Munchkin Edges/Flaws, What have you learned to ban? Options

[The Stainless St...]

Amnesia.

Munch: "Wait a minute. You're telling me that I can sink more points into Slaymaster the Human Quisinart, AND I don't have to come up with some lame-assed backstory? Sign me UP!"

I have also learned to hate Common Sense, because some players seem to take it as a license to blame everything on the GM. "Hey, my character has an INT of 6, and I've got common sense, so you're supposed to tell me when I'm not doing the absolutely smartest possible thing."

[blakkie]

IMO Sea Madness for an awakened or rigger land-lubber Dwarf. High Will gets you through the odd time the GM manages to contrive a way to get you out on a boat. :)

[caramel frappucc...]

Where do people get the idea that you don't have to write a backstory for a character with Amnesia?

[Trax]

Common Sense doesn't allow your character to do the smartest thing possible, it's so your Super Genius of a Runner doesn't do the absolute dumbest thing possible because unlike your character, you do NOT have an Int of 6. :D

[FrankTrollman]

Certainly, I've found that characters with full or partial amnesia have spent more time futzing with their backstory than other characters.

Sea Madness, OTOH, that's a flaw I don't even allow. It's too crippling in a pirate game to be allowed, and in any other game it doesn't even do anything.

Now if you want a flaw that's in danger of being an advantage - you go with day job, which gives you character points and money in exchange for having your character have more screen time in comedy bits. Or dark secret which gives you points for nothing or adventure hooks (which is to say, nothing, since you go on adventures anyway). Still, I don't resent them at all, because as GM they make my life easier. Essentially, I am perfectly willing to throw a PC 2 points in exchange for them having a built-in melodramatic hook that I can exploit if I otherwise can't think of anything to do this week.

If you want straight munchkinism, go for minor SURGE Effects. Those are straight-up bulldrek. Unusual Hair? Altered Eye Color? Heck, while Chronic Osteocuspus is initially crippling, in the long run it's a net advantage and is for some reason a negative ten!? I think the blood elves are cool and all, but I don't think they need to be quite that cool.

-Frank

[hyzmarca]

Amnesia is the greatest Flaw. If your munchkins are taking it so often that you have to ban it outright then you simply aren't sadistic enough.

"Hey guess what, you're really Darth Revan and the Corporate court has sentenced you to death fro crimes in humanity after your trial in absentia."

"Mr. M grins sadistically and presses "play". As the trid recording rolls the true horror of your past is revealed. On the screen is an image of you being tenderly sodomized by the Great Dragon Lofwyr. The note left under your door makes perfect sense now. You were the Great Dragon's homosexual lover but such relationships are taboo amongst his kind. When you became a liability he didn't have the heart to kill you and instead magically removed your memories. Now that you know the truth you are in as much danger as Mr. M is."

Dark Secret isn't bad either, if you make sure the secret is dark enough. Say that the character is a Ghoul that is passing as an uninfected human in a place where being a ghoul is likely to get him killed or fired.

[nezumi]

I *LOVE* amnesia and dark secret, when the player is foolish enough to let me choose them. However, they are the ones I see abused most often by less experienced GMs.

Other frequently broken things:
Aptitude (very nasty, I ban this with all but few exceptions)
Good Looking and Knows It (not technically an edge, but people still try it on me. It's poorly balanced, and therefore not allowed.)
Incompetence (rarely used appropriately)
Allergy/phobia ('space rock' type things are chosen too often.)
Combat Monster (just because if you're dumb enough to take it, you're in trouble)
Codeblock/Choker/Scortched (for non-matrix types)

[blakkie]

[Critias]

Other: APTITUDE.

[Kagetenshi]

[Sharaloth]

[caramel frappucc...]

[Teulisch]

actualy.... scorched and sensetive neural structure are VERY bad for a non-decker with any implants that can be hacked. if they get in, they can make your system play BTLs... and your -2 will to resist addiction. now, if those specific bad guys are the ONLY people who can supply the brand of BTL that your addicted to....

you have to have an evil mind, to see all the posibilities.

i have a food allergy to nuts/peanuts myself. its suprising how many things that say 'may contain traces of' actualy cause a mild reaction. cant eat lance crackers, they all have 'traces'. A food alergy will occur any time the substance gets in contact with a mucus membrane, or blood. so while it makes the mouth itch, if ingested you get vomiting and diareah.

the one food alergy that would be MOST deadly in shadowrun, would of course be soy.

[PlatonicPimp]

Actually, I think it says somewhere in the actual flaw that the gamemaster gets to make up your backstory. I know that if you take the higher version of it the gamemaster makes up the Stats.

Personally, anything like vindictive, combat monster, intolerance, liar, or any primarily roel playing flaws, all go out the window with me. I was in a game once where a player had intolerance (vampires). Later, we were hired by a vampire. At the meet, he said the the vampire: 'I don't like you.". This was the extent of the playing out of his flaw.

If you want to play a character with a character flaw, Just do it. Giving out bp for starting characters based on the promise of role-playing is like paying a shadowrunner up front: dangerously trusting. I tell my players: play it. If you do a good job, you get role playing Karma.

[blakkie]

[Siege]

Heh.

Ok, what flaws do you allow for PCs?

-Siege

[caramel frappucc...]

[Kagetenshi]

I disagree. Even with a good roleplayer, there's a difference between dividing in-game and out-of-game knowledge and truly not knowing.

~J

[Demon_Bob]

[Kagetenshi]

I'd be upset too. That is a very good idea!

~J

[Demon_Bob]

Amnesia is great. Nobody ever take it in our group.
It translates to Evil GM writes your background + 10 pts of unknown flaws.

[caramel frappucc...]

[LinaInverse]

Amnesia: Depends on how the PCs/GM handle it. We have a character in our group w/ Amnesia and he's got around 10 pgs (single-spaced) of highly detailed background on how she (char's gender) was a former SpecOps for a corp (letting the GM pick), along with the story where she was betrayed, set up, and left for dead, etc.

Now Dark Secret/Amnesia combo can be ugly if a GM has a shred of imagination. Think the twist in "Total Recall" when some corp exec shows the captured group some video of their teammate once being something evil and ugly.

Combat Monster: Taken to its logical conclusion, this will eventually end with someone dying. It's already killed one member of our group at the hands of a street gang when the rest of the team wisely broke off and fled.

Assuming munchkinism is the topic, no Awakened is going to take Bio-Rejection when they can take the lesser Sensitive System for the same cost. I would normally say Sensitive falls under the munchkin label, but I've read enough people on this forum say the build cyber-enhanced mages that I would no longer say that.

Aptitude is probably one of the most powerful Edges there is and definitely falls under Munchkin. Unless a GM forbids it, no munchkin worth his salt would not pick this one up.

Believe it or not, our GM has come up with at least 3 (maybe 4 depending on how close you call it) major multi-part runs that involved the sea, so Sea Madness (which luckily none of our group has) would have been costly had anyone taken it, and no, we're not a pirate campaign (though we did blame pirates for something we did when we were trying to cover our butts).

One of my chars as Day Job and Distinctive; he's a day-time radio talk show host (think a low-rent non-syndicated Rush Limbaugh) and speaks with a distinctive Harvard/NorthEastern Erudite accent (think David Ogden Stiers or Kelsey Grammer). Hasn't really hurt him that much, though it did get in the way when he was trying to talk/negotiate with a bunch of street-tough gang members.

[Kagetenshi]

[Kagetenshi]