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Message: <blockquote data-quote="CapnZapp" data-source="post: 8162125" data-attributes="member: 12731">That's what I'm afraid of. Thank you for providing your opinion.Well, sure, but it's not that I need the mechanism for my own sake. The point of having them was to give the players the power to influence scenarios (I'll explain below).Absolutely, and I don't need to count points behind-the-scenes to track this.The purpose of having visible points was twofold:a) to have something with which to reward the PCs. If I'm not giving them gold, what then? How to give them a sense of reward? These are players not primarily interested in downtime, so the usual approach - handing out gold as per D&D defaults since the dawn of time, and expecting players to be interested in how much it costs to build a wizard's tower or start a thieves guild etc - doesn't work. They would only want to take all that gold and purchase magic weapons with it. (They would probably even want to ditch the intended adventure, instead spending all their free time finding and meeting a shady collector from which they could finally purchase magic weapons...!) Awarding not-gold would be a strong indicator that's off the table. Remember, I'm thinking of allowing crafting and/or requisitioning, in addition to good-old looting - so it's not that I'm planning an magic-item-less campaign.Also, my players are sufficiently minmaxing that if I hand them a tangible resource (like a point on a paper or a marker in their hand) they would not want to just ignore that resource. Their tendency to optimize would compel them to actually use the point, meaning to choose which exact luxury their character descends into. (If I don't hand out something, there's a higher risk they try to stay out of every situation where a NPC can get power over them - like the stereotypical fantasy paladin murderhobo <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />  - and this campaign is not about completely rootless flawless killer heroes)b) give the players a say in what adventures that happens. That is, by putting luxury points into "wife and family" you send the signal to me the GM you want adventures revolving around that while by putting points into "supernatural mistress" you send a completely different signal. (Actually maybe the signal is the same but for different content, or at least the same adventure but from another starting point). And of course I would love the player who puts points in both of those <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Sure, but that's static. I would love a mechanism that continuously asks characters (and players) that, so story seeds keep generating themselves. Equally importantly, I am not sure gold as reward is good if you can't purchase magic items for it (and if you can, you will, and I can no longer use gold for temptation - as explained above).I am toying with the idea to hand them a free archetype (<a href="https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=1333" target="_blank">Free Archetype - Rules - Archives of Nethys: Pathfinder 2nd Edition Database</a>) but with the catch they need to come up with one relative or other NPC for each free feat they want out of that variant rule.So one player could say he's got a wife named Nelly working as a nurse, attending knitting parties in her free time. That's one. My immediate reaction would be that this is not the description of an adventurous soul, so I would probably not have her attend secret rituals. She could still be kidnapped by cultists, however! More importantly, if the PC then gets seduced by a Succubi or whatever, I have "story tension" I wouldn't otherwise have if the PC was single. Then he declines free feats for his children, sending the message to me they are to be out of bounds (no threatening them). He can still name them of course: Dudo, Eldron, and cute little Hilda. But since the player declined free feats for them, I will abide by an unwritten agreement not to have them kidnapped by cultists (for example). For his second feat he chooses an old mentor Steinitz the Elf who's fallen on hard times (somehow, perhaps I the GM can come up with a story where the motivation is the fate of this guy). And so on, for the four or seven feats or whatever that the archetype will eventually grant. (You need to come up with the NPCs now, but you only get the feats at the respective levels as expected).</blockquote>

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