Perk Limit

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Kromm

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.

Of course mages often have an enormous number of one point things on their character sheets, with no rules cap on them. Which admittedly does tend to slow up deciding what the character is going to do. And a lot of perks add less complexity than another 1 point skill.

Perk limits, like Disadvantage limits, are trying to do something with game mechanics that you probably can't. "This character is too complex to be playable" isn't something you are going to get out of trait counts or point totals - some abilities are much simpler than others. Though maybe you could get something out of number of column inches of text in the trait definition....

Anyway using the space for a couple paragraph of warning about the dangers of over-complexity rather than for complicated numerical rules would probably work as well or better.

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by malloyd

Anyway using the space for a couple paragraph of warning about the dangers of over-complexity rather than for complicated numerical rules would probably work as well or better.

You are absolutely right. However, numerical rules cause fewer player-GM arguments, because they can be objective and imposed by the game rather than subjective and negotiated by gamers. If there's one thing I know about game design, it's that arbitrariness is less disruptive of the game than vagueness. With arbitrariness, people come in here and yell at me after the game; with vagueness, they do that as well, but also get grumpy at their GM's interpretation during the game. Thus, I offer numerical rules whenever I can offer them (and wouldn't consider those for perks "complicated" anyway . . . not in a game system that appeals to fans of GURPS Vehicles).