Why I Am A Min-Maxxer
Posted: Sat Jun 30, 2007 1:54 pm
Note: A MUCK/MUSH are basically MMORPG equivalents of gaming solely through iRC/Chat.
What makes a person, especially someone who has had over 10 years of online roleplay experience, such a cynical min-maxxer? No one event convinced me. Rather, it was being jilted several times followed by seeing the light of Min-Maxxing over a period of time. For the zero people besides me interested in this tale, here we go.
It was the summer of 2002. I had no job, no college ambition, and no real plans. Why? Well, I had already taken the oath of enlistment for Naval service in February so I was just killing time until I had to ship off. My D&D mania was at the time at its height but I had no real source for gaming. Also at the time, I lacked places to roleplay. OldeMUCK was long-dead and though I didn't know it at the time ChaosMUCK was on its last legs.
Confronted with a serious dearth of distraction, I did what I never thought of before: I went to a MUSH. I was pretty desperate, see, and at the time I had carried over some irrational fear of venturing outside of this codebase. I can't give a reason. It was irrational. But that's not important to the story. Keep in mind that I was just expanding my horizons at the time.
Anyway, after a few dead ends, I had the choice between Winter's Edge and Treyvan for my D&D fix. I was originally hunting for some multi-themed anime place but I had just gotten Sword and Fist, one of the first 3rd Edition supplements. This was burning a hole in my bookcase. Back then, they made supplements of a softcover in black and white with a glossy color insert. Also, pretty much only two artists did the entire project. The production values were nowhere near the level of the oiriginal book, or, later, the supplements made for 3.5E edition.
But to me and many new fans of D&D it may as well have been manna from heaven. I loved that damn book. I haven't enjoyed that book the most out of all of the RPG books I own (I derived a lot more enjoyment from Oriental Adventures, Book of Nine Swords, Exalted 2nd: Scroll of the Monk, and Shadowrun 4th: Street Magic for starters) but that book still meant a lot to me. Almost as much as the core books. I even remember where I bought it. April '02, Hastings, with the last bit of money I had saved up after getting fired from my old job. Knowing me, I probably had those chocolate-covered cookie dough bites they sold, too. I think I also rented Rhapsody, too.
Of course, I had never before followed an RPG. Bitter fans of D&D 2nd Edition, right before it crashed, could have told me through gritted teeth that when Dame Success shoves a fandom's object into her shoddily augmented, veiny boobies that only tragedy follows. I was unaware that my favorite game was going to be intellectually bankrupt by a flood of material just like this and experience the same death of oversaturation that the previous edition has. Of course, that's a separate rant and has yet to happen for a couple of years. As far as I was concerned, Sword and Fist had friggin' Drunken Master, un'errated Ninja of the Crescent Moon, Pain Touch, and a ring of Shocking Blows.
I decided to check out Winter's Edge first. The basis for my decision in no small way due to a little website called When Online RPGS Attack! Imagine if Something Awful tried to review online roleplaying. That was WORA. Anyway, Treyvan was getting slammed heavily on the boards at the time. A lot of the criticism and snark stemmed from the perceived ineptitude of the staff there to bridge the gap of a face-to-face pen-and-paper game to an online textual mass roleplaying game. I can cut the game some slack in retrospect, because the actual honest-to-god D&D game itself was undergoing a paradigm shift. If there was bitter conflict between the game designers on how a game should be run then how much could you fairly expect from a group of amateurs doing it as a hobby?
For those of you who haven't played Icewind Dale (which the game is pretty much a homage to), Winter's Edge is supposed to be the mechanism for the tale of several adventurers who settled at the frontier town of Vintermor. For people who couldn't pick up on the three 'cold' references of the last sentence, the town is located at literally the edge of civilization bordering an unliveable tundra. For such a relatively small city, there are a lot of strange things afoot in this area. It's up to you and your team of plucky adventurers to set things straight. Or load up on cash and whores. They didn't judge you.
Of course, it was an application-only game and the application process required me to put a lot of detail into the character I wanted. I gave my character some consideration, but not as much as you'd think, since I had wanted to play the archetype I was going to apply for a long time. I had always liked to play the 'outsider' characters. Not necessarily social misfits of exiles, but characters that had just something about them that didn't fit into the genre scope. Not so much, say, an extraterrestrial character in Dragonlance but more say if one of King Arthur's knights decided to forgo armor and weaponry and fight with his hands and feet.
