Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 5574716" data-attributes="member: 58197">Mostly what I'm worried about is that a PC with the "Sexy" trait would end up saying (if the PC is female) "I'm batting my eyelashes and flashing my cleavage" in order to finagle a bonus to the Charisma check every time the character interacts with a straight humanoid male. This puts the burden on the DM to figure out what the scope of each trait should be, and leads players to pick traits for their adventuring usefulness rather than fleshing out the character. If one PC is using "Sexy" to get information and favors all over the place, the PC who took "Blacksmith" instead is going to be left out in the cold (figuratively and literally), because it's really hard to find as many in-play applications for blacksmithing as for sex appeal.Now, if traits are more strictly defined in terms of what you can achieve with them, I could see it working. "Sexy" wouldn't be a problem if its sole use was to get people into bed. But then you run into the issue of "What qualifies as a trait and how do you define what each one can be used for?"Limiting the list to professions rather than personal traits helps guide the setting of limits overall. If you have "Profession: Courtesan," you know the professional skills of a courtesan--applying makeup, preventing unwanted pregnancy, being good in bed. An ordinary PC might have to roll Charisma to please a sexual partner, whereas the courtesan can do it automatically. But when it comes to eliciting information from a suspicious guard, the courtesan has no particular advantage over the silver-tongued rogue or the knight whose every word breathes honor and sincerity.Moreover, you can make a list of professions that covers most of the options in a medieval society, give a quick (2-3 lines) rundown of what each one can be used for, and still fit it into a couple of pages. (I think. Haven't tried. Possibly harder than it seems.) Now and then you'd get a player who wanted something outside the box, but in most cases the standard list would do the job. But a list of traits could fill the entire book. You'd have to leave it up to the players and the DM to hash out the details on a case-by-case basis, which goes against the goal of fast and simple chargen.</blockquote>

Verification