Flaws/Other rules from UA

[squat45]

Looking at starting a new campaign in the spring/early summer and was wondering what the community here feels about using Flaws (I believe from Unearthed Arcana). Don't have the book, but there was an article in a Dragon magazine that had some flaws for Clerics and I thought that they "might" be interesting.

Also, I have a handy little gift certificate to Borders and was thinking about picking up UA if it is worth it... What are the thoughts here? There seem to be some pretty good optional rules... but I may only use a couple of them.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Kae'Yoss]

The book is definetly worth it. Prepare to drink from the fire hose

Flaws, on the other hand, are not my favourite kind of thing, unless your players are mature enough to take a flaw that really puts them at a disadvantage.

On a related matter: World of Darkness (the new one, with Vampire: The Requiem) has an interesting way of dealing with flaws: Instead of giving you something right away (like a feat in d20 or extra points for character creation in WoD), you get extra experience points whenever your flaw was a hindrance in the game. Say, you're an alcoholic, but you just spent the evening carousing, it wasn't really a hindrance to you. But if you plan to get up early tomorrow in order to do some delicate works, it is not very wise to go get drunk the evening before ("to help you calm yourself in order to get to sleep") and wake up with a hangover - and an hour late - and now have to work faster than is good - and with shaking fingers, you certainly did have a disatvantage.

Also, if the player just cannot roleplay the flaw, the storyteller can lift it from the player so he won't get any XP for it again: Say, said alcoholic is offered a last drink when he has urgent business elsewhere, and the player just says that he leaves without taking the drink, that's not playing in character. If he does something like that all the time, he's "cured". (Or the DM will impose penalties like a painful withdrawal syndrome).

 

[Doctor Shaft]

Well, I'll start off by saying that UA is a great read.

Flaws are a mixed bag, however. They are a cool idea, and UA certainly has a nice selection of them. However, as the poster before me has said, you really have to closely DM and monitor the flaws and how they get used in the campaign. Feats are usually easy to control. Look at the rules, look at your campaign, and decide whether a feat is good or bad for the game.

Flaws have negative effects, but unless the DM watches and utilizes those flaws in the game, it can get very exploity.

I won't give away that whole system that UA proposes, but I will give a short example. They give you two flaws at 1st level. You can choose any two from the list, and in return, you get two bonus feats. It didn't really specify when you take those feats, though I assumed right at 1st level. So basically, any character with a flaw gets two more feats at first then usual. That's pretty strong if a character build is following a certain design.

For instance, a wizard could conveniently take the flaws that reduce his fort save and maybe a noncombatant flaw to make him an ineffective fighter. But... he was already an ineffective fighter to begin with, so the flaw, at least statistically, isn't really that bad, so long as he has a party with him.

UA also has a "character traits" section. The traits are like the flaws, but you don't get a feat. Instead, it's penalties and bonuses to skill modifiers. So you could have awesome sight and bad hearing, or be kind of crazy but also a great liar. The traits are less dangerous than the flaws.

I don't think the flaw system is broken, but if you as a DM take the opportunity to exploit the flaws in-game, it shouldn't become too lopsided a game. Seperating the non-combatant wizard from a party, or getting the queezy stomach character into miserable fort save situations. That should keep players on their toes even though they are two feats heavy.

 

[Ogrork the Mighty]

Great book, I recommend it. Flaws are pretty cool, IMO. I had a character who wanted to be illiterate (he didn't even know about flaws at the time) so I gave him the illiterate flaw which earned him an extra +1 to one of his skills.

Just don't let it be abused by players who take a bunch of flaws that won't come in to play just to earn bonuses (or make sure those flaws do come in to play).

 

[squat45]

Figured as much

Figured that flaws could get really powerful really fast... the good thing is that only 1 of the players in the group (total of 5 players plus me as a DM) has ANY of the books and the one who does only has the 3.0 rulebooks... so I can very easily control what, when and how things are done in my game - makes it VERY nice. As I've been reading some of the reviews of UA, I think that I'll get it because of the flaws, traits, honor and reputation ideas... I'll need to read up on these to get a better idea, but I'll be double aware to be careful of the flaws...

How about this, maybe Flaws can only be used to gain feats that can only be taken at 1st level... like some of the Feats from Forgotton Realms and the like... that way, you don't have a 1st level human fighter with 2 flaws getting a ton of feats that are all combat oriented - or allowing some of the feats like Athetic or the like that give bonuses to skills or something like that. It'd be nuts to have a 1st level human fighter with 5 feats, especially if they were all combat feats! I'll probably pick up the book tonight...

Thanks for all of the input.

 

[Silveras]

Great book, I recommend it. Flaws are pretty cool, IMO. I had a character who wanted to be illiterate (he didn't even know about flaws at the time) so I gave him the illiterate flaw which earned him an extra +1 to one of his skills.

Just don't let it be abused by players who take a bunch of flaws that won't come in to play just to earn bonuses (or make sure those flaws do come in to play).

But that's not the Flaws rules, that's the Traits rules.

Flaws and Traits are two different versions of the same kind of thing.

With Flaws, the player gets a BIG disadvantage, but his/her choice of 1 Feat to "balance" it. Like "Frail"; a Frail character gets 1 less hit point per level, and this can reduce the roll to 0. That earns the player an extra Feat.

Traits, on the other hand, are more "self-contained"; the bonus and the penalty are related, and come as a package deal. As Ogrork noted, "Illiterate" gives you a +1 bonus on any 1 other skill at the price of being unable to read.

I prefer the Traits for my games; with so many 3rd party sources producing Feats, it is hard to predict the problem combinations.

All of that being said, UA is a great book for adding options to a game.

