Well, in many ways the Vorpal blade is a veritable holy grail for munchkins. Imagine a sword that decapitates its foe on a natural roll of 20 on a d20. In AD&D that only happens on a 20/20 roll. When you roll a 20 then you roll again. If you get another 20, decapitation!! the 20/20 roll! I once knew a guy who lost a 9th level paladin to a 20/20 hit from a goblin. Go figure.
Anyway, munchkins love it.
Back on cheating. The reason that I don't think may of us actually see it is that, as mature adults we just don't see the point. In all the games I've played and GM'd in the last 4 years only one guy has deliberately cheated. The irony was that he was striking down a fellow player who was playing a character who was a traitor.
Trotsky has identified one issue that I have encountered in Heroquest. Some people want to scour their character sheet for augments and others are happy just to use a relevant ability, unaugmented. In fact they normally positively dislike looking for augments, as this spoils their fun and slows down the 'story'. With the rules as written this is difficult to balance. My solution to this was to usually (and in secret) apply the bonus in augments from the player character to their oponent. What this did is that the people that enjoyed augmenting had fun describing their characters with flourish, and those that didn't were not unfairly penalised. I think the players got that I was to an extent manipulating the numbers a bit, so they settled down with fewer augments, but just the stand out interesting ones.
Regards
Rob
--- In HeroQuest-rules_at_yahoogroups.com, Jane Williams
<janewilliams20_at_...> wrote:
>
>
> > Roderick
> > > > the munchkin will go for high-yield prizes-
> > > > demanding the +5 Vorpal toenail clippers and
> > that sort of thing.
>
> > Jane
> > > Hmm.... can you define "vorpal" for me? That
> > sounds
> > > like a fascinating magical item.
>
> Gavain:
> > Comes from Lewis Carol "Jabberwocky"
> >
> http://www.jabberwocky.com/carroll/jabber/jabberwocky.html
>
> I recognised that reference, yes, thanks, but the link
> confirms, as I thought, that the word is undefined:
> probably deliberately so, this being Lewis Carroll. RR
> was using it as if it had some known meaning to
> munchkins.
>
>
>
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