The Necromancer Problem

"Doctor Orpheus, could you tell the court what it is that you do? You're a type of magician?"

"Well, if you must call me that, yes. But if you are after mere parlor tricks you will be sorely disappointed, for if I reach behind your ear, it will not be a nickel I pull out, BUT YOUR VERY SOUL!"

Necromancer is another class that fits in with our bad boys from before. While the paladin and the Jedi are more thematically related, they still share a common problem with the necromancer: They carry a lot of baggage, cause a lot of arguing, but we keep wanting to play them because they're SO COOL. After I go a little bit into the history of the "class", I'm going to discuss the problems in a bullet point format, since we've actually got a lot of little problems that end up supporting the major issue: The idea that necromancers are universally and undeniably evil. More on that later, but it's somewhat bogus. Often people will compromise and say you can play a necromancer so long as you don't do any of its awesome cool stuff. Doesn't exactly sound fun.

The Necromancer's story actually begins in second edition. Before that, the only specialized wizard was Illusionist, and even then it only existed in the same vein as Assassin and Paladin: A subclass that was more powerful but more difficult to get into. Second Edition introduced School Specialists as a basic option: Deny yourself two other schools to get bonus spell slots in your chosen school. This was super popular and the grand-daddy of more modern character customization, which 1e and 2e was quite lacking in. Those bonus spells and the minor buffs to spell save DCs meant you could seriously focus on a particular school, and the lack of two other schools often didn't sting as much as it sounds like: Back then, divination was quite a thin school, and while transmutation had useful buffs, it had plenty of niche-y spells a wizard didn't necessarily need. Third edition not only kept specialization, but brought feats, prestige classes, and a boatload of awesome necromancy spells, some of which were so powerful that they were altered in later spell collections. There was well thought out source like Libris Mortis, and utterly retarded but mechanically effective classes like the true necromancer. Third edition also made the necromancer's signature spell, Animate Dead, easier.

So third edition was a heyday for necromancers, but it actually brought along some new problems and exacerbated some old ones, as you'll see below. Without further ado, let's get to pointing out some bullshit with those bullet points.

One: The Dead Themselves. So yeah, this is the one argument you're never going to win. There are setting specific exceptions, but undead are evil because the negative energy plane they get their power from is inherently evil. Sorry. Despite the fact that no setting has rules for unintelligent undead breaking your control(no, not even Ravenloft) and despite the fact that something that's completely unintelligent can't actually be evil, you are still utilizing and manipulating evil creatures. In addition to that, a lot of undead creatures(some of which you have access to) are ridiculously evil in nature. I've said it before while we were talking about villain design, but most game designers really go ham when describing and fleshing out undead monsters.

So why do I routinely forgive and/or handwave this one? Well. I did already give both reasons, technically. Firstly, there is no way for an unintelligent undead to buck your control, and even intelligent ones only get one save a day. If they were evil creatures who twisted your commands or could get loose at any moment I'd be far more willing to entertain this idea that things like Animate Dead are objectively evil. They do what you say, and nothing else. Period.

In addition to that, the idea that skeletons and zombies are evil by association with the negative energy plane is in conflict with the rules themselves. A positive wisdom score means they are capable of interpreting your commands. Charisma means they can discern the difference between themselves and others. Lack of an intelligence score means they are incapable of drive. Every zombie movie you've ever seen has zombies that possess at least an INT score of 1. They have a basic drive to kill and eat people and extremely poor but existent reasoning skills. Hell, in the Return of the Living Dead series, they have (semi)rational conversations. If a skeleton or zombie in D20 goes uncontrolled, it would logically either complete its final commands ad infinitum, or stand around doing absolutely nothing. It has no drive or predisposition to evil. It can't. An intelligent creature can absolutely be unnaturally twisted toward evil by becoming undead. I don't agree that it should be the blanket that D20 games make it into, but it's possible. An unintelligent thing can't have a ding-dang alignment.

