Ideal Number of Quirks

[Pragmatic]

Originally Posted by tbrock1031

I tend to look at the "five quirks rule" as a guideline, not a hard and fast Rule. I've had characters with only a single quirk, and some where they needed 7 or 8 to get the personality right.

Question: Did you continue to give points for personality quirks, if they had 8? Or did you stop at 5?

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by malloyd

Keep in mind everybody also needs to keep track of their disadvantages, the distinction between them and quirks is really arbitrary, and the GM needs to keep up with them for several players.

The problem with Quirks (and Perks) is that their low cost involves an increased risk of the being overlooked. I clearly halve that tendency, but I'm sure many others have a similar albeit less strong tendency.

[Sindri]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

The problem with Quirks (and Perks) is that their low cost involves an increased risk of the being overlooked. I clearly halve that tendency, but I'm sure many others have a similar albeit less strong tendency.

I think that's rarely true. Whether a trait is remembered depends on the number of other traits, how much of a divergence it represents from the player's natural playing style, whether it comes up enough to develop a habit of remembering it and whether it is advantageous and thus subject to "bonus hunting".

I find it difficult to grok the mindset of a player that looks at a trait and decides it is low importance to remember because of it's low point value. In fact point values are not generally thought about by players in my experience. It may be brought to their attention if they aren't often benefitting from a high cost ability but "I put 50 points in this, so I better remember it" is... weird. High cost traits often overlap with traits central to the character concept but otherwise it seems like the difference in attention trying to capture a +10 bonus is very slight compared to capturing a +1 bonus.

GMs are a sort of different story since they might reasonably focus their efforts on high value traits since they should come up more often or otherwise be more significant but the likelihood of them going to far in the other direction seems low.

Low cost traits mean more traits which does increase the chance of them being overlooked. That's not much of an issue for advantageous traits since they have an intrinsic push to being remembered but it could be an issue for disadvantageous ones. On the other hand a 150 point character can already have 15 seperate disadvantageous traits even if they stick to 5 point value ones and at higher point values it gets even greater.

[Pip Boy]

Five, I always use five.

Players can leave some open to fill during the game, but quirks above five don't give you points back in character creation.

[Not another shrubbery]

Originally Posted by Sindri

So what do you think the ideal number of quirks is? Is it 5 or is it something else?

I find five to be a good soft limit. I'll often allow more, and I usually prefer to see at least a couple to get a feel for a character.

[Phantasm]

Originally Posted by Pragmatic

Question: Did you continue to give points for personality quirks, if they had 8? Or did you stop at 5?

Quirks are -1 point each. Why would I give three of them for free? If someone has 8 quirks at character generation, that's a total of -8 points.

Sorry if that comes off a little snippy. I'm not sure why someone would assume that someone with 8 quirks would not be -8 on the character sheet.

[aesir23]

Originally Posted by tbrock1031

Quirks are -1 point each. Why would I give three of them for free? If someone has 8 quirks at character generation, that's a total of -8 points.

Sorry if that comes off a little snippy. I'm not sure why someone would assume that someone with 8 quirks would not be -8 on the character sheet.

It was a perfectly reasonable question.

It's quite common for people to view the limit on quirks and the limit on disadvantages to be a limit on the points you can get back, not a limit on how many you can take.

I myself rule this way as a GM. If your character concept requires 75 points in disadvantages and 6 quirks, and I've set the limits at 50 and 5. i'm not necessarily going to tell you that you can't play that concept (especially not if it's a good one). But I probably will tell you that you can only get 55 points back to be fair to the other players.

And people do take me up on it.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by tbrock1031

Quirks are -1 point each. Why would I give three of them for free? If someone has 8 quirks at character generation, that's a total of -8 points.

Sorry if that comes off a little snippy. I'm not sure why someone would assume that someone with 8 quirks would not be -8 on the character sheet.

Well, basically, I don't want someone to engage in the exercise of coming up with a list of a dozen quirks, or a score, and claiming a big extra load of character points for it. That's too much to keep track of in their play of the character. So I have a cutoff on how many points they can get for quirks. But if they really want an extra quirk, they can have one; they just have to play it for its own sake, not for the payoff in points.

Bill Stoddard

[Phantasm]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Well, basically, I don't want someone to engage in the exercise of coming up with a list of a dozen quirks, or a score, and claiming a big extra load of character points for it. That's too much to keep track of in their play of the character. So I have a cutoff on how many points they can get for quirks. But if they really want an extra quirk, they can have one; they just have to play it for its own sake, not for the payoff in points.

Bill Stoddard

I should probably have noted that I questioned the guy long and hard about taking that many quirks, just to make sure he wasn't trying to pull a fast one on me. I actually talked him down to 8 from 12, convincing him to turn three of the proposed quirks into regular disads, and dropping a fourth as it was essentially a feature.