Alternate Ancestry Boosts: Three Boosts and a Flaw?

[moosher12]

As a home rule, I was considering expanding the Alternate Ancestry Boosts to give players the choice between two free ability boosts, or three free ability boosts and one free flaw, with the stipulation that the player cannot place all three boosts within the physical or mental attribute category (Though the addition of ancestries like the Vesk have been shaking this precedent).

I was curious if there were any caveats toward doing this, before I actually implement it.

[Tridus]

If you give people a flaw and an extra boost, people will tend to put the flaw into a dump stat and then build around never using it. That's just how it is. Ancestries do this because they're in specific ability scores so you can't just always put it in your dump stat (though you can use it when your dump stat happens to align with what the ancestry wants to do).

If you don't care about that, this is fine. If you do care about that, I think the original voluntary flaw rule was better: you take *two* flaws to get one boost. This still lets someone do it but means its not just a simple CharOp thing that should be done all the time (because flaws in two stats is a lot more expensive).

[Finoan]

Raw power, it wouldn't change much of anything. I don't think there are any dump stats that don't have at least one ancestry with that as their flaw in the three boosts, one flaw setup.

So what it does is lets people do CharOp with the added flexibility of playing an ancestry of choice instead of being limited to the particular ancestries that have the stat array available.

Which does add a bit of power due to the flexibility. You get the best of both: ancestry with the best feats and abilities for the build, and best stat array for the build.

But it isn't so much added power that the numbers of the game engine need to be rebalanced to compensate.