One social trait, multiple society?

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by kdarc

How should this be handled? And especially in regard to when players deal equally with several cultures? In the example from above, should a mage from the accepting society buy Social Regard and a mage from the other buy Social Stigma? I don't want my players to feel cheated for buying certain advantages.

You're probably going to find this frustrating, but there will be a detailed treatment of this in GURPS Social Engineering, with at least a couple of different options. The quick summary is that you should normally pick a reference society, and define the cost of traits in terms of that. The proper choice of reference society is the one where the campaign will mainly take place.

All the characters in a given campaign should be defined in relation to the same reference society. For example, if you were running a campaign set in 1910, where one of the characters was a lord of the jungle raised by apes, and another was a renegade Martian allied with humans, you would give the jungle lord Low TL 6 [-30] and the Martian High TL 3 [15], both in relation to the TL6 society around them. How they were regarded by the apes or the other Martians is irrelevant; the campaign isn't set in Africa or on Mars.

Bill Stoddard