Two: Conflating alignment with cultural norms. Woah-ho, isn't it awesome that we already discussed what alignment means? A lot of people like to say that raising the dead is an objectively evil act. They say that because desecrating or manipulating the bodies of the dead is taboo in most real world societies. However, we all know that Evil is self motivation above others. Something being taboo is a societal construct, and while it's shitty to disregard societal rules, it's not evil. No, societal structure and trends are the purview of the Ethical axis of alignment. In other words, it's not exactly evil to raise the dead, it's just not very lawful. Even then, a lawful character can justify his actions any number of ways, such as purchasing the grave plots, using monsters killed in self defense or using mass graves or battlefields still littered with dead.

If you don't believe me, ask yourself why it's still an evil act if being performed by a person from a society that has no reverence for the dead. If it's objectively evil, then you're declaring that person's society evil solely for having no rules for internment of the dead. That would imply we're judging their society by comparison to our traditional Western Christian society. Which would be subjective. Alignment isn't a subjective "feel" though, it's a set of rules to put things into categories.

Three: Spell selection and spell alignment tags. But all these spells have the evil descriptor, so it's an evil act to cast them. The thing is, spell descriptors are used solely to denote how spells interact with other spells or targets. It is not a commentary on what sort of action it is to cast the spell. Neither is the fact that certain gods will not grant certain spells a commentary on the morality of those spells, since this is not expressly stated in any book. If you disagree with me, you are wrong and did not read the book.

Glad we got that one out of the way.

That all being said, in most systems the necromancer being "A Master of Life and Death" really isn't a proper title due to spell selection. It's more like "A Master of Life and Death". They get a lot of spells which sound really visceral and nasty, like Wrack which debilitates by causing immense pain, or Wail of the Banshee which straight up kills a shitload of people. Some supplements tried to give them some stuff like heals, but even the "life" bit turns creepy with spells like Clone obviously being pretty unnatural. I can't blame people for judging a book by its cover in this instance.

But.

Necromancy does get a really unfair wrap here. We forgive other spell schools and their horrifyingly awful spells because they aren't so obviously evil. There's not much difference between Wail of the Banshee and Meteor Swarm when you really think about it. Baleful Polymorph and Blindness are permanent spells in some editions. 3.5 has a spell that literally boils your blood, that's a transmutation spell. Spells just have horrifying implications sometimes, and normally we forgive it because most PNP games aren't intended to be a morality play. It's really easy to pin "evil" on the spooky spells, though.

Four: Shorthand for Evil. All the big bad evil dudes are necromancers, man. Kel'thuzad and the Lich King himself, The Horned King from The Black Cauldron, Quan Chi from Mortal Kombat...when you see a necromancer in something it's usually a safe bet that they're an evil motherfucker. Hell, the only one who's not evil that I can think of is Doctor Orpheus. The rest are just player centric options like in Diablo or Guild Wars that make no comment on morality.

This is because these creators are using shorthand. Remember when I talked about that? It's devious, but you can do some really simple things to get the viewer/player feeling the way you want them to. Necromancy is one of those because of our societal taboo against messing with the dead. It's excellent shorthand. The moment you see the Lich King raise that frostwyrm from the ice, you know he's bad news, even if you're not consciously thinking it. Blizzard also uses other little tricks like the look of his armor, the mournful music, and his dead father's ironic narration to paint a picture, but you could watch the segment on mute and still get the same impression of him.

Again, they're playing on our societal views when they do this. Unfortunately, this isn't good enough to declare a necromancer evil in a game with a bunch of different cultures and societies in it. That's simply not what alignment is.

Five: Player Motivations. Necromancer gets kind of the same problem as evil alignment in some ways. You can always count on a player to want to do the cool thing, in anything. In addition to big damage and big battle-tilting effects, they often want to do stuff that really has no direct impact on the game: things like trick shots, clever tactics, neat class abilities, or things like raising armies, conquering kingdoms...et cetera. New players, you'll notice, will often go straight for the cool thing without regard to their effectiveness. The necromancer has a lot of "cool things" associated with it that are often in the context of evil like raising an army of the dead or torturing living people. There's also the idea of raising intelligent dead like mummies or ghouls or even turning yourself into a lich, which does have evil implications in 3.X and PF. There's also all the associations with necromancers: they're often characterized with black robes and skulls, putrid cauldrons full of slime, and an utter disregard for human life. Basically, players who choose necromancer are often doing evil things because of thematic association, and not because of some objective declaration that the whole class is rotten. Necromancer's strong association toward evil is...mostly because it has a strong association toward evil. People want to play the big bad guy for a change, because characters like the Lich King are so cool.

