Hi Everyone, In order to revitalize discussion, I've copied some talk from the forums to here: I've been thinking a lot about advantages (and disadvantages). It sems to me that these types of traits can be divided into several categories: * Bonuses/Penalties - give a increased or decreased chance to action rolls in certain situations. * Prohibitions - prevents a character for performing actions that normal humans can perform. For example, Blindness is a prohibition on sight and means the character automatically fails all sight checks. * Feats - akin to d20 feats, these allow characters to make actions they cannot normally perform, e.g. martial art feats might allow characters to make flying kicks, when most other characters can only make normal kicks. As opposed to prohibitions. * Trait Bonuses/Penalties - in particular, Secondary Traits, these allow characters to increase/decrease secondary traits. * Access - these allow characters access to traits, typically other advantages, that they could not normally get. For example, Magic User would allow characters access to learning magic skills. These are typically campaign setting dependent. The problem is the first and most common category, bonuses and penalties. Is this category actually necessary in a game like FRINGE? Selecting weak or strong traits would surely cover this topic. For example, having a lame foot could be best described in having a low Agility, rather than selecting a Lame disadvantage. What other categories might there be? Samuel Penn wrote: > Background options (e.g. social class, wealth, enemies etc). > Supernatural traits which can't be obtained otherwise. Personality > traits (phobias, mental disorders). > > In an SF campaign, lameness and low agility are quite different if the > character is in a zero g environment. If agility affects initiative, a > lame character could still be very fast at performing a quick draw. I'm trying to look for a deeper 'theory' of advantages/disadvantages. For example, could the advantages you give as examples be described using some or the above. For example, Wealth could easily be described in terms of a Secondary Trait, for example. On the other hand, I didn't think of enemies/patrons and so forth. I can imagine these coming under a new category: Campaign Ads/Dis. That is, purely plot-related advantages and complications. The question is, how much do we want to cover with advantages? DO we just want them to cover affects of rules, or do we want them to cover more, as in the case of Campaign Ads/Dis? I'm already planning to include rules for personality traits, which won't be advantages or disadvantages, and will be linked to the secondary traits Will (to resist personality traits) and Passion (to enjoy the benefits of personality traits). I haven't worked out the details yet, but have the embryo of an idea stewing. On the subject of genre Ads/Dis cross-over, I see your point. I was thinking of building a system to custom make your own advantages at one point. You choose a cost based upon the benefit or disadvantage imparted and then multiply by a factor based on how often in the game the advantage is likely to come into play. The only problem, is that such a system might break compatibility. -- Ricardo Gladwell President, Free Roleplaying Community http://www.freeroleplay.org/ president@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx