Cheesy-munchkiny builds you've seen?

[specks]

I'm curious about some power or power combinations that you as a player or GM came across that you thought awful cheesy?

 

In 5th edition, I had a player in my group who used the power AID where half the points ended up in PD and the rest of the points back into AID creating a perpetual motion machine like power.

As  far as I know it wasn't illegal but kind of cheesy.

[Lucius]

Chedarification:  (Total: 20 Active Cost, 4 Real Cost) Severe Transform 1d6-1 (Target into cheddar cheese, Dispel), Partial Transform (+1/2), Sticky (+1/2) (20 Active Points); Damage Over Time, Target's defenses only apply once, Lock out (cannot be applied multiple times) (13-16 damage increments, damage occurs every 1 Day, can be negated by Dispel; -1 1/2), OAF Expendable (Easy to obtain new Focus; Cheesecloth; -1), Gestures (Requires both hands; -1/2), Concentration (1/2 DCV; -1/4), Incantations ("Easy breezy super-cheesy, you'll be much better when you're cheddar!"; -1/4), Reduced Penetration (-1/4) (Real Cost: 4) END cost: 2

 

Over the course of a couple of weeks the target will transform slowly

 

1st stage: smells like cheese

2nd stage: turns yellow, attractive to rodents

3rd stage: develops the taste and consistency of cheddar cheese; has Psychological Complication, Miser

4th stage: turns into a wheel of cheddar

 

Lucius Alexander

 

And a cheesy palindromedary tagline

[megaplayboy]

Old-school NNDs with spurious defenses,  low-intensity NND KAs.  Detects designed to nullify all invisibility.  "Mentalist Sniper" writeups--Invisibility plus enhanced senses plus mental powers, or with Tunneling or other gimmicky stuff.  Any adjustment power usage that basically became a feedback loop.  Multipowers that had dial-a-damage attacks(regular attack, KA, various advantaged attacks including NNDs) or dial-a-defense.  Spot defense is kinda always cheesy.  

[assault]

Foof and nonsense. Back in 1e, your characters were built on around 900 active points.

And that was when we were being polite.

 

 

[Lucius]

 

Not sure how munchkin this is - it's cheaper than just getting Growth but also takes 6 turns to fully activate and costs a lot of END.

 

Growth:  (Total: 214 Active Cost, 44 Real Cost) Aid 3d6+1 (standard effect: 10 points), Delayed Return Rate (points return at the rate of 5 per Minute; +1), Damage Over Time, Lock out (cannot be applied multiple times), Target's defenses only apply once (6 damage increments, damage occurs every Turn, +3), Expanded Effect (x10 Characteristics or Powers simultaneously) (+4 1/2) (190 Active Points); Limited Power Only up to: +20 CON, +20 PRE, +12 PD, +12 ED, +12 BOD, +24 STUN, +15 Stretching, +48 Runing, =24 Knockback Resist (-1 1/2), One Use At A Time (-1), Only to Aid Self (-1), Side Effects, Side Effect occurs automatically whenever Power is used (+8 OCV to hit, +8 Perception to spot, weighs 50+ tons, 17 to 32m tall,9 - 16m wide (at full power); -1), Extra Time (1 Turn (Post-Segment 12), Only to Activate, -3/4), Increased Endurance Cost (x2 END; Pro-rated over 10 Turns; -1/2), Restrainable (Only by means other than Grabs and Entangles; needs room to grow; -1/4) (Real Cost: 27) <b>plus</b> Stretching 1m (Real Cost: 1) <b>plus</b> Knockback Resistance -1m (Real Cost: 1) <b>plus</b> Area Of Effect (2m Radius; +1/4) for up to 60 Active Points of STR, Reduced Endurance (0 END; +1/2) (22 Active Points); Linked (Aid; -1/2) (Real Cost: 15)

 

Lucius Alexander

 

The palindromedary says it is the opposite of Munchkin - a Munchkin is a little person and this would make a person very big......

 

 

[Christopher R Taylor]

Quote

 

In 5th edition, I had a player in my group who used the power AID where half the points ended up in PD and the rest of the points back into AID creating a perpetual motion machine like power.

As  far as I know it wasn't illegal but kind of cheesy.