So that's it for this week, I hope I properly articulated why the "Necromancer Problem" is mostly bullshit. Like the paladin, all this requires is for people to chill out and try to discard their preconceived notions about the class and look at the facts. I'm starting to see that a lot of baggage these classes carry is just that: Baggage.

The Information Game, Part Two: Cooperation and Antagonism

When I began this blog I figured, I wouldn't put it on a schedule. I'd just post whenever I wrote an article. Well, shortly after I decided that, I wrote six posts in two days. There went that plan. So, since I didn't want to overload people with reading all at once, I went with plan B: I post one a week at most. We're still not on a strict schedule really, but this way nobody's ever assaulted with a bunch of shit. I find that there's far more chance someone will read something if it's concise, or if it's spaced out fairly. I also usually know what I want to say immediately, so when a topic comes up, the whole post is often already in my head. So this means most of the time I've been sitting on an unpublished post for a while, sometimes up to a month.

I said all that so you'd know what it means when I say it's 6am on Sunday morning as I write this. It's not procrastination. I've been thinking about this part ever since I posted the last one. This is one of my pet peeves, but it's really hard to put it into words. Today we're talking about information control in gaming, but more specifically, two different game types and their different methods.

So before I explain what the hell I mean by that, I can go into the peevy part of all this. I'm dead certain this has happened to everyone: You figure something out in the game you're playing and you're either told "You don't know that" or get accused of metagaming. This is due to a GM's attempt at information control, and there's a lot of reasons they'd want to do this, depending on the game type they're running. Usually, this is a form of advantage protection.

Okay, what the hell is Mouse talking about THIS time? While this concept crops up more in supernatural, Lovecraftian, or social intrigue games, it can happen everywhere. Everything in gaming has some list of advantages and disadvantages, and sometimes not being widely understood or known is on that list. It can be heavily implied like in most White Wolf games, or directly stated such as when you're discussing the Scorpion clan in Legend of the Five Rings, or even just ninja or secret service agencies. So basically the GM sees a player being really laissez-faire about knowledge of something and naturally feels he needs to put a stop to it. After all, the setting book says most people don't think <Insert Supernatural Monster>s are real, so your character has no reason to either.

Let's be clear, I fucking hate that.

I'll explain why momentarily. There are two general types of games when it comes to information control. I initially wanted to call them PVE(Player Vs. Enemy) and PVP(Player Vs. Player) but that's not exactly what they are. The first type is a traditional cooperative game, where the group is working together and is intended to work together. This is most games. The other game I struggled to name, since most things I can call it are either nondescriptive or negative. Either way, an antagonistic game is one where the players might work together, but more often than not need to keep a personal agenda in mind or support a clan, guild or group before the "party". A lot of White Wolf games are presented with this as an option, and nearly all LARPs in existence also work like this. It's not better or worse than a traditional cooperative game, but it's certainly different. Fewer people like this style of game, to be sure.

Anyway, the GM(or in the case of a LARP, Staff) has to think in different terms when they're running these games. In case you hadn't already guessed, Advantage Protection is far more important in an antagonistic game. There are players who may be relying on this sort of thing to stay alive or to gain ground in a situation. Like I said last week, the best way to eliminate metagaming is to simply not provide the information, but you may have to put your foot down in an antagonistic game because of players sneaking through information they shouldn't be looking at or hearing about events their character simply wasn't at. They may not even mean to do it: A lot of accidental metagaming happens at a LARP. There's also going to be a lot of characters keeping secrets, either to protect themselves or just because it's a lot of fun and everyone else is doing it. This is their prerogative, and the GM ought to protect them from people trying to gain some sort of OOC advantage.

