Editing

[rowyn]

Lut glanced at my monitor. "Y'know, your male protgaonist acts like a whiny little girl sometimes."

I giggled. "He does!"

Lut: " ... well, as long as you know."

Every character needs flaws. :)

Comments

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

Champions characters, especially, need a truly ridiculous number of flaws. I always end up cheesing it with something like 'dependant, slightly less powerful, has useful skills and abilities, x128 quantity'. Because there's no way to make a realistic character with 150 points worth of drawbacks without cheating somehow.

[rowyn]

... That's a lot of DNPCs!

We always were very generous with psychological limitations in my group. One of our taglines: "Psych lims: this is your personality! You get points for it."

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, Champions! I was horribly cheesy. I just wasn't as successfully cheesy as the OTHER players, so at the time it SEEMED as if I was being modest. Still, it kind of said something when my character's activities would often prompt a chorus of:

o/~ "Follower Man! It's Follower Man!"
"If he can't do it -- his follower can!" o/~

(etc.)

I didn't ever try something so crazy as having follower-dependents, though. The GM said something along the lines of, "It's not really a Disadvantage unless it's a disadvantage. But put down whatever you want. Don't worry. Whatever it is, it will become a Disadvantage." ;)

[rowyn]

One of my friends would say of Champions, "If you can't use a power to solve a problem, use a special effect. If you can't use a special effect, use a disad."

The illustration of "use a disad" was an anecdote about a PC with a disad of "enraged by the murder of bystanders/innocents", on a 14-, with a frequency of uncommon. After they'd been playing for several sessions, it transpired that every session, some villain would kill off some hapless bystander during a fight, and the PC would go enraged. Finally, the player took his character sheet to the GM and pointed to the disad. "It says UNCOMMON. I want it to BE UNCOMMON."

After that, the GM stopped having bystanders get killed every fight. :)

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

*giggle*

Enraged by 'party member is attacked by enemies'. Frequency: Almost never.

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Har. :D

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

Our group has not been very good about remembering disadvantages, unfortunately. No matter who's GMing.

When I was GMing GURPS I explicitly limited the number of disadvantages a player could have that required the GM to remember that they existed.

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

HURRAH! That is an EXCELLENT idea. This brings to mind something I actually like about the way Savage Worlds handles Hindrances: roleplaying Hindrances is a major way of accumulating "Bennies" from the GM. Essentially, the player is given an incentive to remind the GM of his Hindrances.

(Unfortunately, in my experience this mechanic doesn't translate very well to the uber-slow pace of text-based MUCK roleplay attempting to use Savage Worlds mechanics, due to the extremely slow pace and great difference of how much action can actually take place in, say, four 6-hour online sessions vs. a single 4-hour face-to-face convention scenario. So your mileage may vary.)

In my earliest GMing attempts at Hero System / Champions, a major point of contention between me and certain players was when I'd try to make sure that in a full-length session*, each PC would have at least one disadvantage come into play during the game. It just felt unfair when one player would have an inherently limiting Disad (e.g., "Looks like a giant green monster; can't blend in -- EVER.") while someone else would have something like "Hates Nazis" (actual example) and then get upset when I would present a scenario where having Nazis present and where simply attacking them on sight would NOT be the advantageous thing to do. (Because, after all, if the consequence of failing your roll on "hates Nazis" is that you attack ... while every other PC is, out of his own free will, ATTACKING anyway, then why the heck is this a Disadvantage? That's like, I dunno, "Phobia: Cthulhu." ;) )

(* Way back in college -- it seems insane and impossible to think of doing such a thing now -- we'd actually show up at a friend's place, start early in the morning, and go until midnight or so, with breaks during the day to walk down the street for pizza, etc. It set very unrealistic expectations for me about how much one can accomplish in a single "session" of a game.)

Anyway, while Savage Worlds certainly has its flaws, I rather like the attempt at tweaking the mechanics to treat Hindrances/Flaws with a little more carrot and less stick. While some GMs seem to get a kick out of playing the "evil GM" and making sure they "pay" for those Disads and such, things have generally turned out very un-fun when I've had to play "bad cop" when it comes to enforcing that sort of stuff.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

I played a really long session like that once, when I was back in high school. Around midnight, someone asked me if I wanted to call my mom to let them know that I was okay. "Nah, I don't want to wake her up."

It turned out she was still awake. She was still awake at 3am when I finally dragged myself home, too. D'oh!

[alltoseek.livejournal.com]

All men act like whiny little girls sometimes. There's a whiny little girl inside each of us ;-)

[rowyn]

My own inner whiny little girl is VERY good at whining!