Comments on: When the World of Darkness died …

By: Dyson Logos

Dyson Logos — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 16:12:56 +0000

Yeah, when I listen to people talk about their old vampire games, 80% of them are talking about their power-gaming and munchkin fun, while the remaining 20% usually talk about how the city worked, how the prince wasn't really that powerful in person, but he made life hell on anyone he didn't like through his web of connections and so on. Fortunately, I mostly played in groups like the latter. Dyson Logoss last blog post..[Moldvay] Temple of Illhan – Second Expedition

By: Helmsman

Helmsman — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 15:55:15 +0000

I feel for you man. That's a real shame because Vampire had a lot to offer, and Mage was a thing of beauty. Still my favorite game of all time Mage is. One thing I've found is that playing over IM chats lends it's self to really heavy role playing over munchkinism, I think if you ever find an IM community that aren't all pretentious losers, try it out. Helmsmans last blog post..The Endless Frustrations of Writing a Game

By: Michael

Michael — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 13:09:27 +0000

I think your experience clearly illustrates how dependent a campaign is on the people playing and running it. I think it also is proof of how difficult it is to find a group that has the same interests and intent. Michaels last blog post..Songs of Inspiration

By: Walker

Walker — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 12:56:22 +0000

I find it weird that your WOD games suffered from munchkinism. Everyone I knew who played WOD in the early 90s were heavy role players and not rules lawyers. Hell, the supplements were over half flavor text and supplementary fiction. It was the appeal to this market that made WOD one of the first breakout LARP systems. Rules lawyers during this time were moving into the generic systems like GURPS or HERO.

The issue that I remember from playing WOD (at least the 1.0 versions in the 90s) was that the rules were just so arbitrary. No set guidelines on difficulty rating adjustment versus number of successes. Mage 1.0 had almost no structure; you could do absolutely anything for no cost by making it look like a coincidence. Maybe that is what leads to munckinism in your groups — the only way to make a challenge is to have the enemy clearly and significantly more powerful than the party.

By: Bob

Bob — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 11:11:28 +0000

Thankfully we never really suffered to badly from that when we played WOD. We eventually got the to munchkin point in one campaign but we had been playing our characters for several years by that point so it was generally excepted that our characters would have been min-maxed by then. Thankfully the only time they seemed overpowered was when someone else played them in our absence. My vamp-blood loving 4th gen brujah was normally a geeky no friends computer hacker so it was very rare that his world ending combat skills got a run out. I miss that charater… It was always a good game when we helped out a vamp on a blood hunt and when he'd killed our target he didn't realise I'd already munched down on the target. I was really hard to kill thanks to some lucky lucky dice in those early games.

I always found the Werewolf games I played in to be very munchkiny though. Very little in the way of roleplay and a lot of combat junkies bent on getting the best attack dice pools.

Bobs last blog post..March RPG Bloggers Carnival Roundup!