Having read many posts and threads on this forum, i have to ask why so many GMs allow the above type of players in their games. I have gm'ed various systems for 25+ years, with many groups. The groups that worked well did not have these type of players. So why do gm's still allow such players?

I have no problem with players creating characters that are good at what they do, but those who mini max/power game just spoil the game for everyone else. Its meant to be a role playing game in which all involved contribute to the story, and have a fun time, not some stupid competion between the GM and players (which the player will always lose), yet often on these forums some experienced GMs still seem to have problems with these type of players.

Yes i have a dislike of power gamers and munchkins, so i simple dont tolerate that type of player, but it seems that others do. So i ask why? Does it make your games more interesting?

Flame on!

Probably because said munchkins are their friends and poeple would rather play with their friends who are munchkins than people who they don't know.

also, you're speaking from the position of 25 years of gaming, I'd wager that like me (10ish years gaming) that your group is pretty stabilised. when people are starting out you tend to play with whoeve'rs around. I know there are people we no longer rp with because they're annoying/munchkins/bad smell/etc.

Plus be glad power gaming munchkins are hanging out somewhere other than your table

Some people powergame because they tend to approach RPGs from a video game perspective and wouldn't know better. Some never learned how to roleplay, for them playing one might be more akin to Heroquest or similar games. Some wouldn't know better - if there's only munchkins in your group chances are you're on that path as well. Some might have to learn how to roleplay yet. Some know very well what they are doing and just like it that way. The possibilities are endless I guess.

In my groups, when a powergamer or munchkin pops up, they're under close supervision. As long as they don't disrupt the game for the other players it's going to be fine, but if their antics spoil the fun for the more roleplay inclined crowd they'll be politely asked to look for another game. Courtesy and the common sense of the players in my groups always worked out in the end. Thus, I think I haven't seen a powergamer in one of my gaming groups for a long time.

But to each his or her own, some people want to be hardcore roleplayers, some are munchkins on a mission, some just want to have fun, and some ... Well, the possibilities are endless, like I said. Lots of different people, lots of different gaming styles out there. Try to tolerate others, you don't have to allow them in your group after all.

I find it's because a large number of people come from a history of DnD, which has institutionalised metagaming and min/maxing.

*dons his flameproof clothing*

I remember starting up a new game (d20 Modern, not that it matters) with a new group a few years back. One player, I discovered later, made what he felt was a totally munchkin character... only to discover that it didn't matter one bit. The character was incredibly good at what she was good at, but lackluster at everything else. The style of the game was such that her being good at those few things wasn't game breaking. Sometimes, power gaming doesn't help.

And on the other end of the board we have those games where you simply can't survive without powergaming (Mutant, a Swedish post apocalyptic game comes to mind where, if you don't max out your dodge you can pretty much make a new character from start anyway).

I tolerate them because A) They are my friends and B) In my group they mix a fair bit, where two role play allot, investigate etc while the other two pumped up their BS and likes to shoot. So actually they complement one another

Another reason why people powergame and sometimes make for troublesome roleplayers is when they suffer from insecurities off the gaming table (lack of success, relationship issues, etc) and as a result, their character becomes a "prop" to their ego. I've had players leave the room or start crying when they thought their character was going to die. This also results in players being overly competitive amongst themselves for time with the GM and embarking on a quest to prove that out of all the group, they are the most bad-ass and indespensible.

Getting rid of such problem players is really quite difficult, if they've been around for a long time and particularly if they're not consistently bad. Personally I think the best solution is to change the focus of the game so they either get bored at the lack of combat and stop attending or start actually having to roleplay.

For high-power characters, I simply stand by what has served me well so far in GMing DH: Whatever the acolytes can throw at a situation, the GM can always up the ante. I know this is likely to lead down the "how realistic is it to scale enemies' approach, but in the interests of keeping things challenging, if a Templar Calix thinks his Force Sword is the be-all-and-end-all, he hasn't met a Greater Daemon yet!

Thankfully pretty much all our players so far have been mature enough to let their characters do as their characters would do without needing to be prodded by the RPing-rewards carrot, so I guess I've had it easy in that I don't feel the need so much to watch for powergamer attitude as I do the single flank of character stats.

