Should all handicaps have an upside??

[garhkal]

OK lets say you are making a template to please a player who wants to mimic that blind monk seen in Rogue one.. SO you make a handicapped monk, who's good in dex/str, but cause he's blind he has penalties to all vision based skills..
Should he also have bonuses elsewhere that wind up being a 'negative sum' (meaning all things equal out), so he's not actually penalized?
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[Solo4114]

What about starting off not being blind, but being a monk. He could have some hand-to-hand abilities, maybe a vague affinity for the Force somehow, but not be anything close to a Jedi. After losing his sight, he gains additional force prowess that maybe enhances hand-to-hand combat. His other senses compensate -- some -- but maybe he handles things like blaster usage at a one or two D lower level than he would have if he could see.

Chirrut's ability with his bow weapon, for example, seems like the kind of thing he'd be tapping into latent force abilities for, but without using those, he'd just be, well....firing blindly.

I guess the other way to handle it might be to do tougher difficulty rolls for him. So his raw skills are what they are, but to pull of anything that relates to sight where he isn't using some kind of "Force sense" or whathaveyou would be at a much higher difficulty roll.

[Bren]

I think I would first have to think about what is the goal?

Am I trying to emulate how being blind would effect a fighter? Or am I trying to design a template so someone can play a Zatoichi-inspired character like Chirrut? If the latter its probably a situation where the character is better than a normal fighter if he can use the Force or be in touch with the Force and worse than a normal fighter if he is not in touch.

Then I'd need to consider whether Chirrut is supposed to be a beginning PC with +7D in skills and only 2 Force Points or whether Chirrut is a PC with more than +7D in skills (maybe a lot more) and 5+ Force Points. In the latter case a starting PC is going to be a lot weaker than an advanced Chirrut-style PC and the beginning Chirrut type will only able to do what Chirrut does on a lucky roll for Concentration and/or the 2 rounds per adventure where he can use one of his 2 Force Points.

[garhkal]

[Naaman]

I think d20 does a fair job of acknowledging that a "handicap" is only fun to play when things like loot and critical hits and other RPG-ish rewards are not affected (or else, are somehow compensated for).

Bottom line: the basic activity of any rpg is to roll dice and add numbers up hoping for as high a result as possible. A player who is constantly failing his rolls just because he chooses to "handicap" his character is basically going to lose interest in the game very quickly, unless there is some kind of gimmick that allows him to excel in certain commonly encountered circumstances.

The lack of sight is certainly a penalty, but if it takes away from the character's ability to participate in the action, then it will probably be a boring game.

In all honesty, the "blind monk" thing is almost too predictable to even be interesting to me. We've seen so many variations on it from someone who is just blind to fighters who are blindfolded and experience NO penalty to their fighting ability, even against hoards of opponents who can see just fine. Even the Daredevil show makes the character's blindness almost a joke (there is no apparent adaptation to his blindness: he just fights and moves just as if he could see).

Having said that, if the player wants to play a blind monk, I'd say just rule that he can't see anything, but is otherwise completely unhindered in terms of his movements, combat, trip hazards, dodging blasters, etc. since that is actually what the player wants (but he just can't read signs or recognize a tattoo or identify colors or other visual cues).

[garhkal]

So in essence, any handicap must be balanced out or give more than it takes, otherwise no one would play with a handicap. IN that case why LET THEM play with a handicap in the first place/?
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[Naaman]

Well, what I said was simply that if he wants to be blind, just let him be "blind" insofar as he can't see things as long as it doesn't take away from the action or basic getting around.

So... what I said was actually a handicap with no upside, but the downside is just less than it would be for an actual blind person (i.e. he's not slipping on every banana peel or bumping his head on low branches, etc).

[Solo4114]

[MrNexx]

In a lot of ways, this is what more modern systems do with their virtue and flaw systems... set a points value on a drawback, and allow those points to be used to purchase benefits. Those might be more skill points, better attributes, or benefits that are neither of those.

In d6 Space, probably the closest Disadvantage would be Hindrance, which gives a total of +3 in modifiers to up to 3 different skills for each creation point. It can be stacked multiple times, with the limit being 10. 1 creation point buys you a skill die; 4 creation points buys you an attribute die. If you went whole-hog on this hindrance, you might find 3 skills and declare that your blind person has +10 difficulty on those... or you might go with 6 skills to which they have a +5.
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[Bren]

[Naaman]

I've tried playing a blind guy before. It sucks.


Here's a recommendation for an acid test: if you created an NPC who was a "blind monk," how would you make it a challenge for the PCs without it being overly difficult or TPK, etc?

[Solo4114]

[Naaman]

I havent seen Rogue 1 yet, so I dont exactly get what you're referring to. TBH, after I found out Donnie Yen's character was blind, my interest in the character (and consequntly the film) diminished somewhat.

In any case, the play style really dictates what power level the PCs can reach. I've played in campaigns where a single character would have given Vader a run for his money... and the party would have easily stomped him in a round or two. The campaign wa epic fun, starting from RAW character gen getting up to rolling boat loads of dice per action.

HowcomeVader never came after us? Maybe he was too scared... or realized it was a battle he couldnt win, etc... who realy cares? Rhe point is that our characters were THE heroes of that particular time: we werent living in Luke's or Obi-Wan's shadow. Without our characters, the rebellion would have been crushed long before Luke ever grew up. But it takes epic heroes to foil the advance of the empire long enough for "A new hope" to arise.

Rogue One is merely a cannonized tale of the most played-in era

[Naaman]

And I said all that to say this: the player who chooses a handicap probably wants one or both of the following:

Some epic heroic ability for which he is willing to take a significant penalty (for the sake of "balance").

Or he just wants something a little different and intriguing (although the blind monk thing is little other than a trope, IMO).

So, I'd say, let theGM decide what is an appropriate trade-off for whatever special ability the player wants the character to have (blindness may be the cost of whatever the ability is).

[garhkal]