picking skill, the cleric and the thief would still be alive today, and it wouldn't be an unfair fight").

SegFaulty wrote:
For all its faults and idiotic complexity, hackmaster actually pulled this off reasonably well.


Ah, HackMaster. Not really all that complicated, just buggy (rolling a two to hit gets you the same K.O. chance as rolling a twenty or better in unarmed combat? WTF?). But it certainly is a prime example of a system that sucessfully mixes class and point structure. The anthropomorphic RPG Ironclaw is also decent at this, although the Ironclaw system itself is so simplistic as to make D&D3e look like quantum physics in comparison.

With regards to the GURPS argument, there's not a whole lot point caps can't do. For a heroic but still relativly down-to-earth campaign, I'd probably say "okay, you get forty points, plus up to thirty-five points of disads and quirks" or something along those lines. As to tailoring systems...it's an awfully slippery slope. Some things, it's true, just need changing (especially in White Wolf products). But disallowing a feat because it's too useful under the grounds that "it's munchkin" can get players' backs up reeeeally quickly.

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PostPosted: Tue Jun 01, 2004 12:31 pm 
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The way my DM worked through the absolute munchkinability of GURpS was to make everyone come up with a plot relevant reason for each disadvantage. You couldn't just say you were blind, you had do give exacting detail as to how you became blind, and he would work the into the plot. You have a 72-point enemy? Great. Every encounter will be harder because one of his heavily armed men will show up. One of my friends drew up a 500-point-disadvantage character (mighta baeen higher, even). He was uber powerful, but as soon as he took his first step, he went into a catatonic epileptic state as his four enemies swooped in for the kill. It may be easy to munchkin a character, but if you've got a DM who can handle killing off stupidly made characters, they won't last long.

[edit="Hmm..."]Because of the campaign setting, though, we weren't allowed to look at psionic or magical abilities, so I'm not sure if that changes munchkinability or not. That said, I liked the game well enough, and wouldn't want a magical character anyway.[/edit]

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PostPosted: Tue Jun 01, 2004 1:06 pm 
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Steve Jackson knows about Munchkins...

Image

http://www.sjgames.com/munchkin/

God of RPG wrote:
Don the Horny Helmet and the Boots of Butt-Kicking. Wield the Staff of Napalm . . . or maybe the Chainsaw of Bloody Dismemberment. Start by slaughtering the Potted Plant and the Drooling Slime, and work your way up to the Plutonium Dragon . . .


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PostPosted: Thu Jun 03, 2004 3:18 am 
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Forevergrey wrote:
Steve Jackson knows about Munchkins...

Image

http://www.sjgames.com/munchkin/

God of RPG wrote:
Don the Horny Helmet and the Boots of Butt-Kicking. Wield the Staff of Napalm . . . or maybe the Chainsaw of Bloody Dismemberment. Start by slaughtering the Potted Plant and the Drooling Slime, and work your way up to the Plutonium Dragon . . .

The only problem is that it's just too damn expansive... And the fact that there are no stores in this side of the planet that sell this stuff...

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PostPosted: Sat Jun 05, 2004 5:26 am 
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Yeah it's pretty much mail order- if you have time you could skank some vouchers off amazon with the first review, but that whole idea always seemed a little...antisocial? Those two-line reviews are pretty annoying. And Munckin D20 is fun, even if it is just a copy and paste of the Player's handbook. Also cool to suggest to a D&D GM and watch them freak- "see my latest character uses using the munchkin halfling...".
Definately agree with the "justified character" for any game otherwise you end up with stupid but perfectly legal rubish- saw one player try for an "insectoid thri-keen"! Psionics, magic and supers can mess up balance in GURPS- that's why you have to use unusual background.


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