>From: David Dunham <david_at_...>
>
>When I run, any time they want. It's not like they can do this very
>long, after all. (Part of my logic for this is that I want the
>character to be better defined as soon as possible.)
I allow players to purchase abilities with HP at any time they want, even. Using the "I had it all along" argument, or the "he just spontaneously developed it" argument, or even no argument at all. Even in the middle of a contest, I allow players to sprout abilities pertient to the contest. After all, I allow it with As You Go characters, so why not with HP?
I also, in practice, never charge for the "unrelated to play" double cost. As far as I'm concerned, if a player wants it, it's related to play for this purpose. Tailor your interpretation of this to suit your needs.
I agree with David that it's important to learn as much about the character as you can in short order. So I push folks to spend their As You Go points (same as the list method), as quickly as possible. But, that said, I don't push too hard, I guess, as I've had players go a dozen sessions or more without fully building out their characters. It's less important to have "complete" than it is to have "interesting" in my experience. Which means that even with half the character filled out, you might have what you need.
I also take gaps in a character as an opportunity to play to those gaps. That is, if I don't know much about the character's homeland, I might have a scene where somebody asks the character about what his homeland is like. Then we take the resulting discussion, and assign abilities from it. That sort of thing.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say that introduction of characters As You Go has a superior feel to me. It's more like how you find out about a character in a book, as you read along. You "discover" the character in play, and they tend to mold themselves to what's going on better.
My reason for pushing, as David indicates, is to get enough information about the character to be able to provide conflict that impacts the character in specific ways. Until you have that data, you're stuck using very general conflicts such as basic survival and the like.
Mike
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