Friday, November 15, 2013

Character Highlight: PunPun (FAE)

Back when D&D 3.5 was still young, WOTC had a thriving message board community. Of note was the Character Optimization forums, a wonderland of ingenuity! Originally conceived of as a place for you to work out your character concept, it was quickly overrun by optimizers, and WOTC was forced to split the forum into Character Development (fluff) and Character Optimization (crunch).

Strange and wondrous things could be found in this place, where math majors went to work using spreadsheets calculate your Power Attack bonus and how to best make some Chosen of Mystra with 10 actions per round and a sweet Figurine Of Wondrous Power: Obsidian Camaro. In this seething cauldron of nerd-heroin, no published rule was safe; no splatbook neglected! For years, the Cleric and Druid fought for the title of Most Likely To Give Your DM Hives.

Sometime thereafter, around 2005, a thread was created called 'Incentive to Play a Kobold.' A poster named Khan_The_Destroyer came up with a build that would forever change the universe. Hither came PunPun, green-skinned, fiery-eyed, viper familiar in hand, a wizard, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to ravage the patience of every GM under his omnipotent feet!

PunPun 1

Aspects
PROTIP: Don't Google image search PunPun at work.
High ConceptKobold Divine Minion 1/Wizard 1/Master of Many Forms 3
TroubleI Will Make Your GM Hate You
OtherImmune To All The Things, You Can Shove Your GM Fiat

Approaches
+30 Clever
+30 Forceful, Careful
+30 Flashy, Quick
+30 Sneaky

Stunts
  • Because I can Manipulate Forms At Will, I gain a +20 to Forcefully Overcome or Attack when I change shape.
  • Because I Legally Exploit All The Books, I can change my Aspects, Approaches and Stunts At Will.
Refresh
Stress
Consequences
  • Exasperated Sigh (2):
  • Goddammit, NO! (4):
  • Kicked From The Group (6)
You can read the original PunPun post here. Of course the community, being as it is, could not just let PunPun be; many tried, and all failed to defeat him. The best part would be the multitude of posters chiming to express their dismay at trying to convince their DM to let them play PunPun, despite the original poster expressly stating that he is a thought experiment and never meant to be actually played. This is a good thing, as allowing him in your game is directly analogous to Robert Oppenheimer's dismay at witnessing the Trinity test!

This is the only known photograph of PunPun in play.
1Note - while Pun Pun may be legal in D&D 3.5, he's certainly not in FAE; here he functions as a conversion.

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