As you might have guessed from the previous sentence, I have a soft spot for characters that are skilled in hand-to-hand combat. Dungeons and Dragons had catered to my puerile need in the form of the monk class. I wanted more of an anime martial artist feel to my character than the Mortal Kombat martial artist feel that the monk class has in the book, but hey, that was pretty much my only option for hand-to-hand. And the options on paper looked pretty sweet. Self-healing? Death touch? Flurry of blows? SPELL RESISTANCE? Where do I sign?
However, as a lot of min-maxxers will tell you, the monk class sucks eggs. I mean from a mechanical standpoint. The best summary of why this is so is contained in an analysis done back when 3.0E was in full swing and monks were at the supposed top of their game thanks to a sourcebook called Oriental Adventures. It's old but highlights a lot of the basic problems of the class. Here's the link right here.
At the time, though, I didn't know I was making an inherently sucky character. I was used to freeform games where characters operated by fiat and gentleman's agreement instead of numbers. If I stated that my character concept involved hitting things with his fists and doing backflips all over the place, he did that and performed competently in the story. And in D&D, I was a monk, ready to punch evil right in the Hitler-stache. Winter's Edge cushioned the suck I was going headlong towards with a very generous point-buy system (As in, all increases were 1-for-1 and it was 32 points).
Unfortunately, due to what I just stated in the last paragraph, I packed a lot of points into typical monk dump stats. I believe I had a 16 in STR, a 16 in CHA, an 8 in CON, a 12 in INT, a 14 in WIS, and a 14 in DEX. Amazingly crappy distribution, I know, but the personality of the character was much more important to me than the fighting. Well, not really, but like a lot of 'roleplayers' I had put unwarranted, self-deluded trust in the system I didn't understand fully--the game wouldn't have provided me with options that would screw me over, right?
I don't remember my character's background well. He was an upper-middle class fop who lived in a big, temperate city who 'wasted' his times as an athlete and a socialite. He diddled a lot of his time working on a martial art style he made up. After a fight with his parents, he, on a whim, left with a caravan heading to Vintermor to establish a new outpost. The hardship, like he had never faced before, almost turned him back until he fell in love with a rough Amazon-like woman going with him. They hit it off and my character actually considered putting down his skills and completely abandoning his old life and living an honest life as a pioneer.
Unfortunately, she died in one of the typical monster attacks and his new family ostracized him. So he went back to Vintermor, nearly broke and only his self-taught style to his name. Desperate for money, he hung out in the worst parts of town and preyed on burglars until he had saved up enough money to get a regular place to stay. Of course, he had found that he LIKED danger and violence and loved to beat on the scum of society. So he decided to take up adventuring.
And ah, the personality. He was sly, cosmopolitan and even-minded with what I thought at the time was a wicked sense of sarcasm and humor. Of course, I'm not that good at snarkiness. So to other people his antics were more silly than sardonic. But I liked the feel, it made him feel less dark and even a little goofy at times. Made my character seem like a bright spot in a pretty dour and grim setting.
His name was Joel Leonwright. Yes, Joel. I named my character after myself--that's pretty much one of the classic Sue traits. I was trained by a couple of years of reading fanfics given the MST3K treatment. Self-conscious, I strived to avoid this impression like the plague to the point where I gave the staff a fake first name for registration. But I went through character creation, applied, and I was accepted. Now that my character had been given life, it was time to search for adventure!
Unfortunately, one of the biggest failings of trying to do P&P on a MU* is that you do not have a dedicated DM to hand-feed you adventures. You could spend hours--days even--looking for someone to set the scene you so desperately wanted to play. Of course, games like these tried to mitigate things by letting non-staff run their own pltos (with monsters, death, treasure, and everything) but since I was new to the game I couldn't just muscle into a group or whip one up from scratch. I was going to have to establish both the out-of-character and in-game connections first before setting Joel down the path of kung-fu justice in the arctic. I was going to have to do some regular slice-of-life roleplay. I was goint to have to do some CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT. Gasp! Shock! Horror! Shameful masturbation! Stay tuned. We'll back that ass up with more tales if anyone cares.
