Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not as fun as Murphy's Rules, but still worth a few laughs, 5 Jun 2001
If you have ever played a role-playing game, you know what plague munchkins can be. They are the ones who know all the rules (all the better to tweak them in their favour) and whose main objective is to kill everybody on sight (this works especially well in some settings) without ever suffering a single hit. They are also the ones that do not care about defining their character's personality (unless it gives them points they can use on weapon skills), interacting with the NPCs (unless they are arms vendors)... you get the point. As such, they make fantastic targets for sarcasm. The guide purportedly helps players create the perfect munchkin character - except for the last chapter, supposed to help the GM deal with munchkin players. While doing that, of course, it makes fun of munchkinism to no end, as well as of gaming in general. The book is divided into separate chapter, each tackling different settings. The fantasy setting is overlong and a bit boring, if you ask me (but then, I do not play many fantasy games). I had very good fun with the modern setting (including horror games) and with my favourite, the superhero setting. The LARP setting could have been longer, though I have to say that the distinction between mud-and-beer LARP and wine-and-cheese LARP is appropriate and funny. Two chapters (on gamers in general and on fighting against munchkin players, respectively) conclude the book. The layout is very good, with nice fake post-it notes adding some humourous almost real dialogues (the attempt to seduce the demon by a Drop Dead Gorgeous character is my favourite). The text itself is nice, though it loses rythm in the fantasy section: elsewhere there are some good jokes, though I was missing the show-stoppers, roaring-down-with-laughter kind of thing. All in all, worth its price, though not as good as Murphy's Rules (an earlier supplement making fun of all the stupid rules of RPGs, still by Steve Jackson Games)
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant, 13 Aug 2002
Having owned this book since it came out, I can heartily recommend this book.Having a lot of experience in gaming, I read through and could see where the author was coming from. Every incident he described, I had seen, every tactic in that book has been tried, and every ridiculous excuse and strategy has been done, and worked before. Side splittingly funny in itself, it is twice as damaging to your laughter muscles if you have a long experience with those annoying players who we unfondly call "munchkins"
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