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Old 07-01-2017, 02:06 PM   #8
Anaraxes
 
Join Date: Sep 2007
Default Re: What's my counterpoint for this observation about advantages/disadvantages?

CP are a completely meta game construct, and have nothing to do with realism or the internal logic of the setting. It has to do with players, fairness, and trying for interesting tradeoffs in character design, rather than just throwing in a bunch of Mary Sues that can do everything and have no flaws.

The statement "just because I'm filthy rich, I can't be as capable as the random guy down the street" is half right. The half that's wrong is that "the random guy down the street" doesn't have 150 CP in the first place. (Normal people are more like 25 by RAW.) The PC already has 125 extra CP just because they're a PC -- which also has nothing to do with realism.

But that aside, there's still a tradeoff because making choices in the face of limited resources is what games are all about.

One classic example would be a character that was some sort of super-race -- maybe an ogre warrior, because ogres are all naturally huge and tough, or an elven wizard, because elves are all smart and magical and have lived hundreds of years, giving them lots of time to study. If the characters pay for all those advantages, then among the PCs, the ogres are either very unskilled by comparison, or sell down their natural attributes making them really small and wimpy ogres. (This point can even be used as a reason why that character would waste his time hanging around with inferior humans. The real ogres laugh at his pathetic weakness, but at least the humans are still impressed.) If the GM ignores racial Advantages because having such makes that race look bad (in PC terms) rather than better, then it's free points, and no one would ever been the (presumably normal) human. (Then you wind up having to create exactly equal race packages, point-wise, which contradicts the initial assumpton that there's some super-race available as a PC. All races are equally super.)

But the notion that the PCs are a reflection of the average member of their species is the incorrect one. In most games, PCs are unusual heroes. They're already breaking the statistics -- in cinematic games, often by huge or impossible margins. There are occasionally games where the humans are supposed to be utterly normal (usually some sort of horror or stranger-in-a-strange-land scenario), but those are the exception in RPGs. (People get to be normal every day. They don't need to play an adventure game to be normal all over again.)

So the player's argument doesn't make sense because its assumptions are twice wrong. The tradeoff faced in character design isn't reflective of most inhabitants of the world, or an actual in-setting, visible, law of nature, and so can't be accused of conflicting with the in-setting laws of nature; and whatever laws of nature those are don't even apply to the PCs in the first place, which is one reason that they are PCs involved in the interesting and heroic stories rather than being one of the countless faceless mooks of the setting.
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