Tabletop Roleplaying Games (D&D, Pathfinder, CoC, ETC.)

  • Want to keep track of this thread?
    Accounts can bookmark posts, watch threads for updates, and jump back to where you stopped reading.
    Create account
For me, that's where the wealth die shines because the limit is vague but reasonable.

eg. "You start with a fully furnished home."
"I pawn my fridge, TV, and microwave to buy a +5 m16."
As a DM, I can object to that but it turns into a negotiation.

In contrast, "I buy 500 'free' bus tickets and resell them on ebay for massive profit" is easy to say no to, and the players can't really defend it.

There was some RPG that had an exploit I saw mentioned repeatedly. I forget the system and exact rule, but the gist was you take a lavish lifestyle cost, and the perk is you can spend 1 hour searching your house to gain any common item. You then spend 8 hours a day searching for spiked gauntlets (the most valuable common item) and generate infinite money. I'd point out that any DM with a even a tiny amount of sense would not allow that, but I'd just blank stares in response. I never saw that rule come up in practice.

It's kind of the opposite of theatre majors (if I'm using that term right) in that people will rules lawyer as hard as they can, but when smacked in the face with the logic of the world, their brain shuts down.
Your post reminded me of the ladder exploit in 3e. Sure, you could spend all day buying ladders, breaking them apart, and selling the two wooden poles for a profit, because there's nothing in the rules that says you can't. At some point, however, any DM with a couple working brain cells would find some way to put a stop to things, like decreeing that you've now bought every ladder in the city or that there's now such a glut of 10-foot poles that they're effectively worthless. Only a very inexperienced DM who doesn't understand that they can put the kibosh on that would let you get away with it. (And of course the exploit was removed in 3.5e, rendering it completely pointless to try.)

That's really the fate of any case of extreme munchkin maneuver: it only works as long as your DM doesn't say "hey wait a minute." Don't be That Guy that tries to pull a fast one on your DM.
 
That's really the fate of any case of extreme munchkin maneuver: it only works as long as your DM doesn't say "hey wait a minute." Don't be That Guy that tries to pull a fast one on your DM.
favorite munchkin maneuver is the Peasant Railgun:
1d4chan said:
Hire a ton of peasants; let's just say that it is two thousand two hundred and eighty. Line them up in single file; this will form a chain of peasants two miles long. It'd have been four miles back in MY day (witness me hiking up my 2nd Edition suspenders).
Buy a ladder. Just buy a standard, ten-foot ladder. Disassemble the ladder into a bunch of rungs and a pair of mighty ten-foot wooden poles. Hand a pole to the peasant at the back of line.
First round of combat. Peasant at the front of line readies an action to throw the pole at the enemy. Every peasant behind him readies an action to hand the pole to the peasant in front of him.
Next round: peasants fire off their readied actions, passing the pole two miles down the line and hurling it in six seconds or less. Pole accelerates to the speed of 1188 miles per hour, or Mach 1.546875 in dry air, at 20°C/68°F, at sea level on our planet.
using the falling object rules this does 300d6 or so of damage. Its great.
 
favorite munchkin maneuver is the Peasant Railgun:

As the pole hits the speed of sound, the sonic boom sends peasants flying - deafened and bleeding as the Mach 1 pole hits the ground, fragmenting, sending rocks and splinters into peasants in the immediate area of the explosion. You have rolls 2683 angry peasants looking to extract vengence from your soon-to-be corpse. What do you do?
 
As the pole hits the speed of sound, the sonic boom sends peasants flying - deafened and bleeding as the Mach 1 pole hits the ground, fragmenting, sending rocks and splinters into peasants in the immediate area of the explosion. You have rolls 2683 angry peasants looking to extract vengence from your soon-to-be corpse. What do you do?
Oh I know and readied actions don't work that way but its a funny idea and never fails to make me smile.
 
Oh I know and readied actions don't work that way but its a funny idea and never fails to make me smile.
Even if readied actions did work that way, there are two major issues that would invalidate the peasant railgun.

First, and most important, the game rules don't really model actual physics at all. Beyond fall damage, there's nothing that addresses concepts like gravity, and even that has a limit (1d6 for every 10 feet you fall, to a maximum of 20d6). Thus, while something moving at supersonic speed should do massive damage, the rules don't specify. You'd have to have your DM be willing to handwave that and come up with a solution, but by then, you run into the same "hey wait a second" that will thwart the plan as above.

