I posted this question on the products page before I knew there was a subforum for the AP itself; my bad.
I'm gearing up to GM this AP and I noticed the player's handbook encourages PCs to build characters with flaws. Playing with folks that medium-to-heavy system mastery, this delights me as APs aren't often challenging for munchkins. And it's advice that meshes well with the horror genre in general.
Mechanically speaking, however, I don't really know how to encourage my players to approach this. Right now I'm thinking paladins are not a good fit for the campaign (a bonus for me is that none of my players are interested in this in the first place). How about barbarians with the superstition rage power, or clerics that can remove all the nasty ailments I'm sure the party will accrue? I imagine those things are fine, but is it?
When considering flaws one person suggested everyone take a drawback but not get the extra trait. Is that more in line with the 'flawed' idea? Or should it be more like players have fears or quirks that cause them to act differently or subject them to minor penalties?
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TL;DR: Did your group build characters with flaws as the handbook suggests? If so, what did you do? How did it affect your play?
Thanks!
I've been awarding Hero Points to PCs when roleplaying their personality gets them into trouble, or when I have an enemy exploit a personality trait. I haven't been giving Hero Points for anything else. It's worked okay, allowing the players to knowingly make bad decisions and suffer the consequences without actually increasing the death toll. I also tried having them describe how their personality strengths help them when they SPEND the hero points, but that hasn't worked nearly as well.
For example, in the most recent session, one of the PCs was overly curious and slowed down to look over his shoulder at a Shoggoth. I gave him a hero point after he failed his save against confusion. A bit later, he spent the hero point in order to dramatically and barely escape from the Shoggoth's grapple just before being engulfed. Much fun all around.
On the mechanical side, however, part of the fun is figuring out how to use what your class is good at in new and interesting situations. This doesn't work if your class "just so happens" to be perfectly suited to the situation from the very beginning (because they were built that way by a genre-savvy player). You also don't want a class that is so poorly suited to the situation that there IS no way for them to contribute.
You want a middle ground, where the PCs are competent, but are thrust into new and surprising situations. Different groups of players will need different solutions. In my campaign, for example, I allowed a player to play as a Psychic Detective, but didn't allow him to put ranks in Knowledge (planes) or learn Aklo until he could justify it in-game. You have to use your judgement to put the PCs out of their element while still allowing them to shine.
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I'm planning to use drawbacks for the first time when I GM this. Either awarding an extra trait as per the expected rules for them or granting an extra Hero Point or something at the start.
Douglas Muir 406 had some neat ideas about amnesia-related disadvantages for PCs in the first book of the AP (here. One option would be to do something like he was trying, but instead of having these disadvantages vanish from the game at a certain point, as on Douglas's suggestion, associate each of these initial disadvantages with a weaker long-term disadvantage for the player that continues after the short term disadvantage wears off.
I'm using Drawbacks as well, plus a mandatory Campaign Trait (which often come with some kind of personality-defining aspect, such as estoicism, or guilt, etc)
I allowed a Paladin, but instead of Inmunity to Fear he gains +4 to fear saves, just like his aura. One of my players really wanted to do a Sacred Shield paladin, so we found this mid-way solution.
I also built myself a background for each character, and I'm giving them a piece of said background, one small flashback per dream. I do this in between seasons, so it doesn't clog the regular play, but I'm tying their traits, flaws, and feats, into something related with the story somehow. For example, one of the players is a Staff Magus, and he is discovering now that he was a warden in the Mysterium, but got entangled with forbidden books and became curious about Elder Mythos stuff, which is how he got to be a Lowlz servant. Other Character took Adopted (halfling), so I'm giving him a tie with the Starling's Captain. Another one is an alchemist, so his mentor was Miacknian Mun. And so on.