Perk Limit

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

It would be nice if Perks weren't overpowered to the point of needing extra rules to limit the number of them you can take. Styles wind up doing double duty as Unusual Backgrounds to balance the underpriced Perks.

Perks aren't overpowered; they're just cluttery. Letting a 150-point character have 150 perks wouldn't break much, if anything, but it would mean a messy character sheet and a five-minute wait before every task and decision concerning that player. Limits exist to curb this, and we phase in more perks at higher point totals and levels of investment in styles because (hopefully!) the player will have grown into the character and learned what's on the sheet.

It's a bit like letting someone take 50 quirks in a campaign with a -50-point disadvantage limit. Forbidding that is less about "unfair" than it is about "annoying and hard to roleplay." It's related to the reason why we got rid of half-point skills, too: Extreme generalists aren't overpowered or unfair, but they are rather sloggy in actual play. Most of the ones I saw were created by the sort of player who treated character design as a minigame and couldn't follow it up by actually acting out another personality in play.