Second, logistics. It's hard enough to get a few people together to do a thing (like play tabletop, heyo), but getting thousands of peasants to stop what they're doing, stand in a straight line, and have perfect coordination to break the laws of physics is borderline impossible. Again, the DM should already have stepped in and said no to the idea by this point. This also breaks a variety of other munchkin tactics, like some methods I've seen to kill a tarrasque in one turn. Unless you have a literal army that will do as you command, any plan that involves coordinating even a couple dozen people will probably fall apart.

Although you reminded me of another munchkin move of teleporting via lining up a mile of horses right next to each other, then repeatedly mounting and dismounting them down the line all in one turn, so you could reach the other end in six seconds. The creative rules interpretation was that if the horses were right next to each other, you could keep mounting them indefinitely without burning through your movement because it was zero feet to the next horse, ignoring the fact that you can only mount/dismount once per turn. But once again, good luck coordinating that many horses, let alone slipping it past your DM.
 
Something of a tangent but looks like John Wick and Chaosium have finally parted ways. There's a lot you can say about the story of the 7th Sea Kickstarter but this likely covers it best.


we're 7.5 years out from the KS campaign, and while it isn't quite Far West, it's not a good look at all. Wick got $1.3 million for his dream project, which he burned through in a couple of years without meeting the KS conditions. Then Chaosium bailed him out and employed him for 4.5 years after that. Despite it all, the last book came out 60+ pages shorter than all the other 2E books. It's also rife with the kind of typos that a basic copy edit could fix.

Wick's accountable for that. All of it. He wasn't doing the job he was literally paid $1 million for. Those are dream conditions for a creator, and he's managed to thoroughly muck it up at least twice.
 
That's really the fate of any case of extreme munchkin maneuver: it only works as long as your DM doesn't say "hey wait a minute." Don't be That Guy that tries to pull a fast one on your DM.
I guess the main thing I look to from a system is a way for me as a DM to bitchslap these attempts to short-circuit physics early, be fair (or at least consistent) with my rulings, and ideally discourage players from trying to break the world in the first place but without shutting down clever thinking, while giving me a good frame work to redirect with a "that won't work but you could try this" without a huge lot of brainwork.
Basically guide rails for my LE id & a stick the Munchkins will be readily forced to respect.

I feel the skills from most editions of D&D WMPRPG do a decent enough job of this. Take what they are trying to do, attach a DC, add penalties/bonuses, toss it in to a skill bucket, have them roll (only issue I have is when a 20 is supposed to be an autosuccess regardless of action attempted)

Going back to what triggered this tangent, FATE doesn't seem to allow this sort of clear-cut resoluton and turns everything into negotiations with the GM, which just sounds like a recipe for bad times.

Something of a tangent but looks like John Wick and Chaosium have finally parted ways. There's a lot you can say about the story of the 7th Sea Kickstarter but this likely covers it best.

LOL, that's some impressive levels of fucking up.
 
Last edited:
Has any one watched anyone of Brendan Mulligan's DnD stuff is he just a less successful Matt Mercer because I watched him talk about gatetowns and Planescape and he has the soyest idea of Planescape ive ever seen.
 
As the pole hits the speed of sound, the sonic boom sends peasants flying - deafened and bleeding as the Mach 1 pole hits the ground, fragmenting, sending rocks and splinters into peasants in the immediate area of the explosion. You have rolls 2683 angry peasants looking to extract vengence from your soon-to-be corpse. What do you do?

I would give them a chance. The burghers of the town these peasants were recruited from are outraged by how they abused so many of their citizens, and they have pooled their funds to put a bounty out on the party: 1000 gp per member if brought back alive so that they can be lobotomized with magic and made into thralls who will sweep the streets and collect night soil. The players won't learn about this for 1d4 weeks, after which they will be ambushed by bounty hunters at the first tavern they visit. Lots of potential resolutions for parties of any level.
 
The reason it works is two fold. First, it allows people to role play without being put at a disadvantage while also taking pressure off the DM. A Bruce Wayne like millionare can just buy things willy nilly, and regular characters can buy small things like bus fare and coffee without the DM having to price check it and count pennies. They players just get them. Anything of value requires a roll.
I don't like it. I want wealth to be an actual objectively measurable thing and things cost stuff, and if you don't have that? Fuck you, you don't get it. I have had groups in campaigns where their wealth was essentially infinite because nothing they needed money to do cost as much as they had, but those were unusual.

Like I had a Call of Cthulhu campaign where they basically decided to start a "group" (although society eventually decided it was a dangerous cult) where the party members went all-in and whenever any of them died, they'd will their entire fortune to the group. Many of them were fairly wealthy independently, including a Russian gangster with a source for nearly any kind of weapon legal or illegal (his origin was his mob had basically been wiped out in a conflict with eldritch horror cultists and had decided fuck this).