 

 

You could use that infinite recursion build with a few powers in 5th and previous.  Absorption worked the same way, you could feed some of the points back into absorb and eventually become invincible.  Back in 4th edition my favorite was to build a HTA with +½ variable advantage on it, since it was 3 points per d6.  You could really build an effective character that way.

 

A current cheese build that's legal is to use UBO to grant someone a tiny amount of a power, then Aid it by a lot, since they technically now have that power.  here's 1 point of mental defense and a 5d6 aid to MD!

[BoloOfEarth]

Pre-6th Edition:  Character with 12 SPD and 1d6 NND on Continuing Charges of 1 Turn Duration.  Effectively a 12d6 NND, and you can hit 6 different people in half a Turn.  Character was a shrinker, too, so he was difficult to find and attack.  In 6th, you could do something similar with Damage Over Time, even if your SPD isn'1 12.

 

Many powers with UBO can be used quite cheesily.  Especially on Defense powers.  There's a reason UBO has a warning sign.

 

Mental entangles.  (Though lately some of the bad guys have been showing up with a nice defense against those.  GMs can churn out the cheese, too!)

 

AVAD attacks against unusual defenses (e.g. Resistant Mental Defense, Resistant Power Defense, or odd Flash Defenses).  Add some AoE, and even a small number of dice can become nasty. 

 

As a GM, I tend to fight Cheddar with a nice Gouda.  IOW, if the players want to be able to do something cheesy, they need to be prepared for the bad guys to use the same types of power builds. 

 

For instance, Malarkey (PC hero) has a power that's something like Blast 6d6, AVAD (Resistant Mental Defense), AoE (4m Radius Selective).  With it, he can basically take out whole squads of agents (Stunning them in the first phase, KO'ing them in the second).  And he can cause a lot of damage to most supervillains with it as well, especially if they group together.  Last night, the heroes ran into a sonic supervillainess who had Blast 6d6, AVAD (Hearing Flash Defense), AoE (8m Cone).  Since few of the heroes had any Hearing Flash Defense, and those who did had only a few points worth, they weren't terribly happy.  But then again, sauce for the goose...

[WalkingParadox]

VPP powers bought with Continuing Charges and Trigger as a Zero-Phase Action.

 

Currently i'm working on an Elemental Manipulator character concept with more than one VPP.  In the "Earth" pool, I bought +20 STR, Continuing Charge 5min, Trigger.  So in prephase he says the trigger word activating the charge as a zero phase action and he gets the STR boost and can then allocated the points in the pool freely.

 

Sharp Cheddar.

[dsatow]

The last cheesy thing I saw a player do was the 14 point martial maneuver in 4th ed.

[Christopher R Taylor]

One thing that's worth considering is that while as a GM you can tailor the bad guys to match special defenses and there is a theoretical infinite number of bad guys that you can create to face the PCs, they only have their limited set of powers and xps to spend.

 

So if a player buys a weird attack that requires some special defense like impenetrable resistant flash defense vs taste, well the agents can all have pocket taste flash shields next time.  But if you pull that on a PC, they're NEVER going to have that unless they spend xps on a defense that nobody will ever need expect against your nifty attack.  And as a GM you can build attacks against what the PCs lack but the PCs can only build against what the average enemy isn't likely to have.

 

So the players really should be given a bit more leeway with powers like this than the GM, is what I'm saying.  If the player is really trying to job the system and create something that's cheating, that's one thing, but if someone is just creative or comes up with a neat powerful build, well find a way to work that into the game.

[BoloOfEarth]

6 hours ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

One thing that's worth considering is that while as a GM you can tailor the bad guys to match special defenses and there is a theoretical infinite number of bad guys that you can create to face the PCs, they only have their limited set of powers and xps to spend.

 

So if a player buys a weird attack that requires some special defense like impenetrable resistant flash defense vs taste, well the agents can all have pocket taste flash shields next time.  But if you pull that on a PC, they're NEVER going to have that unless they spend xps on a defense that nobody will ever need expect against your nifty attack.  And as a GM you can build attacks against what the PCs lack but the PCs can only build against what the average enemy isn't likely to have.

 

So the players really should be given a bit more leeway with powers like this than the GM, is what I'm saying.  If the player is really trying to job the system and create something that's cheating, that's one thing, but if someone is just creative or comes up with a neat powerful build, well find a way to work that into the game.

