kintire said:
But it also means that you can never fall from grace, or lose that reputation, or indeed gain the glory illicitly. Or to be exact, and worse, it means you can do that, but whether you do or not is decided by the dice, not the player.
A player can choose to reduce the value of a trait if they want to, so they can take control back or steer their character away from being so honest, they can cause a fall from grace if they so wish. They can also force the trait to change by acting a certain way thus accelerating things.
As with all things Pendragon though it takes time, a slip from being a paragon of honesty to one of deceit make take a fair few adventures, which at least avoids the "Hey I'm Anakin Skywalker and I'm good, ooops, I'm evil now!" about face.
kintire said:
I'm not a great fan of those, either. My experience has been that if the player roleplays it, it never need s to be invoked, and if he doesn't its very jarring when it is.
If you enjoy them, that's fine, but I've always seen it as trespassing where dice should not go.
Well a good Pendragon Roleplayer will hardly ever roll anyway and will rapidly accelerate their traits the way that they want them to be by that roleplaying.
I view it as a source of drama. In 7th Sea a player has chosen a trait that I can activate or in Pendragon they choose to become a legendary example of a trait. In return they receive mechanical rewards and I get some real strings on their characters that I can tug as and when I feel it helps the story.
Neither mechanic is forced on anyone who doesn't want it.
Thinking of it it's surprising how "new wave", well "new wave" from a 90s point of view, something like Pendragon was.
Anyhow disliking such mechanics is perfectly reasonable, as with all other aspects of RPG mechanics.
Personally I had some real doubters about the "loss of control" in Pendragon but all of them actually swung in with it and in the end took on a number of legendary traits.