I accept, with reservations, the corrections posted by those who actually
have their books nearby as opposed to relying on memory (can y'all say,
"Back in Atomic CIty again"? Knew you could.) However, I stand by my
initial statement that I consider noble PCs to be a (pardon the pun)
royal pain in the butt. The various workarounds suggested by some folx
are workable only in a very broad sense; from a practical standpoint,
the higher a character's Soc is the less useful a PC he'll make, because
he'll be out of sync with the way "normal" people get things done. Lord
Mountbatten is a poor example, BECAUSE his Soc was B or less-- he wasn't
ennobled to the point where he was really living a life that was that much
different from anyone else's. You want a better example? Take the first
son of, oh, say, the Emir of Bahrain, and dump him in the middle of Kenya
with no money, no ID, and a steady job to keep himself fed. There's a common
language (English), but until and unless he wires Daddy for help he's gonna
be a fish out of water. The higher one's rank, the less actual work one
does-- that's how oligarchies WORK. Sure a duke has duties, but his life
is going to less like that of a commoner than just about anything you can
think of. Sure there'll be differences from world to world, but the essential
character of the oligarch is there-- so you have the choice of either making
the noble the center of the campaign, or having him do a whole LOT of
roleplaying trying to learn to act like a normal human being without getting
killed, in which case your campaign will look a lot like that Eddie Murphy
flicker about the African prince who lives in NYC for a while, whatever it
was called. Anyway, *I* wouldn't do it, unless the "poor little rich kid"
is exactly what one of my players wanted.
metlay
Beware....the Horde is coming....!