 

(shrug)  That same PC hero has a magic VPP he can change as a half-Phase action, so adding Hearing Flash Defense, or indeed any other defense, to his powers even on the fly is fairly trivial for him.  The team gadgeteer has a gadget VPP that can do the same thing.  And in this particular case, they had a pretty good idea who their foes were going to be - including that one of them has sonic attacks - as well as pretty much when and where they were going to attack.  (The news sheet I emailed before the game was as subtle as a brick.)  Overall, I think I telegraphed the punch pretty well.  If they don't want to duck the blow, or at least try to duck blows after the first one, that's their choice. 

 

And it's not like the bad guys immediately start using similar powers as soon as the heroes roll theirs out.  Malarkey has had that attack for well over a year.  He's been able to use it, fairly frequently, to great effect.  (In the game a few weeks before, he used it to single-handedly take out over a dozen Genocide Purity League Pawns in about 2-3 Phases - I think only two got any shots off at all - while simultaneously putting a decent hurt on the more powerful Rooks and Knights.)  Given that this particular power is a slot in a Multipower with OAF and Charges, he's gotten a ton of use out of those 4 points he paid.

 

It works the other direction, too - the players have copied powerful builds that villains have used against them.  If I roll something out against them, I'm perfectly okay with them buying something similar.  I'd like to think that keeps me from getting too cheesy with the bad guys' powers.

[drunkonduty]

Had a guy build an Eternal character with an EC: Eternal Powers. ALL his powers and stats were put into the elemental control. (IIRC there were 2 or 3 EC's as some of the points costs were too disparate to fit efficiently into 1 EC.)

 

Same guy worked out that buying back all the figured stats that were improved by STR gained you a net +1point to spend. (This was in the days before buying back more than 1 CHAR was specifically banned.) He then actually built a character doing this and spent hundreds of extra points. He had no idea why I wouldn't allow that character into my campaign.

[Grailknight]

6 hours ago, BoloOfEarth said:

 

(shrug)  That same PC hero has a magic VPP he can change as a half-Phase action, so adding Hearing Flash Defense, or indeed any other defense, to his powers even on the fly is fairly trivial for him.  The team gadgeteer has a gadget VPP that can do the same thing.  And in this particular case, they had a pretty good idea who their foes were going to be - including that one of them has sonic attacks - as well as pretty much when and where they were going to attack.  (The news sheet I emailed before the game was as subtle as a brick.)  Overall, I think I telegraphed the punch pretty well.  If they don't want to duck the blow, or at least try to duck blows after the first one, that's their choice. 

 

And it's not like the bad guys immediately start using similar powers as soon as the heroes roll theirs out.  Malarkey has had that attack for well over a year.  He's been able to use it, fairly frequently, to great effect.  (In the game a few weeks before, he used it to single-handedly take out over a dozen Genocide Purity League Pawns in about 2-3 Phases - I think only two got any shots off at all - while simultaneously putting a decent hurt on the more powerful Rooks and Knights.)  Given that this particular power is a slot in a Multipower with OAF and Charges, he's gotten a ton of use out of those 4 points he paid.

 

It works the other direction, too - the players have copied powerful builds that villains have used against them.  If I roll something out against them, I'm perfectly okay with them buying something similar.  I'd like to think that keeps me from getting too cheesy with the bad guys' powers.

 

They actually can't react unless you let them. The spot defenses are all Special Powers and can't be placed in a VPP without GM's permission. 

[ghost-angel]

I almost broke a game with the combination of Duplication + Penetrating Killing Attack with a Coordinated Effort on a single target... 33 Penetrating Attacks in one phase is a lot of damage to deal with it turns out....

[Christopher R Taylor]

Duplication is one of the more unexpected powers in the game, it doesn't seem like much but being able to easily coordinate and communicate between characters for specialized attacks can be very effective.  A Martial artist is a capable fighter on their own, but four of them can be amazing.

