Ailurophobia
We touched on this issue way back in Special Snowflake, but I think it’s worth a revisit.
If you’re trying to develop a “fully realized, three-dimensional character,” then systems that offer drawbacks can be great. Take Savage Worlds for instance. A few favorites from their big list o’ drawbacks include such evocative and interesting hindrances as Bullet Magnet, Hoardosaurus, Xenophobic, and Wuss. Any one of these can be a great direction to take a character, and they all give you a few extra points to spend. In practice however, I’ve seen disadvantages fall into two traps.
- Minor Character Notes: You load yourself down with weird and marginal hindrances. You’re afraid of clowns, suffer from insomnia, and are a bit greedier than the average adventurer. That’s interesting stuff in theory, but for the most part these quirks have little impact on the game.
- Overemphasis: Your character has some kind of major issue, and you RP the heck out of it. Say your character is an alcoholic. You slur your words, sip from your hip flask, and suffer from the mildly inebriated condition in every session. This becomes the defining aspect of your character.
There’s a struggle here between keeping your disadvantages relevant on the one hand and keeping them from running rampant on the other. It’s very easy to skew one way or the other, and I’m not certain I’ve ever got it right myself. For example, I’m currently suffering from the “minor character notes” issue. I’ve got an ex-nobleman PC who’s addicted to luxury. I’m self-conscious about pausing the game to go antiquing though, so it tends not to come up at the table.
How about your guys? Have you ever seen somebody really nail a disadvantage/hindrance/flaw in a game? What was it?
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It has been my luck that the characters i’ve had with the best flaws have also been the ones in the shortest-lived campaigns.
I had a Savage Worlds character named Melvin Babbage, a consummate nerd. His flaw was that of being a skeptic. This worked quite well with the DM’s setting, which was a post-apocalyptic modern world that had since seen the rise of magic and monsters. Melvin has seen many “mystical” things turn out to be hoaxes, which would leave him at a marked disadvantage if anything mystical actually happened. However, that campaign fell apart within a few session.
Another was a Water Genasi Druid in a 5e survival campaign. This character was built to be VERY powerful to start, with easy access to food, clean water, and a variety of useful paleo skills. However, she is the very model of a Druid, a person of the wilds, and therefore she would have become less useful and perhaps at times even detrimental as the other PCs pushed for more societal development (fixed structures, metal tools, and such.) Again, though, campaign didn’t get too far.
Come to think of it, i’m usually the one with the interesting flaws. The only other person i’ve seen who has played a flaw well was the Monk that was racist to my Half-Elf. It wasn’t the central part of his character, but to my half-elf it sure seemed that way.
I’m going to think more about flaws when making characters from now on, thank you. =)
What I like about Savage Worlds in particular is the tie between hindrances, RP, and bennies. There’s an incentive for players to make their flaws relevant, which tends to generate more interest. In d10 System on the other hand, you only get a benefit in the form of bonus points when you pick your flaws. After that then it’s up to the ST to remember the dozen or so flaw rules and make them relevant to the plot. 5e is somewhat similar with the background system. Sure you get some interesting character notes to help you flesh out your guy, but I find that those quickly fade into the background when there’s no incentive to bring them up in game.
My two cents anyway. I’m sure that a talented GM or player will find ways to make flaws relevant regardless of system.
I think the 5e inspiration system also is a nice mechanical reason to bring up your flaws in role-play.
Good point. I’d absolutely hand out inspiration for good flaw RP.
We had a monk with a vow of poverty who through a random magical effect received 50,000 GP worth of gems at level 4. My character profited nicely from that. 🙂
One man’s flaws are another man’s merits. 😀
Did you at least donate a bit to his temple?
My experience with flaws can mostly be summed up by the option in Shadowrun (I forget the edition) to take “incompetent: parachuting”. As in… it’s a thing you just can’t ever succeed at and you get points for it. My friends and I when discussing character creation were always making jokes about ways in which that skill could come up for a character with that flaw. They all involved the character dying.
Maybe you get sick on the parachute drop at the county fair…?