However, reading the responses here, I have a question: How do you all feel about players who, though flawless roleplayers and always in character, are still able to build characters far and above the rest in terms of effectiveness, either through class/career (I do think Techpriests and Psykers are the two most effective careers in the game when optimised, with guardsmen last), sheer lucky rolls, or other means?

For example, I have a techpriest in our group who is easily the strongest ranged combat monster, and quite capable of taking on any of our assassins, while still having the highest noncombat ability of the group to boot. I don't see any cause to 'punish' him for having such a powerful character, because he is at least as good a roleplayer as any of them.

The Hobo Hunter said:

When having those players I always think "What would Eisenhorn face?" and it usually solves itself.

Hobo Hunter.

If a player, through roleplaying their character and a little luck, ends up with a powerfull character, then that is fine. I have in my current group a gunslinger with maxed out BS and all the talents to make him utterly deadly in close range gun combat. He got that way by role playing the character, not mini maxing to create such a dangerous character. If he had tried to power game it, he would of no longer been part of my group.

I realise i am very lucky, my current groups are my freinds, and decent roleplayers as well, but i have had friends who were/are power gamers, and dont play in my groups, but we are still friends, we just accept that our approachs to role play are different.

One of my gaming group is a power gamer, Warmachine... bamf out pops his unbeatable forces of trolls and khador. everyone stoped playing him.

some people enjoy that style of gaming, others who branch out from other systems, may not know any better. If you're having trouble with a munchkin ty talking to the player, if its disruptive tell them. If on the other hand you have a gamer with a powerful character (accidental munchkin? mind i've only seen this once) and they're not playing as a powergamer ("see my epic stats") then I personally don't have any issues with them. Its only a problem if its ruining the game for others really, and its just a matter of style.

Old timer said:

I've actually enjoyed having min/maxers in my games. It makes me a better DM by forcing me to try and compensate or offer a variety of challenges that might force the min/maxer to become a better all around player.

If you and/or your players don't care for this, then great, don't invite them to your games.

There are others of us who to some varying degrees have a bit of power gamer or min/maxer in us and don't mind having someone that's a bit over the top. They tend to make everyone else better players. Normally the min/maxers I've dealt with provide advice to those who don't know how to min/max. When their advice isn't wanted, they are polite and back down. If they're trying to beat their peers by having the best character, then this is wrong, but if they really want to help others and their advice is welcome, a min/maxer can be a wonderful addition to a group.

It's actually cool when a player in my group comes up to me and says "Dude, you totally could have hosed my abilities if you had just done this...." GM's can benefit from the advice as well.

Competition isn't bad, but it has the opportunity to get carried away depending on the individual.

Friend or no friend these power gamer/"munchkins" are dealt with swiftly in my games. Also the only people that play in my games are folks that don't play that way. But then again I also set a standard of the type of game I am running and what is allowed and not allowed. Story and character development ALWAYS come first in my games. Whether people like it or don't that is first and foremost in my game style and I like to have that "Cinematic" edge to my games. So power gamers have a really hard time existing in my games. And honestly I don't think folks have a right to ***** about it if they are letting it happen and know specific players have a history of this kind of disruptive behaviour. But if these are friends of yours maybe they could show some respect to the GM and the rest of the players/friends and try not to play this way. There are easy ways to mediate such "troublemakers" and if they are not willing to change their ways then maybe it is time to trim the fat as it were from your games if it causes others to not want to play anymore due to one or a couple bad apples.

One thing I have done if a player gets a bit powerful and runs a bit amok is I have them lose everything. That brings them down a peg...karma is a *****.

CanadianPittbull said:

You scare me! I don't think I'd like playing in your game.

Well, our views are different anyway. I think the GM's job is to cater to the players in his group. If you're dictating how the game is going to be played and sending "karma" to deal with those that disagree, that's a bit too totalitarian for me.

If your players like that, then cool. More power to you.

I think it's important to recognize that a lot of the objections to power gaming has a lot to do with the power-gamer's attitude , and not necessarily how powerful the character really is. If you ask me, what separates a munchkin from a mere player with a powerful character are at least two things:

Restraint : Just because player has a powerful character or a character with powerful toys does not automatically mark him or her as a munchkin. The real test is how the player uses that power. Indeed, a player who exercises good sense on when to apply those big guns may experience the GM giving him/her more powerful toys as the GM is confident that the player won't steal the show at every opportunity (by, of course, leveling everything in sight. At least, usually). Speaking of stealing the show . . .