[Tom Cowan]

Killing Attack - Ranged 1d6, Variable Advantage (+2 1/2 Advantages; +5) (90 Active Points)

as one of the slots in a MP

 

or one power:

Multiform (500 Character Points in the most expensive form) (x1,024 Number Of Forms) (150 Active Points with ADDER)

[Christopher R Taylor]

I built a VPP with only Multiform in it.  The reasoning was "can turn into anything" then limited it to "animals from North America only" (patriotic hero from WW2 named Zoo Boy).  Technically its not legal, but the GM gave permission because it was so limited and specific, plus it was really the best way to simulate the power.  But it could be cheesed out badly.

[BoloOfEarth]

On 5/30/2019 at 12:22 AM, Christopher R Taylor said:

Duplication is one of the more unexpected powers in the game, it doesn't seem like much but being able to easily coordinate and communicate between characters for specialized attacks can be very effective.  A Martial artist is a capable fighter on their own, but four of them can be amazing.

 

I built an NPC villain (Common Man, of the Boston Commons), with Duplication up to 128 copies, all Mind Linked and able to Megascale teleport to the base character's location as well as a floating location, and each with their own set of 3 skills in addition to some skills and martial arts maneuvers common to all.  Not duplicated, his stats are pretty good - something like 45 STR, 31 DEX, 31 CON, etc. - but they go down as the number [doublings] of active duplicates go up (40 STR, 28 DEX, etc. with 1 duplicate, 35 STR, 25 DEX, etc. with 2-3 duplicates, 30 STR, 22 DEX, etc. with 4-7 duplicates, all the way down to normal stats (10 STR, etc.) with 65-128 duplicates.  And you're right -- with only 4-7 duplicates, his Teamwork roll is 13- and his coordinated martial arts attacks can be pretty nasty.

 

When he only had 32 duplicates, I gave them the names of the extra-dimensional aliens from the Buckaroo Banzai movie (John Smallberries, John O'Connor, John Manyjars, John Bigboote', etc.), pulled from a screenshot of the computer screen when Buckaroo's people hacked into Yoyodyne's computer.

 

In the "cheesy-munchkiny" part, he has a skills VPP (he can access the skills of the duplicates that aren't active).  Since those skills are almost always at 11- for any given duplicate, it's not incredibly powerful, but it does give him access to practically any skill on the list.

[JackValhalla]

Detect: Susceptibility and Vulnerability. The character's schtick is that they always know the best method of attack. Also an 8d6 EB w/ variable special effects.

Find Weakness w/ the modifiers Sense and Rapid from Enhanced Senses. Make up to 10 attempts per phase w/o giving up your attack action.

VPP: only for powers w/ Trigger advantage + Precognition. You can know what powers you're going to need, and give yourself them in advance.

Damage shields w/ autofire. No to-hit roll, hits the max number of times per phase. So, like 20,480 1d6 NND attacks, 0 end.

Desolidification, 0 STR  w/ Works While Desolid for no cost because 0 STR. Then, Martial Arts and increased Damage Classes.

0pt Summoning, create a normal civilian from nothing. 

Faster-Than-Light Travel, Usable As Attack, x1,048,576 mass. Villain can grab an asteroid of ~100,000 tons and launch it at speed of c. 60pts regulation, would 100% destroy the Earth before anyone could possibly stop him.

Transform, personal Focus into universal Focus. Jailbeak a phone? Nah son, jailbreak Mjolnir.

Teleport, megascale, usable as attack, ranged. Go visit deep space.

Naked advantage: Usable by others (simultaneous), usable by others. Allow someone else to share a power with someone else.

Missile Reflection w/ linked Find Weakness

[Duke Bushido]

20 minutes ago, JackValhalla said:

Detect: Susceptibility and Vulnerability. The character's schtick is that they always know the best method of attack. Also an 8d6 EB w/ variable special effects.

Find Weakness w/ the modifiers Sense and Rapid from Enhanced Senses. Make up to 10 attempts per phase w/o giving up your attack action.

VPP: only for powers w/ Trigger advantage + Precognition. You can know what powers you're going to need, and give yourself them in advance.

 

 

 

Damnit, Batman, stay out of this!

 

 

[Solitude]

On 5/25/2019 at 2:56 PM, specks said:

I'm curious about some power or power combinations that you as a player or GM came across that you thought awful cheesy?

 

In 5th edition, I had a player in my group who used the power AID where half the points ended up in PD and the rest of the points back into AID creating a perpetual motion machine like power.

