[UA] Re: Powergamer != Munchkin

[Donald]

> Methinks the powergamers doth protest too much. 

Methinks it is easy to start applying labels and absolutes.

> There is indeed a difference between munchkins and powergamers, but I 
> don't agree that it's the winning vs. not winning dialectic that's 
> espoused.  Munchkins will go to absurd lengths to win, and a bad 
> powergamer will bend the rules to such a degree that, while it's legal, 
> it sucks the fun right out of the setting.

You're qualifying here--"bad powergamer". So which is it? That powergaming is
bad or the extent to which some people powergame is bad? A person who wants
to play by understood rules and a rules lawyer are both on the same path, but 
it would be odd to criticize someone who merely asks, "Don't you
normally get a saving throw against that spell?"

> Thanks for missing the point, which was not, "The GM's ideas are good, 
> and the players' ideas suck," but rather, "Everyone has an equal stake 
> at the table", and someone who engineers a character who automagically 
> solves every problem, even those 'nut and bolt' problems that really 
> aren't fixed with a 'hammer' solution is taking more than his fair 
> share.  A bad powergamer will apply the 'hammer', over and over, because 
> that's what he's built his character around, and he never really lets 
> the other players try out their wrench sets, and even whines when all 
> the problems seem to be 'nut and bolt' (when, in fact, there's a good 
> balance, but since everything isn't catered to the whims of the 
> powergamer, something must be wrong with the game).

"Equal stake" a nebulous concept. If player A gets into social interactions, has
has a character with high social skills, and is generally the one who gets called
upon to handle strangers because he's good at it, then the amount of time he
gets to be on stage is a function of how much the GM puts the players into
social situations.  If as a player I get sufficient chance to do the things I enjoy
doing in the game then I don't care that some other player technically enjoys
more spotlight time. Either way though such things are largely in the hands of
the person running the game and session to control. Have an uber player? Well
he is still one individual and can only be in one spot at once. Give the players
multiple things to do at once and he can't hog all the action. Throw things at the
party that don't suit Mr. Uber's talents. Going back to Champions, I don't care
what type of character you have, it should be trivial to put forth situations and
opponents that don't suit any particular player or group of players. You've
got 75% Damage Reduction to PD, ED, and Mental? How's your Flash Defense?

> There's nothing inherently wrong with someone who employs careful 
> strategies in creating a character, but when every one of your fighters 
> takes 'longsword' because that's the flavor of most magical swords, when 
> he always seems to have stats at a certain level to maximize benefits 
> and minimize disadvantages without ever varying, when he always takes 
> the same bennies (eidetic memory being a powergamer favorite) and flaws 
> (something that would NEVER come up in a standard game session, unless 
> the GM wanted to screw the players, at which point "it's all about 
> screwing the players!"), that's a problem.  

'Longsword' is biased for IF you happen to use the random tables to generate
treasure. I don't. Perhaps 28 years of playing characters with unusual weapon
types (oh the joy of being a scimitar weilder back in the days of 1st ed AD&D)
taught me that random tables were prone to hosing people who "just played
the game to have fun". And I do believe that the standard for most RPGs is
that a flaw that doesn't come up isn't a flaw and so either you (a) don't allow
the flaw to be taken for advantage in the first place, or (b) you bring the flaw
in. Saying your character loses all power during a solar eclipse is fine. . .but
solar eclipses don't tend to hit very often in any specific location. When is the
next solar eclipse scheduled that will be visible from Denver? Sometime around
the year 2012? Sorry, not granting points for that. Oh, you took a vulnerability
to sonic attacks? Well whatdaya know. . .the Sonic Rampager just broke out
of detention at the Federal Supercontainment Facility.


> In fact, it doesn't have to 
> happen every time--just often enough for someone to say, "Why would you 
> have a Meats of 15?  At 14 you get the wound point bump, and at 16 you 
> get the Fortitude add--15 gets you nada."  Actually, that exact 
> conversation occured during the prelim of a Champions game, with the 
> conversation resolving with, "I don't know why ANYONE would have that 
> stat at that level."  Which intrigued me.  I pulled out my various books 
> and modules that had pregenerated characters, and started flipping, and 
> discovered, indeed, NO ONE EVER had THAT stat at THAT level.  I sat back 
> and considered the implications of that in the game universe, that 
> everyone seemed clumped along certain advantageous points, and that 
> there was no true bell curve there.  It was a little unsettling.  Now an 
> apologist will say, "Well, that's a quirk of the game mechanics," but I 
> don't think that's a terribly valid rationale.

> I'll give you another example, one that never saw the light of day.  I 
> had a rather novel game concept where characters were built around the 
> idea of the theory of multiple intelligences, that a 'character sheet' 
> was in fact a government assessment of your capabilities according to 
> this metric.  While the idea that you can quantify intelligences at 
> specific levels is a little daft, the idea that human beings possess 
> these discrete types of intelligence is widely accepted (though not 
> necessarily definitive).  The problem with the system is the problem 
> with our society, specifically our school system--it highly values two 
> of the seven types of intelligence, and some of the others to a lesser 
> degree, and one or two not at all.  One of them, Rhythmic Intelligence, 
> was the hardest sell.  It was the Comeliness of the system, a place 
> where everyone could steal points during character generation to 
> compensate other areas.  The only people who would indulge it were 
> people who wanted to play musicians, and, given that it was a 
> superheroes game, that wasn't terribly likely.  I found myself staring 
> at that stat, imagining a world where all the super-powered people had 
> tin ears and bad dance moves.  I considered placing a minimum threshhold 
> on RI (as I came to call it), but then suddenly everyone would have 
> EXACTLY that minimum, and no more.  The sad thing was that in our world, 
> people have quite high RI that is either never sufficiently explored or 
> goes ignored in the buzz of life.  It's useful for little things, like 
> remembering (it's why everyone who watched SchoolHouse Rock can recite 
> the Preamble to the Constitution at will), that end up being essential 
> things.  But in a roleplaying game, it was useless.  And pretty much for 
> that reason, and that reason alone, I abandoned the idea.  I wanted to 
> make something that mimicked the real world, and no player would create 
> a character that mimicked a real world person.

That more a matter of wanting to simulate a consistent but non-existent world on
your part than anything to do with the general purpose most people have in
playing/running any RPG--to have fun. Vampire (Masquerade, Requiem, whichever)
apparently allows people to have fun although the idea that nothing stops any one
insane vampire from destroying the fact that vampires are supposed to be hidden
and not genrally known (especially when you consider that one entire clan was
insane in Masquerade and that in either version there are psychological states 
that vampires are prone to that cause them to act without the constraints of their
usual set of morals. One wonders how vampires actually could stay hidden for
centuries when one bad encounter with another of their kind (which most games
present as happening as often as there are bar fights in real life) could leave
a vampire low on blood, prone to a frenzy in which he doesn't care about rushing
down the steps to the subway loading platform and feeding on busy commuters
and in front of tons of witnesses and cameras. But you put details aside like that
becuase consistency in a world is generally hard to find if you really want to start
looking at the underpinnings of the world. One wonders how in D&D you end up
with feudal structures when one person, usually not the head of civic structures, can
personally possess enough power to level the largest cities in most settings or more
subtly enough power to enter the castle at whim and lay a charm on the king. Oh sure,
this king has a court magician who considered all that. . .awfully darned handy having
every ruler in every country have a kinda wizard up his sleeve who will serve without
wanting power himself. Most game settings fall apart under sufficient scrutiny, but since
everyone is sitting down to have fun, you agree (a) not to do enough scrutiny and (b)
not to try to wreck the setting.