Or at least if it has one, I couldn’t find it. I was amazed that even the tvtropes.org site doesn’t have a dedicated article to him, although he’s mentioned in their Game Breaker article. It would be an investment of time and effort on my part to learn how to properly submit a Wiki, article, so my questions are as follows:
Is there an article about him I didn’t find? Is he already on a list of suggested articles there?
Is anything submitted there fair usage, or do copywrite issues from the source material figure into it?
And here is my draft article; any corrections or suggestions for improvement would be appreciated. Thank you.
Pun-Pun:
“Pun-Pun” is the name given to a hypothetical Player Character in a Role Playing Game using the Dungeons & Dragons roleplay rules. He was proposed by a contributer to the boards1.wizard.com web site going by the name “Khan the Destroyer”. His purpose was to demonstrate how the rules of the game could allow for the creation of a character so uber-powerful that further gameplay would be impossible or pointless.
In the proposed scenerio, Pun-Pun starts out as a very low-level character possessing a few traits that allow him to exploit unforseen consequences of the game rules. By working in tandem with a “familiar”, a game entity posessing it’s own attributes but under Pun-Pun’s control, Pun-Pun is able to establish a feedback loop whereby he and the familiar are able to bestow ever increasing power upon each other, bootstrapping their character statistics to limitless or even infinite values. Ultimately Pun-Pun achieves power exceeding the stats for any other conceivable entity in the game, becoming omnipotent, invulnerable and immortal.
Pun-Pun was never intended to be an actual playable character, but rather a thought-experiment demonstrating how the game rules could be exploited to produce an absurd result. Since then, “Pun-Pun” has become a gaming and internet synonym for an immeasurably and transcendentally powerful fictional character.
I’d argue against putting it on Wikipedia, in part because it will probably get removed for lack of notability, and also because I think the methods used are flawed.
I’d specify that it’s the Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 edition, and remove the “uber” in “uber-powerful”.
I would remove the bit about infinite values. Limitless, yes, but not infinite, not without infinite time to perform this back-and-forth boosting.
Yes, but if memory serves, any reptilian (or at least reptilian humanoid) race can be used to perform the same exploit. Kobold was chosen as his race because it is perhaps the most diminutive of the reptilian humanoids.
And because it had no level adjustment, so you could do the trick faster. It also happened to the one reptilian creature in almost every DnD campaign world.