“Welcome to Wal*Mart. I’m glad that you chose to work for us. Not that you had much choice, we Trust the competition to stay away from us if we stay away from them. We have many benefits for employees though. For instance, Wal*Mart Fun Bucks. These can be used to purchase <i>anything</i> in our stores nationwide. They’re so good and useful, that we will pay you in <i>just</i> Fun Bucks. Now, don’t worry about a place to live. As an employee you get access to our wonderful Wal*Mart Employee Apartments. So cozy with just one room each, and just for Employees. Of course, your wife will have to get a job with us too if she wants to live there. I think we have an opening in our Baker’s Street store. Ah, I see you have a daughter too! How lovely. She’ll have to get a job with us too. Full time of course, but she completed the fifth grade, that’s more than enough education to work in our stock room. We wouldn’t want her to be a <i>parasite</i> would we? Welcome to the team! :)
No sir, I don’t like it. It... honestly gave me a minor panic attack hearing this.
With the exception of the last ‘skit’, this is how I am used to people reacting around me when I get down about myself. No ‘punching with friendship’ it’s...
“Don’t you dare.”
“Shut up!”
“You’re just saying that for attention!”
“Why do you always have to be like this?”
Without the final part... it’s just a series on how aggressive people can be around others who are chronically depressed. Thinking back on the video, I can’t even hear the guy’s voice. I only hear my mother’s.
Roleplaying Games and the ‘Stop Having Fun Guy’ - The Munchkin
Alright, here’s the second part of the series. This might be a bit lengthy, so hold on. I plan on describing these kinds of players, and also ways to help get around them.
Now, the most powerful tool in dealing with any kind of Stop Having Fun Guy, is communication. Directly telling someone their behavior is Not Okay is a strong tool, but it is akin to an atom bomb. Direct confrontation leads to direct conflict. While some players might simmer down when confronted, many others will double down. Overall, this may not be the best solution, depending on the natures of the GM, players, and even the environment in which you are playing. Besides the infamous ‘little brother’, I have been to stores where the store themselves forbids GMs from booting players out of their games unless the player is getting booted out of the entire store. This means more subtle methods are to be used, which is what this series will hope to cover.
The Munchkin is a type of power gamer who is in it to ‘win’, even though most games have no such concept. While this can mean a social powerhouse, often it means a mechanical one, and is the definition we’ll be using in this series. These types of players see the game as a ‘them vs the GM’, and aim to ‘defeat’ said GM. Due note, though, that not all Munchkins are Stop Having Fun Guys (SHFG). The difference is in attitude
The SHFG Munchkin is a kind of player who firmly believes that their method of play, min-maxing their character to ‘defeat’ the GM, is the only proper method of play. As such, they will judge all other characters and players on this standard.
As a player, from a player’s perspective, these people can be rather frustrating. They can be, like all SHFGs, very judgmental, comparing everyone’s characters. Classic ‘who can take who on?’ debates, if you can even call them that, are common even if the only person doing it is the Munchkin themselves. They get pride out of being the most powerful member of the party, regardless of circumstances. But, what truly puts these people into the SHFG category and not just a generic Munchkin is the attitude that everyone at the table should be doing the same thing. Everyone should be doing their best to min-max and exploiting the rules to get as powerful as possible, not understanding how anyone can gain enjoyment from the game without it.
As a player, I’ve found one of the best ways to deal with this kind of SHFG is... to not care. Or at least, not seem like you care. Be blase about the amazing feats their character can do. Shrug your shoulders and say you’re not really interested when they talk about how they can optimize your character if you let them give it a few tweaks (often these ‘tweaks’ can take the form of completely ripping the heart and soul of the character in the search for more +1′s, so buyer beware). With any luck, persistence, and general co-operation of the group, this behavior will steadily go down. Granted, if you have a Killer GM, their advice may be more warranted than you would like, but that is a different kettle of fish.
As a GM you have a few more weapons here besides shunning. As with normal Munchkins, using Social rewards can be a greatly powerful tool. Rewarding a strong RPer with their own successful business can really make that super awesome +8 sword, or ridiculous prestige class the Munchkin loopholed into a lot less cool, make the Munchkin a lot less likely to brag about it and encourages non-Munchkin behavior in the entire party.
One issue that these kinds of SHFGs can bring to the table, is the arms race. This is a very problematic thing for a GM, especially a shyer one. If you let this kind of player min-max to his heart’s content, then he is going to leave the other players in his proverbial wake. The flying golden god on his griffon mount, smiting his foes with repeated charge attacks of 8d8+6d6+24 each, doubled because charging, and quadrupled further on a crit can be extremely problematic when the next frontline fighter in the group does... 1d10+4. This means that in order to challenge the Munchkin, you will slaughter the rest of the group, but if you don’t the Munchkin will walk all over it, making the rest of the group useless. This is often the SHFG’s best argument for why the group should go over to their way of thinking.
