"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.
No comments:
Post a Comment