DougL wrote:
> On Oct 15, 4:00 pm, Peter Knutsen <pe...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>>But should ***ual Orientation be the only universal Flaw?
>
> Depending on how you handle tollerance for Pain/Discomfort/nasty
> conditions it may or may not make sense to treat such things as flaws
> or as modifiers to existing flaws.
Discomfort and nasty conditions give generic penalties to dice rolls,
such as -1 or -2, for situations such as hunger, or cold, or fatigue, or
lack of sleep. Characters with the Sheltered Life Flaw then recieve a
multiplier to such penalties, of x2, or of x3 if they have Sheltered
Life as a Major Flaw. The GM is also told that he may give minor
penalties to characters with these Flaws, where the other PCs aren't
penalized; for instance the GM may say that it is slightly cold,
relative to the clothes the PCs are wearing, and therefore the PC with
Sheltered Life gets a generic -1 roll penalty, but the others do not.
Later it becomes colder, and now everyone gets a -1 penalty, which the
Flaw multiplies into -2 for the Sheltered PC.
As for avoiding or at least minimizing these penalties, there's the
"Hard Living" Veteran trait, which will somehow reduce discomfort
penalties, reflecting the fact that the character has survived through
times of hard****p, with poor (and intermittent) food, rough sleeping,
and so forth. The details are still a bit hazy, however.
(Then there's also Self-Control Points, for the Driven character
subtype. If you're extremely self-motivated, it is possible to ignore
minor distractions such as hunger, thirst or sleep deprivation.)
Pain is something I'll need rules for, in order to make Gifts such as
High Pain Threshold worthwhile, as well as various pain-supressing Body
Control and Ki abilities (these two can also help with discomfort -
especially Body Control, since the main inspiration for that are the
Indian faqirs), and the Medical Drugs skill for administering painkillers.
Hence it makes sense to also have a trait that makes a character *less*
able to resist pain (a multiplier to all pain penalties, probably), but
given that I expect combat to be quite common in typical Modern Action
RPG campaigns[1], I think it should be a (physical) Weakness rather than
a (psychological) Flaw.
In terms of character points, Weaknesses are supposed to be 2.5 times as
bad, since during character creation the player can choose to pay 8
points to have 1 fewer Flaw, or pay 20 points to not have a Weakness
(otherwise 1 Weakness is mandatory).
[1] My idea is that a campaign with a "normal" amount of combat will
feature an average of 1 major fight, 1 minor fight, plus a small number
of "violent incidents", per session.
A "high combat" campaign would be 2 major fights and probably 1-2
minors, plus incidents, while a "low combat" campaign would be 1 major
*or* 1 minor fight per session, plus 1-2 incidents. However, measured on
this scale, the average D&D3 campaign is probably off-the-chart at "very
high combat".
--
Peter Knutsen
sagatafl.org
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