The best defense here is to be proactive. Work with the characters as they are being created. This is something you should always do as a GM. Find where a player sees their character’s strengths, and find ones that the player may not. That previously mentioned frontline fighter with the ‘pitiful’ damage might have great detective skills for hunting down the supernatural. Great! Have a storyline where that can shine. Sure, the Golden God might instantly kill whatever the threat was, but if you give most of the credit to the guy who found the thing, or at least make that a notable point, it lets the ‘lesser’ character have his time in the sun, while giving the Golden God his glory.
This all in general can come down to de-emphasizing the combat in the game, where the Munchkin thrives.
Now, if you want to have your combat-heavy game, and counter the Munchkin SHFG, your best bet is to close off the power cap. Adjust the power level of your campaign. You can do this in a number of ways. One way is to just ban classes. Dungeons and Dragons, and Pathfinder have a very distinct power tier system that you can find floating about. The super powerful classes such as Wizard, Cleric, and a certain variation of Psion can be horrible game-busters and closing them off can stem the Munchkinism. Banning certain source-books can also work. Especially in 3.X D&D, source books can be... hit or miss on the power scale, due to the Open Gaming Licence. There are some stupidly powerful splat books out there, and if you don’t like it, or just aren’t familiar with it; ban it.
Now, SHFG Munchkin GMs are... very dangerous. Keep in mind; the idea behind a SHFG is that all players of a game need to conform to their way of playing the game, anything else is ‘wrong.’ In this case, we are talking about min-maxing and exploiting rules. Prepare for no mercy, as your GM is likely a killer. Horribly unbalanced encounters will be common here, as will traps and other nasty surprises. They will expect, nay, require you to play on his level in order to even survive.
While it may not be necessarily endemic to the SHFG Munchkin, I have found each one I’ve played under also being a huge fan of ‘Gotcha’ traps, both socially and mechanically. These are traps that the GM has set up designed so that the player will not see it coming unless they read the GM’s mind. In a social context, this can mean the GM wants to bait the player’s metagame knowledge to make the party look like fools. The kobolds you’re attacking? Actually peaceful. And you slaughtered half the village before the GM ‘made’ you stop. You monsters. How should you have known? Well, if you had just taken the time to ask the small reptilian creatures, who in nearly every game and setting (often including this one) are Lawful Evil xenophobes who attack other creatures on sight, then they would’ve been totally peaceful and cool with you. The giant monstrosity that burst out of the pile of corpses right next to the party on this mysterious slaughtering ground with a great roar and show of muscle, that the party then won initiative on? Well, it’s actually like 15 levels higher than you, stomps you flat, and rather than kill you, lectures you on talking to the monsters that by all rights you would expect to try and kill you.
But don’t get clever. If you try and start questioning every monster, this kind of GM is likely to drop the charade and now punish you for trying. Walk into the next kobold village to peacefully trade? You set off every trap and now they all attack you. No, they aren’t peaceful, they’re kobolds for crying out loud!
Sadly, there isn’t much you can do about this kind of GM, short of just verbal protest when they pull their bullshit on you. Some may try and ‘optimize’ your characters for you, to pull you up to their level, but much like when they are a player, they can often not care about the ‘soul’ of your character, discarding it to fit their vision of a min-maxed character. Others may instead prefer you to sink or swim, to learn the system as well as they do by trial by fire. In either case, the players are having less fun.
In any case, you need to Stop Having Fun, Guys, and start playing by their rules.
Roleplaying Games and the ‘Stop Having Fun Guy’ - Introduction
So, I’ve been thinking about some things lately, and with some recent experiences, I’ve decided to make a series about it, as otherwise the post would just go on for far too long, making digestion of the text more difficult.
Here, we are talking about the Stop Having Fun Guy as defined by TV Tropes. Simply put, it is a person who seeks to maximize efficiency in his competitive games, and feels that all players of the game follow suit, and that anyone who does not is ‘playing the game wrong.’ While it might not seem that way, this can cross over into tabletop RPGs, and can be incredibly frustrating.
For those wondering, I am an experienced Pen and Paper RPG player and Game Master, been playing numerous systems since about 2002.
In the context of an RPG, the Stop Having Fun Guy (or SHFG) seeks to play the game as optimally as possible. This being a Role Playing Game, however, this leads to varying definitions of what ‘optimally,’ or as they might see it, ‘correctly’ is. I can see breaking them down into three camps:
The Munchkin - These players seek to play the game by min-maxing their character. Make them as mechanically optimal as possible. ‘What point is there in playing if you can’t use the system to its utmost?’ is a common argument.
The Thespian - Opposite the Munchkin, the Thespian sees the game purely for its Role Playing potential. A character is judged solely on its ability to tell a story, any mechanical abilities that aren’t intrinsic to roleplaying are at best ignored, or at worst derided.
The Rules Lawyer - This one does not fit quite right with the other two on an axis, but can be just as frustrating. These players are often Lawful Stupid, seeing the game as a set of strict rules that must be adhered to at all times, with no deviation. Unsurprisingly, Rule 0, the rule of what the GM says goes, is often pointedly ignored or thrown out.
