My main problem with reducing with reducing a character's points in character generation has to do with how I perceive the socio-economic situation of Mythic Europe.
In effect, the majority of the population appear to live just above subsistence level. If a region has bad year, then you start to lose the population, mainly starting with the most vulnerable - ie the crippled and others who can't support themselves sufficiently. I would put characters with reduced skills in there.
To support a character that can't pull their weight implies a level of luxury that few live in. Perhaps the King can support his idiot brother, but how likely is such a family embarrassment to be relegated to somewhere out of sight, say a religious order? Where the idiot will have to assist with the communal tasks, unless the King (or whichever patron) makes it worthwhile for the abbey to support the idiot.
Though the village idiot who is as strong as a horse and tough as an ox, and can follow directions with sufficient supervision would probably be considered to be able to pull their own weight.
Perhaps I am over thinking this. Not everywhere is like Ancient Sparta where they expose deformed infants to the wild.
But then again there is the tale of Hansel and Gretel - the archetypical tale where the parents have to get rid of the extra mouths they can't feed. However, Hansel and Gretel were sufficiently competent to survive their abandoning. I would worry about less competent characters.
Basically I am saying, yes you can have flaws that produce Incompetency (slave forbidden to learn anything could be a possibility), but I expect that you would have to explain how they survived to adult-hood, and continue to survive. Probably require some Virtues that give them the luxury to survive while being a drag to the local economy.
Fair points, although the same could perhaps be said of characters with any of the existing Flaws that reduce Characteristics and Abilities. e.g. Ability Block, Poor, Poor Characteristics and Weak Characteristics, all of which one character could hypothetically have.
I think this has mainly to do with what most players will think of, and what they need the rules to help them remember.
Everybody understands that if you have -5 Sta (or Str) you cannot do an honest day's labour, not in the normal medieval sense of the word anyway. Either you have found some way to earn a living from mental capabilities, or you live off charity (or a combination). If you only live off pure charity, you are probably a liability on adventure too, so why bother playing such character.
What I think many players will forget is to select the abilities needed to survive between adventures. In the very first roleplaying games all PCs were full-time adventurers who never did an honest day's work at all. Raid an orc camp if you need something. In games such as Vampire, they aren't, but even so the ST system does not model all the abilities the characters would need to hold down a job. The system only models what's needed on stage, so if the player forgets a skill its fine, we just assume that the character has what's needed off-stage and focus on the adventurer skills.
ArM actually makes a point of long-term and off-stage, everyday activity and it models all the required skills. It has some mechanisms to force players into taking off-stage skills, like barring martial skills if you don't have a special ability, but it only works because you have so many xp that has to be put on legal skills. Remove some xp, and it is very hard for a player new to ArM to remember all the skills needed to make a character who can plausibly survive in the village. There is a case for more flexibility, because exceptional people do exist, but flexibility goes very poorly together with munckin genes.
I would disagree. A companion with 10 points of Flaws either has 2 Major and 4 Minor Flaws, or 3 Major and 1 Minor Flaws.
The following few steps yield a vast variety of 10-Flaw-points companions that are interesting and totally playable:
Give your companion a very, very strong inner fire. Ambition? Piety? Greed? Lust? Bravado? Take the appropriate Major Personality Flaw.
Decide some sort of stories that you want your character to experience. Has he an Enemy? Is she constantly falling in love / being chased by the wrong suitors? A past of Diabolism haunts her? Take the appropriate Major Story Flaw.
Decide another quirk of the PC personality/backstory, orthogonal to that in 1: not strong enough to drive all his actions, but strong enough to colour them. Take that as a Minor Personality Flaw. Maybe the PC is driven by Ambition (Major) but has also taken a Vow of chivalry (Minor). Maybe he is Pious (Major) but has a Weakness for drink (Minor). Maybe he is Greedy (Major) and Pessimistic (Minor).
At this point it should be relatively easy to choose either a Major Flaw, or three Minor Flaws, to complement the above or the character's Virtues. In many cases they will almost suggest themselves! E.g. a Greedy merchant who is Poor, a Pious monk who has True Faith but no Self-Confidence, or a Lusty never-do-well with a hundred Enemies among the cuckholded husbands who is Infamous, has some scar from a fight (Disfigured, Missing Eye), and has a Social Handicap (he ogles every woman in a way that offends everyone taking exception at such things).
ArM5 taught me a valuable lesson regarding flaws in TTRPGs...make them purely narrative.
The Story and Personality flaws are a great addition, and help provide a strong grounding both in the setting and to help define the 'character' of the character. The mechanical flaws suffer from every other TTRPGs system's flaws - they are easily abused and mostly pointless - players take them mostly in things they never intend to do - which means they are mostly a waste of page space.
Looking at nWoD 2.0 - Chronicles of Darkness, it handles 'Personality Flaws' as Anchors (Virtue & Vice for mortals, Mask & Dirge for Vampire etc) and 'Story Flaws' as Aspirations (you have 3 by default). These are completely unrelated to your 'points' at Character Creation.
In ArM5, I'd suggest the same - have magi/companions take a Story Flaw and 2 personality flaws, ignoring their 'cost'. and allow them to choose 10 points of Virtues. Players can then choose to have their characters have odd quirks etc if they want, as a narrative decision. For example, in my Arabic Sand & Sea dnd campaign I've just started, our Wizard, on their first session just decided he suffers from sea sickness. This led to some IC jokes and an interesting conversation with an alchemist they were delivering supplies to. He didn't get any 'points' for having this 'flaw' and in fact its costing him a little gold for the anti-sickness potions, but its good roleplaying and doesn't require any sort of mechanics...
