Flaws

[mattcolville]

Are there any rules laying around for Flaws? A friend wants to make a Raistlin-type character in a game and wants a really, really low STR. He'd like a correspondingly high int. Is there a d20 way to do this, apart from GM fiat?

 

[Crothian]

Point buy or just roll attributes and place the low on in strength and the high one in intelligence. Either works well.

 

[Skaros]

Not really. What sort of bonuses were you thinking?

Lower STR isn't much of a disadvantage for pure wizards, so I wouldn't give him much any boost for lowering his STR voluntarily.

If you are using point buy I suppose you could extend the point buy to allow lowering of stats below 8 on a 1 to 1 basis or something...

-Skaros

 

[Skaros]

If you really want to do something unusual for this guy you might head over into house rules and ask for help creating a template to slap on him. Perhaps +1 ECL with a boost to INT, and decrease in CON and/or STR, plus other benefits....call it gift of the magi or something.

-Skaros

 

[drnuncheon]

Some folks let you take 2 points from one stat to get 1 point in another. If you start with Str lowest and Int highest, that might serve.

'course, Raistlin also had a lousy Con.

In general, though, I think I'm glad to see a lack of Flaws/Disadvantages in D&D. I've played a lot of systems with them (GURPS, White Wolf, pretty much anything from that era) and they often tend to be point-cheeses. The good roleplayers are going to give their characters a personality anyway, and the bad ones don't bother playing the disads unless they're forced to (more work for the DM).

J

 

[mattcolville]

The situation doesn't really involve me, it's one friend in another friend's campaign.

The GM says "Roll 4d6, take the highest three, place." So there's no dock and add. What the player is looking for is some set of rules that cover flaws and advantages.

I'm kinda surprised no-one's done any for D&D.

 

[Crothian]

People have actually. I think there's a sort of system in a Kalamar book for instance. But this seems rather simple and the PC should be able to talk to his DM about it.

 

[drnuncheon]

The GM says "Roll 4d6, take the highest three, place." So there's no dock and add. What the player is looking for is some set of rules that cover flaws and advantages.

I'm kinda surprised no-one's done any for D&D.

Well, the Kalamar VillainD esign Handbook has "anti-feats", but I can't really recommend the way they handled it.

J

 

[thegreatbuddha]

Kinda out there response, but you could always use the HackMaster flws and roll up a HM character, then use the 2e-->3e conversion rules to convert the HM character to 3e(since HM is basically 1e/2e with extra crunchy bits thrown in). Apart from that, I know of no D&D or d20 rulebook that has rules for flaws.

 

[hammymchamham]

lower strength COULD be a problem for a wizard.

DM: You find a book containing many spells that are unknown to you
PC: Excellent! I pick it up
DM: Ok, you're now encumbered.