So I recently picked up Cryptosnark Games'
The Book of Distinctions & Drawbacks, and I'm wondering how I missed this product's existence for over twenty years.
Now, PF1 is my "forever game," and I'm plenty open to mixing in 3.X and d20 Modern material, since they're so easy to convert (most of the time). Part of what I love about those "d20 System" games is that I'm a pretty big fan of transparency between PCs and NPCs; I know a lot of people hate building NPCs by the same metric(s) as PCs, but I love it.
However, this became a thing when I was recently trying to build an NPC that's blind. Not a "blind with compensatory powers/magic/special training" thing, but someone who was blind...only to find that
none of the drawbacks/flaws/defects sub-systems that I looked at made that possible.
None of them.
To be clear, the system has very clear rules about being
blinded, but leaving aside questions of why a
remove blindness/deafness spell wouldn't work (the answer being that the character was born blind), I couldn't figure out a rules-legal way to add that condition to a character (and was adamant about sticking to some sort of rules for character generation, rather than adding that condition via fiat).
Pathfinder's
drawbacks didn't allow for it. Neither did the 3.5
Unearthed Arcana's
flaws. Nor any of the third-party books of drawbacks that I looked at. Adamant Entertainment's
Character Drawbacks; Rogue Genius Games'
Christina Stiles Presents: Ultimate Options - Minor & Major Drawbacks; Purple Duck Games'
Player's Options: Flaws; Octavirate Games'
Octavirate Expansions: Character Flaws, and so many others. None of them made room for the possibility of total blindness.
I get that, as far as disabilities under the rules go, that's an incredibly severe one (or, alternatively, the aforementioned "compensatory powers" makes it into a functional non-issue), but I was still shocked to see just how many flaw-based supplements avoided that particular drawback...except Cryptosnark's.
Their book not only introduces various drawbacks that a character can have, it also has (in addition to a robust discussion of how to use flaws in your game) variable applicability for how severe most of them are, in terms of how many points you get for them (which can, in turn, be spent on other things as a balancing issue). It's an elegant solution, and an expansive one, allowing for the recognition that total blindness is worth a lot more than, for instance, simply being nearsighted. It was quite the useful supplement in that regard, and I'm quite happy to have picked it up at last.
Please note my use of affiliate links in this post.
