[DL] Starting off at lower power

["Douglas W. Moore" <dwm@a-net.email.ne.jp>]

I've been playing Deadlands for a while now both on paper and by email and
one thing kinda sticks in my craw. It seems that there is little significant
improvement to characters. Everyone can start off at a five in their most
significant skills and just seems to pick up ones and twos in their other
skills to round out their character.

Does anyone else feel this way? Wouldn't it be better to have the characters
start off as neophytes and have the thrill of increasing significantly in
power instead?

Here is one possible solution. I just started a Deadlands style game except
it is set in a fantasy world. What I did was to play the game pretty much
straight but I deleted a lot of the western aptitudes and added fantasy ones
in their places. but the most significant change was to lower the starting
skills a lot. First, instead of allowing starting bounty equal to Cognition
+ Knowledge + Smarts I made the characters subtract six from the final
result. Then, I only allowed the characters to buy up to a three or four in
any one aptitude.  Finally, if a character took the VOTWW he only got 8
points and still could not buy higher than a two or three.

The final result was very interesting. Not only were the characters far less
powerful than is the norm for Deadlands characters but they had a far
broader range of abilities as even the most min-max player had points left
over to spend on various aptitudes.

I look forward to hearing your comments on this.

Marshal DWM