Quirks, Perks and Flaws

Attributes and skills say what a character can do. These say who they are — and they are what turns a stat block into a person. A quirk is small and two-sided and free; a perk is a clean advantage you paid for; a flaw is an outright bummer nobody chose. All three work the same way, and the chapter is called Quirks because that is what you will look it up under.

The three

All three are permanent, all three are narrow, and all three emit the same thing: a modifier with a target (what rolls it touches), a scope (when), and a combine (how it interacts with its relatives). That is deliberately the same shape as a piece of equipment — a quirk is a modification to a person, the way fine is a modification to a sword.

Take up to three quirks. More and the character reads as a basket case rather than a person. Perks come from templates, background factors and intrinsic factors — not from the quirk allowance. Flaws aren't taken at all; they're decided, usually by the GM and the character's history together.

Two tests, and they point opposite ways

A quirk is a trade, so the drawback has to actually bite: Weakness for the Ladies that never costs you anything is a perk you didn't pay for. If you cannot name a session in which the bad half would have hurt, it isn't a quirk.

A flaw's compensation runs the other way: nobody may ever want the deal. However the years were redirected, a blind person would still, in almost every case, rather not be blind — and that has to stay true after the compensation. The moment it doesn't, the flaw has a price, and a priced flaw is one you go shopping for.

So: would the drawback bite? yes. Would the compensation tempt? no. A quirk failing the first is a perk; a flaw failing the second is a purchase.

Flaws pay in capacity, never in currency

A flaw grants no points. It is not a trade and there is no good half.

But it does leave a mark on the build, and it should. It genuinely makes sense that someone blind from childhood concentrated on the things blindness doesn't cripple — and had more hours to spend on them. The question was never whether that's real; it's what it's denominated in.

Points are the wrong currency, because points don't remember where they came from. Grant them and blindness funds marksmanship by way of the character sheet. So the compensation is denominated in the thing a flaw actually costs: time. ForeSight already measures a life in years — background factors are years lived, fields are four points a year — so a flaw is an argument about how those years went, and may justify one field, or one familiarity, GM-approved, in an area the flaw doesn't touch.

Never in a skill, and never routing around the flaw's own domain. One field is nowhere near tempting enough to buy blindness with, which is exactly why it's safe.

This is the same exchange as age, and should read the same way: capability for capacity. A fifty-five-year-old with four more background factors and a bad knee is a better character than a twenty-five-year-old, not a worse one.

Designer's Note: ForePlay (2015) priced flaws at an attribute point or two skill points — and then apologised for it in the same breath: "this isn't intended to be a store: design the character you want; sometimes a weakness is just a weakness." That caveat was already the right answer, so the price tag goes and the sentence stays. The consequence is a large simplification: because no flaw is purchasable, blindness and haemophilia never have to be costed against each other. There is no flaw point table to build, balance or argue about — a whole chapter other systems carry that this one simply doesn't.

Families, and the one question that settles stacking

Quirks come in named families, and a family carries its own combine rule. This is not filing convenience — it is what stops a GM adjudicating stacking case by case at the table.

Default: within a family, best applicable only. They do not add.

That matters because +1 EF is worth roughly your whole Score in the sweet spot, so anything additive dwarfs the skill it modifies. Same rule as tools and armour, same reason.

A family is defined by what it touches, not by what it cost — so one family spans all three carriers. Endurance holds a perk (built like a Kalenjin distance runner), several quirks (sprinter versus marathoner), and a flaw (a condition that guts your stamina across the board). They're one family because they modify the same rolls and so need the same combine rule.

The exception, and the question that decides it: family members that aren't on the same axis do stack. Striking and Scarred are both Appearance, but they are not two ends of one dial to be netted off — a face can genuinely be both, and they fire on different audiences and different readings.

Do these two fire on this roll for the same reason? Same reason → take the best. Different reasons → both apply.

That question is answerable in a second, which is the only standard that matters at a table.

The five families

Appearance — what people see first, and how differently they read it. Not one axis: observers agree at the extremes and diverge sharply on type.

• Striking (quirk) — a face people look at twice. +2 where being noticed and remembered helps; −2 where you needed to be forgettable, and you don't get to be nobody in a crowd. Name the audience: striking in a particular way, and here is who it works on.
• Well-turned-out (quirk) — good clothes, good teeth, the accent. +2 where someone is deciding whether you belong; −1 anywhere that reads as money, where it marks you.
• Plain (quirk) — +1 blending in and being underestimated; −1 making a memorable first impression.
• Nondescript (quirk) — +2 blending into crowds, +1 reading people; −1 making memorable impressions.
• Scarred, Disfigured (quirk → flaw, by degree) — −2 on first impressions with the appropriate audience. A quirk pays it back one way, chosen once: you learned to suck it up (+1 on WP-flavoured tasks), turned it into a joke (+1 Charm), or gained insight (+1 reading people). A flaw does not pay it back at all.

