On Fri, 15 May 2009, Brett Slocum wrote:

> I personally think that most of those paired Defects/Attributes should be of
> the same value, positive and negative. I would personally reduce the cost of
> the Attribute, not increase the cost of the Defects. It makes the costs
> fairer.

That would be a completely legitimate design decision, it just isn't the
way we decided to go.

One of the things we didn't want to do (you could look at this as a
fairness or balance issue) was to force all players to come up with
characters with a lot of defects just so they would be competitive. In
GURPS, if you're the one character who isn't a basket case
psychologically, you've got a *lot* less points than your fellow party
members.

Players almost always compete with each other, so if one guy takes an
Alcoholic, Brutal, etc. PC in GURPS then the others are forced to follow
suit in order to keep up. If the payoff for defects isn't that good,
then there's less pressure to take them -- they just become something to
do if you need to scrounge a couple more points to pay for Decisive or
something. In theory.

-- Joe