[UA] Powergaming: we CAN find a cure!

[Greg Stolze]

>Powergamers <shudder> the bane of any good roleplaying storytelling. They
>always want to cut to the chase. Kill. Loot. Move on to the next safe point.

Don't give up on munchkinny powergamers.  They can change, and I'm proof.
(At least, geez, I hope I'm proof.  Tim?)

I used to be a huge, savage twink -- so bad Jonathan Tweet wrote a whole
article about it in Over the Edge.  (He didn't mention me by name, but he
did call me his group's "resident powergamer".)

Now, do I still like having a powerful character who gets things done?
Sure.  More than that, what I really DISLIKE is having a character who
can't get jack shit done.  (Ask the guys in our current D&D game, in which
my preponderance of low rolls has broken the curve and trampled on the
pieces.)  From that, I'm going to offer two pieces of advice.

1) Get the guy to understand that narrative power is far more important
than the numbers on his character sheet.  A GM can always find a way to
kill a character, no matter how buff.  However, a character who's at the
center of the plot is damn near indispensible.  So is a character who is so
beloved and FUN for the other characters that they'll fight to defend him.
No one sheds a tear over the death of a munch character who soaked up the
bulk of GM attention and who treated the other characters like sidekicks.
But munchkins are strangely blind to this, so they figure that the answer
is to make a MORE munched character, who naturally makes the other
characters look like BIGGER chumps, leading to another disposal for the
good of the story and the group.  Lather, rinse, repeat.

(At this point, strict gamist players who want fair CRs and for dice to
fall where they may are tearing their hair out.  That's fine.  For some
people, really antagonistic and competitive games are fun, and for some
groups they're fully functional.  The friction arises when you get one guy
who thinks the point is to always succeed in a group with four guys who
think the point is to make interesting choices and tell a neat story.)

2) The biggest motivation for powergaming (at least, it seems that way to
me) is fear.  Players buff their characters in a manic (and futile) attempt
to be safe.  They don't want their characters to die or be humiliated.
Now, in a rough and tumble game like UA, those aren't guarantees a GM can
always make, but a player contract (stated or just understood) can go a
long way towards alleviating these fears.  "Your accountant does not need
to be a closet Kung Fu expert to fight off gang rape because I'm not
running a gang rape kinda game."  Once the penny drops on the idea that
"safety isn't the point" (a ship in the harbor is safe, etc. etc.) you can
hopefully get to where they can start to understand the notion, "It's
better for your character to have a really cool, intense, meaningful death
than to survive by being a chump."

# # #

In retrospect, large parts of the UA design arise from my twink tendencies,
and from a desire to prevent others from twinking.  With a more mature
view, I suspect that's just not possible, or maybe not even desirable.  Do
I really want to make a design that keeps 10% of the gamers from abusing
it, at the cost of reducing the possibilities for the 90% who just want to
play and not play against?  UA's saving grace, which really emerged from
the design instead of being planned conciously from day one, is that what
characters CHOOSE is typically more important than their POWERS.  That is,
the stereotypical UA adventure I've written has chances for characters to
succeed or fail on their skills and choices, but usually boils down to a
single choice that has no roll involved, and where all the options are
equally mechanically valid.  The big case in point is "To Go" where the
PCs, at the end, determine the end allocation of the big charge.  It
doesn't matter if the characters waltzed over the opposition or were Dion
Isaacs' chew toys, as long as they survive to DC they can be kingmakers.
(I just wish I'd made it more clear that they could be kings if the GM
wants to do the minor arranging required, but oh well.)

-G.

Remember kids, if you don't know who the powergamer in your game group is
-- it's probably you.

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