I suppose it's a bit of an artificial constraint but then again I have never seen a game system that didn't require player characters all to be generated with the same amount of what I shall refer to for the sake of convenience as points. The WoD games, for instance, allocate the same number of Freebie Points to every PC. However... a radical re-think of the ArM system along roughly similar lines could be an option, i.e. PCs would get a certain number of points to add to Characteristics, Abilities, Arts, Spells and Virtues, which could be added to by talking Flaws.
7 points for characteristics
240 xp for Abilities and Arts from apprenticeship
120 points of spells from apprenticeship
120 xp for Abilities from childhood
? xp for Abilities from extra years before apprenticeship
0 points for Virtues
Which could be added to by taking (I'll assume that's what you meant! ) Flaws.
Adding something extra to any of these isn't so radical a change. Bring apprenticeship Arts to 150 and xp to 300, like the olden days? Sure. A few free virtue points? Ok. Force everyone to have a personality flaw and then give nothing for it? Fine. Combining the pool isn't that radical either, since various virtues and flaws let you shift things around.
A magus who has taken no virtues or flaws is quite viable, though less optimal and probably less interesting.
BTW, AM does provide for characters to be generated with different numbers of points. Grogs get fewer points. Mythic Companions get 2 virtues per flaw. Older characters start with more points.
Well... I'm quite content to use ArM5 character generation the way it is, but if I were to make such a change I would be wanting to give every PC the same amount of points but make the numbers allocations a bit more natural - I'd want to get away from the idea that everyone must have 7 positive points for Characteristics, for instance, as they could spend less from their total pool in order to spend more on other attributes, or vice versa, although I would stipulate that players couldn't spend more or less than particular limits for each category. Spending more or less on Abilities would reflect different characters' learning circumstances and make it a bit more like what happens after character creation - characters who have less points in Abilities maybe didn't have good teachers to learn from, and magi with lots of points in Arts or spells would be those who spent their apprenticeships in covenants with high auras and good libraries, or archmagi as parens. As you suggested, taking Virtues and Flaws would be desirable but not compulsory, except for the free ones gained from membership of the various Houses.
If I understand you correctly, 0 points for Characteristics is more natural than 7, and having a "total pool" is more natural than taking a virtue to get extra points for Characteristics (the current rules). And you also find it desirable to have extra rules to establish particular limits for each category even beyond the limits established by the current rules, which limit extra virtues to 10 (for magi) and better Characteristics to +3 per Characteristic (or +5, depending how you look at it) and Ability scores to some value based on age...
I'm not saying your aesthetic is wrong or that it leads to bad design! Other game systems work like this: GURPS, Hero, M&M... But it does tend to lead to a more generic design, less tailored to a particular setting, thus requiring extra work by the GM to impose various kinds of limit on different categories, which leads us back to something like AM (or Shadowrun, or D&D...)
Such as Improved Characteristics or Weak Characteristics if you want to move points between Characteristics and Virtues/Flaws? Such as Improved Parens or Weak Parens if you want to move points between Abilities/Spells and Virtues/Flaws?
Nothing at all. As I said, I use the ArM system as it is and see the Characteristic allocation system as a big improvement on ArM4.
No, that's not correct. I never said anything about 0 points. I would still suggest 7 points as a sensible average for PCs, and to avoid creating unbalanced characters with a slightly more freeform system I would advise spending a minimum amount on each category, which would probably be a bit more than 0.
With the system as it is no extra rules are necessary. With a completely re-worked system I think some different guidelines would be needed to give players an idea of plausible minimum, average and maximum amounts to spend on all their attributes.
Very likely you're right. I see no reason to change much myself, but if I did have a problem with Virtues and Flaws having to balance this might be one idea for addressing it.
If you think about it, they don't always have to balance. Magi get one free house virtue. Mythic companions get 2 virtues per flaw. You could always come up with a new house rule grouping with its own approach to virtues and flaw.
You are free to pick an amount of Flaws points (1, 2 or 3 if the character is a grog, up to 10 for companion/Maga).
Then you are able to choose that many Virtue points. But you may pick less Virtues than you have Flaws.
I’ve met zero players playing WoD games which have taken flaws without Virtues. Given most Storytellers require Virtues paid for with Flaw points, I can’t remember if you could buy Virtues with bonus points, so the only way to have a Virtue at character gen is with Flaws. Everything else you can get with xp later, so it makes no sense to take a flaw for a few extra char gen points. I’m serious, I’ve met no one taking flaws for char gen points.
So...
Requiring a Balace is at character gen with standard character gen rules. With games that do extremely detailed character gen rules this isn’t the case. You explain what initiations your character has undergone.
I believe it is possible though. As I recall Merits can be bought with starting Freebie Points and Flaws add Freebie Points that you could hypothetically spend on anything else. I can envisage taking Flaws in order to gain other Traits, and if I wanted something at a particular score I probably would. Ars Magica doesn't have a similar pool of points that you can spend on just anything like Freebies, although I suppose the Virtues and Flaws related to Characteristics and Abilities serve kind of the same purpose.
) Flaws.