Let's Agree on Vocabulary At Least...

If my blog were about the way my older brother barbecues, I'd call it Cooking Without Heat Because I'm Scared Shitless of Burning Stuff. But here I am digressing already, so back on topic!

Past couple days I've been rewatching The Gamers and The Gamers 2: Dorkness Rising. That makes about the eleventy-zillionth time, for those of you keeping score at home. This time I even put the YouTube link up on my PSM for Skype, and sure enough I got a slew of "lol" messages. Those guys (and ladies, of course) are very talented, and I'm happy to evangelize for them.[subliminal] Buy the DVD... Buy the DVD[/subliminal] You haven't seen it? Shame, shame. Go HERE right after you're done reading this. I mean it.

Here's where I start getting to the point. While I was waiting for one of the parts to buffer* I happened to scroll down to the comments. There I found a month-old exchange that can accurately be paraphrased thusly:

Muppet4016: This is inaccurate. Roleplaying games aren't competitive,
so why are they portraying this as a contest between the GM and the players?

Dumbass6739: They are making fun of his group of immature
power-gamers! Wow, I hate power-gamers. So immature.

Xxn00b-pwner69xX: Yeh. Power-gamers are teh
suXxorz!

This, friends, bothers me. Not only because I am a power-gamer, but also because I'm a big fan language and it is really really difficult to have intelligent discourse on any subject when we disagree on the meaning of a word. So, in the interests of civil conversation, let us agree on the following:

A Power-gamer is defined (by Wikipedia, no less--who'd have thought I'd be citing them) as: a player of role-playing games who focuses on making their characters as powerful as possible. Check. I support that definition, and would submit as I have many many times in the past, that this is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. As a power-gamer I seek ways to make my character efficient in his chosen vocation, be that ranged combatant, backstabber, wizard, whatever. Am I doing this to be a prick? Actually just the opposite: I'm filling a role within my party, so I owe it to them to not do it half-assed. If I'm the party's battle-turtle, they are depending on me to have (to quote the movie) good strength, a high armor-class, and hit points out the ass. By Gygax's Bushy Beard, I'm fucking going to have the best strength, the highest armor class, and the most hit points I can squeeze out of the rules, because the people around me at the table deserve the best I can do. Metagaming? Hell, no! How is it metagaming to say that Hugh Badaxe is going to play to his strengths and train his hardest to be the best damn big, dumb door-kicker he can be?

Some characteristics of power-gamers:

1. They seek, find, and exploit mechanical and/or tactical and/or social advantages to increase the efficiency of their character within its designated role in the party.
2. They have an intimate knowledge of the rules. They may or may not be argumentative, depending on the specific player. This familiarity will extend to other classes and party roles, so they may best support the overall party. They may or may not advise other players in tactical situations depending upon the specific player and group dynamic. They do not, however, cheat; that is the bailiwick of the munchkin.
3. They have an intense and personal interest in the survival and advancement of the character. This usually extends to that of the other party members as well, but may not depending on the specific player and group dynamic.
4. They fucking pay attention. They take notes. They gather information. They make plans, purchase specific gear, and load up on specific spells to efficiently take the party's objective.

In the movie, everyone represented a gamer stereotype. No, I won't get into all of them because this ain't a cinema-analysis blog. But if we agree upon the above definition, the only power-gamers in the movie are Cass and Joanna. They make good representations of the "may or may not" clauses in my definition.

So what are the others? Well, the gender-bending magic-user guy is a munchkin, pure and simple.**

But isn't power-gamer just another word for munchkin? You know: you say 'tomato' and all that?

Nope. A munchkin is a different type of critter. We get confused because very often a real douchebag will exhibit qualities of both the power-gamer and the munchkin. But they ain't the same thing.

So what is a munchkin, you ask?

Tell you tomorrow.

*No, that's not a euphemism for anything, regardless of what it might mean in the UK--we won a couple wars so we wouldn't have to listen to you guys so fu... Sorry. Digressing again.

**AND his character is hawt!