As  far as I know it wasn't illegal but kind of cheesy.

1st Edition. 

And I'm too embarrassed to post it after typing it out.

Second edition was really needed. 

[PeterLind]

Here's a few that I have run across:

 

Autofire NND

Area Effect Telekinesis

Being able to attack while desolid

 

I'm sure there are others . . . as a group, we just decided not to use game-breaking combinations.  

[JackValhalla]

Forgot a few.

Drain or Suppress vs limited group, any elemental control. Because of how the section "adjustment powers and power frameworks" lays out the interaction, this suppress has double-effect.

8 penalty skill levels vs called shots. each attack is a headshot for no penalty. x2 STUN for regular attacks, KAs are automatically 5's for STUN multiplier. Cost 16 points, double your damage.

Suppress vs INT. It's the cheapest basic ability that can immobilize an opponent at 0 that is rarely bought above 20.

Powers w/ Side Effect: Drain vs COM. Having negative COM works like having positive PRE for PRE Attacks. Two phases in you're so horrific that you can petrify enemies in place, for free.

Tunneling, ranged. Create a 8" pit under an enemy, then collapse the tunnel.

Life Support: Water breathing. Transform: Air into water. The value calculations of air and water.. well, this power is best used indoors or  you'll kill an entire city. 20pts to be the only person not drowning.

Flash vs vocal sense group. For some reason, the ability to speak is treated as a sense. And nobody takes Flash Defense for it. If your enemy uses PRE attacks, Incantations, tactical commands or Mind Control, this'll shut 'em up.

Mental Powers cannot be used with Autofire. Mental Powers with Based on CON, however, can be used with Autofire.

Usable as Attack powers don't require CV rolls if they're used against inanimate objects not being held. Cars, floors, lighting fixtures, any environmental feature can be Grown, Shrunk, Desolidified, Teleported, Duplicated, made invisible, density-increased, stretched, etc. You don't have to be great at tactics to make this a power that changes the game.

[BoloOfEarth]

I'll fess up on a cheesy-munchkin build on an NPC - although he was mainly an ally of the PCs.

 

Many campaigns ago ( in 4th edition rules / Champions Universe), the heroes rescued a man from Malachite's clutches.  This NPC was seemingly completely normal, albeit with normal maxima (20 STR, 20 DEX, etc.), eidetic memory... and amnesia.  The man they dubbed John Doe also could use any weapon (had every Weapon Familiarity), and had Find Weakness, AOE (cone), for any attack, with a good enough roll that he could generally get 2-3 successes on most people.  Thus, he could pick up a normal pistol and find / target that one chink in a foe's defenses that allowed him to hurt even superpowered foes.  The heroes adopted John Doe as an associate member, with one of the players generally running that character in combat, although since he didn't have major defenses he tried to avoid combat situations.

 

All of the heroes efforts to find out who John Doe was failed completely.

 

Toward the end of the campaign, the heroes went to the Malachite Islands and faced off against Malachite himself.  During the fight, Malachite revealed that he had created John Doe - he was a test-tube baby, genetically engineered and rapid-aged to adulthood, hypnotically implanted with certain knowledge / skills - as well as a Berserk condition.  And his "rescue" was planned, since Malachite wanted John Doe to spend plenty of time with the heroes, learning all their vulnerabilities, susceptibilities, and weaknesses.  Malachite's spoken command word activated John Doe's Berserk , causing him to attack the heroes.

 

And the heroes, any one of whom could have fairly easily put John Doe down for the count, instead opted to restrain him and talk him down, because to their minds he was one of them.  It took some doing, but they succeeded.  Incredible role-playing on their part.  I was very proud of my players and how they handled it.

[Surrealone]

43 REC bought as a fixed Multipower slot in a shape shifter's Multipower where it could run only one slot at a time -- defined as adjusting physiology to allow for rapid healing.  (The character was an efficient 450pt build in 6e, by the way … and it was the largest of three Multipowers on the character.)

 

The player would hold through Segment 12 and then, if no action was used, slot the REC and keep holding into the next Turn, thereby leveraging the crazy REC during the post-Segment 12 recovery.  Only when needed, of course.

 

I admired it from a justification and rules lawyering angle, as it was perfectly legit with a sound basis in character concept -- but it still smelled like Limburger.