Dealing with these kinds of players as a fellow player, or as the GM presents numerous complications. Doubly so if the SHFG is your GM.
This has been weighing on my mind for a while, so I thought I’d get it out into text.
The Social Justice Movement really needs to start considering the impact of words outside of our little bubble. A good example, and the one that made me want to write this, is the word ‘Racist’. I’ve seen numerous times things like:
‘All white people are racist.’ and
‘Black people can’t be racist.’
And these are true, from a sociology point of view. All people, white, black, whathaveyou, naturally form prejudices about other races and nationalities, formed from our society’s point of view. It is, in fact, just human nature and how our brain works. At the same time, ‘racism’ is generally defined under sociology as a system of prejudices with a society backing it up. You know this, I know this, but the public at large doesn’t.
So, when we use a phrase like ‘All white people are racist’, to anyone outside our bubble, we’re calling all white people neo-nazis and KKK members, because they don’t know how we use the word in a more scientific format.
Similarly, when we say ‘Black people can’t be racist’, it sounds like we are excusing racially charged crime committed by black people, especially if we then say black people can only merely be prejudiced, which is a word with a much lower charge to it. It sounds like we are moving the goal posts to make black people look better.
All this gets worse when we have people within the Social Justice movement, who then take phrases like this, and parrot them around, not understanding what they are parroting.
Something we need to keep in mind, is that this isn’t some battle between Social Justice and those against it. The vast majority of people out there are neutral, and its these people we need to be considering when we write. If we throw around these charged words without considering how they look outside our bubble, we don’t turn people to our cause, we turn them away. If a white person came across these blogs and sees over and over people just stating ‘All white people are racist’, they’re not going to be receptive to anything else we say, because they’re going to feel attacked, insulted.
Now, I’m not saying, we can’t use the word ‘racist’, but I am cautioning in how we use it, and the context. Tumblr isn’t a series of private blogs, our words are going to be out there, and if we want to change the world, make it better for everyone regardless of race, sex, or whatever, we have to think outside our bubble, and how our words affect those outside of it.
You know what I want to see more of in sci fi? Aliens who deviate from their species’ “norm.”
Like, queer aliens, but queer in alien terms; like, aliens whose typical family unit is a trio comprised of three different gendersexes, but sometimes aliens will form trios that only have two different gendersexes, and they still produce viable offspring, but only of the two parent gendersexes, and that carries a social stigma because each gendersex is supposed to play a separate role in the family unit.
Aliens for whom it is the norm to change gendersex upon reaching a certain age, but sometimes (possibly due to a genetic anomaly) it doesn’t happen, so those aliens either a) continue to present as a juvenile gender despite being a stage 2 adult, b) present as a stage 2 adult despite their physical characteristics, or c) undergo medical procedures to change their body artificially, though the technology in that area is still imperfect.
Or disabled aliens who have prosthetic tails/fins/wings/tentacles/etc. Aquatic aliens who can’t hold their breath for an accepted amount of time and so have to carry around atmosphere tanks. Aliens with degenerative conditions that are slowly losing their infrared vision. Aliens who lack their species trademark color-changing camouflage skin. Aliens who are allergic to common foods on their own planets and are frustrated that interplanetary restaurants don’t take that into account when listing which menu items are “safe” for which species.
Neurodivergent aliens who are not connected to the hivemind, who do their best to blend in and guess what they are supposed to be doing, but who are cast out when they are discovered, only to have their numbers build up enough that they are able to build a society on their own using communication aids such as verbal or manual language.
Aliens who are just different in small ways, like generally all three eyes are different colors, except that rare genetic quirks sometimes cause two or even all three to be the same color. Aliens born with five fingers instead of four. Aliens who are more coordinated with their prehensile toes than with their hands, which is inconvenient when most products are designed to be used with hands, but they manage. Aliens born with vestigial wings instead of just residual bone nubs. Aliens born without horns or tusks or spines.
and okay, so I’m basically arguing for more diverse representation of aliens, but like, if our default mode of thinking is to assume that all members of a species are a certain way, then what does that say about how we view our own species? that only ones who follow certain norms qualify as “human”?
or whatever maybe i just think that thinking about this sort of stuff is cool.
That Neurodivergent one is actually a plot point in Final Fantasy XIV. The Gnath have the Onemind which acts as a hive mind for the species. However, some lose their connection and are called Vath or Nonmind, who are then thrown out. You help the Nonmind learn how to survive as a tiny tribe and deal with the fact that the other Gnath are uncomfortable with the idea of Nonmind and try to destroy them. (Of course, the fact that the Gnath are summoning their violent honorable bastard of a god, Ravana doesn’t help). In the upcoming 3.2 patch, the Vath are getting a daily quest/story chain to explore more into their people.
I am white, therefore I am privileged, and deserve to die.
I am CIS, therefore I am always transphobic and deserve to die.
So, with all these reasons to die, why can’t I bring myself to do it? It would be so easy, to just draw the blade across my throat, or tighten the rope around my neck.
