Tiffa/FlawsAndMerits

Revisions of some merits or flaws, and whatever new one comes to mind.

Unlucky and Lucky

There are people that are blessed with good luck, or cursed with bad luck, with nothing going their way.

Then there are people that are fairly normal... EXCEPT in certain situations.

An alternate rule to the Lucky merit and Unlucky flaw I propose would be to specify how is the character's luck in specific situations. However, ANY and all such specifications must be closely related to the character, to prevent twinking. No having bad luck while sailing when the character will never get into a boat!

The cost of the merit and flaw are the same.

Example 1

Star Chaser is an inventor and an engineer wannabe who dreams of reaching the stars. She's fairly smart and has some solid idea in how to create a flying machine... but everyone of them seems to blow up on her.

She has the Unlucky (things she builds blow up on her) flaw. Let's just say that Star hasn't been allowed near a kitchen since she was 6. Maybe she's overenthusiastic or something, but Star somehow manages to screw up at the last minute, or she miscalculated an equation, or SOMETHING.

However, she has the Lucky (surviving said explosions) merit, which means that while she gets into a lot of accidents, she's never seriously injured in them. She has learned to see and hear when things are about to fail in a catastrophic manner, and get the hell out of the way before it happens. If the ST allwed it, she might even have said merit to survive OTHER explosions, besides those created by her own mistakes. Her body knows how respond to them already.

Example 2

Gin is a mighty warrior, strong, compassionate, and skilled. He has enough skill in him to defeat an army by himself, without having to kill a great number of them. In battle, he is truly a warrior to be feared! However...

Gin also has the Unlucky (getting embarrased) flaw. He finds himself falling into the pitraps built by the children of a village after he just got done destroying a monster that hreatened it. In fact, he manages to fall into several of them, often in quick succession. He is in the wrong place at the wrong time when a bird flies overhead. He is the one that the flying fruit hits when a vendor's cart falls over. He is the one that gets the chair that collapses under his weight.

If he wasn't such a nice guy, he'd have probably snapped and killed everybody around already. Thankfully, his bad luck never gets him in direct danger, but it's hard to score a date when you have just been covered in mud.

Comments

I like the idea; having certain types of things just keep happening to you is amusing. But why the same cost? If Unlucky is only applying to these situations, it's less bad. If Lucky is only applying to certain situations, it's far less useful. I can't see why it would have the same cost. - FrivYeti