So information is very important in a game where the players aren't necessarily a cooperative group and GMs must sometimes make heavy use of direct obfuscation(as I mentioned last week) or simply rooting out metagaming.

Do you know where it's NOT important to do these things?

Cooperative games have a much lower need for this sort of stuff. Sometimes a player will have a secretive concept that requires a little bit of help from the GM, like a Scorpion Clan wu-jen, or a Tzimisce masquerading as a Nosferatu because the Black Hand is after him. You know. For some friendly questions. Otherwise, the same constant policing of information necessary in an antagonistic game becomes a nonsensical, tiresome exercise in slowing the game down. It's more Iron Fist stuff, and often a very lazy way to 'enforce' a mystery without putting any work in to actually create one.

Why do I say nonsensical? Well, it's really hard to justify a character's suspicion or opinion when we know the truth. "My guy just thinks werewolves exist, so he carries around a silver knife." sounds like(and even probably is) a lame attempt at metagaming when it's a LARP player talking. Policing this is illogical but necessary to protect the werewolf players. Put aside the fact that the werewolf players don't need any fucking protection if we're talking about Classic World of Darkness.

It's illogical because, when you're a supernatural creature, it's absurd to think you're the only one. I mean, say you're a werewolf, and you KNOW these nasty spirits called Banes exist, and you KNOW they can crawl into a human and fuck them up, so it's STUPID to say this character has no idea vampires exist. Like he doesn't have an inkling. This is where my blood boils because I feel someone's hand pointlessly wrapping around my character's brain. I'm not removing anyone's advantage with forming my own opinions because a single person controls all of the game's antagonists, unlike that other type of game.

It's true that most settings say things like "most people don't know about this" and it could be true(particularly with organizations) that you may need to require some sort of background information or knowledge skill. Mostly though, there's a core difference between cooperative and antagonistic games that shatters the need for this line of thought. In a cooperative game, the players are inarguably the exception. The player can believe whatever he wants or make whatever kind of reasonable action or preparation he'd like. As I already said, the GM has no need of advantage protection. In an antagonistic game, the player is not necessarily the exception. They are in many ways, but it has to be tempered with advantage protection, and the two different types of game really shouldn't be confused.

But you want something to be a mystery for god damn once, because everyone always immediately knows what's going on.

Fair. First off, this is just something that happens when you're consistently gaming with people who have been at this for ten to fifteen years. That's most of our dear readers. Your only option is the method I mentioned last week, where you don't give all the information. Yeah, it can feel dirty, but most people I know really appreciate being asked to figure something out. Just be sure to let them figure it out, and don't just stonewall attempts to find out more. It doesn't have to be instant gratification, but keeping something a mystery by simply saying "You have no reason to think that" or repeating "no, no no no" is a non-option. Neither is an OOC implication that they'll find out later.

That doesn't mean you should never say no. However, you really should figure out some sort of reward for making a good skill check. Some sort of small clue can be the bone they needed thrown at them to feel good about their attempts, even if it doesn't matter much in the grand scheme of things. Even then, giving them something really small can turn into a list of clues that slowly points at what's really going on. Maybe it's just me, but I fucking love this kind of thing. I love slowly figuring something out, and I'm perfectly okay with not being directly told what's going on at first in OOC or blunt terms.

You do have to be careful, though. You can't give wildly strange descriptions of events or obfuscate absolutely everything. Someone who moves faster than light can absolutely look like they're teleporting, but if the players are in a FIGHT with that person, you might have to tell them what's going on simply for mechanical sake. Basically, you have to really adapt your efforts to the situation at hand and I can't just tell you how to do that. You have to learn it. Just remember the flow of information is natural as possible when you refuse to discuss what's going on frankly and OOCly until it's no longer relevant. Let the players brainstorm, but don't jump in yourself with objective information. It's not out of suspicion or some assumption that all players are terrible. It's because nobody really means to metagame, most of the time.

I really don't like pointing at Five Nights at Freddy's for anything anymore. I love the franchise, but there's a lot of baggage now. The games really aren't very good, and the fandom is...well, if there were a top five shitty fandoms, FNAF is certainly on the list along with Homestuck and probably even Undertale.

