A Rule for Everything?

[HinterWelt]

Well, it depends on the game system. For instance, if you have a system that rewards flaws, then a lot of times players will take a lot of role-playing based flaws, but won't actually play the flaw.


Or say, you are playing something like Star Wars. Having a mechanic for the Dark Side/Light Side is pretty useful, I think.

And see, this is where I waffle. Like the Paladin issue, I appreciate that some aspect, tied to a character behavior may be necessary but others just seem intrusive. The Flaws example is perfect. I ran six games a week of oWOD for about a year and I saw some serious abuse of the flaws system. Worse, I found the whole Humanity mechanism just got beat on. It was when I dumped Humanity (more to the point just tracked it myself) and applied the character's behavior against them that the IDEA of Humanity really worked. All I did was indicate they would black out and wake up with blood all over them and the police with an APB for someone who looked like them. It just seemed to sork better away from the mechanism.

Bill