I was redoing a companion of mine to update from AM4 to AM5 and I ran into something and I am curious if it is just me or if others have noticed this to.

I had no trouble assigning virtues to the character as all virtues that I had before I could either find again or find the equivelent of. Knack (replaced with Puissant Ability) and lesser Glamor (replaced with well Lesser Glamor but I need to talk to the storyguides about this still) being the only two that were not the same.

However, big difference when I hit the Flaws side. Suddenly I found that the old flaws ended up coming from catagories that you can't sample so easily from any more. Unlike a Hermetic where you can go for Hermetic flaws which are generally acceptable a companion once they exhaust the personality and story catagory faces extremely tough choices. All of the Major Flaws, General are shall we say "MAJOR" and not exactly something that makes RPing the character fun nor in all cases can I see how you can deal with things which clobber characteristics etc for characters who are combat oriented (not this character as it turns out).

The net result of this is that while a mage can take the full 10 virtues and balance them out reasonably well a companion can not take the 10 unless you specifically intend to essentially gimp the character. Though this was true, at least for me in AM4, it seems worse now in AM5 where balancing 8 Virtues (what this character has) is causing me a headache. Of course 1 major personality, and 1 major story flaw would balance out 6 and add in a minor personality and you have 7 but this seems a bit mechanical to me.

I find that unfortunately beyond a certain point this Virtues-Flaws business degenerates into what flaw will I have to deal with the least and which flaw has the least impact. Basically becoming an excersize in Rules Lawyering or whatever you want to call it. But still the companions are more borked then the mages who have the soak of hermetic virtues and flaws.

What do you others find on this matter?

As an aside, characters who have been in play for a number of years will not balance out, V & F wise. The problem gets worse as the number of years that have been played rolls on. When you go to convert them, you find that the flaws simply don't apply anymore...

As another aside, you also find that other characters become grossly overpowered, especially if you follow the rules for conversion between 4th and 5th editions exactly...

My reluctant advise is to rebuild the companion, using the advanced character rules, and remain true to the spirit of the character, not necessarily the letter of the character sheet.

Steve

I was actually rebuilding the character. That is what we did for all out characters mage and companion...just build them again (in essence we went back in time). The trouble I ran into was that I had a number of flaws in the past that balanced things out but under the new rules they could not apply since their are limits.

It was at this point that I noticed that companions are a bit looped in what they can take. All the major General flaws are fairly catastrophic for example. Most of the minor General flaws are equally ugly though a few are not so bad (no sense of direction, motion sickness). But it is clear that trying to take the full 10 virutes a companion could have would be hard to balance unless all companions are supposed to be missing body parts or else all have major personality flaws and major story flaws...but even that still leaves 4 minor flaws 2 of which are likely to have to come out of the minor general.

And there are lots of minor hermetic flaws that are infact minor there are very few minor general flaws that are minor.

But I was curious if others found this the same or if it was just something I am noticing?

Those limits for how many of each type of flaws you can take are only guidelines to make one dimensional characters harder to create.

If you have characters that work for you there is absolutly no reason NOT to ignore personality flaw restictions and the like.

(did you give each character a major story flaw? I heartily recommend it and I stongly susspect that characters in play would have them already even if they aren't on the 4th ed. character sheet)

There is a major story flaw yes, I have to discuss it with the Story Guides as there are 4 that could be applied, last I checked though Favors (for getting out of Faerie) was the one, pardon the pun, favored.

It will end up depending on the story guides though what other flaws can be allowed which violate the AM5 guidelines.

One big saver under the AM4 rules was an oath not allowing lieing which if that was allowed as a major flaw would simplify things as the rest of the characters abilities translated well. Excepting lesser Glamor but I don't see why we can't just use the AM4 rules for that unless the SG's object.

The character was not played that much before the AM5 switch...just long enough for the Weakness(Poets&Storytellers) to come into play. There was only one person other than the Cei and the character who the character intended to ensure was coming out of that Faerie Regio regardless and that was the Bard. And to determine that a certain mage who had delusions of sacrificing the character to the fae to fulfill some old legend will have plenty of time to regret that silliness, unfortunately the mage in question saw through the glamor so knows he isn't dealing with a 14 year old full human.