Need for Attention : Ever notice how munchkins tend to end up as the center of attention? Not only that, but ever notice how munchkins end up as the center of attention at the expense of everybody else ? Also, ever notice how a munchkin often brags about how powerful their character is out-of-game? They're seeking attention, and they do so usually by leveling the opposition in the most spectacular, obscene way possible, and then go on and on about their exploits later on.

A third aspect that might or might not be present is one that Lucifer216 above touched upon: the need to compensate for something. I'll not go into extensive detail as it's already been dealt with, but I would like to add that if the player mopes after the GM easily neutralizes the supposedly powerful character (not necessarily killing the character), chances are good the player was compensating for something. An example of this is during one Shadowrun campaign where the munchkin came up with this stupidly over-powered custom vehicle, and then proceeds to acquire on the cheap (by buying it as a prototype/used vehicle, which significantly reduces the cost at the expense of the vehicle having some pre-existing stress points). How did the GM deal with it? He had a spirit use the accident power on it, and suddenly that uber vehicle became an uber deathtrap. Needless to say, the player was not happy about that, and proceeded to quit the game and sulk in the corner.

As for me, when I'm the GM and I have a player that munchkins, I take it as a challenge to find creative ways to screw over the character. I certainly have a lot of inspiration to draw from.

-Kirov

Our munchkin in Shadowrun spent all of his creation points to create a bad@$$ Troll streetmage character. He didn't invest in transportation. Our group (I was running at the time) handled it by making him take the bus to the job!

Priceless! I laughed hysterically as he had to meet up with the group at the bus stop across the street from the office building they were breaking into. The imagery of a Giant troll getting off the bus with bus pass in hand lives on forever!

Whether a player is a powergamer has nothing to do with whether they're a good roleplayer. There are good roleplayers who powergame, bad roleplayers who make the most ineffective characters imaginable, and a broad spectrum of people on both axes. And a bad roleplayer with an ineffective character is probably worse for most games than a bad roleplayer who powergames.

I had an unashamed power gamer in my DH group. This was the kind of person who went on and on about how after a certain point, there wasn't any point in taking anything but a Cleric in D&D3.5.

From what I know of him, it wasn't that he wanted to be outright munchkin-y and a bad roleplayer, it was that he thought in terms of numbers instead of drama. In the first D&D4E adventure I ran, he rolled his highest skill on a Skill Challenge and got a success, and when I asked him, "Okay, how do you use this skill to help the group in this?", he got upset because he couldn't come up with an answer to that question. He hadn't put any thought whatsoever into the how and why of it, he simply chose what skill to use solely based on his character's score in it.

The skill was Bluff, and I was asking the question in order to judge what the reaction of the NPC would be, because the pre-written adventure I was running to get everyone, including myself, into the system, didn't have a set result for someone using Bluff in the Skill Challenge.

In the DH game, he took skills, upgrades, and powers on his Psyker to get his BS up to 80-something when using one of the powers. He then proceeded, on the first use ever with that power, to roll badly enough that he hit ONCE with a full-auto attack from an autogun (which was, in fact, worse than missing completely... Just like making a 2 on a test in school instead of a 0 is worse). In the PCs' close-combat training, he rolled our first buckshot of the campaign, a 100 on a simple melee attack. I'm pretty sure that if we had gone through more sessions before scheduling issues killed the campaign, the character would have continued to suffer from constant dice mutiny.

The other character he made (because we only had three players) wasn't nearly as min/maxed, and that character fared far better.

I blamed Tzeentch.

Admittedly, if I was the assassin or techpriest in my group and my GM suddenly knocked me down a peg or two from a perspective of 'group balance' I'd be pretty pissed. I'd be pretty pissed if the character in which I had invested the better part of a year in roleplaying, advancing his own journey through his movitations and the realisation of them, had suddenly lost all his gear or standing because he was getting 'too far ahead of the others' through what is essentially no fault of my own.

The two acolytes who stand head and shoulders above the rest in my campaign worked **** hard for that edge. The tecpriest, 'Legs', has always had to walk on a knifedge with the rest of the party as he follows his own agenda, and faced persecution from every single member of the party (bar our assassin), in increasingly violent manners, for his role in our campaign so far. Not once has he shied from that, and he has always acted as his character would.