Empathy — reading people. PC is the spine; these are the deviations, and the family exists because empathy is perception of people and neurotype moves it hard in both directions.

• Reads People (quirk) — +2 PC reading people and detecting lies; −1 PC noticing physical detail while you're doing it.
• Oblivious (quirk) — −2 PC reading people; +1 sustained concentration, and most social pressure simply doesn't land.
• Face-blind, no theory of mind (flaw) — the thing PC does for everyone else, it doesn't do for you. Routes capacity hard: there is a reason this character knows the timetable, the ledger or the machine better than anyone.

Endurance — the rolls that were EN's before the attributes went to five: exhaustion checks, Pain Resistance, convalescence, shaking off a stun. WP carries them now; these say how.

• Deep Reserves (perk) — +1 EF on exhaustion checks. Built for distance.
• Hardy (quirk) — +1 EF resisting cold, hunger, poison and disease; −1 on anything requiring a turn of speed.
• Conditioned (quirk) — +1 EF on exhaustion checks while fit; the catch is that it is maintained, and lapses when the training does.
• Hardened (quirk) — +1 EF on Pain Resistance and shrugging off a stun; −1 where someone needed you to show you cared.
• Weathered (quirk) — +1 EF on exposure and going without; −1 on convalescence, because the body is already running a deficit.
• Sprinter / Marathoner (quirk, either way) — +1 EF at your distance, −1 at the other. Both are Endurance; they fire for the same reason, so they never stack.

Coordination — CO is the spine; these are the sub-capabilities that must not become attributes.

• Nimble-fingered, Graceful, Remarkable Agility, Sleight of Hand (perk, narrow) — +1 EF in one named kind of movement.
• Corrected Vision (quirk) — fine with your glasses; lose them and it's −2 on anything at distance.
• Short-sighted, one-handed, blind (flaw, by degree) — a flaw names what it closes off, and the capacity goes somewhere the flaw cannot reach.

Age — the same capability-for-capacity exchange as a flaw, arriving with time rather than history. Age quirks are acquired, not purchased, and grant no points: ageing already pays in the other direction, in background factors, fields and skill. Two shapes — standing (it is simply true of you now) and intermittent (it fires on a trigger) — written out in Ageing, below.

Chronic conditions — four lines, and you're done

A condition is a quirk or a flaw depending on what the fourth line says. Write all four:

Attach — which rolls it touches. Trigger — what brings it on. Effect — what it does when it fires. Management — what holds it off, and what happens when that isn't available.

The management line is the one that decides the carrier. Manageable with something a character can reasonably carry is a quirk — the drama is the day the inhaler is in the other coat. Unmanageable in this setting is a flaw.

• Asthma — attach: exhaustion checks. Trigger: cold air, dust, smoke, hard exertion. Effect: −1 EF on the check, and a failure costs an extra exhaustion level. Management: an inhaler, used in time.
• Haemophilia — attach: wounds and convalescence. Trigger: any wound. Effect: −2 EF on convalescence, and a wound that would normally close keeps bleeding — treat an untreated wound as one level worse after a scene. Management: clotting factor, where the setting has it. Without it, this is a flaw, and in most settings it is a severe one.
• Insulin-dependent diabetes — attach: the exhaustion track. Trigger: a missed meal, or no insulin. Effect: start the scene one exhaustion level down; no insulin and it worsens each scene. Management: insulin and food on a schedule, which is a logistics problem for the whole party.
• Chronic pain, an old break — attach: Pain Resistance and agility tasks. Trigger: cold, damp, the first hour of the day. Effect: −1 EF while it's up. Management: warmth, movement, and something for it.
• Epilepsy — attach: whatever you were doing. Trigger: sleep lost, a missed dose, a strobing light — and a GM should let the trigger be visible before it fires. Effect: a seizure ends the scene for you, and you come out of it at an exhaustion level or two. Management: medication, kept up. In a setting without it, a flaw — and in most historical ones it was read as something other than illness, which is a social effect, not a mechanical one.
• Severe allergy — attach: nothing at all, until exposure. Trigger: the allergen, which the player names. Effect: exhaustion levels fast; true anaphylaxis runs on the wound track instead and is minutes, not hours. Management: avoidance, which the party has to help with, plus whatever the setting's adrenaline is. The cheapest quirk to carry and the worst to carry badly — which is exactly the shape worth having.