But.

If you want an example of decent information control, look into the story of the games and where hints are dropped. The story, what's really going on slowly builds and comes into focus over the course of the five games. In one we find a boy's teddy bear is talking to him and we assume something supernatural is happening. In the next game, we find a secret office that holds a "whammy" reveal: A copy of the bear, a walkie talkie...and cameras positioned all over the boy's home. This sort of thing can be very easy to put into your game, and done well it can feel very cool.

The Information Game, Part One: Metagaming

So maybe you only need that title to know why I took a bit of time off. I hate to keep putting bombast and gravitas and such into these topics, but this is another one I'd kind of just think about it and go "Fuck." out loud. For those of you who might be really new to gaming, metagaming is using knowledge that you wouldn't necessarily have in character. It can be as devious as stealing your GM's notes and reading ahead to make all the right choices, or as simple as remembering what a monster's weaknesses or powers are when your character would really have no idea. Something so simple has deep, deep roots so don't be surprised if we have several posts on metagaming and information in games.

In my experience, a lot of gamers are abjectly terrified of metagaming, like it's the worst thing you can do. I mean, obviously it's not great. Willful metagaming is irritating at best and nasty at worst. Accidental metagaming is just...something that happens. I've heard some ridiculous stories of people going out of their way to avoid it, though. One friend of mine(you know who you are) had an online game full of players so terrified of metagaming that they'd routinely ignore deliberately placed in-character information. I mean, they're at someone's mansion and they hear loud scratching and banging coming from the cellar, and it's locked with heavy chains, and they're telling this friend of mine he's "metagaming" for wanting to investigate. I mean this guy literally had ghouls or something in his basement and they're all like WE HAVE NO REASON TO DISTRUST HIM. It's like the doctor from Dead Alive with the blatant Nazi uniform and thick German accent. What a nice man, let's have him give you that flu shot. You have no reason to distrust him.

Before we go into me giving advice about this concept,  I want to go into why this kind of fear happens. The first is a common but bad habit GMs can get into where they want to drop a clue or a hint but don't want the players to investigate yet. As a side note, you should know not to do this. You never want the player to think "Okay fine, he doesn't want us to do it yet". Ideally the clue should lead to an investigation they may or may not have the time to perform, or a dead end. So, that happens and when the player wants to look into it they're told "You have no reason to do that". It's the final defense phrase of the inept. This makes people second guess what ostensibly in-character information means for their motivations, and the whole process grows artificial and awkward.

The second major reason happens way more often in online games, but it's still pretty prevalent everywhere. It's natural in real life to simply have a feeling about a situation or person. You're not always right, but there's a lot more analysis going on in your head than the conscious kind sometimes. You read a situation and act accordingly. Sometimes you're going off previous knowledge. Three men standing around the street corner at night might not be a big deal, but THOSE men on THAT corner are probably drug dealers. You get the point. In a PNP game it's harder to "read" a situation and even tougher to justify it when you have. It's also next to impossible to define or defend your character's past experiences. A lot of characters don't even have them. So, arguments happen. Sense Motive gets thrown around, with the proviso that "If you fail, you believe him.". Situations often get robbed of their minute details in an argument, when the details are probably what guided the offending decision.

There's also the fact that sometimes, we're reading the situation in terms of being a story. This is broadly called Genre Savvy, knowledge of how stories function in terms of genre. Basically, we make the right call or decision based on what significance there is to the story, which is not anything the character himself would have knowledge of. If you don't know what I mean, imagine a party walking into Agrabah before the events of Aladdin have taken place. Even if they didn't catch Jafar in the act of hypnotising the Sultan, they'd peg him as the bad guy. Why? He's slick, he's wearing black and red, he's got a snake staff and he's the only motherfucker in the whole movie with an accent.

But like I said before, sometimes genre is shorthand. So yes, in those situations you're COUNTING on people to metagame. You wanted them to do it. Your ideal situation is for them to get a bad feeling about the villain so they investigate or position themselves against him. Technically, that's metagaming.