This seemed like a good enough idea (considering the huge level of carnage in the campaign) that I put up with it. One of the main NPCs I had actually started out as an accountant so financial planning like this made sense in context, too. Influenced by Moorcock, I had a number of archetypal characters and "the guy who always gives solid advice" was this guy.

This group was ultimately destroyed not by eldritch entities but by the IRS.

This indirectly led to the destruction of the world.
(And of course the exploit was removed in 3.5e, rendering it completely pointless to try.)
One of my favorite exploit-ish things was early D&D, maybe Basic? Or maybe it was in some module. But plain old housecats had multiple attacks like 1 hp for a front claw, 1 hp for a bite, 1 hp for a rear claw, plus a rake attack if they hit with both back claws. So I would have parties slaughtered by a bunch of cats.

I had a whole joke module that was basically just absolutely mundane things being the Tomb of Horrors for L1 heroes.
 
Last edited:
Although you reminded me of another munchkin move of teleporting via lining up a mile of horses right next to each other, then repeatedly mounting and dismounting them down the line all in one turn, so you could reach the other end in six seconds.
That reminds me of a real life physics concept "the speed of push". If you had a pole that could reach from one planet to another, could you communicate faster than light by pushing the pole? Could you put something at the end of the pole and swing it? etc.

Turns out that movement goes through matter at the speed of sound, so it doesn't work. I don't know the physics behind it.

But plain old housecats had multiple attacks like 1 hp for a front claw, 1 hp for a bite, 1 hp for a rear claw, plus a rake attack if they hit with both back claws.
I'm picturing someone holding angry cats in each hand to spam attacks like a monk.
 
Turns out that movement goes through matter at the speed of sound, so it doesn't work. I don't know the physics behind it.

tl;dr is that at extreme scales even solid matter gets "squishy", so when you push on your 1.3 million mile pole, you would be creating a massive "wave" that would travel the pole at physics compatible speeds. This of course ignores that even if you made your pole out hydrogen it would be so heavy you'd need nuclear-weapon worth of energy to move it, and what planetary gravity would do such a pole.

Have a video where you can see this in action; go ahead mute the audio
CELLPHONES AREN'T MEANT TO JIGGLE LIKE THE D.O.A. GIRLS
 
Nethack was based on AD&D wasn't it? That would explain why if your pet cat went hostile because you were a monster at low levels you were in trouble.
They start as kittens with 1d6 damage but eventually grow larger in two stages. Also if you eat a cat or a dog you automatically get a nasty intrinsic called aggravate monster which wakes up monsters near you and makes it so monsters can tell where you are even if you're not in sight.
 
They start as kittens with 1d6 damage but eventually grow larger in two stages. Also if you eat a cat or a dog you automatically get a nasty intrinsic called aggravate monster which wakes up monsters near you and makes it so monsters can tell where you are even if you're not in sight.
Man I miss nethack such a fun game.
 
So, quick question for you all; what was your favorite character concept, and why? Like, regardless of which game that you run; what character did you come up with that you just really, really enjoyed for whatever reason?
 
So, quick question for you all; what was your favorite character concept, and why? Like, regardless of which game that you run; what character did you come up with that you just really, really enjoyed for whatever reason?
In a previous game I ran I saddled the party with an assigned guide that was a near morbidly obese halfling that spoke like a warcraft peasant with mild brain damage. In actuality he was a highly skilled horse thief that feigned incompetence and seasoned outdoorsman with extensive knowledge of the surrounding lands. He eventually got caught and was given a choice of becoming the local lord's gamesman/warden or the noose. He chose the former. He'd often take last watch for the party and sometimes they'd wake up and start asking questions like "where did that horse come from?/I don't remember packing two entire hams/didn't we have only 4 chickens last night?" while fatso the halfling just gave them a fluoride stare with a bit of drool on his lip and go "dunno me lord".
 
So, quick question for you all; what was your favorite character concept, and why? Like, regardless of which game that you run; what character did you come up with that you just really, really enjoyed for whatever reason?
An insanely courageous Pierson's Puppeteer (who was occasionally outright schizo) and a reasonable Kzin (not a pacifist in the least though) who were best friends and shared a fondness for classical Greek and Latin drama, Shakespeare, baroque music, and human culture in general. The Kzin was an expert violinist who had won musical awards, as well as military awards from his own people before he was exiled for being seen as a xenophile.

These two were sort of the task assigners in a Ringworld campaign.

They only showed up once in an actual scenario because they were so ridiculously OP that the question often came up "well why don't they just do this themselves?" And the running gag was coming up with some ridiculous other thing they had to do.
 
Back
Top Bottom