Gritty Low Tech Urban Fantasy Campaign Recommendations.

[Kelly Pedersen]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I think that may not be necessary. When I ran the Worminghall campaign, with only 37 points for negative traits,

Certainly, you can fit some good characterization into less than -50 points. However, I don't think an extra -10 or -15 over -50 will break the campaign either.

Personally, I don't really ever use the "half the positive character points as the disadvantage limit" rule. I find it tends to produce rather ridiculous characters - even -100 for 200-point characters is pretty absurd, let alone -250 or -500 for supers-level characters. My own rule of thumb is to use -50 as the limit for "normal" campaigns where disadvantages are characterization, -75 for games where disadvantages tend to define the story (a campaign like Pmandrekar's idea here would fall into this, as well as things like a "Dirty Dozen" game), and I reserve -100 for games where the disadvantages are expected to be both defining, and individually fairly large - a classic "four-color supers" campaign, for example, where everyone's expected to have significant Codes of Honor, Pacifism, etc. to conform to "supers morality", and things like significant Weaknesses/Vulnerabilities, or severe "origin trauma".

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Kelly Pedersen

Certainly, you can fit some good characterization into less than -50 points. However, I don't think an extra -10 or -15 over -50 will break the campaign either.

Probably not, but my experience has been that 20-25 points of negative traits is sufficient to do characterization.

Personally, I don't really ever use the "half the positive character points as the disadvantage limit" rule. I find it tends to produce rather ridiculous characters - even -100 for 200-point characters is pretty absurd, let alone -250 or -500 for supers-level characters. My own rule of thumb is to use -50 as the limit for "normal" campaigns where disadvantages are characterization, -75 for games where disadvantages tend to define the story (a campaign like Pmandrekar's idea here would fall into this, as well as things like a "Dirty Dozen" game), and I reserve -100 for games where the disadvantages are expected to be both defining, and individually fairly large - a classic "four-color supers" campaign, for example, where everyone's expected to have significant Codes of Honor, Pacifism, etc. to conform to "supers morality", and things like significant Weaknesses/Vulnerabilities, or severe "origin trauma".

I agree that that sort of thing is necessary, both for low-point characters (a 25-point character with only -12 points to use on negatives is severely constrained) and for high-point ones (as you suggest, if the campaign base is more than 200 points, getting more than 100 points of negative traits starts looking seriously over the top). But if you are not tying disads to point budget, the argument for a character point base in excess of 100 points becomes even shakier, I think. Even a character with 100 base points and 50 more points from disads to spend on positively valued traits is way above ordinary people in competence, and in a campaign about kids they're going to be over the top. Unless your kids are the Teen Titans or the X-men or the Young Avengers, I guess. . . .