Finally, a special note goes to monster weaknesses. I don't feel this is something you can get around because of the nature of preparation. Essentially, games count on a certain amount of preparation when designing challenges. Being prepared means some amount of knowledge of weaknesses or powers, on some level. Basically, telling a player "You don't know anything about that" means you're either robbing him of his ability to prepare or adding a "tax" of knowledge skills. With all the rolling he'd need to know things about monsters, the game can get bogged down quick. It's also pretty shitty to look at someone who spent a lot of gold on various weapons of various enchantments and materials and tell him with total seriousness that he has no idea when to use them. It herds him toward a decision of not even bothering and just dumping all of his gold into mechanical effectiveness. Trust me, you didn't want that. You don't want the PCs feeling like preparation is an impossible task, because that will make the game less fun for everyone.

This means the first piece of advice is to let people try to remember things about monsters. Don't let them go looking at the book until the thing is dead. In fact, don't be THAT GUY and try to look up the stats of everything the GM is using. As a GM, occasionally toss them weird monsters to shake things up, but remember not to make the idea of preparation worthless. Let people use knowledge skills to confirm ideas about monster knowledge, but don't require them. This is especially true if the players have several levels or karma under their belt when the game starts. Nobody is "fresh" in this situation(or as Sam would call them, pukes straight from the farm) but nobody wants to define their character's whole history. In fact, even if they did, nobody would want to read that. There's even a famous story about a guy who wrote a character background so long that A: Nobody in their right mind would read it, and B: He could justify knowledge of anything. Note that I don't recommend you do basically anything Old Man Henderson's player did.

The second piece of advice is to limit accidental metagaming. If it's not something the characters would know, don't tell the players. Be reasonable and try to keep this to plot details so the mechanics don't get bogged down. This way players can count on details they've been told, or gleaned, or had a feeling about to be in character. They can naturally act on it. If you use a puzzle and someone's seen it before, don't complain or try to rule over what they would logically know. In fact, we'll get into this at a later date but don't ever lord over knowledge with an iron fist. Your primary goal is to make the flow of information feel as natural as possible. This will remove most unwanted metagaming.

Basically, chill the fuck out. Every time you want to argue and your opening statement has the words "logically" or "reason" in it, I want you to count to ten and think about if you should really bog the game down with this. Damaging metagaming does happen, but in my experience pointless arguing happens way more often.

So, I told you what to do, but not really how to do it. Well, remember when you're describing something, you're describing what the characters see and not necessarily the objective truth. This has the potential to be an excellent tool. We'll use Vampire: The Masquerade as an example. Picture a mortal, or any character being introduced newly into the world of darkness. In pure mechanical terms, he watches a toreador use celerity 5 to escape an encounter with a hunter. You have a few options when describing this scene.

You could just flatly tell them what's happening. The toreador moves real fast out the door. This is acceptable when the players are used to this sort of thing or if the obscuring of knowledge isn't important. Please note that it's not always important to obscure knowledge.

Or you could describe what their human eyes see. There's a blur of motion around the willowy guy in the expensive clothes, and then he's simply gone. The night club's door is swinging wildly on its hinges, maybe even broken. This does two things. First is that someone who knows the system can speculate on what happened but won't be sure. He'll have a hunch that can be interpreted as a feeling, but he won't truly be sure of what happened. People new to the system are left to wonder and are entirely unable to metagame since you didn't use the name of a power.

Obviously, you need to use kid gloves with this. Try not to use a description that implies something radically different than the truth happened. Don't use this to try and deliberately "trick" the players. It DOES mean that they'll never guess the truth, but it also means they're reliant on you to give them more clues. That sort of leading around by the nose gets really old. You should also either drop this or use repeated/familiar descriptions as the players get close to the truth. Keeping up the mystery ad infinitum gets old.

But really, that's the through-line to all of this advice: Don't worry about it so much. Metagaming is bound to happen, and constantly making a huge deal out of it when it's not necessarily an issue will just slow the game down. In my experience, GMs who desire total control over their game often question motivations readily. Remember this is a collaborative effort to tell a story, not you presenting something untouchable for someone else's enjoyment. Try to keep your complaining to willful, repeated or very damaging examples of metagaming.

