Re: Heroquest thread
All of your charms are at 6W +1 which is 7W
your next lowest is therefore 6W.
Inquisitive 7W
Rules are for others 6W
They are certainly flaws that would come up often!
Good point though. I shall go ask the god learners.
Flaws
Many great fictional characters are defined as much by
their humanizing flaws as by their positive qualities. You
may assign up to three flaws to your hero. Common flaws
include:
Personality traits: surly, petty, compulsive.
Physical challenges: blindness, lameness.
Social hurdles: outcast, ill mannered.
Most flaws are assigned a rating equivalent to your
abilities. Your first flaw is rated at your highest ability, your
second shares the same rating as your second-highest
ability, and your third equals your lowest ability.
Certain keywords include flaws. Flaws gained through
keywords do not count against your limit of three chosen
flaws. All flaws after the third are given the same rating as
your third ability. You may designate flaws from keywords
as your first or second-ranked flaw.
When flaws manifest during play, the Game Master
places you in a contest against them, and uses the flaw as
the difficulty of your efforts to overcome the flaw.
This method applies to flaws that primarily present
the hero with additional obstacles to overcome.
Game Masters may decide during play that certain
flaws are better expressed as penalties to your attempts
to overcome other obstacles. Divide the value by 5 and
round down (a flaw of 19 imposes a –3 penalty). This
is appropriate where you specify that your ability to
solve problems drops under certain specific conditions.
Examples might include:
Hated by trolls
Always insulting to Lunars
Marked for death by Black Fang assassins
Can’t stand dogs
Cursed by a god.
When assigning numeric values to flaws, you can mix the
two types.
Some groups find flaws enormously useful in
humanizing their heroes. Another train school of thought
considers them unnecessary at best, and more often
actively troublesome. Often, heroes’ dominant flaws do
not appear on their character sheets; they arise more or
less unconsciously from the player’s style, in the course
of the story. The heroes may be played as, to name a few
common examples, cowardly, dominating, or reflexively
dishonest. Heroes with both imposed and spontaneously
occurring flaws are generally too unlikable to support the
dramatic weight of an ongoing story.
A worse problem with flaws occurs when a spotlighthogging
player uses them to exert control over the rest of
the group. Many so-called flaws are in fact fun to play, in
a very selfish sense. They exert more of a disadvantage on
the other players, who have to work around them to get
to their goals, than on the hero they’re supposed to harm.
Players who use flaws to stop the story and focus attention
on themselves shouldn’t find active encouragement for
their disruptions in the game rules.
Many so-called flaws are in fact abilities in disguise,
and should be treated as such. If being, say, vengeful or an
outcast can ever work to your advantage in a conflict, it’s
not a flaw, and can’t be had for free.
However, you might not realize that a flaw can be
useful. If during play what seemed only detrimental
could be of use, with Game Master approval you can
spend a Hero Point (see page 105) and convert it to a
regular ability for your character.
