Dom C's page

Munchkin, weenie, cheese

these all sound like insults but i have NO IDEA what they mean, and i know these are not purely the board lingo. A dm in a game i'm joining warned all the players he hates munchkins and my first thought was "Those doughnut holes from dunkin' doughnuts? How can anybody hate them?
what do these mean?

Munchkin - This refers to someone whose only (or near-only) interest in the game is to be as powerful as possible in their chosen specialty. This person doesn't care about story, character/personality, etc. They just want to put out the best numbers. They'll use whatever rule combinations are necessary to achieve this result, even if doing so creates a character who has no reason to exist in any kind of believable setting.

However, most of the time that people on these boards call someone a munchkin, it's a misnomer. There are people who will call you a munchkin if your character is what others would just call "pretty strong", and I've even encountered some who will sling this derogatory term at you just for having both an 18 and an 8 in the same stat array.

Typically, when the term "munchkin" is being applied to a specific individual instead of being discussed as a concept, it's the result of a less-skilled player resorting to elitism to make themselves feel superior to the more-skilled player by accusing them of, basically, being a worse person.

Weenie - I haven't really heard this term much in the context of RPGs. I can only assume it means "small and weak", "hot dog", or... something else I probably shouldn't get explicit about on the boards.

Cheese - This is a term referring to a rules loophole or other method employed in character creation which, while (typically) legal, is probably not something intended to be possible and is used to achieve either a game-breakingly powerful result or reasonably-powerful but very strange result that shatters the sense of setting. Cheese is frequently employed by munchkins.

"Cheese" is as frequently a misapplied term as "munchkin". It is most often used to refer to a perfectly fair, legitimate and sometimes even specifically-intended-by-the-designers mechanic that just happens to violate someone's idea of what the game "should" be. There are two typical reasons for someone misidentifying something as "cheese": one is that a new player isn't used to how the game works and thinks that something he read about is/would be more powerful than it actually is in practice. For instance, an ability might seem too powerful because the player doesn't realize how incredibly situational it is. The other (and more common) reason to call something "cheese" is that a veteran gamer has certain traditional expectations of what "should" happen in a game, and when someone has the creativity to break the mold (sometimes even in a sub-optimal way), these players get up in arms and start flinging the "cheese" accusations.

...I was considering an alignment shift for most of them... Just curious what your general thoughts (and experiences) are on this topic.

Hm. I've had alignment drift occur in my campaigns. Thing is, I never told 'em. Their first clue was when somebody took a little damage from holy smite (having fallen from NG to N): then the cleric did some alignment-checking via magic so everybody'd know where they stood now. It was one of those things I kept recorded behind the screen (right next to Will saves and remaining onset time for diseases). I prefer the players play their characters however they like and let me worry about how the alignment mechanic fits in. So by all means: if they're acting CE, put "CE" down behind the screen. When they suffer from a holy word, and complain that they have CN written on their sheets, say, "How do you know? Have you guys ever examined yourselves with detect evil?" Some might say a GM shouldn't be in charge of 'deciding' a PC's alignment, but hey - I don't tell 'em what to do, I only tell 'em the visible consequences of what they've done. Same as for anything else.