Next time we talk about another sort of information restriction and control.

Red Ranger, Pink Ranger, Munchkin Ranger

"Heroes may come and go, but idiots... are forever."

Ya'll might remember me saying that everyone should build the best character they can. I mentioned as well that you want to bring characters lagging behind up instead of tamping well performing characters down. I said all that without addressing the dreaded "munchkin" and since I was inspired to thought by an unlikely source, we're doing that today. I'll be using the original Power Rangers, of all things, to help prove my point and show some warning signs. You can take this article as things to look for in other people's characters, but really I'm giving you a list of habits to avoid in your own.

Part of the problem is that "munchkin" is like the pen and paper world's version of words like censorship or Nazi. It gets thrown around so much that it's almost meaningless anymore and it seems like it comes up in conversation just any time someone wants to insult someone else. Unlike censorship, though, its real definition is a bit harder to pin down. Most people use "munchkin" to label a player who's built a very powerful character. That's not exactly what a munchkin is, though. After all, it's completely ridiculous to expect someone to build a character that's substandard or bad just to prove they're committed primarily to roleplaying. In fact, doing so doesn't prove a god damn thing except the fact that you're kind of an asshole. This is a sidenote, but there's a fine line between taking a concept and trying your best to make it work and deliberately building something bad. Don't do the latter unless you've got some sort of cool background or concept you're excited about. You're not proving anything.

The thing that most people miss is a fine distinction from simply building an effective character: It's someone who's only concerned with the numeric power of their character. It's not JUST that, though. I'm going to get into minutiae of it below, since this is a surprisingly hairy thing to talk about: "Munchkin" is really a set of seemingly unrelated bad habits, not one big thing.

Going forward in this example(I know I know, more examples) I want you to see the original five power rangers as a party in a pen and paper game. After all, the show's largely set up like that anyway: a lot of simple monster-a-week plots at first, easily dispached mooks, reoccurring villains, supporting characters which cause issue for their real world personas, et cetera. They even have Tommy, a new player join mid-game. I'll be leaving him out of this discussion to focus on Jason, Billy, Kimberly, Trini, and Zack.

Interests and Passions. This is the one that made me want to write this, so it goes first. Our multi-colored party has a show-and-tell style event where they show everyone one of their hobbies or interests. Let's see if you can jump ahead of ol' Mouse and spot the munchkin. Billy obviously talks about some scientific project he's working on. Zack shows off his surfboard. Kimberly showcases some gymnastics. Jason shows off martial arts, and Trini has a collection of dolls.

If you said Jason or Kimberly, you're a smart boy(or girl, we don't judge). Now, none of the original rangers had much in the way of character, and that's okay. Most of them just had a few simple notes. In the context of a PNP game, however, in this instance Jason and Kimberly's players have mistaken hobbies and interests for "things they're good at". They look down at their character sheets and see nothing that relates to the school event. If Jason is a fighter type, I'm sure he saw his ton of feats and lack of skill points. He probably put a lot of stuff into 'serious' skills like notice or investigate. He reasons his character's primary purpose is beating the hell out of people and he says "martial arts". Kimberly's character may have gone into a similar thought process: The 'rogue type' character has acrobatics, but also a ton of skills like disable device that could lend themselves to some sort of interest but none that mesh with her stereotype bubbly "valley girl" personality at first glance. Both characters end up giving a bland answer that does nothing to really characterize them.

Both characters made several mistakes. The first is presuming that the character's interests MUST be something that they're good at or something that shaped their capabilities directly. That's not true at all. Most people are interested in a huge range of things, many of which aren't going to be represented by some skill in a PNP game. Most people even have something they're fuckawful at but love anyway. But even then, both answers are okay on the surface. The second mistake is the method of their answers: Neither thought about it very much, perhaps because their players are disinterested in the character building they've been presented with. Of course that disinterest is a major factor, but let's not speculate. Plenty of people have Martial Arts as a major hobby so Jason's answer is at least logical. However, what would this enthusiast do when given the opportunity to talk about his hobby? He'd bring memorabilia. Maybe his Karate Gi, some training weapons. Movie memorabilia or a signed photo of a famous martial artist that accompanies a cool story. Fuck, even some trophies or awards. What does JASON do? He gets in front of the class and does a bunch of martial arts moves. Bo-ring. What I'm saying is all he really needed is some level of spin.

