Out of the Adventure Paths context, I’m not a great fan of Character Traits. They were created originally for the awesome Crimson Throne Adventure Path, giving little mechanic benefits for backgrounds linked to one of the campaign’s NPCs. The idea quickly took root, showing up in future Adventure Path Player’s Guide.
These Traits are also called “half-feats”, which gives a good idea of their mechanical potency.
The Advanced Player’s Guide
officially introduced Character Traits as a generic mechanic. And that’s my problem: without any connection to a campaign, I believe that Traits are practically useless, just more “rules inflation” on character sheets… but then I remembered Wolfgang Baur’s excellent idea about giving Aristocrat levels as a special reward (in the first Kobold Quarterly
).
officially introduced Character Traits as a generic mechanic. And that’s my problem: without any connection to a campaign, I believe that Traits are practically useless, just more “rules inflation” on character sheets… but then I remembered Wolfgang Baur’s excellent idea about giving Aristocrat levels as a special reward (in the first Kobold Quarterly).Character Traits could be an interesting way of giving lesser mechanical due to an adventure’s consequences (not always good consequences, please note that). They’re very specific and traditionally linked to campaign’s places, legends and persons. In other words: perfect. They could easily represent unique training, mystical initiation or even a bitter defeat.
Just another random thought provoked by long tedious hours of study.
I like the idea.
ReplyDeleteThink deserves more speculation about!
I do like the idea of traits as rewards. That does have potential.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the commentaries! ;-)
ReplyDeleteMore speculation? Hmm… I find that hard, because I can only think of that as some sort of concrete example. I believe that any attempt to give traits limited by level or any other rule would by counterproductive, as they would work better after some kind “milestone” was reached in the campaign.
For example, in my Pathfinder campaign the party’s monk/sorcerer recently manipulated a powerful gate from a Far Realm nexus to lead the group back to the material plane. It was a great idea that I hadn’t predicted, but it worked. I could give him a trait “Touched by the Outer Planes”, giving him a +2 caster level bonus to any teleportation spell (or any dispel attempt against teleportation).
A hypothetical example now: the party rescues and old dwarf warrior after a harrowing underdark journey. The old dwarf could tech the party’s fighter a new fighting style with the pike or axe. If using such weapons against armored enemies the fighter can ignore a maximum of 2 armor bonus to AC, to represent strikes against the weak points of the protection.