[PnP] noob questions part IV - Bride of Noob Questions

[Burton Choinski]

On Sep 20, 2007, at 3:37 PM, Scott M wrote:

> ok, starting to wrap it up here I think, but a few other questions:
>
> 1) Do any of you use variations of character generation? I love the
> complete randomness of it and I like that everybody usually gets
> something about their character they don't like but have to role play
> around. Yet occasionally, someone wants to make some kind of magic
> user and gets a 3, 4, 5 in Intelligence, Will, and Empathy
> respectively. Have you guys had a lot of problems with over powered
> characters if, for example, you allowed your players to swap one score
> with any other score? Or allowed two sets of rolls and allowed them to
> choose the better?

Nobody wants to play Joe Loser, but it's always healthy to play  
someone with a defect -- in a homebrew game my brother ran (Not P&P)  
I rolled a character that was overall pretty good, with excellent  
stealth and agility, but absolutely no memory (one of the stats).  He  
offered to let me reroll it, but I went with it and had fun with it.   
My character was terrible with names (I would often call NPC's with  
names similar to, but not properly the name), kept asking the Gm to  
reiterate things as my character looked at his Palm Pilot that he  
had, etc.

In P&P, in normal games, we usually rolled 3 characters (complete,  
including any special attributes) and they chose the best of the lot.


>
>
> 2) When creating magic users, as they buy their initial spells, do
> they buy that at the "instructed" rate or the "alone" rate? Oddly, the
> book does not specify. On the one hand, characters would start with a
> whole lot of spells if they bought them all at the discount rate, yet
> the apprenticeship does seem like the very definition for instructed.
> So I'm curious what you all are doing.
>

I think we always used the "instructed" rate.  However, we had a  
house rule that you could only be a magic user if you rolled the  
special event or were able to qualify with your initial attributes  
after any starting adds.  Magic users were probably a bit rarer for  
our early games.