Lack of Detail. So we already kind of talked about this above, but in the next event our "party" was presented with, they're participating in an ethnic foods drive. There's a ton of booths set up with food from all over the world. Most of the booths range from the typical Italian or Mexican to the vaguely racist Chinese food booth being run, of course, by Trini. What booth are Jason and Kimberly running? American. Yes, really. Our two munchkin twins came to an ethnic foods drive with hamburgers and hot dogs. They give the impression of coming up with the idea last minute because they slacked off. That'd be great characterization if it were intentionally expressed, but it's not. No, they're still A+ students, they just have no identity they could have put into this event. Again we can speculate that they were disinterested and just flopped any old answer out. Maybe one of them even said it and the other chimed in with "I'm helping him with it". The detail expressed by the other three rangers wasn't even necessarily purely driven by their ethnicity: love of spicy foods comes up in the episode. This was an opportunity to, at no real cost or consequence to themselves, characterize. Neither of them takes it, instead going for a bland, boring answer. They even could have "owned" this particular decision by adding detail, or going over the top. Maybe their booth isn't just American, it's Super American Fuck Yeah Style. They've got flags waving, a giant paper mache eagle, and they're selling Texas style chili that tastes like Satan is boiling Lava. But no, burgers and hot dogs and Jason's got like a hat on or something. Yawn.

Application of Skill. So yeah, I understand Power Rangers is a show for kids and sometimes characters eat shit just because they're supposed to be the butt of the joke. If you watch MMPR after the age of 25 or so, though, you kinda start to feel bad for Bulk and Skull. Sure they deserve a lot of the stuff that ends up sailing their way, but sometimes they catch hell simply because the universe is kicking them...or because the cast is being unrealistically mean. At one point Bulk becomes convinced he can "take" Jason. This is false. This is really obviously false. Like, Bulk is half his level, or probably much lower than that. Hell, Bulk doesn't really DO anything in the course of the first three seasons, he could be effectively level one. Now, I don't precisely remember the end to this particular scenario, but you can imagine how this is going to go. Jason has several options. He can talk Bulk down because he doesn't want to seriously hurt him. He can go 'full defensive' and just humiliate Bulk a bit(which is I believe what happens) or he can just straight up beat the shit out of the plus-sized punk. The end of this scenario can showcase another bad habit, one where the player is so eager to showcase the thing he's built his character to be good at that he'll take any opportunity to do so, even when it's the wrong thing to do. In this case humiliating Bulk is obviously better than just straight up hurting him, but with Jason being a hero and ostensibly lawful good, he probably should have tried to talk him down first. Something other than borderline cruelty, anyway. Imagine that didn't happen largely because Jason's player sees anything he's not 'great' at as a waste of time and you'll see my point. This one's kind of hairy I admit, since everyone does this to some degree.

There's a somewhat related event where Kimberly is turned "evil" by Rita Repulsa's latest monster. Being evil obviously means she's attracted to Skull now and propositions him for a date. Later when she's been cured Skull shows up completely ready for his date and Kimberly flatly, sarcastically turns him down. There's no problem with this exactly since "total bitch" is technically characterization, but even so, you could see this as more refusal to roll a skill she's bad at, namely letting him down easy with diplomacy. Since he's not done anything wrong in this case.

So, none of the hallmarks of munchkins we discussed today were directly related to how powerful their characters are. What should you look out for? Largely, watch for people who are disinterested or uninvolved with characterization beyond what their character is good at. It's not exactly that the players in question are very concerned with the 'power' of their characters. That can be true sometimes, but more often than not, the problem is that they're unconcerned with anything else. The distinction is a fine hair to split, but it's important. Simply helping them to get interested and showing them how to detail their character might save you from having a blow-out argument.