Quote:
Originally Posted by dataweaver
Got it; love it. A few observations:
1. There's no reason that I can see to charge double for buying an Extra Life retroactively. In order to do so, the character in question needs to have 25 unspent character points available to him; this is no different than the character who pre-spent them on Extra Life, with the sole exception that said points can't be used for Impulse Buys ‒ and even that's not true if the GM is willing to let the player Sacrifice the Extra Life in order to free up the points for other purposes. In effect, Extra Life isn't so much an Advantage as it is a Declaration of Intent.
|
Ooh! Ooh! I know this one! :-)
The problem is that if you allow the rules for sacrificing abilities (p. 5), you don't even need to have 25 unspent points kicking around; the door's open for the hero to sacrifice his abilities for the points he'd use to buy Extra Life. In other words, in theory,
every character becomes "ablative" in a campaign where death is a concern and Extra Life costs the same at character creation or bought on the fly. If you don't impose some kind of penalty, then no one would bother to "shop ahead" for Extra Life; you'd simply scrape the points you need from abilities on your character sheet (since "built on 225 points and still alive" is a better deal for most folks than "built on 250 points but dead").
This issue isn't eliminated entirely by doubling the cost of Extra Life, but it at least introduces a gulf between someone who plans ahead to die and those who scrape up the points at the "last minute."
This isn't to say you can't impose whatever rules you want in your campaign, but (IIRC from the review process) that's the rationale there.