Feats, Merits, and Flaws

I love merits and flaws, but not ALL of them.
For years I loathed all of the merits and flaws that said things like "at storyteller's discretion", because as the ST/GM you really have to plan your game around these things and that takes a lot of time.  Truth is, I'm starting to come around though. I'm beginning to think of character creation not as 'get the points down quick and scrub up a back story so we can play' but as a dialogue between the GM and the players.  It's really an opportunity to define what we want out of the game.

For years: I hated the Flaw: Dark Fate.  It's a White Wolf flaw that basically says that "something tragic" is going to happen to your character and he will fall and probably die.  I hated it for a few reasons:  first of all: no one wants their character to die.  What they want is the points for the flaw.  Second because I then had to plan what the Dark Fate was.  But I started thinking recently and I realized that if one of my players wants to pick Dark Fate maybe we should start talking about what that fate is and how we "WE" want it to play out.  Maybe in a werewolf game a powerful Shadow Lord player might willingly walk his player into a series of decisions that causes the character to fall to the wyrm and innevitably become my lead villain.  That's definitely worth the 5 points from Dark Fate and it's the kind of awesome gaming that I don't get to see a lot of.

If you or your players are not in a place where you're willing to share storytelling responsibilities in that way or can't compromise then you can always do what I used to do.  I used to ban any merit or flaw that did not have a specific system effect.  In essence it had to affect the way you rolled dice.

Now a feat is a merit (and I've actually seen negative feats as well) which is why I included them in this entry. 

What I did was to look at all the games that I have and choose the Merits, flaws, and feats that I felt worked.  I pulled from White Wolf games, 7th Sea, Dead Lands, and Dnd 3/3.5  The next problem is that not all point systems are created equal.  Some times you'll have to modify the way they work to fit into a D20 based system, but that shouldn't be too hard.  The next part which is a little more difficult is deciding how many points a merit or flaw would cost.  For the most part I decided that a feat would be worth 2 points.  So, from there I simply compared the merits and flaws to that scale and worked out how many points I felt it should cost.

It's subjective, but everything in gaming is subjective.  At some point the guys who wrote the game had to establish their base values and work off of them just the way that I am.  If you think a feat should be one point: go ahead, but then what happens when there's a merit that you feel is valuable, but doesn't do as much as most feats?

Also, going through those books took me a few hours, but was totally worth it.  I've also adapted backgrounds from White Wolf because I've always felt like those added a lot.  Again, there's some rules tinkering involved, but most gamers are pretty good at that.

Somewhere down the road I'll talk about my point spread for character creation so everyone can see how I plan to tie to together.