Disorganized, 3 pts:

This character is a fucking pig. His home and car are so cluttered with crap that he has trouble finding things when he needs them. Disorganized characters tend to buy redundant equipment to compensate for their poor organizational skills.

Game effects: Whenever the character searches for something in his home or vehicle that he has not used in the past 12 hours, there is a 50% chance that he cannot find it (1-3 on 1d6). The character may search for one hour to find the item for another chance, but each further attempt takes twice the amount of time before it (2, 4, 6, 8 hours). After enough failures, the item should be considered indefinitely lost at the GMs discretion.


I just thought this up after my girlfriend helped me start using a weekly planner to deal with my own hideous disorganization. Comments are welcome

How about a variable-level flaw, where you have to roll above the level of the flaw to find your stuff. So, with a 1 point flaw, youd have to roll a 2 or higher to find anything, whereas with a 5 point flaw, youd only find what youre looking for on a 6. Theoretically I would allow it as a 6-point flaw, but anything you didnt have with you every single day would become irretrievably lost. You can search for a particular item a number of times equal to your intelligence.

I was originally thinking "intelligence or willpower, whichever is lower." The problem is that varying it by willpower would also entail varying it by item cost... as youre certainly less likely to give up when looking for your fairlight excalibur than when youre looking for your cell phone.

Having the number of attempts be equal to intelligence shows how good the characters "search algorithms" are. Its not that you can not continue to look after that number of rolls, its just that continuing the search will not be successful (you start to look in the same places over and over).

That's why I made search times exponential and left indefinite loss up to GM discretion. The characters willingness to continue searching for 8, 16, 32, 64+ hours should be up to the player. He won't waste time on inexpensive stuff, but he should be allowed to do the required 2-week overhaul on his house to find his Fairlight if he needs to.

Now if a low-willpower character decides to spend his week of downtime searching for something just to save 200 bucks, that's when the GM reminds the player that he's not being faithful to his characters stats and deducts karma if necessary.

If a reasonable amount of downtime guarantees the player will find whatever stuff he needs, its not worth a 3-pt flaw. It *is* worth the flaw points if the character can actually lose stuff more or less permanently.

Also, as a part of the flaw, the character should not ever voluntarily clean up his mess. Rather, some other character would either have to force the character to clean up or clean it up themselves. In such a case, there would be a chance equal to 1/2 (round down) the value of the flaw on a d6 that any particular missing item turns up broken.

The corp hit team that comes to ransack your place must love you. Especially if you booby trapped the place and you can't remember those too.

"Where did you put it? Don't make me hurt you, man!"

"Uh... somewhere in there. I swear! I can't find it myself!" Points into the cavernous warehouse that serves as hideout.

*boom* "What the hell was that?"

"Probably some C12, I left lying around after that demo job 2 years ago. Been looking for it. Seems you guys found it for me."

Hah! Nobody _ever_ misplaces C-12 more than once.

-Siege

Hey, you can. As long as the person doing the searching isn't you, that's why you get your good friends the corp hit team sent by your friendly neighbourhood megacorp to search for you. I'm sure they'll be happy to oblige.

This sounds astoundingly like a SSG housing flaw: "Gnomes under the Floorboards" or something like that. Any item with a concealability above 8 has a chance of dissapearing for around a month. The stronger flaw adds a 1 in 6 chance the item will never resurface.

Cool flaw. Chop up your victims into little bits and have them disappear.

Only to return a month later!

That would be an embarassing wedding reception!

I just thought of a nice edge along the same lines as the disorganized flaw:

Purposefully disorganized 1-5 points or 3 points.

Your living space is a filthy disorganized mess -- or, at least, it appears that way to everyone else. You manage to keep track of where every single object is within the general disarray, but other people searching for things amidst your living quarters only have a marginal chance of success. Apply the effects of the disorganized flaw to anyone except yourself for any attempt to find something in your residence. This edge is incompatable with the disorganized flaw.

Perhaps a good way to compromise on the Disorganized flaw's ability to cause permanent loss is to allow the designation of a limited number of "personally valuable items" which the character will not give up on, perhaps Intelligence or (Intelligence+Willpower)/3. Just apply one of those points to the Fairlight. It may still take a few months to dig out those personally valuable items, though...

~J

The real drawback of the Purposefully Disorganized flaw comes in when someone else decides to "neaten up"...

definitely, I can't stand it when my wife moves even 1 object from my desk, it ruins the feng-shui of the whole affair! so she agrees(and obeys) most of the time the concept of what is on my desk is holy, and shall not be touched for threat of hand of god to smite her. Just like I don't try to do the budget anyway. Purposefully Disorganized is awesome it's a self balancing flaw, if someone neatens, then you can't find anything, if nobody neatens, even robbers can't find where you keep your valuables


How many points of flaw would this count as, or would it even be a flaw?

I spent eighteen years trying to convince my mom of that...

...and it still doesn't work.