One of the things that keeps me entertained on these boards is the vast confusion over lots of terms that are thrown around in posts all the time, the majority of which posts eventually become ensnared in semantic arguments about what the terms mean. Specifically the terms that seem to cause the most issues are the following:
Munchkin
Power gamer
Roll player
Grognard
Role playing
etc.
I personally see a huge difference between the terms "power gamer" and "munchkin" but they are used more or less interchangeably in many threads.
So as a public service I offer this thread as a means to create a "Tabletop Gamer Personality Profiler" (TGPP) which can be used to not only quantify the differences between these terms, but which can be used by players to identify their own gamer personality profile.
To do so I propose that we examine the personality of a gamer along three axes, and then to plot the resulting position into a three-dimensional grid with each "box" in the grid having a designation as to the type of gamer personality that box represents.
The three axes I propose for this exercise are:
1. Gamer maturity (this is not the same as normal maturity, but there is a lot of overlap)
2. Gamer approach (basically roll play vs role play)
3. Gamer rigor (basically how important the gamer feels adherence to the rules is)
The idea would be to generate a couple dozen questions that provide a numerical result on one or more of these three axes which can then be plotted into the grids. Each question would be constructed with a need to pick one of the following responses:
- Very important
- Somewhat important
- Not important
So a bit more on each of these:
Gamer maturity is a measure of how self-centered the player is when it comes to gaming. This is not necessarily a measure of their real-life maturity, but is instead intended to focus on how they GAME. A typical question might be:
"How important is it to you when you game that your character is as powerful or more powerful than the other PCs in the group."
Gamer approach is a measure of how the gamer views the importance of a character concept being created and played according to the character's actual statistics. A typical question might be:
"How important is it to you that your characters act within the limitations of their physical attributes, skills and abilities."
Gamer rigor is a measure of how important the gamer feels it is to have and follow a set of predictable, reliable rules. A typical question might be:
"How important is it to you that in your games the GM not create house rules that override the rules of the game system you are playing."
Some questions could provide insight into more than one axis at a time. For example:
"How important is it to you that your PC be an active member of a cooperative group of PCs in an immersive story?" Such a question would provide a result on both the maturity and approach axes.
At the highest level this could be mapped into a nine-box grid, with each box corresponding to a result of "very, very, very" vs "very, somewhat, none" etc.
Then we could say that a "power gamer" would probably fall into the box which rates maturity as "somewhat important", rates high in "roll play" and rates high in "rules adherence", while a "munchkin" would rate the same in role vs roll play and rules adherence, but would rate low in maturity.
This could be put into an online survey and the results could be posted.
Thoughts?
Suuuure.
Seems interesting but I dunno if it will turn out as you expect.
I just call people powergamers and duck if that offends them.
Actually, you will end up categorizing players, but never the GM.
I think a proper categorization of gamers should apply to all regardless of which role they currently hold.
I fully intended to include questions that targeted GM activities as well.
Heh, based on the general lack of response to my message, I sort of decided there wasn't enough interest to put in the effort.
Maybe bumping it up might get some responses from others who might be curious. We'll see.
I am interested.
I would say that you have to control for the game being played, as I am finding that the character creation of Pathfinder and lets say FATE is a different experience and would get different results.
Heh, based on the general lack of response to my message, I sort of decided there wasn't enough interest to put in the effort.
Maybe bumping it up might get some responses from others who might be curious. We'll see.
I'm interested to see such a survey, and would gladly fill one out, but don't really have any input besides that.