The assassin, Nvnqr, has engaged in god-emperor-knows how many radical ventures as he pursues anything to get the job done so he can Just . Go . Home . Already . and return with his inheritance. To acquire the daemonweapon he now wield, he took charge of the rest of the group, succeeded where they failed against an entire city, and ended up fighting a rogue cleric on top of a tower while it rained blood into the streets below. And ended up with a local urban legend about him to boot.

Legs and Nvnqr have been backbones in my campaign the entire time. Legs' player was more than willing to play the double agent the entire campaign (about a year now) at the risk of what could happen if he was found out, and Nvnqr's player submitted to me an entire list of characters, with their own ages, motivations, ideals, quirks, friendships and rivalries, even deaths (where applicable), and everything else short of exact physical descriptions. Those turned out to be the current members of his character's mansion/orphanage/training facility back home, who he plans on returning to after his service expires.

They've gone out of their way in this game, probably further even than the psyker who's made a daemonic pact with the BBEG and now has a mouth on his hand to steal souls. I couldn't punish them for that. I can't do anything but reward them for that.

A lot of people (regardless of gaming system) seem to think that optimizing your characters numerically (or munchkining, powergaming, minmaxing, whatever) automatically also means that that player is a spotlight hog with no interest in roleplaying ... this is a fallacy.

There are players who optimize characters and have a good attitude towards gaming, roleplaying and the overall enjoyment of everybody in the group. There are also players with bad attitudes and unuptimized characters. One has absolutely nothing to do with the other

I try to optimize my characters because I like the mathematics and logic problems involved of finding the optimum outcome given a particular set of rules. This can be every rule in a book, a subsection of rules in a book as determined by the DM or additional rules to the book as provided by the DM. This is how I have fun with roleplaying when away from the table, thinking about my character. This involves writing a backstory for my character and thinking what his/her stance is on certain issues relevant to the gameworld but it also involves lots of numbercrunching and numerical optimizing. As such, you could label me a powergamer, I suppose.

But that is just the away from the table portion of the game. When at the table I try my best to roleplay, stay in character and dont do stupid things. I am no thespian, but most people arent so im pretty sure I do about as well as most. I do not see why spending a couple of hours at home amusing myself by optimizing my character makes me, by default, a worse player at the table.

Also: "This was the kind of person who went on and on about how after a certain point, there wasn't any point in taking anything but a Cleric in D&D3.5." Are you kidding? Wizards can be broken much more easily and with far scarier results (See, I'm a power gamer, bad little me

Optimizing the game mechanic aspects parts of a character to be and min-maxing everything there is plus abusing every loop-hole in a set of rules to gain advantage over other players (yes, thats players not characters) is a BIIIIIIIG difference.

Of course there's extremes on both sides of the bad roleplayer vs. good roleplayer fence, if such a thing exists at all. But from my personal opinion (and that's just me) munchkins have a tendency to be the weaker roleplayers in a troupe as well as having the bleaker characters. That's not a rule of thumb of course and everybody makes his/her own experiences, so nothing should be generalized.

Well, after reading all the post so far, I've come to the conclusion that all my players are power gaming munchkins. They all min-max their characters for optimal effectiveness, and generally know every loophole in the game. Surprisingly though, they're excellent roleplayers and each is quite attached to their chosen persona. They just hate losing, want lots of gore filled glory, and above all seek to make the game their own. It's all fine with me though because I get to put them in impossible situations, against legendary foes like Chaos Marines or Necrons. It's quite fun.

Ex: Our Templar beat the brains out of a Chaos Marine leading some cultists in an assault on their masters estate. After blowing the wretch's giblets out through his backside with his force sword, the psyker turned to the remaining cultist and roared "Where are your gods now!?" Fear 3.....

LordMunchkin said:

Like I said, nothing can be generalized since every player and every group has other expectations (and standards) when playing a game. As long as everyone in a group can agree on the same key principles it's going to be fine and fun for all.

sloth said:

But...

sloth said:

You sound like one of my awesome players (if I do say so myself! ) Good enough with the crunching to have powerful characters who can actually do stuff, but good enough with roleplaying to actually have those numbers still mean something.

Best of both worlds, as i see it.