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Why Munchkinism and OA don't mix |
The word 
munchkin was first
coined by L. Frank Baum in his 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.,
which was the basis for the 1939 film, The Wizard of Oz in which the
munchkins were funny little people who befriended Dorothy.
In roleplaying games, a Munchkin
is a player - specifically a powergamer - who plays exclusively for the
purposes of "winning", usually at the cost of the other players'
enjoyment of the game. Munchkins only want to build a super powerful
character/magic item/weapon/combat ability/etc that has such high
points it's out of balance with everything else in the game. This is
done by "min-maxing" - juggling the character creation options to come
up with the most combat effective player character possible. An example
would be a character with huge strength and reflex levels, but with
personality, intelligence, and other non-combat essential stats almost
non-existent. Munchkins consider the only purpose of role-playing games
is for them to create the most powerful (but numskull) character,
defeat the most enemies, and acquire the most experience points
How the literary munchkin mutated into the roleplaying munchkin isn't quite clear. Perhaps the term is in reference to the dwarfish non-combat personality of the RPG munchkin character?
In worldbuilding, a munchkin is, if anything, even more dysfunctional and out of place than e is in role-playing. Whereas RPGs are concerned with adventure, worldbuilding is concerned with creating a world or universe in which adventures (whether role-played or in the form of stories or novels etc) can take place. Worldbuilding munchkins are not in the slightest interested in all the things that make up the richness and diversity of a world (real or imagined). They don't care about culture and history, language, geography and astrography, peoples and places, fads and fashions, art and science, philosophy and religion. The only thing they are interested in designing weapons, long endless lists of them, and often the most ridiculous sillytech weapons at that. Munchkin universes tend to consist of things like a giant interstellar empire (the qualities of which are barely described) which has a starfleet consisting of thousands or even millions of baseline-human-crewed imperial battlecruisers, each one of which has hundreds of zillion-watt disintegrator guns and force fields and antimatter torpedoes and can travel billions of times the speed of light, and that's about it. Their universes are not only meaningless, they are boring, and more than that they are ugly (i remember them being described once on one forum as "chilling" because of the degree of depersonalisation)
Finally mention should be made of that most OA-dysfunctional of species, the plucky baseline munchkin. Munchkinites would have us believe that the humble unaugmented baseline is the most powerful killing machine around, capable of ganging up to overwhelm higher toposophic levels, and even, if suitably equipped with nukes or what not, taking out entire archailects.