What makes a person, especially someone who has had over 10 years of online roleplay experience, such a cynical min-maxxer? No one event convinced me. Rather, it was being jilted several times followed by seeing the light of Min-Maxxing over a period of time. For the zero people besides me interested in this tale, here we go.
It was the summer of 2002. I had no job, no college ambition, and no real plans. Why? Well, I had already taken the oath of enlistment for Naval service in February so I was just killing time until I had to ship off. My D&D mania was at the time at its height but I had no real source for gaming. Also at the time, I lacked places to roleplay. OldeMUCK was long-dead and though I didn't know it at the time ChaosMUCK was on its last legs.
Confronted with a serious dearth of distraction, I did what I never thought of before: I went to a MUSH. I was pretty desperate, see, and at the time I had carried over some irrational fear of venturing outside of this codebase. I can't give a reason. It was irrational. But that's not important to the story. Keep in mind that I was just expanding my horizons at the time.
Anyway, after a few dead ends, I had the choice between Winter's Edge and Treyvan for my D&D fix. I was originally hunting for some multi-themed anime place but I had just gotten Sword and Fist, one of the first 3rd Edition supplements. This was burning a hole in my bookcase. Back then, they made supplements of a softcover in black and white with a glossy color insert. Also, pretty much only two artists did the entire project. The production values were nowhere near the level of the oiriginal book, or, later, the supplements made for 3.5E edition.
But to me and many new fans of D&D it may as well have been manna from heaven. I loved that damn book. I haven't enjoyed that book the most out of all of the RPG books I own (I derived a lot more enjoyment from Oriental Adventures, Book of Nine Swords, Exalted 2nd: Scroll of the Monk, and Shadowrun 4th: Street Magic for starters) but that book still meant a lot to me. Almost as much as the core books. I even remember where I bought it. April '02, Hastings, with the last bit of money I had saved up after getting fired from my old job. Knowing me, I probably had those chocolate-covered cookie dough bites they sold, too. I think I also rented Rhapsody, too.
Of course, I had never before followed an RPG. Bitter fans of D&D 2nd Edition, right before it crashed, could have told me through gritted teeth that when Dame Success shoves a fandom's object into her shoddily augmented, veiny boobies that only tragedy follows. I was unaware that my favorite game was going to be intellectually bankrupt by a flood of material just like this and experience the same death of oversaturation that the previous edition has. Of course, that's a separate rant and has yet to happen for a couple of years. As far as I was concerned, Sword and Fist had friggin' Drunken Master, un'errated Ninja of the Crescent Moon, Pain Touch, and a ring of Shocking Blows.
I decided to check out Winter's Edge first. The basis for my decision in no small way due to a little website called When Online RPGS Attack! Imagine if Something Awful tried to review online roleplaying. That was WORA. Anyway, Treyvan was getting slammed heavily on the boards at the time. A lot of the criticism and snark stemmed from the perceived ineptitude of the staff there to bridge the gap of a face-to-face pen-and-paper game to an online textual mass roleplaying game. I can cut the game some slack in retrospect, because the actual honest-to-god D&D game itself was undergoing a paradigm shift. If there was bitter conflict between the game designers on how a game should be run then how much could you fairly expect from a group of amateurs doing it as a hobby?
For those of you who haven't played Icewind Dale (which the game is pretty much a homage to), Winter's Edge is supposed to be the mechanism for the tale of several adventurers who settled at the frontier town of Vintermor. For people who couldn't pick up on the three 'cold' references of the last sentence, the town is located at literally the edge of civilization bordering an unliveable tundra. For such a relatively small city, there are a lot of strange things afoot in this area. It's up to you and your team of plucky adventurers to set things straight. Or load up on cash and whores. They didn't judge you.
Of course, it was an application-only game and the application process required me to put a lot of detail into the character I wanted. I gave my character some consideration, but not as much as you'd think, since I had wanted to play the archetype I was going to apply for a long time. I had always liked to play the 'outsider' characters. Not necessarily social misfits of exiles, but characters that had just something about them that didn't fit into the genre scope. Not so much, say, an extraterrestrial character in Dragonlance but more say if one of King Arthur's knights decided to forgo armor and weaponry and fight with his hands and feet.