Severity means writing it twice, not adding a dial. Mild and severe asthma are two entries — and often the mild one is a quirk while the severe one is a flaw. The same goes for the degree ladders above: Scarred and Disfigured are two entries, not one with a knob.

Intermittent conditions must hang off something already in play — never their own timer. Tie it to weather, exertion, an exhaustion level, or a roll someone is making anyway. Anything that asks the table to track "is it flaring today?" will be quietly dropped, and then the character sheet is lying.

A wound that heals badly becomes one of these. Convalescence that goes wrong is the commonest way a character acquires a chronic condition mid-campaign — same four lines, written at the table.

Ageing — the family you don't buy

Nobody spends points to get older, and nobody is paid for it. Age quirks are conferred, by the same route a background factor can be conferred after creation: at downtime, the GM hands one over, and it is simply true from then on. One at a time, and never retroactively.

The compensation is real, and it is not written next to the drawback — it is the rest of the sheet. This is the one place where the usual quirk shape doesn't apply: a 55-year-old's fields, familiarities and skill levels are what he was paid for the stiffness, and he was paid in the only currency ageing deals in, which is time. So an age entry looks one-sided on the page, and isn't. (It is also why age entries grant no points: that would be charging the character twice for the same decade, once in years and once in build.)

Standing — it is true of you now.

• Stiff — −1 EF on agility tasks and on running speed. The commonest first one, and the one players feel.
• Long-sighted — −1 EF on fine close work; nothing at all with reading glasses, which makes it the Corrected Vision shape and the day you lose them a scene.
• Hard of hearing — −1 EF on PC where hearing carries it, and −2 in a noisy room. People repeat themselves, and you miss what was said behind you.
• Slow to mend — −1 EF on convalescence. The wound that cost a young character a week costs you a month, which is a campaign-level fact rather than a combat one.
• Winded — the first exhaustion level comes one push earlier than it used to.

Intermittent — it fires on a trigger, and the trigger is never a clock. Each of these hangs off something already in play, for the reason the chronic-condition rule gives: anything that asks the table to check whether today is a bad day gets dropped.

• Arthritic — trigger: cold or damp. Effect: −1 EF on anything needing hands or fast movement, for as long as the weather lasts. The GM already narrates the weather.
• An old break — trigger: the first hard exertion of the day, or the first hit you take. Effect: −1 EF on that limb's tasks for the scene.
• A knee that goes — trigger: exhaustion level 2 or worse. Effect: running and agility tasks are −2 until you have rested it off. It attaches to a track someone is already moving.

Severity means writing it twice here too. Stiff and Arthritic are two entries, not one with a dial; so are Hard of hearing and Deaf, and the second of each pair is a flaw — which means it closes something off and routes the capacity somewhere the age cannot reach.

Attributes do not decay. Ageing is entirely quirk-borne, deliberately, for three reasons. A single number cannot say which rolls got harder, and age is specific — the hands go before the eyes, or the other way about, and that difference is the character. A decaying attribute makes a character worse at everything it feeds, including the things that in life get better with age. And a sheet that rots is a sheet a player stops wanting to pick up, which is the practical objection and probably the decisive one. If a campaign genuinely runs for decades and the table wants an attribute lowered, lower it — but as something that happened in the fiction, not as a rule the rules make you apply.

(The young end of the same idea needs no mechanics at all: a sixteen-year-old's disadvantage is a short field list and a thin background, which the point economy already produces.)

Writing your own

There is no list to pick from; the ones above are examples, and a good quirk is specific to the character. Build one by analogy: name the family, write the two halves, and check it against the two tests. If it has no bad half it's a perk and costs points. If nobody would ever want the deal, it's a flaw and grants nothing. If you can't say which rolls it touches, it isn't a quirk yet — it's a personality note, and those are free and need no mechanics at all.

Designer's Note: these used to be attributes. Endurance and Appearance each had a column, and the argument for cutting them was not that they don't matter — it's that neither is one number. Appearance asserted a total order on faces, which is not what the world looks like; Endurance had a genuine central axis but drove no skill formula, so nothing on the build screen ever showed a player what it was for. A family fixes both: a quirk can say striking in a particular way, and here is who that works on, where an attribute could only say 13. The general principle is worth keeping: attributes are for independent capabilities; quirks are for deviations from a correlated default. It is why exceptional eyesight and left-hand coordination don't get columns either.