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Dumpshock Forums _ Shadowrun _ Why the word "munchkin?"
Posted by: Da9iel Jul 16 2004, 07:54 AM
Seriously, this has been bugging me. I'm not starting a pro v. anti munchkin war here. They can be annoying, they can be really fun. But why use the word "munchkin?" I think I've also heard others but I can't find them now. Something about "twinkies?"
--bewildered
Posted by: BGMFH Jul 16 2004, 08:06 AM
The word is "twink."
As for Munchkins... Somebodies little brother most of the time
Posted by: Da9iel Jul 16 2004, 08:15 AM
Ahhhhhhh. :light dawns: Now I get it.
But "twink?"
Posted by: JaronK Jul 16 2004, 08:18 AM
A twink, originally, was a term for a young gay male who recieved gifts, mostly for sexual favors, from an older gay man. Thus, in MMORPGs, you have low level "twink" characters getting loot from higher level characters (who I guess would be sugar daddies).
JaronK
Posted by: Da9iel Jul 16 2004, 08:24 AM
I didn't expect that to be a TMI question. 
Posted by: Firewall Jul 16 2004, 08:32 AM
I thought twink was in reference to those Twinkies you get in the US. I heard that they have a 100-yr shelf-life.
Which is just plain wrong in itself...
Posted by: Da9iel Jul 16 2004, 08:36 AM
That's half life. 
Posted by: Lantzer Jul 16 2004, 01:33 PM
That's odd - I heard that 'twink' referred to those players who make copy-cat characters of comic-book, movie, TV, or book characters, and expect them to be as cool and well-respected as the original. The most famous sort - the 'Drizzt' clones from that other game. 'Wolverine' fans are another.
Posted by: RangerJoe Jul 16 2004, 01:44 PM
I think it's something about an insatiable lust for molybdenum....
Posted by: Mr. Man Jul 16 2004, 01:48 PM
The http://users.rcn.com/aardy/faq/rgfdfaq5.html#G9 has a lengthy definition, concluding with:
| QUOTE |
| No one seems to know exactly how such characters have come to be identified with the tiny folk from L. Frank Baum's books, but it probably has something to do with the sheer annoyance factor such characters exude. Another theory is that, since it seems that most munchkin players are the younger set of players, say pre-teens and down, that someone's term for people younger than themselves morphed into a term for the type of players described above, and has since changed meaning to also include the characters created by such players. |
Posted by: Cain Jul 16 2004, 03:57 PM
I was taught that it was because munchkins are short; and munchkin players are therefore compensating.
Posted by: sidartha Jul 16 2004, 08:13 PM
Whatever could they be compensating for with that assualt cannon?!
Posted by: Diesel Jul 16 2004, 08:37 PM
Their short legs. Duh.
Posted by: Necrotic Monkey Jul 16 2004, 08:51 PM
In all likelyhood, the term refers to younger players (thus shorter players, usually of the little brother variety, and thus the term "munchkin") who are new to a game and their tendency to create obnoxiously overpowered characters. Practically everyone who plays the game went through the same stage, and it's probably the memory and embarrassment of that stage that creates so much animosity towards them.
Most of the time this is due to ignorance of both the rules and the nature of the setting. They exploit rules more out of not knowing there's a rule to curb that one, and they create their characters thinking more along the lines of movies and videogames.
It only takes time, experience, and maturity to grow out of it. Having a hoard of holier-than-thou players screaming "munchkin!" doesn't really help do anything but drive players out of the hobby.
Posted by: Kagetenshi Jul 16 2004, 10:40 PM
The real story for Munchkin comes, as so many do, from D&D. Specifically, the D&D that Gygax and others played in their attics or basements or whatever. Playtesting, still just creating the rules. Back then, one of the rules revisions had been done by someone who had read The Hobbit too many times beforehand. Halflings were optimized to be excessively good rogues, but there was one problem that the rules failed to account for: by being aimed towards being rogues, they absolutely ate everyone as monks. Thus, anyone wanting to shamelessly powergame would take the short little monks while players would groan about "attack of the munchkins". This was corrected by the commercial release.
Twinks are less interesting. Bribing other players with twinkies for favoured status for loot. IIRC it came from GURPS.
~J
Posted by: Adarael Jul 16 2004, 10:56 PM
I can't speak for the 'twink' used in other states, but California has a slightly different take on where the term came from. At least, I've heard almost no dissenting opinions on it among the metric asston of Californian gamers I've met. Granted, when examining this story, please bear in mind most of the gamers I know tend to be older, and generally pretty well educated.
Whereas many non-Californians I've met use twink pretty much synonymously with munchkin, most gamers here use it to refer to muchkins who specifically try and weasel out of the IC consequences of their actions, or are otherwise unwilling to allow anything bad to happen to their PCs.
Twink, here, seems to be accepted as a reference to the semi-apocryphal (and commonly misunderstood) 'twinkie defense' offered when Dan White was on trial for shooting and killing San Francisco mayor George Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk. The twinkie defense is commonly understood to be making the claim that criminal acts were caused by some barely-believable outside influence that 'made' the criminal do it - in Dan White's case it was said that he ate a twinkie, and the sugar imbalance drove him kinda crazy.
(In fact, his lawer claimed his twinkie addiction was evidence of his long standing manic-depressive condition, but the papers kinda ran with the idea.)
So:
Twinkie Defense=Patently retarded.
