>From: "Adrian Smith" <smudge1_at_...>
>
>I'm running a PBEM at the moment and a new character has just been
>introduced, the trouble is this is his 100 words;
Rory's got a good point.
By way of disclosure, I'm a player in Adrian's game, and so is at least one other person on this list.
Further I know the player in question, and I think that people are assigning some motives to the player that I don't think he has. In play he's actually a very story-driven player. I think that his narrative is simply pushing the boundaries, and I'm guessing that he doesn't know about the particular rule in question from page 20.
Put another way, if presented with the same "rules" for creating a character (sans the text on p. 20), I'd probably do pretty much the same thing. I'm a "min-maxer" too, and I think anyone who's not is crazy. If a system says you can do something, you should. That's not abuse. If the system doesn't work when min-maxed, then it's a crap system. That's an assumption of Von Neumann's 600 page Min-max Theorem, which is the foundation of the mathematical field of Game Theory. Somehow RPGs have gotten along for a long time with the notion that if the rules are broken, that you should just play as though they aren't, compensating for the system's inadequacies.
HQ isn't broken as written (it's actually rather sound). I think with the proper rules in hand the player in question will do just fine. Or perhaps he, like myself, would be more comfortable with the list method, as it has objective limits (though then you run into the problem of comparing between people who have used both methods, which they have in this case...).
Anyhow, the worst thing to do, in my opinion, is to "punish" a player for their enthusiasm by twisting the intent of the character. That's not to say that the player in question might not enjoy some sort of Krjalk taint or something; be careful what you wish for, lest you get it. Lots of players are happy to be "saddled" with such a "problem" as an excuse to have their character behave in all manner of bad ways.
Either way this idea always backfires. Two wrongs, you know.
Mike
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