As you might have guessed from the previous sentence, I have a soft spot for characters that are skilled in hand-to-hand combat. Dungeons and Dragons had catered to my puerile need in the form of the monk class. I wanted more of an anime martial artist feel to my character than the Mortal Kombat martial artist feel that the monk class has in the book, but hey, that was pretty much my only option for hand-to-hand. And the options on paper looked pretty sweet. Self-healing? Death touch? Flurry of blows? SPELL RESISTANCE? Where do I sign?
However, as a lot of min-maxxers will tell you, the monk class sucks eggs. I mean from a mechanical standpoint. The best summary of why this is so is contained in an analysis done back when 3.0E was in full swing and monks were at the supposed top of their game thanks to a sourcebook called Oriental Adventures. It's old but highlights a lot of the basic problems of the class. Here's the link right here.
At the time, though, I didn't know I was making an inherently sucky character. I was used to freeform games where characters operated by fiat and gentleman's agreement instead of numbers. If I stated that my character concept involved hitting things with his fists and doing backflips all over the place, he did that and performed competently in the story. And in D&D, I was a monk, ready to punch evil right in the Hitler-stache. Winter's Edge cushioned the suck I was going headlong towards with a very generous point-buy system (As in, all increases were 1-for-1 and it was 32 points).
Unfortunately, due to what I just stated in the last paragraph, I packed a lot of points into typical monk dump stats. I believe I had a 16 in STR, a 16 in CHA, an 8 in CON, a 12 in INT, a 14 in WIS, and a 14 in DEX. Amazingly crappy distribution, I know, but the personality of the character was much more important to me than the fighting. Well, not really, but like a lot of 'roleplayers' I had put unwarranted, self-deluded trust in the system I didn't understand fully--the game wouldn't have provided me with options that would screw me over, right?
I don't remember my character's background well. He was an upper-middle class fop who lived in a big, temperate city who 'wasted' his times as an athlete and a socialite. He diddled a lot of his time working on a martial art style he made up. After a fight with his parents, he, on a whim, left with a caravan heading to Vintermor to establish a new outpost. The hardship, like he had never faced before, almost turned him back until he fell in love with a rough Amazon-like woman going with him. They hit it off and my character actually considered putting down his skills and completely abandoning his old life and living an honest life as a pioneer.
Unfortunately, she died in one of the typical monster attacks and his new family ostracized him. So he went back to Vintermor, nearly broke and only his self-taught style to his name. Desperate for money, he hung out in the worst parts of town and preyed on burglars until he had saved up enough money to get a regular place to stay. Of course, he had found that he LIKED danger and violence and loved to beat on the scum of society. So he decided to take up adventuring.
And ah, the personality. He was sly, cosmopolitan and even-minded with what I thought at the time was a wicked sense of sarcasm and humor. Of course, I'm not that good at snarkiness. So to other people his antics were more silly than sardonic. But I liked the feel, it made him feel less dark and even a little goofy at times. Made my character seem like a bright spot in a pretty dour and grim setting.
His name was Joel Leonwright. Yes, Joel. I named my character after myself--that's pretty much one of the classic Sue traits. I was trained by a couple of years of reading fanfics given the MST3K treatment. Self-conscious, I strived to avoid this impression like the plague to the point where I gave the staff a fake first name for registration. But I went through character creation, applied, and I was accepted. Now that my character had been given life, it was time to search for adventure!
Unfortunately, one of the biggest failings of trying to do P&P on a MU* is that you do not have a dedicated DM to hand-feed you adventures. You could spend hours--days even--looking for someone to set the scene you so desperately wanted to play. Of course, games like these tried to mitigate things by letting non-staff run their own pltos (with monsters, death, treasure, and everything) but since I was new to the game I couldn't just muscle into a group or whip one up from scratch. I was going to have to establish both the out-of-character and in-game connections first before setting Joel down the path of kung-fu justice in the arctic. I was going to have to do some regular slice-of-life roleplay. I was goint to have to do some CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT. Gasp! Shock! Horror! Shameful masturbation! Stay tuned. We'll back that ass up with more tales if anyone cares.