 

[woodelf]

Figured that flaws could get really powerful really fast... the good thing is that only 1 of the players in the group (total of 5 players plus me as a DM) has ANY of the books and the one who does only has the 3.0 rulebooks... so I can very easily control what, when and how things are done in my game - makes it VERY nice. As I've been reading some of the reviews of UA, I think that I'll get it because of the flaws, traits, honor and reputation ideas... I'll need to read up on these to get a better idea, but I'll be double aware to be careful of the flaws...

How about this, maybe Flaws can only be used to gain feats that can only be taken at 1st level... like some of the Feats from Forgotton Realms and the like... that way, you don't have a 1st level human fighter with 2 flaws getting a ton of feats that are all combat oriented - or allowing some of the feats like Athetic or the like that give bonuses to skills or something like that. It'd be nuts to have a 1st level human fighter with 5 feats, especially if they were all combat feats! I'll probably pick up the book tonight...

Thanks for all of the input.

Two thoughts.
First, if you want a flaws system, may i heartily recommend The Book of Distinctions and Drawbacks--best implementation of a flaw system for D&D-ish D20 System i've seen. Though, depending on your group, you probably don't want to let the buying of extra levels with flaw points (as suggested as one option in the book). It's a much more comprehensive and flavorful system than the flaws or traits systems in Unearthed Arcana.

Second, watch out on only using 1st-level feats for the bonuses: a fair number of the 1st-level-only feats are actually more powerful than most other feats, under the justification that no character can ever have more than one (or sometimes two) of them.

Oh, and on the XP-for-flaws-in-play: just for the record, that's how Spycraft does it, and it's been a common rule floating around online, and implemented in several systems, for years, precisely in response to flaw systems like the old Storyteller. The new WoD game is just catching up with the times, not innovating. Not that it's a bad way to do it--it really does work much better, especially if you have power-gaming characters. Doesn't matter how many flaws they take, 'cause they're not getting extra feats/abilities/whatevers for them, and it doesn't matter if they don't play them, because they don't get the benefits unless they play them.

Oh, and on that topic, you might want to take a look at Spycraft to see how it handles "backgrounds"--very well done (along with eth rest of the book).

 

[Doctor Shaft]

Giving people the special regional feats may be a good idea, although it could be bad as well.

I don't think you should be overly leery of using the flaw system from UA if you want a quick and easy system to implement. Like many others are suggesting, it's not that bad if you monitor the flaws. It would be best to design your campaign and take into account their flaws, so that at least a few times players actually pay for having the character flaws they chose. The system really depends on both the player and the DM to divert some attention to the flaw, otherwise it just becomes a way to give your character great saves and reflexes.

If anything, I'd look at the bonus feats each person chooses, and just make sure that the flaw 'fits' the feat. i.e., Luck of Heroes as a feat might not really mix with a character that has a Flaw that makes him very unheroic, even if the flaw doesn't give a penalty to his saves.

 

[Li Shenron]

Looking at starting a new campaign in the spring/early summer and was wondering what the community here feels about using Flaws (I believe from Unearthed Arcana). Don't have the book, but there was an article in a Dragon magazine that had some flaws for Clerics and I thought that they "might" be interesting.

There are several little systems around to give a character one disadvantage in exchange to one advantage. Usually these systems (not that I have seen myself more than 3-4 actually...) scare some DM because they can be abused: if you can take the disadvantage in something you are already bad and wouldn't have used it anyway, you're not really worse than you already were.

However, the UA Flaws system - with some attention - does NOT carry that risk. If you read the existing Flaws in UA, you notice that most of them have these 2 properties:

(1) they carry a penalty which is larger than the bonus to the same thing given by a core feat
(2) the penalty applies to something the character cannot choose not to use

These together are the key IMHO to make the system very good. Things like saving throws, hit points, initiative, spot & listen checks, are something that you cannot really avoid to use when you need, therefore it is very hard not to be hurt by a -4 to Fortitude saves for example.
But, as I said, it needs some attention: already in UA there are some of the Flaws which are much more easy to exploit. For example, flaws that give penalties to melee/ranged attacks or to one ability by choice, or a few skills (other than Spot & Listen), can mean simply nothing to a character who would not use them anyway. E.g. a Wizard who doesn't use touch spells can afford a -8 Strength or a -100 on melee attacks with no consequences.

In conclusion, my opinion is that UA Flaws work well as long as you only allow those that give a penalty to a generic enough thing (which are indeed quite few), which means not even all the UA ones. That also means it's quite impossible to invent new ones.

(by contrast, UA Traits are much more easy for min-maxing, but at least the bonuses given are very minor)

Also, I have a handy little gift certificate to Borders and was thinking about picking up UA if it is worth it... What are the thoughts here? There seem to be some pretty good optional rules... but I may only use a couple of them.

This is the most common reason why several people shuns UA, that they are afraid not to use too much of it I understand, but I also use a very minority of each other book I have after all. UA has a lot of player's material, but for some reason the book carries an aura of "DM's use only" which makes people think the UA players' stuff is different from the stuff from the Complete books. This is something I understand less: why should the new races from Races of X books be more "legal" than the variant races in UA? Why should the new PrCl from Complete Y be more "acceptable" than the variant classes in UA? If you think about it, UA character material is much more balanced than the average stuff from player's book, simply because it is less far from core classes/races.

Anyway, I'd recommend the book much more if you're a DM of course, if you intend to play D&D for a long time, and if you run/play multiple campaigns at the same time (or after each other), because the point of the book is basically to change a few things at a time to achieve a distinctive different feel and strategy to different campaigns.

Or if you want to know more, you can check out my review