So… made a new character for my group today, the medic. Good character creation session - good player.

So. She's an old doctor, remembers the last year or so of the clone wars, she's been a doctor for the empire - now living in the outer rim doing good by doing bad so to speak. Betrayed by the empire and takes her doctors' oath to help sentients a bit too far sometimes.

Now, this might not be a question that comes up very often, but this character is old - not like REAL old, but old. She's also pretty frail. Basically, this human character should have a brawn of 1, to fully implement the frailty in game mechanic terms, rather than just a roleplaying gig.

At the moment we haven't lowered it, because I'm slightly at loss. Should I just giver her an extra 20 xp? 10? How would you compensate a player/character for deliberately wanting and desiring a lower stat in this way? It wasn't my wish or idea, and as of now I haven't allowed it - mainly due to not knowing how to treat such a decrease in characteristics.

20XP is what it costs to increase from 1 to 2, but since this is a voluntary decrease I was thinking that maybe 10XP would suffice, so not to encourage this sort of min-maxing… although I'm not certain any sort of compensation should be given.

If this is treated in the book - please direct me to page, I haven't found anything.

Jegergryte said:

I've thought on this myself a few times, but I'm not aware if it is in the book either. I think it would be a nice option. Maybe they could drop it in a text box as a "careful option" for GMs to allow. I think it is a very appropriate concept (some humans will just be weaker than average, for example), but it does create the dumping stat potential for players and GMs should be aware that it is going on.

Yeah, I don't think I would see a problem with requiring GM permission on something like this. You could refund her the 20 XP it would cost to advance the attribute from 1 to 2. I would refund the entire amount especially for brawn because it plays into soak.

If you wanted to represent a "frail" character without reducing attribs, you could say "for 5 xp, you have to roll an additional setback die everytime you have to make a Brawn check." or increase the difficulty of Brawn checks by 1, or upgrade all Brawn checks once. Whatever, really. There are a variety of ways to handle it via 'flaws' or other game mechanisms other than reducing attibutes.

-WJL

Oh lord, don't go down the merit/flaw system road. That's a can best left unopened. Reducing the characteristic would be a far simpler and elegant way of handing things like that.