#4 Legolas
So the backup party arrives at Rivendell to salvage the campaign. You've got a human fighter played affably, with a mix of skills and feats that make for a solid party member. There's a dwarf that is pure tank, heavy armor with lots of hit points and a weapon mix for killing anybody at any time. A God PC playing a fighter posing as a wizard that was just supposed to be there for a session but came back for more. And then there's the guy that builds his character from ten different spat books, comprised of four different prestige classes taken just far enough to get the front loaded abilities. You know that character, he goes by many names. Minmaximus. Detective Munchkin. Legolas.
The rest of the munchkin doesn't have any idea just how power gamed Legolas is. Gandalf and Gimli have suspicions, especially since Legolas' books needed to build just his character dwarfs the stack you normally need to play a GURPS supers campaign. The books range from official splat books, to some of the drek that was churned out with the 3.0 OGL spamfest. A glimpse at his character sheet shows two and a half pages to list all his abilities, and two and a half lines to explain his character background. He's used every optional rule in the book, found ways to take useless disadvantages to gain quite useful advantages.
The older players immediately smelled twink when Legolas revealed he was half snow elf and got to walk on the snow while everybody else had to trudge. When Gandalf wanted to see the rule, Legolas immediately whipped out his dog earred copy of Bastards and Bloodlines and tried to justify why he had two elven racial traits by blood, and a third set of traits because he was adopted per the rules in the Hero Construction Guide. Gandalf is just stunned, and never directly addresses Legolas for the rest of the adventure. Gimli takes a dislike, as he has been playing for ages and has a built in disgust for the power gamers. Legolas doesn't even notice, because he's just so cool like that.
Legolas gets to show off in Moria, where because of Pippin's blundering it's a straight slug fest the entire way. Legolas reveals that his character is a gestalt fighter/rogue from Unearthed Arcana with a single prestige level of Thief-Acrobat from Complete Adventurer just so he can get fast acrobatics, kip up and steady stance. He explains this while he's standing on a troll's head for a multishot backstab straight to the cranium. The hobbits are wowed by this. Gimli just hates him even more.
Despite losing Gandalf, Aragorn takes the party straight to Lothlorien to load up on cool elf stuff, something Legolas is all too keen on. Sure enough he gets this awesome magic bow of awesomeness. He points out it would go great since he put a few levels on Deepwood Sniper for the extra critical threat and damage and with his two levels in Ninja he can move around without anybody seeing him. Gimli would have been angry at this, but he was too busy counting all the gold he was going to make from the DM gifting him super valuable spell components.
When the final fight happens, Legolas is happy slaughtering Uruk Hai, showing off all the cool abilities he's found. Splitting from Champions of Ruins lets him double his rate of fire, letting him mow down the Uruk Hai like nothing else. Gimli wants to know how many arrows Legolas even has as they have not resupplied even once so far. The elf happily show the DM gave them a large budget, he simply converted them to darkwood, reducing the weight to next to nothing and allowing him to carry several hundred since he was under his encumbrance value. Then he just turned and went back to shooting Uruk Hai. When the encounter was over and Boromir was dead, Legolas sided with Aragorn to go publicly go after Merry and Pippin, but in reality go looking for more Uruk Hai to kill.
Their side quest unfortunately ends in vain as Eomir had already stolen all the kills. Tromping through the forest looking for victims, the trio come across an surprisingly not dead Gandalf. Legolas immediately prostrates himself, knowing that even his power munchkin abilities were not match for Gandalf's epic levelness. Instead of being homicidal, he kicks them back into the plot. Greatful, they head off to go talk to Theoden, where Legolas shows off the one level of monk he took for tone against Wormtongue's mooks. The huge fight they were looking for is coming. Life was good.
After a quick skirmish where Gimli had to get a DM ruling on whether kip up actually applied to mounting a horse backwards. The DM finally ruled for Legolas, because he thought it was cool. Though Aragorn falls in the battle, his whines about his crappy luck get him another saving throw so Legolas didn't have to be bossed around by Gimli. As a doomed company of elves arrives to help balance the forces, Gimli has a side bet for Legolas. A bottle of the good stuff to whoever kills the most. Thinking it was taking candy from a baby, Legolas gladly accepts.
The battle is everything Legolas could have hoped for. A target rich environment and he's standing on a wall while Gimli has to sit and watch. Everything is going great, he's got a large lead going until the Uruk Hai reach the wall and Gimli gets in the act. Then it starts to fall apart. Legolas faces his number one foe, a leveled Uruk Hai mook with a magic belt giving him DR against piercing. The oversight allows for the destruction of the wall, and Legolas is thrown off his game.
While Gimli charges into the mass and starts cleaving, Legolas tries to regain his composure by using a shield as a skateboard firing as he goes. While it looked impressive, he only managed to kill two orks, even after successfully arguing his thief-acrobat skills would give him no penalties. As Gimli catches up to Legolas in the kill count, Legolas starts to realize he's out of his depth in mass combat. The mooks are dead, now the higher level monsters remain, and they don't fall to arrows as easily. Legolas settles on a supporting roll while Gimli and Aragorn slaughter another twenty Uruk Hai each outside the great doors of the hall. When all is said and done, Gimli has over sixty confirmed kills to Legolas barely breaking 40, though the dwarf lies and just gives a number just one higher over the elf to avoid hurting his feelings.
The last third of the adventure quickly becomes the Aragorn show. Legolas does show a bit of spite towards Gimli by wasting a feat slot on a Alcohol Tolerance just to win a drinking contest with the dwarf. While Aragorn runs around getting gifts showered on him and generally taking center stage every single scene he can, Legolas is still trying to figure out how he lost at Helm's Deep. Gimli starts to show him basic tactics and predicting attack patters are much more useful than just power combos and front loaded prestige classes. Instead of focusing all on just his bow, he could have spread out his feats to include melee as well to get around damage resistance for example.
In the big battle at Minas Tirith Aragorn gets the trio to the battle late, just in time not to save Theoden. Despite having an entire army of plot devices at their disposal, they do get to mix it up some. Legolas takes Gimi's lesson to heart and instead of trying to kill the Mumakil, he uses his mighty ninja acrobat skills to take out the Howdah instead, then takes out the beast with his patented stand on their head and shoot them technique. Gimli was impressed that the elf actually learned how to think his way to victory, but was less than thrilled at him wasting an action just to look cool on the dismount.
At the final battle they both come to the realization that Aragorn has no idea whatsoever what he's doing, as his tactics nearly get everyone killed except finally for DM intervention and the bad guys running away because the DM is just finally tired of the campaign. In the big wrap up scene, Gimli admits that perhaps a little showing off is allowed, and Legolas concedes tactics beats min maxing if you know what you are doing. Legolas asks to be in the next campaign, begging to keep his character even though its set in the past. The DM agrees, not paying attention as Frodo's player has already stormed off.