Nope. Death. 😉
Well, you know about Mabel’s heart condition. With Doctor Asklepio I took Shaky, Murky-Eyed and Nearsighted to simulate severe myopia, his Dex-boosting item being reflavoured as some really really expensive specs while I enforced that the DM was not to let him make Spot checks at range…
However. The best one was the quarter-Drow. He took a -1 to AC vs attacks from the bottom-left. This was never explained. It came with no upside, no bonus. It just was. I just really love it. It wasn’t a backstory-vital thing like Mabel’s, or a cool flavourful way to get some vital extra feats like mine… it just was the way that character’s guard was failing. It was also a good show of team-playing from the player in question; Mabel and I rolled really badly on our stats, while he didn’t have anything lower than a 10 (or maybe 12) until he voluntarily lowered his Con to 8.
Also I’m really sorry for almost bombarding you with all these comments during my archive binge; you’re just provoking too many interesting thoughts and happy memories in my head. 😛
I’d always heard that wizards were a bit OP in 3.X, so the first time I rolled one up I gave him this hangup about flight magic. During his apprenticeship, my character’s master tried to teach like the birds teach. One too many times falling off his master’s tower and my wizard wound up with a mental block. In other words, I never gave him any fly spells, which is pretty hard on a squishy casty’s life expectancy.
That is an interesting way to handle it! I’ve always been a fan of thematic casting, so long as one can be flexible enough not to end up useless.
One of the cooler setting-specific attempts at thematic casting: https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder_RPG/comments/2sc1qu/my_friend_is_homebrewing_an_mtgpathfinder/
In the longest campaign I was ever a part of, I was playing a young Lawful-Good monk fresh out of the monastery. Cheerful, helpful, friendly to a fault, and perhaps just a little to convinced that the world worked like it did in all those fantastic stories his mentor had told him. Some of this manifested in little quirks, like forgetting to mention that there was a reward promised for resolving some issue when we were trying to decide what plot-hook to bite next, but the most glaring issue was that my character refused to make Sense Motive checks.
Not only did he not have any points in that skill, but any time the GM asked the party for a Sense Motive roll, I declined to provide an answer. My monk simply didn’t believe that someone so trustworthy would lie to him (he never quite grasped the obvious paradox here). As the only party member with both a decent Wisdom score and Sense Motive as a class skill, this did not endear him to the rest of the group.
I find myself enjoying the 5e Inspiration mechanic for this reason. People will RP these disads without the promise of a reward, but it just seems like a nice gesture on the game’s part to give you one anyway.
The first (and only) time I ever played Unhallowed Metropolis, I took the OCD drawback for my character.
The very first thing that happened when I met the party, was that one player wiped his bloodied hands on my coat.
That combined with the GM/party not really giving me anything to work with in the ways of motivations to actually join the party, I ended up rolling a new character.
Too bad. The common wisdom is to “find you own motivation for adventuring,” but I’ve seen too many interesting characters get ignored despite their obvious plot hooks to think it’s a one way street. I guess that, sometimes, it’s just down to what catches a GM’s interest.
I hope your new guy worked out better.
In my 5e game, I play a tabaxi who’s main character flaw, besides being incredibly trust which works fairly well, is that she is overwhelmingly curious. I tend to reign that in around shit that would probably murder the entire party, such as not pressing the big red button, no matter how in character it would be.
I’m amused that your comment is on this comic. It fits this one perfectly:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/frickin-laser-beams
Throw more cats at him! He’ll snap and temporarily turn into a cat-brained killing machine.
I haven’t come back to this comic in a while. Now I’m trying to remember if Wizard and Magus have ever been in a comic together.
I just looked and they have! https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/behaving-intelligently
Sad times. Looks like I won’t get to make that joke. Even worse, Wizard has to be embarrassed that she missed an opportunity to play up on that character trait.
Well, you could always just say that Wizard didn’t realize she was a cat at the time.
I was playing L5R, and played a Mantis (the pirate clan) who had Phobia: Water. I played it as he got seasick every time he actually got on water. Which is a problem for a clan based on islands. He was sent to the mainland to serve as an assistant to the ambassador.