Twink=One who uses twinkie defense tactics to avoid responsibility.
Ergo,
Twink=Patently retarded.
Just a little history lesson for yas.
Posted by: John Campbell Jul 16 2004, 11:30 PM
| QUOTE (Kagetenshi) |
| The real story for Munchkin comes, as so many do, from D&D. Specifically, the D&D that Gygax and others played in their attics or basements or whatever. Playtesting, still just creating the rules. Back then, one of the rules revisions had been done by someone who had read The Hobbit too many times beforehand. Halflings were optimized to be excessively good rogues, but there was one problem that the rules failed to account for: by being aimed towards being rogues, they absolutely ate everyone as monks. Thus, anyone wanting to shamelessly powergame would take the short little monks while players would groan about "attack of the munchkins". This was corrected by the commercial release. |
The earliest versions of D&D didn't make any distinction between the concepts of "class" and "race". There were no such things as "halfing rogues" or "halfling monks"... there were just "halflings". All of them were thieves. All elves were fighter/magic-users (and that was the only way to be one). All dwarves were fighters. All clerics (no such thing as "monks") were human.
Posted by: Kagetenshi Jul 16 2004, 11:39 PM
Monks were from 1st ed D&D (the original Oriental Adventures sourcebook specifically talks about how they aren't appropriate for the base setting), though now that I'm remembering the really early stuff was as you've described it.
Note the spoiler, though. 
~J
Posted by: John Campbell Jul 17 2004, 12:14 AM
Monks first showed up in 1st edition AD&D. There were no monks in basic D&D. The character classes were, as I recall (I don't have any of my pre-2nd-edition-AD&D books here or I'd be able to say for certain): Fighter, Magic-User, Cleric, Thief (all of the preceding being human), Elf, Dwarf, and Halfling.
AD&D separated the concepts of class and race, and added a number of new classes - Paladin, Ranger, Illusionist, Druid, Assassin, Bard (a bizarre not-really-a-class that required changing classes repeatedly), and, yes, Monk.
The D&D and AD&D lines were produced in parallel for quite a while... right up until TSR got bought out, I think. D&D may have gotten monks later on... I pretty much quit paying attention to what they were doing with it after AD&D was released. It certainly did not have monks prior to that point, however, and, TTBOMK, the concepts of race and class in D&D stayed integrated right up until the line died (3rd edition "D&D" is really the continuation of the AD&D line, not the D&D line).
Posted by: Kagetenshi Jul 17 2004, 12:24 AM
Ah yes, that A was what I was missing 
~J
Posted by: Cursedsoul Jul 17 2004, 12:24 AM
Munchkin is a cardgame too. Steve Jackon I think. Its got several varients apparently, the one I played being AD&D based. Oh man is it fun. You just go around collecting the most powerful loot you can and slaying monster cards in an effort to reach level 10 I believe. Some of the monsters are rather funny (The gimp, a gazebo) and the items.
I'm sure it gets old after a while, but obviously with some fairly good friends who like to laugh, joke, and be goofballs (we were certainly goofballs and morons ) its good fun.
Fits in your pocket too!
Posted by: Kesh Jul 17 2004, 03:35 AM
In my experience, munchkins were people who wanted more and more power: the biggest guns/swords, the flashiest spells, the most money, the most skill points, etc. They just wanted to have "the best" of everything, to the exclusion of anyone else's fun. They're greedy and jealous of anyone with better "stuff" than they have.
Twinks, on the other hand, were more specialized. They narrowly interpret the rules so as to make their character the most powerful in their field, and thus the best at the table. They're close cousins to "rules lawyers," except they're the kind of lawyers that invent cases to fit their pet theory, and then claim the system is trying to hurt their client when their tactics fail.
Posted by: mmu1 Jul 18 2004, 04:09 AM
Making a character that's been optimized to be the best at something while staying within both the spirit and the letter of the rules is not being a Munchkin, it's Powergaming. It can be annoying when taken to extremes, but it's an order of magnitude better than being a Munchkin.
Munchkins don't just powergame, they thrive on loopholes and editorial mistakes, "creative" rule interpretations, and characters that should have never (even though technically viable) have come into being because they use rules from a dozen supplements that were never all meant to be used together.
Posted by: Prospero Jul 19 2004, 06:02 AM
This is a really cool thread. I always took "munchkin" as a refrence to min/maxing - i.e. the character is a super badass, but often minimised in areas that are less rule-govered. Like getting flaw points for being short*5 and using those points to buy combat-related edges, etc. I never really thought about twink. You guys have some really interesting explanations. Maybe we should submit this stuff to the OED? 
Kesh: I'd reverse your definitions. In my experience, anyway.
Posted by: Sahandrian Jul 19 2004, 07:06 AM
| QUOTE (Cursedsoul) |
| Some of the monsters are rather funny (The gimp, a gazebo) and the items. |
The gazebo thing comes from an old D&D story about a player who didn't know what a gazebo was, and, assuming it was some sort of monster, attacked it.
Here's the whole thing copied from some website Google found.
Posted by: shadd4d Jul 19 2004, 09:25 AM
That story also got made famous http://www.hoodyhoo.com/kodt08.htm
Don
Posted by: Mr. Man Jul 19 2004, 01:44 PM
Interestingly enough, Eric and the Gazebo is a http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=513140 from the dawn of RPG history.
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